#like I don’t think he’d vote for Trump but he just wouldn’t vote hell put his name on the balet

[dykedvonte]

I really do like character design in mouthwashing

Anya is obvi inspired by Shelley Duval (who was also verbally abused by Cubric, if I recall correctly), the Shining protagonist. Curly is your typical captain America style charismatic leader, he is even canonically a gym bro (although I recall you mentioning that if Curly's pre-crash face wasn't revealed, you would've headcanoned him as black, so I am a bit curios, what his dynamic w/ Jimmy would've been. Like, I think this little piece of sht would be casually racist towards him, he is just that sort of asshole. If the story was set at our times he would've def vote for Trump and complain abt immigrants eating dogs or something equally rediculous lol. Also, his dynamic w/ Anya - being marginalised himself would've he been harder on Jimbo's bullshit? Or would that not matter at all in their particular situation? So many possibilities.)

Daisuke is a bright spot in an otherwise dull and grey space. Swansea is simply perfect, 10/10😁

-💀

I don’t think Jimmy would be racist towards Curly or anyone for that matter.

Like I don’t see Jimmy as a misanthrope. He’s not hateful just to be hateful, he’s spiteful. All of his envy and resentment of others comes from his own projection of shared aspects he feels inferior by. I think the biggest difference is it adds a little more ire to Jimmy’s sentiments as it takes away an easy aspect of Curly’s life. I assume Mouthwashing operates in a similar social history and structure as our world so Curly likely faced prejudices based on his race in this scenario. He had something extra outside of his control weighing him down and yet he still reached that highest rung.

For Jimmy it’s infuriating. It feeds that delusion that Curly has it so much easier, that he doesn’t have to do the real work to get to that space. He should’ve struggled more, he should be more bitter but he isn’t. He’s not like him still and he’s pissed about it. He still wouldn’t understand the underlying and systemic issues Curly would’ve faced cause he can’t. He wouldn’t try to because in doing that it’s an admission he’s just not trying like Curly is. Any comments that could be seen as racist are less targeted at Curly’s ethnicity but just at him. Jimmy’s issues are with Curly as a whole, being so idealic compared to him and everything around him. It’s not just one facet of him physically, mentally or emotionally that makes Jimmy so envious. It’s why he’s obsessed, it everything about him.

As for Anya, this is no anger toward you, but there’s this perception in fandom spaces with intersectionality that sharing a minority status creates an equal understanding of what exact struggles the others go through. You can understand the feeling of oppression but certain aspects of certain systems will still be misunderstood if they don’t apply to you. Curly is still a man and Anya a woman. Perhaps she is a woman of color, it think he may have been a bit harsher to Jimmy as he would be aware of the racial factors at play when it comes to the dehumanization and sexism perpetrated towards WOC but he still wouldn’t get it as a man.

It’s like apples and oranges to where they are both fruit but being categorically the same doesn’t make them identical. I can not describe to you the taste of an apple by using an orange. Anya would no more understand Curly’s struggles being black than he would her being the only woman on board. Of course they share the similarity of being the only one but even in this case we do work off the assumption everybody but Daisuke is white. He’d inherently have more solidarity with him on that aspect than her.

[prosopopeya]

New Year’s Meme

this survey has been a tradition among my friend group for YEARS, but i haven’t filled it out since 2015 apparently. i’m not entirely sure why except 2016 was the year a lot of stuff changed for me, namely in that i finally got out of school in some form and started a new job, but i also had a few health problems that kept plaguing me (thyroid medicine being off, vitamin d) and my anxiety was all over the place. so here we go i’m doing it again and feel free to do it too if you want!!

1. What did you do in 2020 that you’d never done before? tried on wedding dresses. taught virtually. dealt (poorly) with drunk teenagers. performed in a pep rally. wore face masks all the time. i’m going to lump in living with someone. jon moved in october 2019, but i don’t think i did this quiz last year so. taught ap.

2. Did you keep your New Years’ resolutions and will you make more for next year? i don’t really like resolutions. they put too much pressure on me and i am a fragile person when it comes to setting expectations and living up to them. i did want to try to read more this year, and i maintained that until the pandemic, and then just kind of gave up requiring myself to do anything but live.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? i don’t think so. a coworker did.

4. Did anyone close to you die? jon’s cousin committed suicide in march or april. the circumstances were pretty upsetting. um. andy died in february, very suddenly. andy was my high school boyfriend for four years with whom i had a very... he scarred me in a lot of ways when it comes to sex and consent. it’s taken me a long time to unpack all of that. and i struggle with how much any of that was his fault or just bc he was a stupid kid too. our mutual friends had nothing but nice things to say about him on fb. anyway. he would guilt me into saying he’d kill himself if we broke up, and jon’s cousin killed himself over his girlfriend. so that was a complex part of the year.

5. What countries did you visit? none. literally the week before the quarantine, we went to asheville to visit jon’s cousin.

6. What would you like to have in 2021 that you lacked in 2020? maybe a different job? or at least some peace at doing mine.

7. What date from 2020 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? march 13 we cancelled classes and had a technology training day; the 15th we had another one, and then we were virtual the rest of the term. it was such a sudden shift and while i so loved working from home tbh, it was such a relief after a supremely shitty january/february work-wise, i still had a lot of keyed-up, stressful days centered around transitioning to being the senior upper school spanish teacher. i hate it!

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? writing 50k in the month of november. i have literally never done that before and actively reject nano as being typically unhealthy for how my mind works, so it was nice to do it entirely by accident.

9. What was your biggest failure? mishandling the drunken teenagers on that field trip in january.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury? i sit crosslegged in my virtual teaching chair and i did it so much that my ankle hurt for the entire summer.

11. What was the best thing you bought? we put a deposit on our elopement in ireland. jon’s wedding ring. (i didn’t buy my wedding dress.)

12. Whose behavior merited celebration? my best friend at work who keeps me sane and is represented by benny in my au, which other than the fact that he is not my sidepiece, is perfect he is crucial to my survival at work and i love him so much. (also he is gay and the french teacher so the benny parallels just keep coming). everyone who tore down a statue in virginia (and other places, but especially monument avenue). everyone putting their lives on the line during this pandemic.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? guess! but aside from all the obvious, i found out a friend of mine at work voted for trump. my work bff and i had been trying for years to sway his politics, but that had us both deciding to give up on him.

14. Where did most of your money go?  food, ALCOHOL. god., our savings account. i did a pretty excellent job saving this year, though a good deal of that is because jon moved in and makes more money than me, and also we split all the bills.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about? my wedding dress but strangely only when i went to try it on after it came in bc after the purchase i was so sure i’d made every mistake possible. my wedding band. wellbutrin changing my whole life. and, last but certainly not least, the gay angel and the bi(lingual) hunter. i wouldn’t have survived nov-dec in school without that distraction. the election.

16. What song(s) will always remind you of 2020? the entirety of taylor swift’s oeuvre this year, maybe specifically “this is me trying”

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:  i. Happier or sadder? happier, i suppose, perhaps contrary to what should be the case, but wellbutrin is a hell of a drug. ii. Older or wiser? wiser. ii. Richer or poorer? richer.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of? reading. cleaning. exercising.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of? stressing. chaperoning.

20. How will you be spending Christmas? so, an update; last year was the first year i didn’t go to my mom’s for christmas. i was supposed to see her for thanksgiving last year, but she basically told us not to come bc she wasn’t feeling up to it (cool!), and we went to jon’s for christmas and my mom’s for new year’s. 

this year, obviously we couldn’t go to my mom’s. instead, we rented a little cabin by the lake. it was perfect; it was really really nice inside, the beds were SO SOFT, the pillows were the best things i have ever laid my head on, like i took off the pillowcases to try to find the brand. we had a little tiny christmas tree with tiny ornaments from walmart that we decorated. the 23rd, we went and picked up our wedding bands. we slept two nights in the (cold) back bedroom so i could wake up and look out at the lake. it snowed for christmas. :)

we opened presents on christmas eve, per jon’s family’s tradition. on christmas eve, we also went to his family farm and sat outside and hung out a little. every year his family does like a secret santa sort of thing and i got my first present in that exchange, which is notable bc jon and i are not yet officially married. i got a remote control car -- jon’s idea bc i couldn’t think of anything, and he was so delighted to hear that i loved playing with rc cars when we went to the beach as a kid.

christmas morning we facetimed my parents and opened some presents together. then jon and i marathoned mandalorian (after spending the previous few days watching several die hard movies), and then we watched wonder woman 1984 which was a bad movie.

21. How will you be spending New Year’s Eve? ok LAST year for new year’s, we were in a hotel room, so that was nice, bc it meant minimal stress with my parents. i had always wanted to go to this restaurant near us that has a special new year’s menu, so we did that. the night before or after i think we went to cheesecake factory, which was also amazing.

this year currently i’m tumbling and he’s playing pokemon, and in a bit we’ll try to time it so we finish schitt’s creek in time for the new year.

22. Did you fall in love in 2020? i re-fell in love with supernatural so that was nice.

23. How many one-night stands? 0. i submit we should randomly change question 23 each year to something more relevant to any of our life experiences.

24. What was your favorite TV program? what did i even watch this year. schitt’s creek. mandalorian. i mean obviously we know supernatural. the circle. are you the one (the queer season). pose. unsolved mysteries. we’re here! perry mason. watchmen. oh maybe that mcdonald’s monopoly fraud documentary. avenue 5. i’ll be gone in the dark. of those i think my favorite maybe is... pose or we’re here.

OKAY UM. on my 2014 version of this there were a bunch of questions about tv shows that i’m putting back in if only for the memories:

25. Which TV shows did you start watching in 2020? the haunting of bly manor, which we still need to finish. derry girls.

26. Which TV shows did you let go of in 2020? HERE’S WHY I WANTED TO RESURRECT THESE. here was my answer in 2015: “supernatural. goodbye, my sweet prince.” CAN YOU EVEN FUCKING BELIEVE

27. Which TV shows did you mean to get into but didn’t in 2020? Why? so far, queen’s gambit and that one on hulu with catherine the great. EVENTUALLY. 28. Which TV shows do you intend on checking out in 2020? fleabag. queen’s gambit. 29. Which TV show do you think you might let go of in 2020 unless things significantly improve? idk i drop things pretty regularly if they don’t entertain me 30. Which TV show impressed you least in 2020? GUYS HERE’S MY ORIGINAL 2015 ANSWER: “supernatural. :(”

anyway back to the rest of the quiz:

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year? every person who refuses to listen to facts and information.

26. What was the best book you read? killers of the flower moon: the osage murders and the birth of the fbi, or the his dark materials series.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery? well i knew about tswift so i’m not going to count her albums. i will count this song that jon played for me once in the car that got stuck in my head for two weeks straight and led me down into a great related-songs spotify playlist: through the roof ‘n underground.

28. What did you want and get? a wedding dress and a very specific kind of wedding band. a gay angel. a christmas getaway. animal crossing.

29. What was your favorite film of this year? idk i don’t know how many films i saw this year. maybe mucho mucho amor: the legend of walter mercado

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? i was 32. we went to an escape room with a BUNCH of people -- work bff, my old work bff and his wife (old bc he quit and we’ve fallen out of touch :(), the cool new physics teacher and his fiancee, and the aforementioned trump voter and his wife, before we knew... we went out for brunch/lunch after. it was pretty great!

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? not having to chaperone that school trip in january. dean being bi in english as well as spanish. cas just ilke, appearing in 15x20. not having to physically go back to work this fall.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2020? no! real! pants!

34. What kept you sane? jon. supernatural (in a way?). animal crossing for a while. wellbutrin! i haven’t really been able to detail this yet, but finally i did something about tumblr and my therapist making me think about adhd. my doctor gave me wellbutrin (bc i lack any official diagnosis and was on anxiety meds anyway, and he was like let’s try this!) and it’s fucking. it’s a fucking godsend. surprisingly enough, my students. trying to provide them a safe space has been a calming thing for me.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? jensen ackles’ silence. misha collins again, i guess.

36. What political issue stirred you the most? the summer was so fucking intense. i guess though it was me trying to exert my influence in a responsible way with my students without trying to try to make them feel uncomfortable but then one kid was a vocally upset trump supporter after the election and i had to try to defuse that situation.

37. Who did you miss? my old work bff. several old friends that i’ve fallen out of touch with bc i have no object permanence.

38. Who was the best new person you met? people i met through the spn resurgence!

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2020: if you manifest it in an au, it will come. no really though. maybe that expectations are only as important as i make them out to be.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year: usually i have a hard time coming up with anything for this and i default to looking at my most played songs of the year. my most played song of the year received each and every one of its plays within the month of november and you can guess why. anyway see if this works

I had all and then most of you Some and now none of you Take me back to the night we met I don't know what I'm supposed to do Haunted by the ghost of you Take me back to the night we met - the night we met, lord huron

[always5hineee]

Hell and Back- Chapter 34: Condolences (No Trials)

Word count: 1478

Chapter warnings: Mild language and themes

-----

       "It's been two days." Kris said as they sat around the table in the dorm.

       "Actually, it's been five days since we started the trials." Kyungsoo corrected. They all knew that hadn't been what Kris meant, but no one wanted to bring that up. "What if in that truth trial, we accidentally voted?" He tried to continue a conversation.

       "Wouldn't Baekhyun have lost too, then?" Xiumin posed.

       "I don't remember, I'd have to go back over who voted for who..." Looking up and thinking for a moment, he said, "I don't think so, Suho got one more vote than him. Maybe it wasn't random at all."

       "That wouldn't be fair then." Well of course it wasn't fair. None of this was fair. The room was stagnant once again.

       "We have to keep going at some point." Kris said in the silence. They all sat in front of their food, just staring. This had been their routine for the past few days. Everyone had managed to eat little bits and pieces, mostly on their own time, but every time they tried to have a meal together, it just didn't feel right.

       "What, you just want us to get over it?" Chen glared in his direction.

       "No, I'm- His death was meaningless if we don't win-"

       " That was trial fifty-nine, Kris!" He shouted suddenly, slamming his fists against the table. "Fifty. Nine. That's barely over halfway. He's not going to be the first to die, you know that!"        

       "We just need to be more careful! There had to have been a way out of it, we just need to work harder to find it next time-"

       "Next time? So you're just going to say that we were too lazy to avoid his death, he was just an experiment?"

       "No! I wouldn't-"

       "You know you would!" As they were yelling at each other, Sehun flinched, getting up quickly to bring his dish to the counter. He didn't like it when people were angry. Y/N felt tears rise to her eyes, heartily unwelcome. She had done nothing but cry for days, and the boys weren't helping.

       "Both of you, fucking stop it!" Kai said, gesturing to her, "You're upsetting everyone-"

       "Aww, look at you, trying to take his place." Chen sneered.

       "He wasn't the only one who could see when you're acting like a child, you know."

       "You're one to talk."

       "How are you still fucking mad at me? What are you, twelve? It was months ago-"

       Suddenly, Y/N stood straight up, saltwater about to spill all over her face, so quickly that her chair slid back and hit the floor surprising all of them. She looked between them, trying to think of something to say, but finally just rushed out of the room. She heard the half-hearted calls of 'Y/N' 'wait', but she was too worked up to deal with them. Kyungsoo turned back to discuss his theory regarding the trials with Xiumin. Sehun, still removed from the group, followed her in concern.

       He didn't know exactly where she went, but he walked through the sitting room, then to the hallway with all the bedroom. Peeking into the first door, the lights were on, but he saw nothing. Then the second, then the bathroom door- still no one. It wasn't until he made it to the last room that he thought he heard something. Pushing the door open, he saw that the space inside was completely dark, but he heard a light, quick breathing coming from the other side of the beds. Moving around, he could just barely make out the figure of his friend, knees to her chest as she curled up, back to the wall.

       "Hey. Are you okay?" Sniffling and quickly trying to wipe the tears off her cheeks, she asked,

       "Are you?"

       "Fair enough." He wiggled the bed over so that he'd have room to sit next to her. "Do you want to drop out?" He asked, but not condescendingly. She shook her head.

       "I can't let you all do this without me."

       "Why? It's all of our reward." No it isn't... she thought to herself. Oh... oh God. Now Suho was dead, and they weren't even going to get their reward? They'd never forgive her. She could find a way out of it...

       "It's not fair, this is my fault. I'll only drop out if everyone else drops out." She knew it wasn't possible. They were too hard headed, to dead set on getting what they wanted. They wouldn't even know what the drop out fee was until they started the next set of trials, and by the time they were ready, they'd already be prepared to keep going. There were forty left. Could she do this forty more times? Would she have to watch anyone else die?

       Watching her get inside of her own thoughts and panic, Sehun wrapped his arm around her shoulder, allowing her head to fall against his in the dark. He ran a hand over her hair gently, saying,

       "I'm sure it'll be alright. Maybe we can find Tao and he can reverse all of it." Tao. Yet another thing she didn't want to think about. He never would have just left her like that... would he? Maybe something had changed, while he was stuck doing all of those challenges by himself. He was kind of their trump card, and he knew it, too. So why would he abandon them? More importantly, how were they supposed to break the news about Suho to him? And Luhan, oh God- he would be so angry. At least he'd managed to avoid the same fate.

       At that moment, she heard the muffled shouts of Kris and Chen from the kitchen again, causing her to involuntarily seize up slightly. Feeling her fear beneath him, he continued muttering to her that it was going to be okay. A minute or two later, the door opened again, and Kai's large build was visible shoving two other people in the room. The light turned on, and the two rose, facing the newcomers.

       "Uh, Chen and I wanted to say we were sorry." Kris said with an awkward cough. "For scaring you. Everyone's a little worked up." She sighed.

       "It's fine, I understand." Chen turned to leave, but Kai blocked his way and Kris elbowed him in the side, indicating that he would have to say it as well.

       "Yeah, uh... Sorry."

       "It's alright."

       Three days after the incident, they held a funeral for Suho. They didn't really have anything they would be able to bury, so instead, they took the calculator he'd left on the ground before the trial and a few pages of his sheet music, burying it behind the building. She didn't know why they'd waited three days. Maybe it was some desperate hope in a Jesus-like miracle, the prayer that he would reappear behind them and make fun of them for being so sappy, or scold them for wasting so much time. It didn't happen. As they stood around the joke of a grave, they all tried to say something about him.

       "Suho, he, uh..." Baekhyun swallowed, having difficulty trying to be serious. "He meant a lot. To all of us. And we're going to win this for him, and I'll beat the shit out of whoever is behind it to begin with."

       "He always used to say that giving him compliments made him want to work harder." Chanyeol said, wiping his eyes roughly to try not to cry. "And he really did work hard for all of us. We never would have made it this far without him." They went around in a circle, not one person skipping out. It did more for them than it ever would have for Suho- for some of them, their last living words to the man were regarding how obnoxious he was, and now he was gone. No one ever expects that kind of regret to weigh so heavy, but it really, really did.

       "Sehun, do you want to say anything?" He looked down at the spot of overturned dirt in the ground. It wasn't what Suho deserved. They were just kids, that's it, and he already had a murder under his belt. This was his fault. There were tons of uncut, safe, ropes, and instead he dropped one of his best friends to his painful, gruesome, awful death. Suho had always liked to complain about injuries, no matter how minimal. He'd get a paper cut and act like he'd been shot. For someone like that to...

       "I'm sorry." Was all he could say, tears rolling in droves across his skin as the underside of his nose grew damp, seconds away from ugly crying.

       "It wasn't your fault." She said, putting a hand on his back and trying to calm him down.        

       "Wasn't it, though?"

Go to Chapter 35

[imagitory]

*exhales heavily*

Okay...I don’t usually go off the deep end in political essays that often. If it’s a quick thing like “f**k Neo-Nazis,” then sure, fine, that’s easy. I don’t have to explain why Neo-Nazis -- especially the cowardly ones that try to label themselves as the “alt-right” in a vain attempt to seem more acceptable to modern society -- can go screw themselves. Everyone already knows they’re awful -- or at least, everyone should already know they’re awful. If you’re the sort of person that wants to try to “teach” me about how the alt-right are not Neo-Nazis, then this post isn’t for you, so kindly don’t interact and keep scrolling.

This post is instead for my Democratic followers, whether you support Bernie, Biden, Warren, whatever. Please feel free to skip over it, though, my dear followers -- I know this whole political season has been very draining, and I have a lot more positive posts on my blog that you can consult instead. If you do want to read my thoughts, though, here’s a cut.

Hi, guys. How’s it going? We really dodged a bullet with Bloomberg dropping out of the race, didn’t we? At least now no one should be able to say Democrats and Republicans are alike, right? The Democrats kicked their racist, sexist, obnoxious, out-of-touch billionaire accused of multiple sexual assaults to the curb, while the Republicans made theirs president.

On that note, though...we still have the Republican version of Michael Bloomberg -- the one and only Donald Trump -- in office. We all remember how he got there...Hillary won the popular vote, but thanks to the ridiculously outdated electoral college rules and Russian interference, the electoral votes went Trump’s way. We could conjure up multiple reasons for Hillary’s loss, but at least in my opinion, I would say we learned a few lessons from the 2016 election that I think we should keep in mind. (Alongside making sure Russians butt the hell out of our elections and fact-checking all the rampant misinformation from our media outlets.)

1) We Democrats have more things in common than we might think, sometimes.

Clinton was infinitely closer to Bernie, politics-wise, than Bernie was to Trump or Gary Johnson. Yet there were those who were so upset about Hillary’s nomination and the role Democratic Party officials had in coaxing  delegates to support her that they protest-voted against Hillary, even if that vote wasn’t in their best interest. We don’t have a system that lets us rank who we want for office from most to least, so sometimes we have to accept a bird in the hand rather than reach for two in the bush. You might feel good about voting your conscience in the short term, but you probably won’t when it results in your vote being a drop in the bucket that doesn’t prevent someone like Donald Trump from winning. We’ve already seen this happen not just in the Trump-Clinton election of 2016, but in the Bush-Gore election of 2000.

2) Despite that first point, if we want unity, our Democratic candidate must be aware of how diverse our party is.

Even if we do end up having to settle for a less liberal candidate in order to win an election, that candidate MUST acknowledge that we are not like the Republican Party. We will not march lock-step with people we don’t agree with just because they’re in our party or we agree with some things, and we will certainly not be satisfied with simple pacifism. The Republican Party has been tilting farther and farther to the right over the last three decades, to the point that their policies now involve mass internment of Mexican immigrants and family separation, directly paralleling plans carried out by the THIRD EFFIN’ REICH. We cannot keep begging for civility and peace and trying to reach a compromise -- you cannot compromise with this kind of extremism without sacrificing all of your principles, because those kinds of people do not make concessions.

I remain convinced even after four years that Hillary should’ve chosen Bernie to be her running mate -- if she had, the rift between the centrist and more liberal branches of the Democratic Party might have been healed enough that we could’ve looked at our ticket with excitement and hope, as we had for Obama and Biden back in 2008. Instead Hillary chose Tim Kaine, an inoffensive centrist Democrat who added absolutely nothing to her presidential bid. He couldn’t even help Hillary out by boosting the campaign with youthful energy or natural charm -- Bernie would’ve both boosted morale among younger and/or more liberal voters and lit a fire under those who were anxious about what a Trump presidency could lead to. The same could’ve been true if Bernie had been chosen to be president -- if he’d chosen Hillary, she could’ve better appealed to moderate voters intimidated by the thought of voting for a Democratic Socialist and run on her international experience as Secretary of State.

3) In order to make any difference at all, we must vote, and we must win.

I’m the first person to acknowledge that I hate voting against my convictions. If the Democrats had chosen Michael Bloomberg, I would’ve probably been ready for whole-scale revolution, right then and there. But let’s be frank here -- in 2016, we got complacent. We assumed that Trump would lose. We assumed that America wouldn’t choose racism, or Islamaphobia, or sexism, or Nazism. BUT WE DID. In the end, our country -- like many other countries before us were -- is more afraid of the promise of social change than we are of the threat of fascism. Yes, I called Trump’s vision of the country fascism, and I stand by it. Fascism is defined as far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial authority, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and the economy and often supplemented with government-sanctioned racism -- and yeah, given that Trump clearly wants to do whatever he wants whenever he wants without facing any consequences for his actions, persecute any so-called “enemies,” make money for himself while in office (even using his office and political power to achieve that end), and scapegoat minorities, I think my point is made. And so I will state it again -- America is more afraid of the future and the progress that could come with it than it is of the cruelty, bigotry, and tyranny of our past. It’s an absolute tragedy, but it’s true. Americans were absolutely terrified of Obamacare until it actually became law and people saw how cool it was, not to be booted off your care for preexisting conditions and stuff. Once that happened, Americans were ready to bite off the hand of any Republican who made any move toward repealing it. If it’s something we’ve never done before, it’s beaten back like the plague, but once it’s something we’ve become accustomed to, you can tear it from our cold, dead hands.

In the 1930′s, Germany had a choice between three political parties -- the Communists, the Democratic Socialists, and the Nazis -- and in the end, the reason the Nazis got power was because the Communists and the Socialists could not band together to stop that greater threat. The Nazis were able to paint a pretty picture to the German people of returning their country to its supposedly long lost, mythic greatness, and they won power, even if they were still not the majority when Hitler got into office. And as soon as the Nazis got power, they never let it go and went out of their way to destroy both Communists and Socialists, just like they did with Jewish people, the Romani, and the rest. We are at such a crossroads now. I am deathly afraid that the Republicans will try to find some way to keep power even if Trump were to lose, but we cannot let that happen. We must stand together, strong and united.

The more liberal of us must acknowledge that radical change cannot be put into place quickly. Our system is broken and falling apart thanks to the Republicans’ on-going sabotage, and we cannot hope to remodel our house until our foundation is secure. Even the Republicans were not able to destroy our country in so many ways these last four years without dismantling a lot of other things first -- corrupting our elections with money thanks to the Citizens United ruling -- sparking two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that drained us of money and added to the backlog of veterans that have yet to receive their deserved financial support -- intimidating political officials away from substantive gun control legislation -- chipping away at abortion rights nation-wide -- stacking the courts, both local and Supreme, with unqualified, strongly right-leaning candidates -- gerrymandering districts like crazy so as to split Democratic-leaning areas and puff up Republican-leaning ones -- even spreading misinformation through shows on their own private so-called “News” network. It will take time to repair all of the damage the Republicans have wrought, but we must first win if we are even to have the chance to try.

On the flip side, the more centrist of us must acknowledge that we cannot go back to the way we were because the way we were was WRONG. We might have nostalgic visions of it being more civil and peaceful, but the tremors of war were still rippling under our feet. The Neo-Nazi rats that elected Trump were gathering under us, and we let them. We let them gain enough confidence to come out into the light in large numbers and we stood by, assuming that they wouldn’t succeed in their goals. We ignored the rampant spread of anti-immigrant rhetoric and Islamaphobia -- we downplayed the racism, the homophobia, and the sexism. Sometimes it was due to arrogance, and sometimes it was due to flat-out indifference, because those things didn’t directly affect us. We should know by now that that rosy view of our past was not how things were -- just as many of our Founding Fathers were still slave owners, and America interned our own citizens in camps during World War II, and the supposedly great Ronald Reagan turned a blind eye while thousands of Americans died of AIDS, our country saw the signs of racism, xenophobia, and ultranationalism coming out in full again and didn’t fight back. And now that racist, xenophobic ultranationalism is in control of the Oval Office. If we have any chance of stopping them, we can’t simply go backwards -- we must charge ahead. We can’t simply pretend like everything can go back to normal -- we must accept responsibility for what we’ve done and pursue justice in making things right. We must fight back against these far-right, tyrannical policies and we must pay restitution to those our country has hurt. I do not want the Mexican families we have destroyed to be treated the way our Japanese American brethren were after they were released from the internment camps in the 40′s -- dismissed and forgotten, with our flag figuratively slapping them in the face every time some stupid guy crowed his head off about America being the greatest country on earth. I may have hated Trump’s immigration policy -- I might not have voted for him -- but he still represents my country, and therefore me, to the rest of the world, and even if he’ll never apologize for a single damn thing that he’s done, I want my country to make things right.

Maybe once a Democrat -- even if it’s a centrist like Biden -- is in the White House again, we’ll have the chance for real change -- good change. We certainly won’t get it as long as we’re stuck on the outside looking in.

Now of course, even when this whole presidential thing is done, we can’t rest on our laurels. We must get out in force for local elections too -- we must take back the Senate and keep control of the House. We must pressure our lawmakers to get the money out of politics, and fix gerrymandering, and restore environmental protections, and hold corporations accountable, and tax the rich, and abolish the Electoral College, and put term limits on Congresspeople, and impeach Brett Kavanaugh, and fund dismantling the backlog on VA benefits, and cancel student loan debt, and implement universal health care, and pass gun control legislation, and do all the other things we need done.

I really hope that whichever candidate we end up with -- whether it’s Biden (*sighs begrudgingly*), Bernie (*smiles*), or Warren (*wiggles in glee*) -- that candidate will strongly consider choosing a Vice President who is either more centrist (if they’re more liberal) or more liberal (if they’re more centrist) and filling their Cabinet with those other ex-presidential hopefuls who still have something to offer. Kamala Harris was Attorney General of California -- why not have her become Attorney General of the United States next? How about Tom Steyer as Head of the EPA, or Cory Booker as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development?

Here’s the thing about us being more diverse in thought than the Republicans -- it means we have a great swath of very different members with very different skill sets, as well as the ability to learn, critique, rationalize, change, and improve. And if we are to defeat an institution like Trump’s that demands lock-step, mindless obedience and praise, it seems to me that’s something we should use to our advantage.

[docsamurai]

Where I say something nice about the Democratic candidates.

I know my last few posts about politics have been furious and relentlessly negative, so I'm going to try and say at least one nice thing about each person who was running for president, past and present. Keep in mind I'm not going to mention bad things about these people, so yeah I know that guy supported awful things or that other guy has utterly toxic followers. That's not what this is about.

My feelings about Liz are well known so I'll just cry about the fact that we lost yet another absurdly talented female candidate, and one who had the power to fucking atomize a billionaire from 30 feet with only her death glare.

I'll actually start though with the people still in the race.

Bernie Sanders: Dude is a progressive powerhouse and has been consistently on the right side of history for decades. He's got energy, he's got plans, he's got a passionate following of young people who, if their candidate actually wins will almost assuredly lead the charge in a new progressive wave in politics. And I'm sure that many of them will be passionate enough to support progressive candidates and fight for real change even when their guy isn't on the ballot.

Joe Biden: This guy is a charisma powerhouse, and honestly even if he himself may be more moderate, with as charged up as the democratic voters are right now we could practically hand him a gift wrapped congress. It frankly doesn't matter that much if he's moderate if Congress keeps sending him progressive legislation to sign. Do you think he wouldn't jump at the chance to do M4A or climate change initiatives or even a green new deal if we just put a stack of paper on his desk to sign? He'd get to go down in history as one of the greatest presidents ever without having to do any of the hard work. And even if we can't take Congress for him, he *is* actually charismatic enough to negotiate deals across the aisle. I'll frankly take a small amount of progress over literally burning the planet down.

Tulsi Gabbard: Forgot she was still in this didn't you? Well that's the nice thing I'm saying, she's tenacious. If we can just get her to fight for the right things then she can be a real asset...

Alright now the people who have dropped out.

Pete Buttigieg: it's not nothing for someone to be openly gay and to have gotten as far as he did in American politics. Like yeah, he wasn't the guy to win but for a long time he was a frontrunner and whether you agree with him or not, every bit of representation matters.

Michael Bloomberg: (yes I'm going to say something nice about Bloomberg). Disregard his policies and track record for a moment. Also ignore the disastrous consequences of what it would have meant to allow someone to effectively buy the nomination of a major political party. If he *had* secured the nomination this guy had literally billions of his own personal wealth to throw at down ballot races. If he were president he would have wanted a cooperative Congress and he would have thrown as much money as he could at making that a reality. And while that probably wouldn't have addressed some very important issues, he probably would have at least addressed climate change which any reasonable person will agree is an existential threat to all mankind.

Amy Klobuchar: She was basically Hillary but with fewer scandals and meaner. And honestly the meaner part is kinda important in modern politics. We need someone who can basically turn Senate Republicans into scolded children on a daily basis.

Tom Steyer: He's been taking out ad space to tell us to impeach and remove Trump since January of 2017. Yeah, he's another billionaire but he's the only one I've heard openly talking about how billionaires need to be taxed more.

Andrew Yang: Yeah another billionaire but he got us to have a national conversation about UBI and that's not nothing. Plus I'll admit that he was pretty fun in a genuine way.

Corey Booker: look there's a reason a lot of people were talking about him back in 2018 like he was the next Obama. Smart, charismatic, well versed in policy and procedure but willing to break the rules when the rules were blatantly unfair. Also as a side note could you imagine First Lady Rosario Dawson? Could you imagine a White House wedding?! Between brilliant, talented, hilarious, literal film and theater star Rosario Dawson and President Corey Booker? It would be an event filled with actual class and glamor happening in Washington DC that would have nothing to do with politics that would rival a royal wedding for sheer opulence and spectacle.

Julian Castro: he endorsed Warren so he's automatically getting points for me, he was fairly progressive in his own right and as someone with a Latinx heritage it's pretty damn likely that we could at least start to undo some of the damage of the last few years.

Marianne Williamson: Not gonna lie, I'd be mildly terrified of what her presidency would actually look like, but you have to admit that seeing her campaign against Trump in the general would have been absurd and hilarious. Plus, let's face it she *would* hold cleansing rituals to purge the White House of evil and who knows, it might work.

Deval Patrick, Rob Delaney & Michael Bennett: I'm lumping them in together because I have the same thing to say about all 3 of them. They're boring without standout policy proposals. Remember back when we had boring presidents? No you don't because even the most boring President we've had in a generation (Carter) was still going out and building homes for Habitat for Humanity at the age of 90. But I'm just saying, if we get some bland, inoffensive white guy in office it's not the worst thing in the world so long as we can shift Congress to a more progressive stance.

So yeah. That's the takeaway from this. It's ok to be disappointed that your candidate didn't win. It's ok to not be enthusiastic about the choices you're left with. What it's not ok to do is to refuse to vote. We are literally up against a fascist regime who is hell bent on kicking everyone out of the government who doesn't agree with them and removing voting rights altogether.

In 2016 we underestimated how dangerous his administration would be and how many people in America would be fine with a failed Reality Show Dictator in office. Think of all the things he's been able to do in the last 3 years alone and realize that he keeps "joking" about running for a third term.

Put a stop to this. Now. Vote in your primary for your preferred candidate and then regardless of who wins, vote a straight Democratic ticket in November. We won't get another chance at this.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): On Sunday, Howard Schultz, former longtime CEO of Starbucks, told “60 Minutes” that he was considering a run for president — but he said he wouldn’t run as a Democrat, instead he’d run as a “centrist independent.”

Schultz’s announcement was met with swift backlash from many in the Democratic Party, including those who fear that a third-party candidate will pave the path for Trump’s re-election. Others, such as David Frum at The Atlantic, have argued that Schultz might be the kind of candidate needed to defeat Trump, as the anti-Trump majority is strong, but it isn’t all that progressive.

So, what do you think — can an independent win?

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): Probably not, but I have learned my lessons from 2016 about naysaying.

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): People are being too absolutist in thinking that Schultz has a 0 percent chance of winning. He may very well have a 1 percent chance!

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): An independent could win the presidency, but I don’t think it’s very likely, and Howard Schultz seems like one of the least likely independents to win the presidency.

julia_azari: Whether an independent candidate could have a chance of winning is less about ideological positioning and more about having a solid Electoral College strategy. But I don’t see Schultz demonstrating that he would have one.

Instead, I think he’s trying to make a point about the Democrats moving too far left.

natesilver: I guess if we want to distinguish a 1 percent chance or a 0.1 percent chance from a 0 percent chance, then sure, he “has a chance.” But, I dunno, is Schultz more likely to win the presidency than Pete Buttigieg or Tulsi Gabbard? It’s probably pretty close. And Buttigieg and Gabbard aren’t being booked on every television network.

nrakich: Yes, it’s pretty dramatic how much our political system is stacked against independents.

Parties are very powerful organizations (especially in this era of polarization/partisanship) with built-in operations and supporters. And our winner-take-all system makes it very hard for even a strong independent — say, one who gets 25 percent of the popular vote — to get ANY Electoral College votes.

julia_azari: I’d add that nationalized messaging really puts independents at a disadvantage in a presidential election.

natesilver: I don’t think that’s quite as much of a barrier as people assume.

Like, if the independent gets 37 percent of the vote, and the two major-party candidates get 26 percent each, he’s probably going to win.

julia_azari: Permission for a brief history geek-out?

There have only been a few independent/third-party candidates who won Electoral College votes. Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 — although it probably helps when you, like, used to be the president. Before that, but as part of a related political movement, James Weaver ran as a populist in 1892 and got some Electoral College votes. (The Progressive and Populist movements had a sort of regional base in the West and Upper Midwest, and that’s generally where they did well).

And of course, George Wallace won a bunch of states in the South in 1968, as did Strom Thurmond in 1948.

Third-party politics has changed as television and other mass communications have made regional campaigning less of a thing. The signature third-party candidate of the current era is Ross Perot, who ran as a centrist without a particular regional tie. Perot won a lot of votes in 1992, but no states.

nrakich: Right, the most “successful” independent campaigns tend to be regionally based. But, of course, you can’t win the presidency with just one or two regions, and winning is (theoretically, anyway) the whole point of running.

sarahf: So if Schultz is at a disadvantage as a third-party candidate and is just as much of a longshot as Buttigieg or Gabbard, why is he getting so much attention?

nrakich: That’s the million-dollar question!

I agree with Nate that it’s unwarranted.

But I think it’s probably because media elites generally run in those (small) circles where there is an appetite for a centrist alternative — specifically, someone who is socially liberal but fiscally conservative, a trait Schultz and much of the Acela corridor have in common.

natesilver: Because he’s a rich guy, because the media thinks “Anything Is Possible Because Of Trump,” and because it’s sort of a slow news week.

sarahf: But what do we make of arguments from conservatives like David Frum that part of the panic we’re seeing from Democrats is that the anti-Trump majority is strong, but it isn’t all that progressive, so a candidate like Schultz actually offers more moderate voters an alternative?

julia_azari: I buy the concept that David Frum’s argument resonates with some people. After all, it’s likely that there are people who don’t like Trump, but who also remember Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and, going further back, George McGovern, losing big in presidential elections. Those voters may be worried about the Democrats becoming too liberal and losing in 2020.

nrakich: I’m not sure I buy Frum’s argument. A lot of so-called “progressive” priorities, like Medicare-for-all and legal marijuana, actually have strong majority support, if you believe polling.

natesilver: The panic is dumb and it’s about equally likely that Schultz will hurt or help Trump. But Democrats like to panic and, paradoxically, they’re also feeling very confident about their ability to beat Trump, so they don’t want anything to screw it up.

sarahf: Walk us through those two scenarios, Nate.

natesilver: I guess the scenario Democrats are worried about is that if, say, only 40 percent of the country likes Trump, Schultz will siphon off enough of the anti-Trump vote to allow Trump to be re-elected somehow.

There are a lot of issues with that, though.

One issue is that it presupposes that Trump’s still going to be at a 40 percent approval rating on Election Day next year. If he is, then frankly Trump is pretty screwed, most likely, with or without a third-party candidate in the race. I suppose things would be so dire for Trump at that point that any sort of wild card would help him. But it’s a big assumption to make.

Another issue is that lots of people who disapprove of Trump are going to be inclined to vote for him, especially if they identify as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents.

nrakich: As they did in 2016.

natesilver: Yeah, Trump won quite a few votes last time from people who did not like him because they also didn’t like Hillary Clinton and figured “Why the hell not?” Giving those voters an off-ramp — we’re talking about people who are basically conservative, but not Trump fans — might be helpful to the Democratic nominee, because if forced to make a choice between the major-party candidates they’re probably more likely to vote for Trump than, say, Kamala Harris or Bernie Sanders.

julia_azari: So one of the questions I’ve been thinking about here is ideology vs. partisanship.

The arguments for and against Schultz often assume people vote their ideology, and if there’s an option that’s not as far to the left as other Democrats, maybe they’ll choose that — putting aside for a moment whether this is a real segment of the electorate.

But there’s actually a decent amount of research that pushes back on that, saying that partisanship isn’t just about ideology — it’s also about disliking the other team.

It’s hard to argue that this isn’t the case with Trump and many Democrats.

natesilver: What are the implications of that, though? If anything, it seems to me like anti-Trump sentiment is so strong that Democrats will be very strategic in how they vote.

julia_azari: Exactly.

natesilver: Which means that Schultz wouldn’t pick off very many votes from Democrats.

julia_azari: Yes, that’s what I was trying to get at.

natesilver: And the reaction to his candidacy is sorta proof of that, maybe.

nrakich: Right, and the stereotypical Schultz voters — well-educated, elite — seem like the type who would vote strategically.

They understand, perhaps better than anyone, how voting for a third party runs the risk of throwing your vote away.

sarahf: So is that how Schultz hurts Trump? He takes voters away from Trump who were never going to vote for a Democrat but would support someone different than Trump?

julia_azari: For me the big takeaway is that the current party system precludes third-party impact — not just that third-party candidates aren’t likely to win. Rather, because voters are likely to be really averse to the idea of doing anything that might help the other party win, third-party candidates like Perot have had a harder time gaining traction in the national conversation.

I doubt that reluctant Trump voters would be drawn to Schultz’s socially liberal positions, either.

After all, a big reason why conservatives came home in 2016 and voted for Trump was because of abortion issues and the Supreme Court.

sarahf: So who does Schultz even appeal to?

natesilver: People who hated the Seattle SuperSonics.

People who read Axios.

sarahf: I struggle to understand his appeal as a candidate. Because if Democrats are going to vote for a Democrat regardless, and he’s not going to have much success in pulling away reluctant Republican voters, who then is his base?

natesilver: People who like mocha Frappuccinos.

sarahf: Nate.

nrakich: Probably very few people. Our default assumption should be that he’ll start off at the same level as a generic independent/other candidate in the polls.

julia_azari: He probably appeals to some rich, comfortable Democrats and moderate Democrats — but I just have my doubts about whether he appeals to them enough to attract a vote in the general.

natesilver: Yeah, the “both parties are too extreme” rhetoric will appeal to a certain number of voters.

But not necessarily a ton, especially because Schultz’s message is so substanceless (so far) and superficial. And he isn’t an especially interesting or dynamic guy. But, hey, politics is superficial sometimes.

nrakich: Schultz’s team is trying to argue that there’s an appetite for his candidacy because around 40 percent of Americans identify as independents. But I think that demonstrates how politically naive Schultz is. In reality, many of those people are Democratic or Republican leaners. Only about 12 percent are true independents.

And then even fewer of those independents are actual centrists. Independent does not equal moderate! Many independents are libertarians, or people on the far left who don’t think the Democratic Party goes far enough, like a certain Vermont senator.

natesilver: I’d also note that Schultz isn’t exactly a centrist.

In the context of American politics c. 2019, his economic views are quite conservative.

julia_azari: Centrism is an incredibly hard concept to nail down.

natesilver: Trump has largely given up on deficit reduction as either a rhetorical or an actual objective, for instance, whereas it’s maybe the headline message of Schultz’s campaign.

julia_azari: Right, that was a signature issue for Ross Perot, but the game is different than it was in 1992. Economic inequality has become a key item on the national agenda as a result of figures like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, and vocal movements like Occupy Wall Street. Republicans began talking about the issue a few years ago, too.

Presidential elections turn on whether the economy is good. And, not to revisit the 2016 primary too much, but Bernie Sanders seemed to resonate with certain voters by arguing that the economic system is rigged.

sarahf: So, if you’re Schultz, who is a lifelong Democrat, why not run as a Democrat?

That’s one thing I don’t get about his candidacy. Branding yourself as an independent thinker by running as an independent isn’t necessarily the best way to roll out a platform.

natesilver: Probably because you know you’d get crushed in the primaries.

And also maybe because you’re hearing stuff about Medicare-for-all and a 70 percent marginal tax rate and you don’t think that’s good for you, personally, as a Really Rich Person.

julia_azari: I saw a tweet from Jon Favreau of Pod Save America asking why Schultz thought he could just skip the Democratic primary and go straight to the general election — and asked pretty pointedly if it was because he has a lot of money — which I thought was interesting framing.

But another reason one might arguably go outside the normal party structure is that the parties are a bit beleaguered right now. Case in point: Trump and Sanders got a great deal of mileage out of anti-party messages even in their party primaries.

natesilver: To make an obvious comparison, Bloomberg is polling pretty badly right now. And Bloomberg is much more progressive than Schultz, is much better known, and has a much longer track record of actually doing stuff to support liberal causes (e.g. on gun control).

So if Bloomberg is having trouble seeing an opening, Schultz has no chance in hell.

julia_azari: And Bloomberg has actually held elected office.

natesilver: Yeah. Like, this conversation would be a lot different if Schultz had been mayor of Seattle or something.

Or Tacoma, even. Olympia. Walla Walla.

Anything that showed commitment to public life or any interest in public policy.

julia_azari: I’m not totally sure how to characterize this, but I think his candidacy and the attention it’s garnered is kind of a last gasp at this centrist idea that a non-politician is going to come in and save us.

Some people may have felt this way with Perot almost 30 years ago, but my sense is that the idea may no longer hold the same appeal.

nrakich: I don’t know if it’s a last gasp. I kind of feel like the three constants in life are death, taxes and baseless media buzz about a third-party candidate who’s going to shake up the presidential race.

Remember Americans Elect in 2012? Good times.

And Bloomberg in 2016?

This happens every year.

julia_azari: Sure, but anti-party politics are evolving, and I think Trump and Sanders are more illustrative of what the landscape looks like now.

nrakich: That anti-party messages are most effective within a party?

Yeah, it’s pretty ideal if you can run against the party and give people the rhetoric they want to hear, but still take advantage of all the structural benefits.

natesilver: To the extent it’s the last gasp, it might be because Schultz is such an ineffective messenger for it.

julia_azari: Yeah, I don’t mean it’s the last time this will happen, but I do think its appeal has diminished.

Please don’t ask me to predict the rest of human history, guys.

natesilver: I don’t use these terms a ton, but it reeks of a certain kind of entitlement and privilege to basically say that you’re the only reasonable person in the room and that a “silent majority” (Schultz’s term) of Americans support your ideas, when (1) those ideas just so happen to be in your economic self-interest and (2) you’ve put no real effort into learning about how politics or policy work.

sarahf: I still wonder though what Schultz’s candidacy would mean for the Democratic primary if he were to run as a Democrat. Would it force the conversation to hit more issues in the middle? Or are we past that point, and now if a candidate doesn’t support some version of Medicare-for-all they can’t win the nomination?

natesilver: In terms of what would happen if Schultz were a Democrat, I think he’d get literally almost no traction and it would be a non-story.

sarahf: So that’s interesting. Are we only experiencing the current Schultz-mania because he’s an independent?

natesilver: I think so, Sarah. I mean, look, there’d be a few days of coverage. But there’s not a big market for this candidacy in the Democratic primary and, to the extent there is, Schultz is not the right vessel for it.

nrakich: This is only tangentially related, but I also don’t know how much appetite there is among anti-Trumpers for yet ANOTHER rich businessman with no political experience.

Just another reason Schultz isn’t the best type of independent, I guess.

natesilver: I agree with that, Nathaniel. It’s an awfully weird time to claim that running as a businessman with no political experience is an asset, when you’re also claiming that Trump is a terrible president.

julia_azari: But on the topic of “electability” (heavy quotes), a conversation that was already happening before Schultz announced, Schultz theoretically possesses the qualities that make voters feel more confident — he’s a centrist, he’s older, and he’s a white man.

Arguably, he’s also a foil for what could be a very diverse crowd of candidates in the Democratic primary.

natesilver: But to some extent, he can be a foil for whoever the Democratic nominee is anyway.

julia_azari: Unless it’s Biden! Since he’s also an older white man and has kinda distanced himself from some of the heavy redistribution policies that other Democrats have advocated.

natesilver: In part because (so far) he’s a pretty bad spokesman for his positions.

Maybe he’ll get better.

nrakich: Honestly, the backlash has been so swift and unanimous, I wonder if Schultz even goes through with it.

sarahf: Yeah, maybe he won’t run.

natesilver: To appear in the presidential debates, he’d have to get enough of a base to poll at 15 percent.

nrakich: He got his media attention. He’s selling his book. Why drag yourself through the mud on an actual presidential campaign?

natesilver: But, like, having Kamala Harris standing on stage against two old rich business dudes who are saying we need to roll back the welfare state is a contrast that probably works pretty well for Kamala Harris.

julia_azari: Definitely in the Democratic primary.

sarahf: Any closing thoughts?

nrakich: I think Kyle Kondik pretty much summed up my thoughts on Howard Schultz’s chances as an independent:

One way of thinking about third party presidential aspirants in 2020. In 2016, two of the least-popular major party candidates in history faced each other, and third party candidates received… just 6% of the total vote.

— Kyle Kondik (@kkondik) January 28, 2019

[drumpfwatch]

How We Know Trump is a Racist

    So, I think it’s time I put this card on the table. I think there’s no more room to argue here, that Trump (who still lost the popular vote by 2.5 million) is a racist and most certainly a threat to people of color. And I’ll give my best evidence by the end of this, but let’s cover some of the more...obvious stuff.

    Let’s talk about the first big racist thing that Trump did that caught everyone’s attention. You know, that time he said Mexico is sending us their rapists and criminals.

    Let’s break that down for a second, shall we? Is he saying that Mexico is like, sending rapists as a military? That they are some kind of invading force? Because that what it means to send a group of people to another country. It’s not like there’s some grand Mexican conspiracy to make life so horrible for the people their that they’d rather come here. Or some sort of “globalist” conspiracy to flood the Americas with Mexicans because…

    Actually, why? Why oh why would they be doing that? Why might a man whose more than once shown himself willing to defend Nazis be convinced that there is some sort of effort to bring lots and lots of non-white people into our country in such a manner that they could be said to be being “sent”, as if apart of some military operation.

    GEE, I WONDER.

    Of course, that would give Trump the credit of having intelligence, which I’m not entirely convinced of. Maybe he does actually think that Mexico is purposely trying to torment its population to chase them out because he’s an idiot. Or maybe he’s just too stupid to know what the word “sending” means - I wouldn’t out that past him either. That’s what makes dealing with Trumby so hard - is he real? Is he just stupid? Maybe he’s just accidentally saying Nazi talking points because he’s a moron and doesn’t know to NOT say them! May he’s stupid enough to believe them! Maybe he’s just an idiot who doesn’t know that what he’s saying are Nazi talking points! Who knows!

    Actually, while we’re on the topic of Nazis, let’s talk about the second big incident, the one surrounding Charlottesville.

    For those fortunate enough to forget about that little blunder, back when he first got elected a bunch of Nazis got together with members of the KKK and other hate groups to march in protest of a statue of Robert E. Lee going down. Talk about being overly sensitive. It took the President two days to finally say anything on it, and what he said can basically be translated as “Sure there were some bad people there but I’m sure there were a lot of good people.” He then went on to talk about how the Alt-Left was there and came “charging at the Alt-Right” as if both sides were equally bad.

    Another common Nazi tactic, by the way. “Mom, mom, they were being bad too!” says the child who was just beating his sibling because she wanted to play a video game when he wanted to.

    Of course that’s not a perfect analogy - Nazis would kill the child for the crime of existing while Jewish/Gay/Roma etc. But that’s a whole other post.

    Point is, Trump, a man known for jumping the gun, suddenly decided to take a moment to make sure the reports of people screaming “Jews will not replace us!” (something you could find with a 5 second video search) and carrying swastikas (again, something you can find fairly quickly) were true. Sure, he says, SOME of them were obviously bad but some of them were probably “fine people.” Right?

    Except no. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, do you know what good people do when they accidentally find themselves on the same side as the swastikas at a Nazi rally? THEY LEAVE. Meanwhile, the “Alt-Left” which doesn’t exist were violent largely only in self defense, if at all, and certainly didn’t end up murdering anybody like the Nazis did. .

    What matters today is that the first thing a Nazi tries to do when dealing with a “normie” (and yes they do call non-Antifa, non-fascists that) is say they’re not a Nazi, so never believe it from the mouth, always look at the actions. If someone hangs out with Nazis, says Nazi talking points, and has Nazis following them around, they’re a Nazi.

    Even if Trump was trying to be honest for once in his goddamn life by taking the time to actually get the full story, then the answer is “These guys are Nazis, and Nazis are bad people.” It doesn’t matter if they have a cute dog at home and take care of their children as great parents, they want to kill people - they want to commit literal genocide. How do you excuse that? You either have to unbrainwash them, educate them, or deal with them on those terms - if they’re going to kill you, you are in your rights to retaliate in self-defense. End of discussion.

    “Fine people” my flatulating ass.

    Anyway, they say two makes a trend, but three makes a pattern, so what about a third horribly racist thing he’s done?.

    I could talk about all the dog whistles he’s blowing, to the point where he mind as well being using a megaphone and not a dog whistle, but people won’t believe that entirely easily. It’s not a simple thing to convince people that the “OK” symbol is actually a little highsign Nazis flash to each other without sounding like you’re crazy, but again, that’s a whole other topic. Besides, that’s more of an ever pervasive thing instead of a specific incident.

    On that same tack, I could talk about the time he called himself a nationalist, and how scary a term that is and how afraid a lot of people should be that he did because it means he’s either admitted to being a nationalistic Nazi or he’s too stupid to realize that that’s what he just did. Either way, he’s not fit to be president, but people would argue the same thing - that it’s just a word. It couldn’t possibly mean anything, certainly not something bad!

    I could talk about how I hear people complaining that I’m only a silly liberal who only thinks he’s racist now that he’s president and I don’t like him, but that’s not true. There’s plenty of records of people talking about Donald Trump being a racist before he ever ran for President, including numerous reports of him disallowing black people into his apartments because they are “welfare queens.” One of his staff reported that everytime a colored person applied, he was supposed to attach a small sticky note with a “C” on it to let the higher ups know. Trump was very eager to settle these outside of court, probably because he knew he’d lose. But I’ve heard a lot of people say that because it never went to court it doesn’t count and nothing was ever proved. Hell, if you’re still on about it being me specifically, I called Trump racist before he ran for president when he kept going on about Obama’s birth certificate, although I couldn’t prove that with any sort of record, that was all in conversations with my friends.

        That’s actually a whole other thing I could write an entire post about - how we know he’s racist because he refused to believe a Black Man could actually be American, but that’s another one of those things that people just find it difficult to believe for some weird reason.

    Hell, I could cite every single racist thing he’s said or done. Because racism isn’t...like, a crime you commit, it’s a pattern of behavior encouraged by systemic structures that serve to better one group over the other, so everything from that comment he made about how a judge wouldn’t treat his case fairly because he’s Latino or how he berated that Gold Star Family for the mother not talking when she was literally grieving the death of her son just because they were Muslim count. Maybe that time he encouraged people to beat up the Black Lives Matter protesters would count.

    But all of this is almost tangential. You wanna know how I know Trump is a racist? Because I’m not the one saying it. David Duke is saying it. You know, that former Grand Wizard of the KKK? Sebastian Gorka, a known Neo-Nazi, says Trump agrees with him. The KKK was pretty notorious for hating American politics for leaving them more or less behind with the exception of crawling out of the woodwork to support a Ronald Reagan or disavow a Barack Obama or two. Even then, their support was a bit hesitant, and of course even Ronald Reagan was like “Ew, no. You guys can get away from me” as soon as it became news that the KKK had done so.

    But with Trump, you have very enthusiastic Nazis coming out of the filthy, disgusting sewers they belong in saying “Yeah, Trump’s our guy! He’s our guy!” and Heiling him all over the place. THEY wouldn’t be excited about him being a racist if they didn’t believe he was racist. They like him, they approve of him, and the only reason for that, the only point of that, is that they’re saying he’s on their side. THAT should be more than enough to prove the point.

[anthonybialy]

Blue in the Face

The answer as to who can unite us will divide us further. Who can bring Americans together in this amicable epoch where everyone hates everyone who votes differently? We could use a guy willing to at least make the case in unsafe territories that there's more to life than voting yourself entitlements.

Just as only Nixon could go to China, there's a lone person who's able to cross the lines to persuade without fear. And because that person is Donald Trump, it'll never happen. I'm sorry to build hope emptily, but I'm just being presidential.

Trump should be reaching out to Blue States as part of that whole fearless shtick. In particular, he should pitch to some of our biggest and stupidest states. Appealing across party lines in New York and California would not only show serfs in those feudal hellholes there are other options than fealty to idiotic governors: it'd be helpful to win elections, which is his core principle. You'd think he'd particularly want to dominate his home prefecture, unless that sick freak is into getting dominated by a Democrat.

Explain what failures have been inflicted by big-government goons would be his easiest task yet, and he's very much into not having to stay for overtime. But it wouldn't take much effort to offer the alternative. Like he asked of black voters who have been exploited by Democrats out of habit, what the hell do you have to lose? Sure, he should offer something better than noting the other side is pond scum. But pointing out how everyone he doesn't like fails has worked for him so far.

It's easy for Trump to note what sucks, which is why he does so from the moment he wakes up until after the final syndicated Judge Judy. Arguing that present policies fail takes nothing more than gesturing around. Maybe he's worried about noting his own frequent detours into liberalism. It'd take a diagram with index cards and overlapping strings, and he's more of an instinctual conspiracy loon.

The purported art of the deal ought to lead its kingpin to making bold advances. History’s best businessman should calculate that he'll struggle to win with the same coalition of shaky states. A handful of Hillary-haters in contentious areas could propel him to victory again, just like the Trump Vodka and Trump Ice cocktail could come into fashion. Brace for that damn collapsing dam.

Making them play defense would be the best way to stay offensive. A president as ambitious as this one claims he is should want to put every state into play. It's time for a purportedly audacious leader to go on the attack. The strategy counts upon board game geeks not noting how few armies he has in reserve for Risk. By playing timidly, he'll spend 2020 wasting finite resources on formerly safe outcomes, which is a Democratic specialty. I told you he never really switched.

A president who'd like to be known for aggressive moves is bravely not even making an attempt. The most fearless leader and top salesman ever won't try to make a pitch in unsafe states. Noticing how he claims things he doesn't actually do might lead to unpleasant traitorous thoughts. Realizing that everything Trump has ever chosen has been a calculation to seize upon popular opinion could hurt his feelings, so avoid at all costs.

Refusing to cross territories is philosophically cowardly, but at least it'll have devastating practical consequences. Oblivious timidness is going to make it difficult to maintain the slim circumstances that allowed a win last time, much less gain on them. Trump's best strategy will be to withdraw the night before the 2020 election claiming there are no more accomplishments available.

The man who demands unquestioned loyalty may not precisely reciprocate. Voters who think they discovered the one man above politics should start realizing he's more into it than anyone before. It's about time to know that someone who discards people like gum wrappers doesn't care about a party he joined out of convenience.

Why even be opportunistic? Trump could use his own oscillating party alliance as a selling point, but he can't even connive correctly. The fact that Trump's businesses have relied on convincing rubes that slapping his name in gold on anything shoddy is the only necessary selling point. Yes, he should care about reelection. But thinking too far ahead is for those eggheads his ever-rational minions discarded.

I'll always be thankful we avoided electing some book-reader who thought out why liberty is good and sticks to principles. This is episode number one million where someone who actually knows who Thomas Sowell is could argue merits. Now, conservatism is whatever Trump says it is. You claim it's in trouble?

This gambling executive sure doesn't like trying to win big for someone who claims he has nothing to lose. The bully would rather punch down. Calling Jim Acosta names is easier than trying to convince anyone why government is to life what Anthony Scaramucci was to his legacy. Trump's present party would be much more confident about the future if he started believing it. But that's really hard when he's the one in charge of it. Don't distract him with that checks and branches talk.

Rallying his fans at rallies partisan enough to make Obama blush is much more comfortable than trying to recruit more. I'd accuse him of selling out once he got famous if he hadn't done so long ago. To be fair, his shtick was never sincere. Hoping to repeat his winning strategy of running against Hillary Clinton is much easier than convincing liberal states their lives don't need to suck so much. He won't even close the easiest sales.

[seenashwrite]

do we know anything about john winchester's parents, besides Henry? Do you have any speculation as to why the boys were named after Mary's parents? We learn from Henry that he hadn't abandoned young John. Thanks to Abaddon. But I need more!

Ah, an autopsy. Everybody gown up. Grab the rib spreader. This is gonna be a good one. Characters like Millie are my most favorite when it comes to writing in the vein of “based on…” and “adapted by…” because we have little information on them, meaning we can fill in those cracks ourselves, but at the same time? In this case, at least? The little bit we’ve got on Millie holds a lot.

Brief disclaimer: I am of the opinion that the writers (excepting Kripke, who was playing the long game with a five-year plan) aren’t doing as much foreshadowing and employing other sneaky-tricksy, deep-seated literary gambits as I’ve noted more than a few viewers assert; it seems to me that the writers backtrack and use past plot points (broadly, that is - evidence has shown us that, on the whole, they aren’t precise canon adherents) to bolster present/immediate-future arcs. However, it gives us the opportunity to expound upon the more minute things/characters they’ve forgotten about and/or left to languish.

Let’s do a list of knowns vs. unknowns about The Mysterious Mrs. Winchester, because the former’s more important than the latter when getting our brains on task for an adaptation/based-upon piece, a.k.a. fanfiction. I have used her as a pivotal player (in the backstory) for my big story, so minus some specific lines I just pulled from a script, the following is coming from my (canon-based) notes. You have come to the right person #humbly #not really #Millie’s my jam 

Check this out.

Millie has only come up twice in the show, most recently on Lady Antonia “Brain-Diddle” Bevell’s grossly incomplete mood board, then in a flashback during a conversation between Henry and Josie. Watch your step for that turd of exposition dump up top:

Catch that? 

Item #1: Millie is aware of Henry’s job / The MoLs

Perhaps she’s even met Josie - decent speculation, Josie is her husband’s partner, at least for now, in the context of their novice/initiate status, and Josie felt comfortable referring to Millie by name to Henry, vs. saying “Your wife is lucky to have you.”

To what degree is Millie in-the-know? Specifically, is she aware of the paranormal bend of it all? That’s a crack we can fill. She could very well be under the impression this is some sort of niche government division.

I vote “no”. I think Henry would’ve said, “Except she doesn’t know, Josie. She doesn’t know what we deal with, how dangerous the work can be. All she’d know is that she’s become a widow….”

A little sidebar to bolster my claims of her being in the know - whether Henry had, in the past, started tip-toeing down the road of cluing in John on his work is unknown, but he sure as shit was starting to edge there based on the whole “What’s that pin mean” - “You’ll find out” exchange. Now, Henry’s smart, and smart people know that telling your offspring to keep things secret from the other parent is a dumbass move, from beans to beanstalks, and particularly when they’re in mouthy toddler beansprout stage, that crew can’t keep anything secret, it ain’t how they’re wired.

So Millie knows, and I think Millie knows about the bumps in the night. I think she knows Henry’s father and grandfather were members. And she knows that means John’s on deck. And she knows that’s bad news. Here’s why.

Item #2: Millie & John move from Illinois

Henry went missing in ‘58, we’ve no idea when when she moved. Was she from Illinois? Did she move alone? Did she have family somewhere? Did she go there first? Did she go straight to Kansas? Why did she end up in Kansas? Nobody knows. We’ve zero knowledge of anything in this area. Plot away.

But we do have the knowledge she got herself and her son the hell outta Dodge. She left friends. Took John away from his friends. Left the house she shared with her husband. Again: did she lose the house? Did she not have a skill set that would’ve = decent employment? Do the MoLs not have some sort of killed-in-the-line-of-duty spousal/family payout? Was it a crappy one? Got me.

Point is, single motherhood is tough now, much less the further back in time you go. It’s possible she did just fine on her own.

But let’s talk probable.

Item #3: Millie remarried & put down roots in Kansas

When we meet adult John, a random in town tells him “Say hello to your old man for me.” 

[glances around] 

Cool.

Now, the writers - when they had to do the whole MoL thing in order to get us to the bunker so there was a stable set piece for consistency or budget or whatever - absolutely forgot this one-off comment that was made in the infancy of the show, guaranteed, hundred percent, no way I’m wrong. Same goes for the one-off “comes from a family of mechanics” line that some fans glom onto. 

These are canon misfires that piddled into the ocean, never tore through the hull of another ship, and are No Big Deal. [yes I know the difference between cannon and canon, I’m being cheeky, nobody “@” me] Upshot is, we get to stick it into the Millie file. Make stepdad a mechanic. Boom. Done.

In any event, I use the phrase “puts down roots” because this is where John returned to when he left the service, got a job as a mechanic, ultimately started dating this chick named Mary, so this was home. We can reasonably assume, then, that he’d lived there for most of his life, given how young he was when he signed up for the service*.

[* Note: I state vs. suggest because I have extensive character autopsies done on both John and Mary; I’ve covered a bit of my Mary diagnoses elsewhere; just letting y'all know it’s why I tend to state things about them vs. quantify it with “My impression is…”, etc., because I’ve got a decently robust pile of evidence to support my statements; J & M aren’t the topic here, though]

I actually like the misfire line about mechanics, and I like saying that stepdad is a mechanic, because it tracks with items #1-4 above, and gives us…

Item #5: Millie didn’t want John to be in the Men of Letters and made critical life choices to prevent such

Two points for this item:

—> She went from being the wife of an academic professional involved with covert ops to being the wife of a mechanic

This isn’t impossible or strange or noteworthy in-and-of itself. I’m not saying it is, not shitting on blue collar workers or persons who specialize in a trade vs. those on a scholarly track. I don’t mean to infer that Millie - as a single mom in the early ‘60s - lowered her standards or something, that she was desperate for a husband and took what she could get; on the contrary, based on how important knowledge and order was to Henry, how he looked down his nose at what he found to be the pedestrian lifestyle/life choices of hunters, I’d assert that Millie was quite intelligent and perhaps even “upper-crust”.

But that sharp turn, regardless of the impetus, does go to our Millie profile. It’s just interesting, that flip of her switch, especially when you combine it with the move from her established life with a young child.

—> She never told John the truth about Henry’s disappearance

Why? Why would you do that to your kid? Why would you allow him to have the impression - and the heartache from - believing he was abandoned?

Because - what trumps everything (or should) for a parent?

Protecting your kid.

The Namesake Question

Real answer: the characters didn’t exist at the time the show’s skeleton was being assembled.

Moving on to the answer(s) we can divine based on canon…

First obvious answer, on the Millie front, is they had two boys. Yeah, yeah, could’ve been “Miller” or her maiden name or something, and we don’t know their middle names, etc. Knock it out, throw it in as a plot point. And true, it’s not like they went with, say, Henry and Sam. The Dean character could’ve pulled off the nickname “Hank”, admittedly difficult as it is to imagine from our current vantage point. So, you’re right - it’s a thing. 

Again, I’ve long had autopsies done on John and Mary, adding to them over seasons 11-13 (when I started watching in real time), and those are lengthy, winding roads that do branch off of the Millie highway, but aren’t the topic here. Just a reminder that all the things I’m presenting below in a factual tone, I’ve got evidence to back it up.

Based on John and Mary’s behavior, their choices, their parenting styles, we can paint a pretty clear picture in our minds of their childhoods. For John, we’ve covered the broad sweeps of his to the extent we can by way of examining Millie. For Mary, we have more, and have seen her parents and their behavior, their choices, their parenting style. I don’t see the Campbells as putting family first above all (they put the mission first - sound like anyone else we know?), whereas Henry has been shown to love his wife and son more than anything, so had John been exposed to him? Wow. We probably wouldn’t recognize him.

But as it stands, John doesn’t have an instinctual reaction to put family above everything else. Neither does Mary, as we’ve since learned. Dean does, vehemently, and as Sam matured, his instinct has changed to be this way, as well. It happens - some of us, either purposefully or unintentionally, end up replicating our childhoods for our children; others, like Dean and Sam, strive to do the opposite. Even siblings growing up in the same environment can go different directions - it’s a crap shoot to a degree, whether when, upon leaving the house, you go out the front door or the back.

So while I don’t see that Mary was particularly close to Deanna and Samuel, I do find there’s enough to support that John wasn’t close at all to Millie. Absence of evidence does not = proof, true, so the lack of him talking about his mother alone doesn’t exactly make a solid case. Having said that, there’s multiple reasons (again-again, that’s for another time) based on solid evidence (i/e, John’s actions/decisions), which have me leaning towards he and his mother being anywhere from distant to estranged, not covering that list, but one that’s germane to our current topic is this:

When John got busy investigating Mary’s death - or letting folks assume he was working through his grief by ditching his business and checking out on being a father - he left Dean and Sam with Mike and Kate Guenther while he was off drinking and researching, perhaps others (and yes, Bobby later, but I’m talking about initially, in their hometown) if the Guenthers were unable, and who knows who all if he left for days at a time.

So why did John and Dean and Sam not ever stay with Millie? Why were Dean and Sam not left with their grandmother? She was right there.

Well, the answer is that the writers didn’t think of Henry (and by extension, Millie) til seasons later, but for us, it’s a crack that could be filled, a nice deep one, too. 

Three possibilities:

(1) Millie had died prior(2) Millie and John were not close, possibly estranged(3) Millie did help watch after Dean and Sam

Numbers 1 and 2 are plausible, and it actually could be both. Could also spin it to where Millie was dead, stepfather was alive (we have evidence of that, see above, RE: rando dude’s “Say hi to your old man for me”) and John wasn’t comfortable leaving Dean and Sam with him, or there was some reason the stepdad was unable to take care of them, or maybe John loved stepdad dearly and would have stayed with him/left the kids with him, but stepdad had died or remarried or moved away before Dean was born. Fill in that blank yourself.

I don’t find number 3 very probable, as it’s not mentioned in John’s journal. He specifically mentions Mike and Kate several times. He even mentions Missouri meeting Dean and Sam, how they really took to her immediately. He would’ve mentioned Millie.

I say all that to say, the lack of naming one of the boys after Henry is of note, but not mysterious for me because John was under the impression that his father ditched him and his mother. And, um...

.

INT. DINER – DAY

We see a close-up of a black-and-white photograph of HENRY holding a baseball with his arm around a young boy holding a bat. HENRY is sitting at a table holding the photograph. DEAN and SAM are standing at the counter.

SAM Driver's license says he's Henry Winchester from Normal, Illinois. He knows Dad's birthday, the exact place where he was born. Dude, that's our grandfather.

DEAN I'm just saying before we break out the warm and toasties, let's not forget that, uh, H.G. Wells over there left Dad high and dry when he was a kid.

SAM But maybe he didn't run out on Dad – I mean, not on purpose. Maybe he time-traveled here and, I don't know, got stuck.

DEAN Yeah, well, either way, Dad hated the son of a bitch.

.

So name-wise for the Winchester side? Miller, Mills, a maiden name - I can see something as a namesake for Millie still being plausible as one of their middle names; a Henry namesake never had a chance in hell. 

And despite neither John nor Mary behaving as if they truly buy into the whole FAMILY IS EVERYTHING stance, Samuel and Deanna died a horrible death, and not far away - it happened when both John and Mary were in the mix, Mary specifically. I don’t see her having to push very hard to get John on board with naming their kids after her parents following a shared traumatic experience.

Alrighty, then.

We can send some samples off to the lab, I hear the Stynes run a really thorough one not too far from here, but I’m pretty satisfied - pass me the sutures, time to tag and bag.

.

.

.

.

That was gross, I’m so apologizing. 

.

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.

.

[whispers] I’m totes not. 😏

Hello, person who has read this far! See HERE for how to make an appointment with Dr. Nash.

[patriotsnet]

Did Trump Ever Say Republicans Are Stupid

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/did-trump-ever-say-republicans-are-stupid/

Did Trump Ever Say Republicans Are Stupid

Trump Secretly Mocks His Christian Supporters

Donald Trump Tells Oprah in 1988 What He Would Do as President

Former aides say that in private, the president has spoken with cynicism and contempt about believers.

One day in 2015, Donald Trump beckoned Michael Cohen, his longtime confidant and personal attorney, into his office. Trump was brandishing a printout of an article about an Atlanta-based megachurch pastor trying to raise $60 million from his flock to buy a private jet. Trump knew the preacher personallyCreflo Dollar had been among a group of evangelical figures who visited him in 2011 while he was first exploring a presidential bid. During the meeting, Trump had reverently bowed his head in prayer while the pastors laid hands on him. Now he was gleefully reciting the impious details of Dollars quest for a Gulfstream G650.

Trump seemed delighted by the scam, Cohen recalled to me, and eager to highlight that the pastor was full of shit. Theyre all hustlers, Trump said.

The presidents alliance with religious conservatives has long been premised on the contention that he takes them seriously, while Democrats hold them in disdain. In speeches and interviews, Trump routinely lavishes praise on conservative Christians, casting himself as their champion. My administration will never stop fighting for Americans of faith, he declared at a rally for evangelicals earlier this year. Its a message his campaign will seek to amplify in the coming weeks as Republicans work to confirm Amy Coney Barretta devout, conservative Catholicto the Supreme Court.

The People Whom President Trump Has Called Stupid

Since he declared his candidacy for the presidency, no group has been deemed stupid by Donald Trump more frequently than Americas leaders. There are stupid people running the country, he said over and over and over again on the campaign trail; making stupid deals with Iran and stupid deals on trade. Everyone in charge was dumb and he wasnt except that he was stupid for self-funding his campaign. That, in broad strokes, was Trumps rhetoric in 2015 and 2016.

But that wasnt the full extent of it. When Trump tweeted disparagement of LeBron James and CNNs Don Lemon Friday night, it was a reminder that Trump often divides the world into two groups: those who are stupid and those who arent. It was also a reminder that, of late, Trump has often chosen to describe as stupid people who are not white.

That wasnt always the case. Before the presidential election, Trump mostly disparaged white people as stupid.

Of course, back then, his political opponents were mostly white people: those running against him in the Republican primary and the conservative establishment broadly opposed to his candidacy. He called Karl Rove, former George W. Bush adviser, stupid five times, including in interviews. Bloombergs Tim OBrien, whom Trump once sued unsuccessfully for alleged libel, earned the description three times, as did television host Glenn Beck.

Since President Trumps inauguration, though, that has changed.

It wasnt Obama.

The Dumbest Stuff Donald Trump Has Ever Said

Paul J Richards/AFP/Getty

Americas favorite faux-political shock jock came back with a vengeance two weeks ago when, during a press conference to announce his candidacy for the presidency, he characterized all Mexican immigrants as drug-peddling rapists.

The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody elses problems, he said. When Mexico sends its people, theyre not sending their best. Theyre not sending you. Theyre sending people that have lots of problems, and theyre bringing those problems with us. Theyre bringing drugs. Theyre bringing crime. Theyre rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

The comments ended up getting both him and his television programs booted from NBC. After a public pressure campaign that racked up more than 200,000 petition signatures, the network decried his words as derogatory. Trump, as to be expected, railed against NBC. Instead of apologizing for his words, he later asserted that his stance on immigration is correct.

Its not the first time Trump has insulted Americas southern neighbor. This past February, when Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu took home an Oscar for his film Birdman, Trump offered dubious congratulations. Well it was a great night for Mexico, as usual in this country It was a great night for Mexico. This guy kept getting up and up and up. I said, you know, whats he doing? Hes walking away with all the gold.

On African-Americans:

Laziness is a trait in blacks.

On women:

On religion:

Read Also: Do Republicans Support The Death Penalty

Trump ‘knows Republicans Are Stupid’ Jared Kushner Allegedly Said To Former Editor

Greg Price U.S.Jared KushnerDonald TrumpRepublicans

One of the strategies Donald Trump employed as he began putting his name on the U.S. political map years ago was championing “birtherism,” the long-held conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was born outside of the U.S. and hence should never have been elected. He often chastised Obama and demanded the president produce his birth certificate, revving up an anti-Obama base that eventually helped put Trump in the White House.

Evidently, Trump may have been using the so-called birthers only as a means to an end.

His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is also a senior adviser to the president, allegedly told a former editor of the newspaper he once owned that the billionaire real-estate mogul didn’t believe his own “birtherism” claims, and only made them to charge up Republicans because they are “stupid,” GQ reported.

During a discussion on how to cover Trump, the former New York Observer editor, Elizabeth Spiers, claimed she told Kushner that she had serious problems with Trump’s repeated claims that Obama was not born in the U.S., to which Kushner allegedly told her: “He doesn’t really believe it, Elizabeth. He just knows Republicans are stupid and they’ll buy it.”

Spiers told her Kushner anecdote in response to a question from a conservative blogger on Facebook, and then screenshotted the response and put it up on Twitter.

In 1988 Oprah Asked Donald Trump If He’d Ever Run For President Here’s How He Replied

Donald Trump;wasn’t always so sure he wanted to run for president.

Long before The Donald officially kicked off his;polarizing2016run and became;the Republican frontrunner, Oprah asked the business tycoon about his political aspirations on a 1988 episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” ;Trump had originally appeared on the show to promote a new book and discuss his life as a businessman, but the conversation soon turned toward foreign policy and how Trump would take a tougher stance with America’s allies.

“I’d make our allies pay their fair share. We’re a debtor nation; something’s going to happen over the next number of years in this country, because you can’t keep going on losing $200 billion,” he said on “The Oprah Show” back then. “We let Japan come in and dump everything right into our markets… They come over here, they sell their cars, their VCRs. They knock the hell out of our companies. And, hey, I have tremendous respect for the Japanese people. I mean, you can respect somebody that’s beating the hell out of you, but they are beating the hell out of this country. Kuwait, they live like kings and yet, they’re not paying. We make it possible for them to sell their oil. Why aren’t they paying us 25 percent of what they’re making? It’s a joke.”

The rant prompted Oprah to ask the question that people would ask for the next few decades.

Of course, he couldn’t help but hedge.

“I think I’d win,” Trump said. “I’ll tell you what: I wouldn’t go in to lose.”

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Trumps 10 Most Hilariously Stupid Things He Said In 2019

President Donald Trump has a long history of saying some of the most bizarre things in politics. This year was one for the books as the president flailed, searching for excuses for his July 25 phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Here are some of the most hilariously stupid things the president has said this year:

1. Windmills cause ear cancer

If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value, Trump told Republicans in April. And they say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one. He then made a whirring noise mimicking a turbine.

2. He wants to buy Greenland

In meetings, at dinners and in passing conversations, Mr. Trump has asked advisers whether the U.S. can acquire Greenland, listened with interest when they discuss its abundant resources and geopolitical importance and, according to two of the people, has asked his White House counsel to look into the idea, the Wall Street Journal reported in August.

Denmark essentially owns it, Trump told reporters in the days that followed. Were very good allies with Denmark. We protect Denmark like we protect large portions of the world. Strategically its interesting.

Trump then got into a fight with Danish leaders and had to cancel a trip hed planned to the country.

3. Trump is the chosen one.

4. Why dont they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.

Im Getting The Word Out: Inside The Feverish Mind Of Donald Trump Two Months After Leaving The White House

I Alone Can Fix It

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Seventy days had passed since Donald Trump left Washington against his will. On March 31, 2021, we ventured to Mar-a-Lago, where he still reigned as king of Republican politics. We arrived late that afternoon for our audience with the man who used to be president and were ushered into an ornate sixty-foot-long room that functioned as a kind of lobby leading to the clubs patio. A model of Air Force One painted in Trumps proposed redesigna flat red stripe across the middle, a navy belly, a white top, and a giant American flag on the tailwas proudly displayed on the coffee table facing the entrance. It was a prop disconnected from reality.; Trumps vision never came to be; the fleet now in use by President Biden still bears the iconic baby blue-and-white livery designed by Jacqueline Kennedy.

Trump had invited us to Mar-a-Lago to interview him for this book. He had declined an interview for our first book about his presidency, and when A Very Stable Genius was published in January 2020, attacked us personally and branded our reporting a work of fiction. But Trump was quick to agree to our request this time. He sought to curate history.

But future elections were not front and center in his mind. A past election was. Trump was fixated on his loss in 2020, returning to this wound repeatedly throughout the interview.;

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Trump Told A Reporter His Biggest Secret: That He Is A Danger To The American People

Trump is a particularly stupid man who thinks he is very smart. Perhaps this lies at the root of his monumentally dumb decision to grant Bob Woodward 18 interviews

The Inuit are supposed to have dozens of words to describe snow. The Brits have endless ways to talk about rain. Now its time for Americans to delineate all the many ways that Donald Trump is dumb.

If Bob Woodwards new blockbuster teaches us anything new about the character of the 45th president, its that we dont yet have the words to describe the multiple variants of the vacuum inside his head.

Theres the stupidity of arrogance, the stupidity of ignorance and his old friend: the stupidity of blatant duplicity. Theres his homicidal stupidity, his traitorous stupidity, his criminally corrupt stupidity and his plain old infantile stupidity.

Lets start with the top of this taxonomy: the domain of Donalds dumbness. At his core, the former reality TV star is a particularly stupid man who thinks he is very smart. Or as he prefers to call his own character, a very stable genius.

Perhaps, just maybe, this lies at the root of his monumentally dumb decision to grant Woodward 18 interviews, on the record and on tape.

Instead, our very stupid genius vomited up all manner of secrets that collectively prove beyond all reasonable doubt that he represents the greatest single danger to the fate of both the American people and to himself.

Fact Check: Did Trump Say In ’98 Republicans Are Dumb

Donald Trump: I didnt say that. (He did.)

Did Donald Trump tell People magazine in 1998 that if he ever ran for president, hed do it as a Republican because theyre the dumbest group of voters in the country and that he could lie and theyd still eat it up?A:;No, thats a bogus meme.

FULL ANSWER

The meme purports to be a quote from Trump in;People;magazine in 1998 saying, If I were to run, Id run as a Republican. Theyre the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe;anything on Fox News. I could lie and theyd still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific.

We were alerted to the meme by a reader, A. Douglas Thomas of Freeport, N.Y., among others, who saw it in his Facebook feed, along with a message from someone who said, I just fact-checked this. Google Donald Trump, People magazine and 1998. This is an actual quote by Trump.

Well save you the effort. It is;not;an actual quote by Trump.

We scoured the;Peoplemagazine archives and found nothing like this quote in 1998 or any other year.

And a public relations representative with;People;told us that the magazine couldnt find anything like that quote in its archives, either.;Peoples Julie Farin said in an email: Peoplelooked into this exhaustively when it first surfaced back in Oct.;We combed through every Trump story in our archive.;We couldnt find anything remotely like this quote and no interview at all in 1998.

There were several stories in the late 1990s about Trumps flirtation with a presidential run.

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Trump Is Right: Republicans Are Stupid

Donald Trump, master of the deal, is right. The Republicans are stupid, not only as politicians but also as political psychologists. He criticized Paul Ryan for bringing up the subject of Medicare reform that the Democrats could use to turn the elderly against the Republicans. Their video of grandma being shoved over the cliff by Republicans is a stark indication of how the Dems will fight to win four more years for Obama.

As the discussions over increasing the debt limit go on, the Democrats are portraying themselves as the more flexible party in the negotiations. They are willing to cut cherished programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, provided Republicans agree to some increases in revenue. They want the Republicans to agree to raise taxes and cut spending on programs that the elderly hold sacred. A perfect recipe for Republican defeat in November 2012. Thursdays meeting was supposed to focus on spending cuts in the two health care programs and on new revenue. And only stupid Republicans would attend such a meeting.

From the very beginning, by focusing on cutting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, the Republicans have trapped themselves into a no-win situation. Why havent they offered a list of real cuts in federal spending? Who told them that cutting programs that the elderly are dependent on is the way to win votes in 2012?

Here Are The Top 10 Stupidest Things Trump Did As President

We’re tentatively starting to emerge from the four year-long national nightmare of Donald Trump’s presidency, but the reckoning of what the nation endured will take years to really understand. Trump was terrible in so many ways that it’s hard to catalog them all: His sociopathic lack of regard for others. His towering narcissism. His utter ease with lying. His cruelty and sadism. The glee he took in cheating and stomping on anything good and decent. His misogyny and racism. His love of encouraging violence, only equaled by his personal cowardice.

But of all the repulsive character traits in a man so wholly lacking in any redeemable qualities, perhaps the most perplexing to his opponents was Trump’s incredible stupidity. On one hand, it was maddening that a man so painfully dumb, a man who clearly could barely read even on those rare occasions when he deigned to wear glasses still had the low cunning necessary to take over the Republican Party and then the White House.

On the other hand, it was the one aspect of Trump’s personality that kept hope alive. Surely a man so stupid, his opponents believed, will one day blunder so badly he can’t be saved, even by his most powerful sycophants. That has proved to be the case as Trump fumbles his way through a failed coup, unable and unwilling to see that stealing the election from Joe Biden is a lost cause.

He then pointed at his head, and said, “I’m, like, a person who has a good you-know-what.”

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Top 10 Actual Things Donald Trump Said At His 2016 Presidential Campaign Kickoff

Top 10 Actual Things Donald Trump Said At His 2016 Presidential Campaign Announcement

— On Tuesday, real estate mogul-turned reality show star, Donald Trump, became the latest Republican to jump into the 2016 presidential race.

If hes elected in 2016, the GOP hopeful predicated that he would be the most successful president for U.S. jobs that God ever created, used the recent sale of a multi-million dollar apartment he owned to someone from China as an example of his friendly ties with the country, voiced concern that people from the Middle East are probably sneaking into the country through the border, and revealed that rich Islamic terrorists are his competition within the hotel market in Syria.

This is all real, and its trademark Trump. Here are the quotes from Trumps presidential announcement that you will never hear another presidential candidate say — ever.

[your-dietician]

Richard Marx has many great 'Stories to Tell' — and one big Twitter controversy he'd like to clear up

New Post has been published on https://tattlepress.com/entertainment/richard-marx-has-many-great-stories-to-tell-and-one-big-twitter-controversy-hed-like-to-clear-up/

Richard Marx has many great 'Stories to Tell' — and one big Twitter controversy he'd like to clear up

When superstar singer-songwriter Richard Marx began work on his new autobiography, Stories to Tell, he knew it wouldn’t be a racy, sex/drugs/rock ‘n’ roll tell-all like Motley Crüe’s The Dirt or Pamela Des Barres’s I’m With the Band. “I’ve always been a very private person. I’ve never been in the tabloids. I’ve never been that kind of celebrity, if you will,” he explains to Yahoo Entertainment. In fact, Marx never expected to write his memoirs at all, but after playing VH1 Storytellers-style acoustic shows about a decade ago, he realized, “I have great stories. I’ve had some really crazy, funny s*** happen to me.”

Those tales, which cover Marx’s early days apprenticing for Lionel Richie to his work with Kenny Rogers, Madonna, Barbra Streisand, NSYNC, Olivia Newton-John, Keith Urban, Luther Vandross, and many others, comprise Stories to Tell: A Memoir, which comes out July 6 and hit No. 1 on Amazon’s bestsellers list the day it went up for preorder. “I chose [stories] that were either compelling or funny or self-deprecating or whatever,” says Marx. “There’ll be stories I’ll tell you about my life that I wouldn’t necessarily, you know, write on Twitter or whatever.”

The cover for Richard Marx’s autobiography ‘Stories to Tell: A Memoir.’ (Photo: Simon & Schuster)

Marx is big into the self-deprecation thing. The funniest line in Stories to Tell is when he says the upside to undergoing double hip-replacement surgery was that “Richard Marx” and “hip” could finally be used in the same sentence, for instance. And his Twitter page is a delight, a compelling read in its own right — his famous tweet about going to the dentist because he felt like hearing some of his own music is but one RT-worthy example of his snark. Marx owns his squareness, but ironically, his posts have, intentionally or not, made the public realize that he’s a pretty cool dude.

The perpetually unbothered Marx also gets very political on social media. And one since-deleted tweet in particular, when he wrote — “If I ever meet Rand Paul’s neighbor I’m going to hug him and buy him as many drinks as he can consume” (a reference to a 2017 incident when Paul was assaulted by his neighbor, Rene Boucher) — made headlines in May 2021, after the Kentucky senator outrageously cited Marx’s tweet as the reason he’d received a suspicious package at his home. It was a rare moment when Marx actually was in the tabloids, and he uses his Yahoo interview to clarify that situation.

Story continues

“I mean, it seems pretty obvious. I made a quip. Let’s start with this: Do I, would I, ever really endorse and support physical violence against someone? I can’t think of a circumstance,” Marx stresses. “I made a quip, which I likened to you hear about some raging assh*** who’s just constantly an assh*** getting his ass handed to him — and you might go, ‘He kind of asked for it,’ or, you know, ‘He kind of had that coming.’ Show me a person who’s never, ever thought of that in regards to anyone, and I’ll show you a liar, right? To me, what I quipped was nothing more than that. Stupid me — Rand Paul used that to his advantage. He went on Fox News and pathologically, as he always does, lied about what I tweeted, what I said. He actually claimed that I incited violence against him, that I was the reason he got a suspicious package of powder the next day in the mail. I thought, if I did that, [U.S. Postmaster General] Louis DeJoy should get a raise. If you can get a piece of mail to somebody overnight now, then I’ve been misinformed.

“I made a joke. And you know, the people who rallied to [Paul’s] defense are the same people who defended, or had nothing to say, when Trump retweeted someone saying, ‘The only good Democrat as a dead Democrat,’ or never had a problem with Donald Trump at a rally saying, ‘Knock the hell out of ‘em, I’ll pay the legal fees; go beat up protestors exercising their First Amendment rights.’ So, these people who were supporting Rand Paul and attacking me are just the typical ultimate hypocrites, and they’re full of s***. So, that’s my comment about that.”

Marx actually prefers not to use the adjective “political” when describing his non-partisan social media stance. “I am definitely opinionated, and I definitely find it next to impossible not to respond to what I consider to be blatant ignorance or bigotry or certainly racism. I guess the word ‘political’ is the easiest one to use, but I don’t know that it’s the most accurate, because I’m not on Twitter or in any other part of my life espousing policy or opinions about much other than proper treatment of everyone — and especially when it comes to elected officials,” he clarifies. 

“For instance, I’m 57. I started voting as soon as I could. So I guess my first presidential vote was in ’84, and it was for Ronald Reagan. I have voted for Republican politicians in my life. I’ve definitely voted more for Democrats, but I’m a registered Independent. I’m not a Democrat. Also, as much as I find the current GOP to be the most distorted, vile, awful group of people I’ve ever seen in my lifetime in terms of politics, I’m also no fan of anyone in the Democratic party. None. Joe Biden would not have been my… maybe 20 years ago, I would have been like, ‘Yeah, Joe Biden might be a really good president.’ And don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled that he won this election. But he would not have been my choice to be the president of United States. The screwed-up thing is I can’t necessarily point to anyone I would say should be, on either side of the aisle. I think they’re all, to a degree, different forms of reprehensible and mercenary.”

Marx says, “In a span of an hour, if I were to look through my mentions, I’ll find 50 people calling me every name,” but he balks at the argument that pop stars shouldn’t express their opinions. “It’s interesting, because when I get into a thing on Twitter, especially when you have people on the far right who say things like ‘shut up and sing’ and ‘nobody cares about the opinions of celebrities,’ these are the same people who voted for Donald Trump and follow Scott Baio, you know what I mean?” he chuckles. “So, that kind of tells you right there with the kind of mental decision-making we’re dealing with. … I feel like I can’t be on the [Twitter] platform and see something that is so outrageous and awful and not respond to it.”

Watch Yahoo Entertainment’s full, extended Richard Marx interview below, in which he tells stories about Luther Vandross, Vixen, Barbra Streisand, and more:

There are plenty of people who follow Marx online who are now well aware of his frankness and hipness — but unless they read Stories to Tell, they still may not be familiar with the simply stunning breadth of his discography. Sure, he has scored 14 of his own Billboard top 20 hits, including nine that made the top 10 and three that went to No. 1, and was the first male solo artist to have four singles from a debut album make the top three on the Billboard Hot 100. But has always been an in-demand songwriter for other artists as well. However, as Marx himself notes, many people don’t even know that he co-penned Luther Vandross’s signature song “Dance With My Father” — despite the fact that he accepted the Song of the Year honor for that single, and performed it with Celine Dion, at the 2004 Grammy Awards when the ailing Vandross was unable to attend. Hits written or co-written by Marx have topped the charts in four different decades and in almost every genre (“Not polka, though,” he quips), but there’s one more thing he’d still like to accomplish.

“I’ve gotten to work with amazing people, and hope to continue to. But the one thing that has eluded me in my career… Vixen, for example, I wrote and produced their breakthrough song [“Edge of a Broken Heart”]. I wrote co-wrote and produced Josh Groban’s first single, ‘To Where You Are.’ So, I’ve worked with brand-new artists who broke out — but I didn’t discover them,” says Marx. “That’s probably something that I would like before I really call it quits: to discover a talent, bring them to light and launch them, and then just wish them well, whether I work with them or not. … I’d like to be able to have some artists say, ‘Yeah, it was Richard Marx who started my career.’ That would be nice.”

Early in his autobiography, Marx details how Lionel Richie played that role in his own life — when Richie randomly heard the then-teenage Marx’s demo tape and was so impressed that he reached out and encouraged Marx to move to Los Angeles to pursue music professionally. But one sweet Richie story, which Marx shares with Yahoo Entertainment during our interview, actually didn’t make the book.

“A year and a half or two years ago, two summers ago, I went with Barbara Streisand to London and she asked if I wanted to be part of the opening act slot for her concert in Hyde Park. Lionel Richie was one of the support acts, and I’d hoped to run into him. I think I had texted him on the way to London and we were going to try to get together, but it was chaotic. I closed my show. And by the time I got back to my hotel, there was a text from Lionel,” Marx recalls fondly, putting his hand on his heart. “He was staying somewhere else. He texted me and he said, ‘I’m sitting on my balcony of my hotel room, listening to you sing “Right Here Waiting” and hearing thousands and thousands of people singing it even louder than you are. And I can’t tell you how proud I am.’ And I remember texting him back and saying, ‘It’s because of you, man.’”

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:

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— Video produced by Jen Kucsak, edited by Jimmie Rhee

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Heatwave for President

Fic: Heatwave for President (ao3 link)

Fandom: Flash, DC's Legends of Tomorrow Pairing: Mick Rory/Leonard Snart

Summary: Mick Rory will go down in history for being the first person to start his campaign for President of the United States by saying, "I really don't want to do this, but seriously, look at my opponent."

A/N: Birthday present for @oneiriad! Happy birthday!

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"Do you have any regrets about the process?" the reporter asks as they all stare at the giant television showing the projected results as the exit polls start trickling in from the states. "Anything you would change?"

"What kind of question is that?" Iris mutters under her breath.

Mick - to whom the question had been directed - hums for a moment. "I think - the time travel," he says. "That bit. Wouldn't do it."

The reporter frowns. "But wasn't it your association with the, quote, 'Legends of Tomorrow' that originally propelled you on your current path towards politics and, eventually, your present run for President?"

"Yeah," Mick says glumly. "Exactly."

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Technically, it's a bit more complicated than that.

First, of course, there was the Flash. Everything always starts there - oh, shut up with your stupid 'Green Arrow was first' bullcrap, no one cares that he was first because he was just some weird serial killing vigilante to start off with, and anyway barely anyone outside of Starling (Star City, whatever) knew about it - because it was by watching the Flash's epic battles with what have come, retrospectively, to be known as his "Rogues" that Mick first became famous. He even had his own action figure, which most people running for president could only imagine happening in relation to political satire.

Of course, back then they called him Heatwave.

Then Snart - that's Captain Cold to you, reporter - had the bright idea of hooking up with some time travelers for a lark. Mick hadn't thought much of the idea at the time, even tried to quit a few times - quit with prejudice, one might say, and there'd been that whole Kronos business that you're not finding out any more about, the news media already knows more than Mick would like on the subject - and it hadn't taken.

And then Snart died.

Yes, Mick is perfectly aware that Snart's back now, but for a while there he'd been absolutely and totally convinced that he was gone for good (he was dead - how was Mick supposed to know that it hadn't fully taken?!) and it'd been pretty shattering.

That was the period with the Legends. Saving history, fucking up history, all of that.

Yes, that's when he met Georgie Washington. Stop asking about it. Mick's already told you all he knows.

No, he refuses to go get him for the Inauguration, should it happen! The guy didn't even like politics towards the end of it! Leave Georgie alone!

Okay, maybe a dinosaur. Mick makes no promises.

Well, yeah. He guesses it would be pretty cool to ride to the White House on a dinosaur. You might have a point there.

Anyway, where was he? Oh, right, the Legends. Anyway, when the first alien attack came - the Dominators - Mick was there with the Legends. It was a state secret and all that at the time; that's when he got a pardon for everything he'd previously been involved with. Very hush-hush, though how the pres was planning on keeping the details of how a nation- or world-wide invasion was defeated a secret is anyone's guess. Sure, keep it a secret from the American media, that's one thing, but those British tabloids are vicious weasels that will stop at nothing.

Okay, yeah, Mick taking a selfie with a downed Dominator and posting it to Instagram - instantly making it one of the only good pictures anyone had of the damn things, which were resistant to being recorded on any type of media unless you did some special adjustments to the settings, like, say, the sort Gideon did automatically when upgrading their camera phones, and by sheer scarcity thereby became famous worldwide as the definitive Dominator photo - probably didn't help with the whole secrecy thing.

Hell yeah Mick's going to put a copy of that in the White House if he wins, you kidding? That picture won photo of the year, and that was the year of the solar eclipse, so it had some pretty stiff competition.

Anyway, yeah, that's how Mick's rep started shifting from supervillain to - you know what, let's just avoid any use of the terms 'superhero' (Mick is not) or 'hero' (also not).

Good guy?

Ugh. Fine. Out of lack of better options.

Anyhoo, that's when the buzz started, y'know? A couple of pranksters - whose names shall remain nameless but who know exactly who they are, Barry Allen and Cisco Ramon - uh, that last part's off the record - anyway, these fucking assholes decided to start up a fake Super PAC called 'Heatwave for President'.

Yeah, Mick knows it was just meant as a contrast to the current incumbent. Sort of a "if this idiot can become president, why not Heatwave the famous supervillain" sort of deal. Mick's cool with that. It was a funny joke and, yeah, the incumbent was worse than useless. You'd think getting the job when your predecessor was shot by aliens would give them the sympathy vote, at least for a bit, but wow did they blow it. Who the fuck tries to kill health care for kids as their first official push in action? Seriously, who?

Yeah, you can definitely write that down. “Mick Rory still ticked off about asshole move”. Honestly, just keep that handy for copy-paste purposes, it’s probably going to be relevant a lot in the future.

What? No, Mick hadn’t thought about running for office as far back as the whole joke Super PAC thing. Mick was traveling through space and time at that time. Keep your chronology straight. If Mick can do it – and, again, not to over-emphasize this, but do you know how hard it is to keep track of time on a time-traveling spaceship? – then you can do it when you've got your feet firmly set down on planet earth in a consistent timeline.

So yeah, things were going along that way, Mick with the Legends, going around, doing shit, messing shit up, fighting with people. The whole thing wasn't exactly all sunshine and roses, but they did well enough. Well, they managed to keep the timeline more or less intact, at least.

No, you wouldn’t know it if they’d failed. Time doesn’t work that way.

No, the current incumbent isn’t a result of a horrific failure by time travelers to prevent an evil catastrophe from –

Huh. You know what, Mick’s not going to give a definitive answer on that one. Just assume that if the Legends had failed, things would be even worse.

No comment on North Korea. Just – no comment. Ever.

Yes, ever.

The Legends are on it, okay?!

Not the point Mick was trying to get at here. More what he was trying to get at is – Len. Snart. Captain Cold.

Fuck it, Mick's just calling him Len for the rest of this interview -

Yes, thank you Len, your commentary that you are “always the point” is incredibly helpful here.

Fucking drama queens.

Anyway.

That's about when it turns out (or rather, when they all discover) that Len didn’t, in fact, die – or maybe he did, and it got reversed, or something like that – and he ended up in a different universe. Fighting Nazis.

Listen, if there’s one thing that Mick’s going to take a permanent never-gonna-change-it-no-matter-what-new-evidence-appears-no-matter-what position on, it’s gonna be Nazis. Mick fucking hates Nazis.

Yes, neo-Nazis count.

Yes, they have a First Amendment right to free speech, meaning no government oppression.

Yes, Mick realizes that means he’ll have to stop punching them all the time if he gets elected President. It’s okay. He’s sure that some fine, upstanding people will take up the slack and keep on the good work for him.

Listen, if Super PACs are “sufficiently unrelated” to a presidential campaign to raise money on behalf of some asshole – and yes, Mick’s counting himself here – then the Nazi-Punching Party which endorsed Mick and which he may or may not go to regular meetings of is “sufficiently unrelated” for the purposes of government oppression of free speech. You get me?

Fine, Mick will probably stop attending meetings.

Probably.

Len can still go, though, right?

See, Lenny, you can still go. Bring a goddamn camera.

Fuck, being President is going to be no fun at all. Why is he doing this again?

Oh, right, because the World’s Worst Caricature is running for office and the Legends and Gideon have all agreed that letting that guy get elected would literally mean the end of the world. That’s it, kaput, no more history, everyone’s all back to using sticks to write in the dirt again – what weird mutated creatures are left over anyway.

Ugh.

Trust Mick, you don't want to see the things Mick has seen. It's bad.

Mick would like it known that he does not approve of things going in a political drama-slash-mutated creature sort of way. Sci-fi was always more Len’s things. Mick prefers ninjas.

Yeah, that meeting with Tokyo’s Prime Minister went awesomely, why do you ask?

Shut up, Len. There was some discussion of policy; it wasn’t all about what classic ninja movie was the best. Though the last five hours were definitely all movie marathon. Not gonna lie.

Where was he?

Right, Len. Fighting Nazis. Terrible nearly world-ending invasion of the present Earth by the Nazi forces of that Earth, including the superhero and meta equivalents, repelled only by the combined forces of basically everybody.

Len and Mick teamed up to save the day, just like old times.

Okay, old times, they teamed up to steal things. Basically the same thing.

Listen, Nazis from another dimension invaded. That trumps everything.

For anyone other than the current incumbent, anyway. Fuckhead.

Yes, that’s on the record.

What? What the fuck is “Presidential decorum”? Listen, you, unlike you, Mick’s actually met George Washington, and if you think that every three words he uttered wasn’t some variation of ‘fuck’, ‘shit’, or ‘damn’, then that’s just because you’re reading the cleaned up history version. He was a soldier. And before he was a soldier, he was a surveyor, which as far as Mick can tell means “walked out into the forest with a compass and came back out hating bears”, and if that doesn’t make a man swear, then nothing will.

No comment on whether or not Mick hooked up with him.

Just give up. You’re never going to get a comment.

So while everybody else was being scared shitless at how the Nazis from another dimension – and yeah, Mick’s perfectly aware that the usual term is “another Earth”, but fuck it, “another dimension” sounds like a crappy 1950s sci-fi “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” and makes Len grin every time, so Mick’s sticking with it – were invading, especially when they got all the white supremacists on this Earth to join up with them, taking advantage of all those so-easy gun laws to arm up into an actual local army, the current incumbent decided to throw a temper tantrum because the attention wasn’t 100% focused on them for five fricking minutes.

Also, Mick’s pretty sure they’re actually not-so-secretly a Nazi supporter. All that talk of cooperating and seeing what they have to say and how they were “good people” – total fucking crap, obviously. That asshole was probably disappointed when Mick and Len had their Moment of Awesome sending them all back to where they came, right into the trap Len’d been setting up with the other resistance forces on that Earth.

Either way, as everyone knows, as soon as the Nazis were gone, the next thing the current incumbent decided to do was push a horrible law outlawing any metahumans – and they defined metahumans in the stupidest possible way, and all because they wanted it to cover people who actually didn’t have any powers like Len and Mick, which didn’t even make sense – and trying to make Earth-1 full on fascist.

Yeah, fascist. They put lots of fancy words and stuff – no, that’s not right, their speechwriters put fancy words and stuff around it, but that law was – is – fucking dystopia nightmare fuel right there, okay?

Listen, Mick literally has someone from 2042 going around and testifying to how awful that law makes literally everything. What more evidence do you fucking need?

So, yeah. Horrible future. World's Worst Caricature running for office, almost certain to pass it if they get in.

And that means -

Someone was gonna have to man up (woman up? non-gender up? human up? wait, is the last one specieist?) to stop it.

Now, you’d think the other party would do something about that, wouldn’t they? But noooo, they decide to shoot themselves in the foot by nominating some old geezer taking a hard line about how everything’s going to change now that everyone’s “together” – never mind the details, togetherness is what’s important, right guys? the movement's gonna fix everything! because it's a revolution! of feelings! Of all the dumbass hippie-dippie crap... – and coming up with increasingly more stupid ideas that wouldn't work. Doesn't matter, of course, Mick was all set to vote for the fucker anyway, along with everyone else, just to keep Worst Caricature outta office, but no. See, then, three fucking months before the election, the asshole gets found out to be corrupt as fuck! Except he won’t resign and let anyone else run! And his fanboys have made their way into the levers of power, so the party can’t kick him out, either! And all the goddamn ballots have already gone to the printers!

That’s how this whole thing really got started, you know. Three fucking months, and the only other person who’d been entered to run for President in all 50 states before the deadline passed is – you guessed – Heatwave for President.

Fucking hell.

At the time, the entire freaking organization was being run by the people who now make up Mick’s circle of advisors – Felicity Smoak, Oliver Queen, Barry Allen, Cisco Ramon, Caitlin Snow, and Iris West – because they’d all thought it was freaking funny or something, and everyone suddenly had to change gears real fast to try to make it into an actual thing.

Not that anyone thought it would work. You know, they just thought - might as well give it a try. Can't just roll over and give in; gotta go for the Hail Mary pass if that's all that's left to you.

No one actually thought it would work.

At least, no one thought it would work until the polls started changing. First time they polled it, Mick got, like, 5%.

Second time they polled it, he got 30%.

Now he’s somewhere near 50%.

Jesus.

If Mick wins, Mick’s taking a weekend to go sit quietly in a room and hyperventilate for, like, an hour.

Thanks for the hug, Len. Means a lot; Mick knows very well how much you hate public displays of affection. Or emotion. Or anything but drama, drama, drama.

Huh? Yeah, Len and Mick are partners. They’ve always been upfront and clear about that.

No – no – partners.

Yes, criminal partners. But also, you know, partner partners. If you get what Mick’s saying.

Oh, for fuck’s sake, they’re married. Len’s going to be the First Supervillain or whatever they call it when it’s a guy.

What do you mean, nobody…? It’s fucking legal and everything! Central City’s Hall of Records has a copy of the goddamn certificate!

…oh, okay, yeah. Fair point. Can’t even imagine the type of backlog you’d have to go through to get Central City bureaucracy to do anything, much less respond to a freaking FOIA request. They'll probably get around to responding to it sometime in the 2030s.

You mean people really didn’t know?

Huh.

Well, that’s gonna surprise a lot of people, then.

First ever non-straight resident of the White House? Don’t be ridiculous. Haven’t you met Lincoln?

Right. Not everyone time travels. Sorry, keep forgetting.

Yes, Mick’s met Lincoln.

No, Mick’s not going to comment on if he hooked up with him, either. Jesus. Stop asking.

Why hadn’t Mick mentioned meeting Lincoln before? Because it wasn’t important? It never came up!

It’s not like anyone asked for a listing of all the time eras he’s visited!

Of course the Legends never mentioned it; it wasn’t when Mick was with them. It was during his Kronos period. Listen, it’s a long story, okay? And they’re getting close to actually starting to yell out states, so maybe everyone should pay attention to that instead.

Yes, Mick is totally aware that he’s being weaselly. He’s a politician now. He’s allowed to be weaselly sometime.

What’s everyone got against weasels, anyway? Perfectly nice animals.

Mick has a pet rat, you know. If Mick wins – yes, he’s still using fucking “if”, nothing gets decided until we hit Ohio and Florida, Iris – does that make Ratigan the First Pet or something now?

Is there a First Pet position?

Wait, there is? Kickass.

Never been a rat before? So what? Mick’s got nothing against dogs, you know, but he doesn’t have a dog. He has a rat. People will just have to deal.

Heh. Not Mick’s fault you don’t know what part of this interview you should make the headline.

…thank you, Len, he’s not going to go with “Bisexual Rat-Owner Wins Presidency; Husband Approves”.

No, “President-Elect Uses ‘Fuck’ More Often In Last-Minute Interview Than Any Prior Candidate” isn’t a good choice either, Iris. Probably historically inaccurate, too; LBJ was real big on the whole swearing thing - no comment on the hook-ups! Jesus!

What? No, Ramon, no one is running a headline that goes “Time Traveler Confirms Academic Suspicions Regarding Lincoln’s Sexuality”. No one cares!

Fine, maybe the history journals care. But no one else. Not like it’s a big deal. People can sleep with whoever they want.

Oh, it’s still a big deal in some ways? That sucks. Okay, that’s going on the agenda of things to do to fix in the next four years.

Eight years?

No.

Yes, he means it! Why the hell would he run for office twice? How bad can the next option be?!

And Sara just ran into the room. Please say that you’re not here to tell everyone that some horrible thing has happened in the future that –

Actually, never mind. Please be here to tell everyone that some horrible thing has happened in the future and that you desperately need everyone here to go take care of it immediately.

No?

Damn.

Wait.

What do you mean, Mick won?

Oh fuck.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“So, what are you planning on doing now, Mr. President-Elect?” the reporter asks, beaming like a maniac, as the giant television shows the explosive celebrations occurring immediately outside – literally explosive, since Mick had insisted on bonfires and fireworks and at least four different pyrotechnics teams. “What’s your first move?”

"What kind of question is that?" Iris laughs as Barry swings her around. “We can worry about that tomorrow! Tonight we party!”

“The world is saved!” Cisco cheers.

“I’m doomed,” Mick says, his head rolling back. “They’re never gonna let me quit.”

“Probably not,” Len, who is perched right next to him, says to him, not without sympathy. “But it’s okay. I’ll do the work for you.”

“You’re the best, boss,” Mick says, not without feeling. “Why couldn’t you have been Vice President?”

“Because they can’t be in the same building for too long,” Len explains. "Meteorite strikes."

"Oh," Mick says glumly. "Right."

Len pats Mick’s arm comfortingly. “Don’t worry. There’s a long, storied precedent of First – uh, First Spouses – running the joint for their husbands.”

“Damn right there is,” Mick says, rubbing his face. “Thank god for Woodrow Wilson, that's all I'm saying - don't you even ask," he warns the reporter.

“Besides,” Len continues, sounding quite practical. “Sara makes a great Vice President. After all, if you die, who would you want to avenge your murder if not Sara?”

Mick nods.

“Um,” the reporter says, blinking at the two of them. “That’s…not what a Vice President does?”

“Really? Are you sure?”

“…moderately sure. I’ve been reporting on political matters for a long time now.”

“If it makes you feel better, I’m pretty sure she’s gonna let Jax, Stein and Ray do most of her work,” Len offers. “Even after all that trouble we had to go to in order to get her declared alive again…”

“It…really doesn’t,” the reporter says. “But thanks for the update?”

“No problem,” Len says. “C’mon, Mick. Let’s go watch things burn.”

Mick brightens and climbs to his feet.

“Hey,” Len asks the reporter, “you’re the politico here. Do Presidential spouses get immunity from prosecution?”

The reporter frowns. “Why?”

“No stealing stuff, Snart,” Barry says.

“Oh, fine.”

“For four years.”

“Wait, what?!”

"You're a role model now!"

"No! I refuse!"

"Too late now," Iris cackles.

Mick starts laughing. “Well,” he says, looping an arm around Len’s waist and dragging him towards the flame, Len’s face still frozen in a rictus of horror. “At least I won’t be the only one suffering!”

“Look on the bright side!” the reporter shouts after them. “Politicians are basically just thieves on a much larger scale!”

[filipfatalattractionrblog]

First off: Donald Trump is a moron. No matter how much time and effort pundits and democratic party officials try to gin him up as some conniving mastermind so they can convince themselves their candidate didn’t get beaten by a man who thinks health insurance is dirt cheap because he sees life insurance for babies advertised on Fox News, he is an ignorant dipshit of the highest order. His attention span is nil and his ideas can be changed by whoever talked to him last, or whoever just butters him up enough to play to his ego. He is not a clever man, or a consistent one. He’ll say anything, then change it in the next minute. The few things he sticks consistently to are his ego, his bigotry, and his predatorial behavior towards women. Steve, on the other hand, is portrayed as a very clever man. Not just historically as Captain America, but here in the modern Secret Empire arc and everything leading up to it. How he plays people against each other, manipulates connections and government power to get what he wants, putting together all sorts of tricky plots to end up deposing the Red Skull and also taking over America. The way Donald Trump rose to power was heavily pinned on old fashioned bigotry. Not just his personal bigotry either, which he’d use to fire up overt and latent racists, but how the GOP has spent decades suppressing minority vote, especially black vote. And when keeping them from getting to the ballot isn’t enough, just straight up purging votes, or them ending up getting ‘lost’. Manipulation of the right to vote itself, and also, fostering state level power via gerrymandering and more, continuing to play to bigoted ends, to prop up their own power and also continue to use racism and other forms of bigotry to solidify their base. We did not put some too-clever-for-us genius in power. We elected a short-sighted moron who was willing to tear all the dogwhistles off on standard southern strategy GOP campaign racism, whose power was solidified from a local to national level with a GOP who stand behind his actual policies and decisions 100 percent even if they may dislike how erratic he is as a person. Which leads nicely into the next way Steve is a poor fit as a representative for Trump: Steve isn’t racist. Steve isn’t even secretly racist, as Spencer will tell us over and over again, and that Hydra is actually the wokest fascists in the world and more socially progressive than the standard democrat. Steve is so much not-a-racist that even while using Inhumans being shoved into concentration camps as minority metaphors, and mutants being exiled to their own nation as another set of minority metaphors, none of the writing will take the leap to say that Steve is bigoted against these minority metaphors. Even while using them as symbols of the damage bigotry does, Steve himself, fascist in charge of it all, gets to stay clean, gets to be “I don’t personally have anything against mutants and Inhumans…” Trump, on the other hand, is a racist in the extreme. Not a secret racist, not a dogwhistle “welfare queens” and “urban youth” racist, he is very publicly a racist. He has been for decades. He called for the death of the Central Park 5, even took out ads for it, no matter how thoroughly their innocence was proven. He got a federal investigation into the fact that he wouldn’t allow properties to be rented out to black people. Before he started his 2016 campaign, he had spent years and years railing against Obama, calling for his birth certificate, believing and inflaming a racist conspiracy theory that Obama wasn’t an actual American citizen. A racist conspiracy theory that even “mainstream” GOP members found themselves having trouble explicitly denouncing. He kicks off his campaign early calling Mexicans rapists and criminals. He casually puts out the idea of Muslims having to be registered in America. And that’s not even getting into his sexism, either, which modern Steve Rogers would be painted as being totally devoid of. Trump preys on women, talks about them like objects, sexually assaults them, and when one of them infuriates him, his misogyny is constant, even against conservatives who would be believed to be on his “side”. And even all that wasn’t enough to stop him from getting the majority of the white women vote, which shows a hell of a lot of the power of explicit racism. The stunning reality of how much people will tolerate or even cheer for. Then there’s the fact that while both Hydra Steve and Trump are fascists, Steve was a secret fascist the whole time, and Trump was very much publicly so. So much so that there was whole debates on “should we call him a fascist?” while the campaign was still going, and if there was any foolish doubt left before he got elected, the time inbetween certainly removed it. America did not elect someone who hid his true, fascist intentions, relying on their belief in him as a good, moral, and certainly not bigoted man; we elected someone who publicly called for reporters and protesters to be assaulted, that said he’d pay for the legal troubles of anyone who beat up people at his campaign stops he didn’t like. We elected someone whose racist behavior was publicly documented daily and decades ago in legal courts. We elected someone who talked about registering Muslims, who talked about building a wall to block out Mexico and forcing them to pay for it to boot. We elected someone who did absolutely nothing to hide his beliefs, or his intentions. He shouted them out, and loved the attention it got him. He did not go through backdoors, and he did not use socially acceptable dogwhistles the way types like Paul Ryan might have. He just threw it all out in the open. He was what he showed us to be. He called for his own opponent to be thrown in jail while he was campaigning. His fascism was naked. Which leaves the other thing. Steve wasn’t elected, he was appointed. The way Trump takes power is far more banal than Steve’s byzantine plot and use of Hydra soldiers to take the country by force. Trump was elected, and despite the fact that yes, there was meddling from various Russian interests, that cannot, and does not, explain the whole situation. If GOP hadn’t been suppressing black vote year after year after year, this wouldn’t have been a contest. You can blame hacking on political interests from another country, but you’re going to have a hell of a time trying to blame GOP racism which has been in action for longer than I’ve been alive on Russia. Trump didn’t need soldiers on the ground either, though there was plenty of random racist civilians trying to intimidate people at voting booths. People tend to imagine fascism can only come into power by sheer military force, but here it is, through vote suppression of various flavors, through rallying of bigoted interests all across America, from a fucking presidential campaign that was allowed to do whatever the hell it liked, and given infinite coverage by networks because it was too good for their ratings. Hell, even extends to social networks like twitter, which could’ve cut off his influence forever ago because of his racist and abusive comments breaking the TOS, but twitter never wants to rock the boat there, and is constantly scared of ‘losing’ users, no matter how much people like Trump and his followers drive others off. There are people who actively collaborated in Trump’s win, and there are people and corps who enabled it, and there’s even liberals like Spencer who tsk-tsked protesters who shut down a Trump rally because it was “bad optics” and “giving Trump what he wants”, instead insisting on some meaningless silent protest that would’ve been ignored by CNN anyway. It’s not hard, either - news networks ignored the massive anti-war rallies when Bush was pushing it. Whether protesters did anything or not, Trump was still getting that media attention, cuz media wanted to give it to him. Trump didn’t need a bunch of costumed goons with guns to take America for him. All he needed was the fact that America can and does vote for racist fascists, and even supposed liberal, progressive people and groups will sit back and let him do and say what he likes because they fear disrupting order and comfort more than they fear the damage of what Trump and his followers were doing and still are. If you wanted to tell a story about American style fascism, you’d be better off talking about elections and how much bullshit America is actually willing to tolerate, or even enthusiastically vote for. Hell, you can look back at the original Secret Empire. The guy in charge of that entire plot was already in office. America doesn’t need to be tricked into fascism, we vote for it. We vote for it regularly, and often, enthusiastically. In all these ways, Steve Rogers is a terrible fit as an analog for Trump. But the racism, the bigotry, sticks out a lot. Intentionally avoiding grappling with bigotry in Steve Rogers’ Hydra, his ascent to power, and his rule over America means what you have to say about America? About American fascism? About fascism at all? Is fundamentally dishonest. It omits some of the most important things. You cannot have effective fascism without bigotry of some form. It just doesn’t happen. No bigotry? You’re not taking the throne, that’s for sure. If Trump wasn’t as racist as he was? If Trump was, in some bizarre alternate universe, not racist at all the same way Steve is portrayed as? He never would’ve stood a chance at getting elected.He would’ve never been allowed to get anywhere near power in America. His racism did not fell him, it empowered him, because we, as a country, are racist as hell. Our history is racist, our government is racist, our present reality is racist.

Colin Spacetwinks, Comics and Cowardice

[arcticdementor]

I’ve never voted. Well, I lie, I voted once. I was 18, and my mother sorta forced me. It also felt like some rite of passage, you know, you grow to 18 and you get to do grown-up stuff like voting, having a voice in the political process. I’ve never been into rituals though, and I felt stupid immediately after putting my vote in the box. I didn’t even like the guy! I thought he was retarded. All of them, really. I still do.

Of course ever time there’s an election people would ask me now and then who I’m gonna vote to. I evolved a series of bunch of canned answers. First one was “Nah they all suck”. Then I read Bryan Caplan’s Myth of the Rational Voter and started saying “one vote doesn’t count anyway”. This triggered huge discussions if there was even a single Boomer at home. “But if everyone thought like you nobody would vote!!”.

-“Well sure but my not voting doesn’t influence other people’s behavior”.

“But you have to vote, if nobody voted…”

-“It doesn’t follow that if I don’t vote then other people don’t vote”.

“But you have to vote, if everyone did like you”

-“Where on earth are you taking that ‘if’ from?

“But you have to vote……”

You should try this, it’s hilarious. They just go in an endless loop bug. Talk about NPCs.

…

And then… Trump happened 3 years ago. It took me a while to get into Trump. I didn’t care about elections, you see? Elections don’t matter. It’s all the same. And not being American I knew little about the guy. I’d seen him on TV now and then but besides him being this kinda sleazy showbiz guy I couldn’t care much about him.

But I was on Twitter, and I was watching all the outrage, and man, Trump was good. He wasn’t good, good. He wasn’t Moldbug. Not even Pat Buchanan. Trump is really inarticulate, I don’t know his verbal IQ but he has the vocabulary of a dumb 10 year old. And yet he got his points across. Good points. Drain the Swamp. NATO is pointless. Make America Great Again. China is ripping us off. You’d be in jail. No more senseless wars. BUILD THE WALL. All great, and most importantly, hilarious ideas. Trump was trolling everyone that I hated, the press, the bureaucrats, the whole Cathedral was up in arms against him, and *he was fighting back*. Successfully! He was talking shit to AIPAC! I just couldn’t help myself. Trump was my guy. I couldn’t vote for him, I’m not American, but I would have. Honest to god, I’d wake up early and vote for Donald Trump.

…

Fast forward 2 and a half years later. No wall. No jail for Hillary. Narrowly avoided jail himself! The swamp is a big as always. Forever war still going on. Spending more time tweeting about Israel than his own country. Shits on Ann Coulter and says he wants more legal immigration. Did I mention no wall? What a disaster. Trump has been a huge and complete disappointment. Again, I don’t dislike the guy personally. I mean I never *liked* him. He’s weird, talks like a retarded 10 year old. I’d say I’d probably wouldn’t enjoy having a few beers with him but he doesn’t even drink. But I don’t hate the guy, I think odds are his heart is in the right place. He just can’t get stuff done. He’s incompetent. I mean, it’s hard. It was always hard. One just doesn’t come in as a complete outsider and reform the whole government from scratch. Then again, people who work in the heart of the beast, in Washington DC, tell me he’s just incompetent.

…

So now what? Back to Moldbuggian detachment? Nothing ever changes, huh. The Cathedral really is all powerful. Ever since Trump made some protests about the intelligence agencies being disloyal or outright attacking him, the Establishment feels so powerful they just blatantly say in the press that the CIA are the good guys. Does nobody remember that the CIA being evil was pretty much proven by the 1960s, and that evil CIA ops have been a staple of books and films for decades? Not anymore; they’re not content with being powerful in the shade. They want outright public submission.

Democracy really is a sham; but it’s hard to go back to detachment now that Bioleninism is out in the open. Elections now are openly not about economic policy or social conservatism. Elections now are about the speed of the dispossession of white straight males. It’s for or against Bioleninism. The majority of candidates of the Democratic party are openly talking of “reparations” for black people, i.e. outright Danegeld. And don’t get me started with open hunt to mess with the sexual hormones of white children in schools. It’s going on right there in the open.

The US has an election next year, the campaign is starting now. Given the present demographic trends, it is very likely that Florida, if not Texas, will flip blue very shortly; that means a rock-solid majority for the Democratic party, forever. Donald Trump is likely to be the last white male president in American history. The 2020 election is probably going to be the last election which is more or less contested. Trump does still have a chance.

But Trump is incompetent. He’s not helping. He’s just treading water while another million Third-world immigrants sneak in, another middle-school boy gets injected estrogen because he doesn’t like football, and another hundred-thousand white men just overdose on opioids because you can’t even play a videogame today without being forced to play a black woman avatar. Can you support this guy? I sure can’t. Again, not my nation, but I wouldn’t. I won’t call him a traitor, although many have. But he didn’t build the wall. He’s letting Amazon, Facebook and Twitter campaign openly against him and censor everything to the right, and he hasn’t lifted a finger. He doesn’t deserve support.

…

Seriously though, to the extent Bernie represents a constituency that’s not for instant Brazilification, I wish him well, but he’s old and frail, and his program isn’t very interesting. And most importantly, his own constituency is being taken over by a guy who’s 10 times smarter, is young, has actual good ideas, is not white and will give the Bernie crowd everything they want, and more. Much more.

To be precise, $1,000 a month more.

Come Andrew Yang.

…

He’s the only candidate in this whole race that doesn’t talk like a bugman. You know what a bugman is. All those politicians and corporate guys who talk in that odd and disingenuous jargon designed to obfuscate. High-grade NPCs, that’s what bugmen are. Well, he isn’t. He goes straight to the issues, analyzes them intelligently, and then has a plan. It may be or may not be a good plan. But I dare you to show me a presidential candidate with a higher IQ than Andrew Yang in the last 30 years. That’s even more of a feat because the guy is East Asian, and God knows East Asians tend to be bugmen too.

The guy even wrote a book called The War On Normal People, which is the perfect definition of the Left. I should use it as a subtitle for a Bioleninism book.

…

But a big part of it is just pure appreciation for the guy. Look at his interview with Tucker. You might remember my last post on Tucker, and how he’s revolutionized conservative commentary in the US by arguing that the focus of government should be taking care of working families. Well, Tucker himself liked Yang, and it’s no wonder he did. Yang is the candidate who’s using the closest arguments to Tucker. By far. He’s lamenting the plight of the working man. He’s calling to help the rural white middle class who’s being ravaged by the opioid suicide crisis. Note that Trump has said some stuff about that, and has tried to get China to stop exports of fentanyl, but he didn’t mention white people by name. Yang did, just like that. He’s the only guy who’s not only overtly or covertly calling for your extinction; he’s the only guy on the record for trying to stop it.

…

And, he’s promising to stop it by taxing the hell of the Enemy. Which again, as Tucker mentioned, isn’t a huge abstract thing The Jews or the Left. No. The enemy is Big Tech. It’s Amazon, it’s Google, It’s Apple. It’s Facebook. It’s Twitter. It’s Woke Capital. It’s those guys who aren’t only taking your jobs, they’re using their monopoly in the management of information to censore us, hide us, slander us and ostracize us. You might remember that Trump also hinted at doing something about that. Regulate Facebook and Twitter as utilities to make sure the Right could actually fight the Culture War, and perhaps show that there’s a majority of people against injecting synthetic hormones into 12 year old children. That he’d make big tech build in America and stop avoiding taxes with blatant laundering tricks. Well, Trump did nothing, and he’s avoiding the topic. Yang isn’t. I have nothing against Amazon’s business, but Bezos chose sides by buying the Washington Post and recently going on a censorship spree, banning right wing books from Amazon. He must pay. Yang says he will.

I don’t know if UBI would work. Americans are crying bloody murder about a proposed 10% VAT. I say cry me a river. Europeans have a 20% VAT. It’s annoying, but it’s not a big deal. Smart people say that automation is overhyped, it’s not growing that fast, self-driving cars, one of the biggest talking points of Yang, are likely to not even happen after all. That may be true. But I’d like to say that the beauty of UBI is not that it’s actually necessary in the way Yang says it is, to give people something to fall back on while they find a new job.

Tucker is also worried about the middle class trucker. But Tucker’s answer is to ban automation. Go full Luddite. Yang is talking about automation a lot. But he doesn’t want to stop it. By implementing UBI he wouldn’t stop automation, he’d accelerate it. Businesses would start automating like crazy once people left unsatisfying jobs to go play Fortnite on UBI or try an instagram e-thot career. A big majority of white collar jobs are complete and utter bullshit make-work made by government regulation to keep people busy and have some income to tax. If Yang succeeded in his proposed plan to completely change the regulatory paradigm to adapt to the computer economy at last, companies could actually get rid of all the inefficiencies, and automate everything. Starting with the bureaucracy.

…

Well China is pushing hard for developing AI and automation. Which is weird in a country which could have a serious unemployment problem if automation goes on. But China doesn’t care. Why not? Because China has realized that with Internet and modern computing, they don’t need the corporations to manage the people anymore. They can do it directly. Everybody has a mobile phone with a camera and a microphone 24/7 with them. The government knows your every move. You don’t need to shame people into buying your ideology by threatening with firing them from their jobs, like America does. That’s so 20th century. Now you can control behavior directly with internet surveillance. Social credit is an extension of this trend. It boggles the mind that accelerationists aren’t talking more about this. Not saying it’s a good thing. But the tech is here and it’s happening anywhere. The only place where it isn’t happening is Europe because we’ve outsourced it to American companies.

If you think UBI might work at giving people hope and readjusting the economy in a more just and fair way, sticking it to the oligarchs, vote for Yang. If you just want $1,000 a month, vote for Yang. If you think UBI would crash everything, vote for Yang, as this gay earth deserves crashing. If you just want UBI to show people that democracy inevitable ends with the people voting themselves money and thus proving democracy is a sham and discredit it as a political system, vote for Yang.

And if you want the final death of 20th century politics, and a new paradigm which breaks with the thievery of Boomers inflating the currency so that asset prices are rising through new records every year, while young people have to go through unpaid internships and ‘gig economy’ servitude until their 40s, while the Bioleninist government is busy with the soft genocide of every productive person with natural biological instincts.

Then Vote for Yang. I rest my case.

[somuchbetterthanthat]

What do you think the barricade boys would be like today. Like with everything going on.

I was thinking about this, and I thought “oh my god, I have zero idea, that’s why it’s so hard to really write les amis in modern AU” but, I can try to actually give the beginning of an answer (and I’m ready to hear everybody’s opinions on this, really, because I think, depending our own situations, we’re gonna imagine something different for all of them.). This turned extremely long.. sorry.

I think the easiest to pin down are Feuilly and Grantaire, to be honest. 

Grantaire, would be That Guy who never went to vote to an election because “what’s the point? They’re all the same.” Or maybe, the first time he was able to vote was for a presidential, he voted someone, they didn’t pass (or they did and disappointed him) and he was disappointed and he went “whatever, voting is not as cool as I was told it would”. Grantaire won’t say he avoids the news because the bullshit around him actually affects him, and he totally won’t ever admit how much he loves being friends with people who ARE optimist and who sees humanity’s beauty and want to make things better. Grantaire is also the guy who is Totally in Favour of Women’s Rights, Especially the Sexual Liberation Part of It *wink wink*. He… probably had unfortunate sentences like “girls don’t like the nice guys, they just want assholes” (i mean he basically already say unfortunate things like that in canon). Irma probably said once to him “Dude, you are an asshole, and I don’t see women running to your feet, so shut the hell up.” In my opinion, he’s also a white man in his twenties, with all the blind prejudice it can bring. He’s bi, but not that comfortable with it. 

Feuilly, and dear god will I fight anybody on this if I must, is a STUDENT. (Or was a student, depending on which age you give them). Feuilly still struggles with money, because he’d live in fucking Paris, but Feuilly would NOT struggle to study, because FRANCE’S UNIVERSITIES ARE CHEAP (in comparison to some other countries, I mean), and also there are different financial help for people like Feuilly who don’t have the financial means to pay everything from their pockets. It’s still highly probable Feuilly would work anyway, probably in retail or tutoring!, though. Feuilly would spend his time reading and Getting Angry or Passionate about everything that’s going on in the world, that won’t change in our modern world. It’s not about Poland anymore, but oh man Feuilly would rant hours on the situation of Syrians refugees. He probably sat in baffled, horrified silence after Trump’s election. He makes sure people know about what happens in countries the media aren’t interested in. In fact, I could see him write long articles on international problems. 

To be honest, I really don’t know If I can do this for all of les amis (perhaps not as detailed). A lot of this is only my personal opinions on how they might be in modern France. 

In a world where Law school isn’t the only available school for people who don’t want to graduate for School, what do Bossuet and Bahorel do? I can see them, of course, going to university, again and again, but? Would they really not get a diploma…? I mean, okay, poor Bossuet probably doesn’t because of Circumstances, but for Bahorel, I don’t know - he can still have gone to study Law in the first place, find it filled with Terrible Arrogant Competitive People, went “nope” and just. Tried a lot of other things, accidentally majored and got a diploma in at least two of them, and somehow ends up with the most diploma in the group???? Which is baffling because Bahorel would also clearly be a Stylist. He has a page and everything. People don’t get it. I dunno. 

Concerning politics activity, Bahorel would still be the person who Knows Everybody In Paris, which means he goes from group to group - Bahorel probably knows the most radical leftist you can find in Paris, and he has tried to infiltrate an extreme-right meeting once or twice (but that ended up badly). Bahorel probably is the Main Messenger of l’ABC. He’s also probably very good at corrupting students and making them think “maybe being Far Left is actually quite cool”

Jehan probably is vegan? I have no idea what radical art movement is actually scandalizing the Good Society, but he’s probably part of that in some way (with Bahorel). Street art..? I truly have no idea here, so I won’t embarrass myself trying to say something. He still writes a lot of poems, he’s still very erudite, and he’s probably still very rich. He probably gives a lot of money to charity - for women, children, and animals, and he’s an active participant in at least one of them. He’s very big on the “nature doesn’t belong to human and we should be respectful of it” sustainable development movements. 

… Of course les amis would probably all be for sustainable development cause they’re not idiots but. you know.

I can’t see Joly as anything else than a doctor, and I tend to think he’d go for caring for kids in particular. He’s good with them. To be honest, when it comes to politics, Joly and Bossuet are the hardest for me to pin down - I have zero doubt they’re as invested as the others, but I don’t think they’d have as much “clear” role if you know what I mean? Joly probably organizes things for the children at hospital, like having people come here to visit them and make them laugh (Bossuet would probably help with that, and, in fact, probably so would Grantaire), or making sure they can see That Movie that just got out, etc. Joly would also be highly invested in the cause of nurses, which are having a hard time in France right now. Bossuet, drawing from his own experiences, would probably help people in situation of poverty - homeless people, etc. Perhaps he’d help in Le Refuge, which is an association that helps lgbt kids in France who are homeless. 

As for Joly, I can’t see Combeferre as anything else than a doctor, apart if he’s a teacher. Combeferre could totally be a teacher. however, Combeferre would probably be a family doctor, after trying a lot of different specialization. In fact, Combeferre probably went for medicine after trying a bunch of other things, and probably did at least two years of “prépa” (I have zero idea how to explain what it is. Two years of school that prepares you to a test that will allow you to enter prestigious schools all over france?) in like, physics or something because he used to plan to become a scientist. Combeferre is fascinated by technology and how it can help; probably works on making teleportation a thing during lost hours; has contacts all over the scientist words, and spends a lot of time with Jehan speaking about how we could actually already put into place green energy all over the world. Combeferre also tutors kids, he’s involved in feminist groups, and of all his friends, he is the most socialist while everybody else is pretty far into radical left.

Would Courfeyrac be a lawyer? Honestly, I could see it! There is something about Courfeyrac that feels right about this, choosing to defend the innocent and all, he’s a paladin isn’t he - of course he would be a real life lawyer, not a fictional one, and I don’t know exactly which branches of law exists for him in modern-france, but he would be for the one who comes closest to helping either children, group of people being wronged, etc. He probably also gives free lawyer advice for those who don’t even know perhaps they hAVE rights. Courfeyrac would deal with everything social media in the group, and he would still have an uncanny eye to notice people that might fit and belong in their group. He’s charming in a less intense way that Enjolras might be, which makes him an easy “first contact”. 

 As for Enjolras, well, duh, he’d be a printer. He’d be involved in particular with everything that touches the right of workers, what the EU means for France’s companies, and what generally speaking international market do for workers that might not have a chance to fight against the competitive prices of other countries. Chances are, the printshop would also have an editorial branch to it, too. Which brings me to my point-

I think les amis de l’ABC would have a newspaper of sort: they’d started with a blog, and somehow it turned into a very political, humanist newspaper, of which Enjolras would be the principal editor: all of les amis might write articles from times to times - Bahorel, Bossuet, Courfeyrac and Jehan are the one who find other authors to fill in. Grantaire probably writes the horoscope, and it is mocking and still very PoliticalTM, but the tone is humouristic and there are a lot of puns and les amis are much too weak for puns.  

They would also have a branch dedicated to tutoring students of all ages, particularly in “difficult neighborhoods” (which would go hand in hand with Valjean’s center, which is a vague idea of mine that i like). That’s Combeferre and Feuilly’s responsibilities, though Joly chimes in when he can, as well as Courfeyrac and Enjolras. 

They would, obviously, protest - that’s a French Given. They would be, as I said, very active on social media (Courfeyrac on youtube, please and thank you, videos of Enjolras speaking, etc.). A lot of their stance might be on visibility and education: which wouldn’t stop them from direct action when it needs to happen. Les amis de l’ABC would very much be far left, though I don’t think they would like the idea of two big parties anymore, because that’s a feeling that every french people feel nowadays, i think, or so it feels anyway. 

And while I said “he” all the while in this post, because I put them all from canon to modern era, obviously not all of them would be “he”. Les amis de l’ABC would be boys, girls, trans, non-binary, they’d be white or black or brown-skinned, atheists, muslims, catholics, jewish people, etc. Les amis de l’ABC would be very diverse. Also, probably bigger than they were in canon-era - apparently there wasn’t that much of them because of political restrictions of the time-period, but nowadays they could be as much as they can freely, so, there’s that.  Of course, that doesn’t change the idea that Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Combeferre, Feuilly, Bahorel, Jehan, Bossuet, Joly and Grantaire might be the “core” of their association/group. 

I don’t… actually know if that answer your question at all? I hope so?  

[v3-killing-harmony-imagines]

V3 cast as Traitors

this hurts me to write because I remember the second game traitor :((

-mod Saihara 

IMPORTANT!:  I wrote this as if the reader((y/n))was part of the killing game, and may or may not the the s/o. It’s up to the reader 

this is way too long , so for the anon who asked, imagine is under the cut

Kaede:

she’s the what?

the traitor?

no... how 

how is it that the girl standing in front of you betrayed each and every one of you 

Angie, Himiko, Ouma, even Saihara 

everyone 

she helped everyone of them die 

all this time she was telling everyone to not give up.. and now this?

she’s been found out...now what’s going to happen to the remaining students?

the remaining students just stand there, in horror 

and the bright look in Kaede’s eyes are gone, every hint her previous self gone as she talks about how naive everyone was

“Too bad, this is the ending Shuichi died for.”

your numb, monokuma is laughing-he’s won and he knows it 

then a piano starts to play- but it’s different. Its as if the entire piano is set to a minor scale, making everything sound dark

its a mix of flats and sharps you hear at the end, and then your world goes dark

Saihara: 

he’s smiling 

smiling as he betrays everyone 

smiling as he kills Amami 

smiling when everyone find out how he really is 

he’s disappointed of course, but he’s glad he could pull of a trick of that caliber!

and your left screaming 

he promised 

he promised

he promised

he promised that he’d protect everyone, he promised Kaede that she wouldn’t have died in vain

he promised 

and he lied 

you ask him why.why.why.why.why.why

and he gives you a look of pain

“I just wanted to feel alive.”

and monokuma is beginning the execution.

he’s not the same detective that you met in the gym.

he’s not the Saihara you knew

he takes his hat off, and looks at you.

 he’s smiling 

and then its over 

Maki: 

her hair is flowing in the night sky as you find out.

and she frowns

how very,very bad of you to figure it out 

who tipped Angie off

who knew about Korekiyo’s past

she was a caregiver

loved by kids

not very sociable 

and has a bad personality 

she’s sighing as she knows what needs to be done 

dispose

she can’t be found out

she needs to stay alive 

“You’re a pain, y/n. I knew you were going to be a hassle eventually.”

And she hits you and you go down

you realize that you passed out when you wake up

but something’s different 

your tied up

and she’s the only one here

she brings you food. And even reads to you.

She keeps you safe.

She trains you until you follow her every command.

even if that means dying 

she lets you see other people now, a smile on your face as you cant feel anything

looks like Maki has a trump card up her sleeve 

Kaito:

He’s the fourth murderer  

he didn’t plan on being the traitor, of course but he had no choice 

he was blackmailed

that’s why he had to tell Mokokuma about the plan

Mokokuma would have killed the person he loved

He couldn’t let that happen 

he had to 

Everyone is voting for him, what do you do?

you suddenly realize why the trial-room is this big

why the murder was the only one that knocked the victim out before hand 

You can’t look at him when everyone votes correctly 

But he’s desperate to look at you

you can tell he’s trying so hard to get your attention

but you know what?

you’re not about to give it to him.

so when he finally speeds over to you as monokuma calls time up, you brush him off

“Get away.”

and he’s so hurt 

his eyes are as deep as the night sky, every twinkle of stars gone

finally with choking breaths he manages:

“I just wanted to protect you.”

You keep your composure until you get back to your room

then you break down

because he knew someone had to die, and he chose himself over you.

and you couldn’t even comfort him in his last moments. 

It hurts you sosososo much

almost enough to die

But also enough to get revenge

Iruma:

It makes sense, she’s the ultimate inventor 

She’s the only one who could have upgraded those machines monokuma controls 

she’s the only one who could have helped plan the new motive 

she’s shaking on her podium when you finally figure it out

but you cant do anything about it? can you?

she isn’t the killer and no one can trust her now 

so what’s the point ?

she says she did it because she just wanted to get out of here alive.

she didn’t like anyone here at all. She just wanted herself to live.

and now your whole world is shimmering 

and you realize you’re crying 

what was it then? your yelling now. 

why did she spend time with you then? When she hated everyone in the first place?

she tries to defend herself, saying she doesn’t hate you guys...

“But you’d let us die to save your fucking life.”

your voice is full of malice 

She Told you that she enjoyed being with you

how could have been so stupid?

And then Monokuma steps in.

What good is a spy that’s been found out?

and then she realizes whats going to happen 

she’s going to die anyways.

and shes crying and pleading for someone so save her.

no one will

you watch as the light drain out of her eyes, just like she watched the light from Angie’s eyes fade.

and your glad she got what was coming for her. 

but now there’s an even bigger question 

Who killed Iruma Mui?

Kiibo:

The first thing monokuma does when you find out is to laugh

Kiibo-Hope,Huh. How ironic 

he forced Kiibo to kill

he forced Kiibo to gather information 

and now he’s forcing Kiibo to kill the remaining students, in front of their eyes

Kiibo’s ares are glowing a deadly red color as he blows up Katio 

No emotion 

and then he takes down Shirogane with a blade 

You want to run, but you can’t

no one can defeat an AI

you cant move. its impossible 

your trying to remember the shy robot you met the first day

and now he’s choking Tenko

The doors are locked, everyone is trapped in this arena 

Gonta throws Kiibo to the other side of the room

there’s the crunching of rocks and metal before Kiibo gets up again

and he cuts Gonta, blood spraying like snow

and now he’s coming after you

and you just.cant.move. 

Kiibo lifts the blade for the final strike 

but you don’t feel anything.

reason being Ouma took the blade for you.

Ouma. Of all people.

He’s been impaled through the stomach. 

You can see the fear in his eyes as coughs blood, some of it dribbling down his chin 

He falls. 

You’re the last one alive, covered in blood and forced to look into the killer’s eyes.

Ouma saved you. But that only extended your lifetime by seconds 

You don’t have the energy to cry.

Kiibo brings the blade up, covered in different layers of blood.

“Any last words.”

he states it in a monotone voice.

You don’t really have your thoughts straight enough, so you just tell him what you’ve wanted to tell him. 

“I still believe you can be human.”

He actually falters

and then your world goes red.

but you wouldn’t doubt it that Monokuma will be able to control Kiibo for the next killing game 

Himiko:

She did it for you

You were always the one to find food when you two were hungry 

You and her were the only family to each-other

You made sure she got enough to eat

Even if that meant giving all your food to her

You were both together ever since both of you were abandoned 

and you survived 

and now you, the SHSL scavenger, has to watch as your sister is found out to be the traitor

Now people are saying that you could possibly be the traitor 

“NO!STOP! I’m the one who’s the traitor here! Leave y/n out of it!”

some people still look skeptical but they watch as you approach Himiko

“why?”

“I had to pay you back for all those days where you made sure I was safe, even if that meant putting your life at risk.”

Tears started to well up in her eyes

“ I didn’t want to do it. But it was either me or you. I needed to, i’m sorry. I’m so so sorry.”

and then your crying, and crying and crying.

she’s not your real sister but hell, she’s the been more of a family then your real family ever was.

and you don’t want her to leave you. nonononono.

who’s going to keep you company on cold nights when the only thing you can think of is how cold and hungry you are?

who’s going to preform magic tricks to help earn money?

the only member of your family is going to die. Your terrified 

You cant let go of her, if you do then it’ll be the last time you ever see her.

Your yelling at Mokokuma to please,please please please please please don’t kill her. Anyone but her.

But she knows that she has to go.

It takes both Tenko and Gonta to pry you away.

Himiko gives you one last look as monokuma is yelling that its punishment time 

She places her your hands, giving a weak smile.

Your being pulled away, your throat is raw but you couldn’t care less.

She’s just about to be dragged off when her face contorts and tears fall 

“No...I don’t want to die.”

And that’s the final strike for you.

everything goes dark

you don’t come out of your room for days, Tojo brings you food and water but your not hungry 

It takes you weeks to realize she would want you to get out here.

Make the mastermind suffer.

so you finally go out.

You can deal with the grief for now.

Until you can get out of this game.

Korekiyo: 

he’s bored by the time you find out

I mean come on, it took you that long to put the pieces together 

everyone is yelling at him that they won’t trust him anymore,that he’s going to be suspected of every single murder now.

“Really, when did I ever said that I cared.”

He tells a story

A story about how he was always a pawn

how he worked for his mother, obeyed every command 

he sharpened his talents. He obeys his owner 

He was bought, and was put into this killing game to make notes for his master.

He doesn’t care if he dies or lives, he’s even working with the mastermind.

he confesses all of this at once, leaving everyone speechless 

the only truth he ever told was that he loved humans 

He’s been intrigued since day 1

And that’s why he’s in here

To study their behavior 

To know them better than they would know themselves

And if people die, the better.

Because it shows humans their true personality  

His eyes cloud over as he talks about his master, he won’t ever ever ever ever eeeeverrr betray them.

And that’s why the mastermind is letting him say this, because they know he wont say anything, even if they torture him.

‘Ahhh, but alas, it seams as if my master doesn’t even remember me. You see, they also decided to join this game, how wonderful of them.”

And the room drops a few degrees.

because now even monokuma is confirming it, one of these people alive is the mastermind.

.......

and you wonder.....

just mayyyyyyybe....

that your part of something that you can’t remember.....

Angie: 

nihahah!

your right! Its! Angie!

she jumps up in down in various poses as she is convicted of being the traitor. 

Angie?

How is she, the most energetic person in this entire game... the traitor?

She’s laughing, as if someone said something funny

“ Angie told allllllll of your secrets!”

but..why?

what would she get out of betraying everyone?

“you are are so silly!Angie didn’t betray you!”

she sold everyone out she told the mastermind everything that they were planing. She sabotaged the escape plan.

“You DIRTY LITTLE SON OF A-”

thwack

and Kaito is down  

“neh heh heh! Don’t get too close Momota-kun~”

She didn’t kill him, of course. But he’s injured.

“Hey... Angie-san... what do you get out of going this?”

and now she tilts her head like you’ve just asked her why humans need air 

“Isn’t it obvious? God has made it this way!”

God?

“It’s God’s will for Angie to be the traitor! So Angie trusts in God!”

everyone is shoring her glares, because really?’ she’s going to use that excuse?

you might as well ask...

“ Hey Angie, what is God’s will for us?”

She gives you a darkened smile.

“God can’t hear you.”

And she leaves the courtroom.

Gonta:

h...how? How could someone like him be the traitor?

In fact, he doesn’t know it himself

what! He...... he....betrayed everyone...

Oh no..oh no oh no oh no.....

Because he didn’t mean to

he didn’t know that saying that would help Monokuma... he really didn’t 

And then he’s crying because he never ever meant to hurt anyone.

and just because he accidentally told monokuma about the hidden hallway..

now all the information about the outside is gone

everything that would tell them how to get out is gone 

and of course, people are angry

they yell at how he messed up

how he’s useless 

how no one’s going to trust him now 

and it makes your angry 

everyone is yelling and Gonta is crying and shaking 

and its when someone calls him dumb, you snap

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

well that got everyone's attention. 

“I DON’T SEE ANY OF YOU BRINGING UP THE FACT THAT ALL OF YOU WERE TOO PANSY TO KEEP STALLING FOR TIME. OR MAYBE THE FACT THAT GONTA WAS TERRIFIED TO TALK TO MONOKUMA. OR THE FACT THAT HE MANAGED TO KEEP TALKING FOR A FULL 20 MINUTES.”

your breath is coming in raged inhalations

“AND THE FACT IS THAT  YOU CAN’T JUST BLAME HIM. EACH AND EVERYONE OF YOU WERE TOO GREEDY TO WAIT YOUR TURN TO GO ONE BY ONE IN THAT HALL. YOU JUST ALL WANTED TO GET OUT OF HERE.”

your dragging Gonta away now, away from these sick people 

“If you need us, then too bad, we’re not giving anyone help now.”

There were people that didn’t blame Gonta of course, but they still didn’t stand up for him did they?

he thanks you as you get him something to drink and some tissues.

everyone eventually apologies, Gonta 100% forgives them 

you, on the other hand are a different story 

looks like everyone is back at square one.

Tenko:

she’s the traitor 

the reality of the situation finally gets to you when you see her dead body

she just wanted to protect her family 

Monokuma had forced her to be the traitor

 her akido master, her parents her family.

They were all being tortured 

she heard them scream 

she had to 

she had to 

she had invited you over to talk the night before her death 

she asks what you think of her

“Tenko, it’s OK... I don’t blame you. I know that you had no choice.”

she’s crying 

thank you, she’s saying.

Thank you thank you thank you 

she’s so happy.

your don’t hate her. you don’t hate her 

you take her hands and tell her that you’ll always be here for her 

and then she tells you that she likes you

she’s grown to like the things you do, the way your hair is, the way you smile 

she likes you

but then she tells you that she needs to go... that she can’t be with her for much longer

You tell her to please, please please please be safe.

and she takes her choker off.

she hands it to you, saying that you can give it back to her in the morning, and that she’ll make sure that she can see it you again

you tell her that you want o be with her, you want to take her out for coffee once you get out of here

and then she asks to kiss you.

its soft and is too short, and when she pulls away she’s trying to be cheerful

that was just a goodnight kiss, she says, there’ll be more to come.

and then she waves you goodbye 

the next time you see her is the next morning, dead

and she lied 

you plant a goodbye kiss on her cheek before you leave for the trial, when no one is looking

and now your hanging onto the ribbon with the bell as tightly as you can 

she lied

with trembling hands, you put it around your neck and fasten it on

and the trial begins 

Hoshi: 

He warned you.

he warned each and every one of you to not get close to him

yet you still did 

how does it feel? To have hoped so hard only to fall into despair ?

Well, you can’t say he didn’t warn you

he’s done bad things in the past, why would he stop now ?

and now your crying 

because you should have known better 

everyone else did, so why didn’t you?

he asks you this as your sobbing 

“B-because I believe in everyone! that includes you!”

Believe?

that’s stupid 

“I Know that even the worst of people can change so that’s why-”

“Shut up!”

your’re punched in the face and go down

you feel a searing pain on your head, hot liquid trickles down your face

he just wants you to shut up.

you should be hating him, contorting beneath the despair 

but you’re not

because you have hope 

you tell him that he can change, you get punched again

and again

and again

he does it over and over

wanting you to hate him

wanting you to say mercy, just once 

but you refuse 

finally, your not moving

he’s done it 

he thinks

and then you move 

and now he’s crying 

because why

why wont you let him win?

and you refuse to fight back

and he can’t take it 

he runs away, like a coward 

he’s found the next day, hanging from the ceiling 

Toujo:

the first thing she does is apologize. 

apologize fore all that she’s done

she just needed to save herself 

she needed to return to the place where she has worked hard for everything 

she needed to do whatever it took to not get killed 

w h a t e v e r i t t o o k 

she’s sad yes, because she knows what failure means 

and she has failed

and she’s addressing everyone, and she’s not looking in your eye 

she’s not the type of person to loose 

so she must do everything she can to not loose 

she needs to do this, she says 

she’s sorry

and she runs away

your following her before you even know whats going on

and now you’ve lost her 

no,please no.

You run around, looking in the library, the kitchen, the dormitories. 

you can’t find her

finally, Shirogane tells you to take a break

you tell her to fuck off

more searching, more searching 

and finally you find her

she’s ditched the maid outfit 

it looks as if she;s been waiting for you

“I hope you didn’t have to come.”

and you can’t hold it in any longer 

you tell her she doesn’t need to do this, she can survive with everyone 

she tells you that it’s impossible, that Monokuma doesn’t like useless pawns 

it’s kill or be killed for her 

you won’t let her leave

so you call monokuma, after a while you two work out a deal

Toujo lives if you become the traitor 

you tell her that she doesn’t need to kill, your going to get her out alive

and maybe it’s because of the time you two have spent together, but she trusts you. 

she won’t tell anyone about the new predicament 

so you two make up a lie

about how she was being controlled

she has to act completely different now, but only around everyone else

they believe you

you keep her by your side 24/7

your going to make sure she lives. no matter what 

even if you have to taint your soul

Amami:

“It was a bit obvious, wasn’t it?”

He was the SHSL ??? After all

he was very much suspicious from the start 

and yet, everyone trusted him with open eyes

they even saw how his demeanor would change, how he somehow knew that it wouldn’t be as easy to leave the school

and now he’s the one left standing 

you yell why

he investigated with you

you two ate meals together 

you had eachother’s backs for the trials 

and he’s the traitor?

he... he helped kill everyone?

you just don’t want to believe it.

he tells the remaining students that they’re all going to die

that his ruler will kill them all

people ask him if this ‘ruler’ is Ouma..

he laughs 

“ As if someone of that level could ever compare to my ruler!”

He goes on, about how his ruler takes care of all his subjects who do as they are told

they are loved, they get food and drink

he tells them that he was offered the chance to help his ruler with one of their blissful killing games.

and of course he just couldn't say no.

he belongs to his ruler, that’s why he is here in the first place

he looks directly at you 

“ Now don’t worry, I don’t intend on killing anyone myself...I just might... help a little bit.”

he’s smiling the same carefree smile 

and then you notice that he’s wearing a mask

and the room is starting to get warmer 

now your friends are collapsing 

 and it hurts to breath 

and your eyes are on fire

now someone is dragging you 

...........................

you wake up in a white room

you cant move

And then a girl is above you

she introduces herself as.... mu...kro?

you can’t really tell, your hearing isn’t really that good

she tells you that you won.

the game ends when 2 people are left standing

you just happened to get lucky and not die until last 

Your going be soo happy

it’ll be you and Amami, the great leader has ordered that you two carry on another killing game in another country

you two will be lovers

partners in crime 

And you want to object, 

Maki, Kiibo... everyone 

they’re nobody anymore

you don’t have a choice

You either die a hero, or live to see yourself be the villain 

and you were forced to live.

Shirogane:

She denies it, of course

 it takes multiple pieces of hard evidence in order to make her confess 

and boy is it ever hard

your yelling at her, noticing the holes in her facts adn pointing out when she slips up

it takes both you and Saihara most of the afternoon in the trial room to get a conviction

she’s starting to sweat, and her hair is gradualy getting messier and messier 

and she starts pulling at it when you call her out on another thing

it hurts you, to see the person you thought you knew act like this 

but you keep going on

pressing further and further 

come on, come on

just one more thing 

one more and you could crack this entire case 

“kaede didn’t see the cloth becasue the body was covering it!”

oh no

it’s over 

“Shirogane... how did you know that the body was moved?”

“Isn’t that obvious, the killer stabbed the victim in the back, they would have either fell forward or landed on their side.”

“No. That’s wrong, you can clearly see that there was a hole for the knife to go into, the killer simply had to knock the victim down!”

and then it hits her 

shit 

she shouldn’t have said that 

and now she’s cornered

she snaps in the blink of an eye

her eyes glassy, reflecting a sea-blue spirals in her eyes

“I’ve been found out.”

She’s not talking to anyone, she’s just stating it for herself 

she doesn’t say much after that, and the voting goes smoothly

but now you realize the reality of what’s going to happen 

Shirogane, knocked students out and took them to the mastermind 

she was given protection

a fair trade 

but one of her plans went wrong

she did’t even realize what had happened until she had killed them

you sadly don’t feel bad

your sad that your friend is about to die, it hurts you so much

but she tortured you

for hours and hours and hours

you watch as the guillotine comes down on her head. 

and then you start to cry.

 Ouma:

the SHSL supreme ruler, is a sidekick.

the though by itself is enough to make you laugh

combined with the fact that he is working with the mastermind of the killing game that you’re in, it’s less comforting 

people had suspected him of being the mastermind, many many people 

and he turns out to just be a traitor 

but then as more people died, and everyone grew closer and closer to confronting the mastermind, Ouma began to act strangely 

he would have dark circles under his eyes when you saw him

he rarely showed up for the morning meet up in the cafeteria

he looked more panicked 

and then it was the final trial  

it’s just you, Saihara and kiibo that are still alive when you find out 

and instead of laughing in your faces, he starts crying 

the room is dead silent 

you can’t think straight, the idea alone of Ouma breaking down is enough for tears to start rolling down your face 

your gripping the poduim for dear life as saihara says the mastermind’s name in a shaky breath 

 it’s Kaede

saihara is devastated, of course

and as she pops up in a dramatic entrance and begins ranting on about something to do with hope,Ouma is still sniffling 

you can tell by the way he’s shaking that he’s trying his hardest to keep composed 

“OI, Shut up will you!”

as Kaede’s voice echos throughout the room, Ouma gives a small wimpier and shuts up

and hell, now you’re angry 

because how dare she 

you’ve been the one to protect him from the other accusing students, you always held onto that hope that he was a good person all along 

and she killed them all

amami, Tenko, Angie, Maki, Kaito, Tsumigi and everyone else 

they’re dead because of her 

and now your tears are gone

you’re filled to the brim with rage 

and you ask her why? Why would you do this?

she tells it all,she did it because she likes too

and Ouma?

he’s her slave

Ouma goes rigid at her words, you can see he’s scared 

you don’t want to believe it, but Kaede has evidence

and then she talks about her talent 

she’s not really the SHSL pianist

she’s got Ouma’s talent, she just let him ‘borrow’ it 

 Ouma is the SHSL slave

no no no no no

you don’t want to even think about that 

“Ouma, take off your scarf.”

he has to, he has no choice

and sure enough, there’s a collar there.

it’s not one of those old fashion ones, it resembles a shock collar

there’s red welts and purple bruises where it’s been pulled at

you want o cry out as Ouma begins to shake, because you just wanted to protect everyone, and you failed

Saihara and Kiibo have to both work against the mastermind, but you know it’s pointless

you are all found guilty for a non-existent murder 

Ouma saying sorry over and over and over

but what’s the point

this game was meant to kill everyone 

you’re sitting under a crusher when Ouma locks eyes with you

eyes full of fear and pain and the wright of the world in those deep orbs

“I tried.”

the press comes down in a quick motion

and you don’t realize anything