#trump name means lies

[isawthismeme]

[lizardsfromspace]

The factchecking this cycle has been so profoundly incompetent that it's finally getting some real backlash, but the extent of it really should be clear. So much of factchecking is not based in reality, but in a kind of contorted moon logic that can find true claims to be false and false ones to be true based on wildly inconsistent reasoning.

But this one really shows off some of the base assumptions of modern factchecking, and also bc it got a community note which is funny:

Let's take this one by one

The idea that quotes have any options but "he said it" or "he didn't say it". It is a binary, maybe with a third option of "it was clipped wildly out of context", but something you see constantly now is the idea that quoting someone's direct words without deceptive editing or removal of context can somehow be false

Pointlessly noting that it's from 2016, and that it's not clear if he currently believes it. What the hell does that matter to the question of if he said that in 2016? People understood that the "dig up someone's tweets from when they were 17" thing was inane, but they counter-balanced by apparently deciding that citing anything someone said more than about six months ago is Misinformation if we don't have objective evidence they would say the exact same thing now, even if there's no evidence they believe anything else. Analyzing someone's high school tweets and analyzing something the literal President said seven years ago are not equivalent

Noting that he walked it back following criticism. You see this constantly, too. Again, what does that matter to the question of if he said it? But this is just taken as a given now: if someone gets blowback and says "whoops I didn't mean it", that should be taken at face value. Effectively, Politifact is letting Donald Trump self-factcheck Donald Trump: their only evidence (and I read the article too) this is at all false is that Donald Trump said Donald Trump didn't really mean the words he said, so they must agree with the judgment of Donald Trump that Donald Trump was treated so unfairly here.

A general confusion over what factchecking is. If you're asked "did Donald Trump say this in 2016?", your sole job is to determine if he really said that in 2016. It's not to divine if he, deep in his heart, still believes it now. That's completely irrelevant.

The two guiding principles of modern factchecking are this: one, it's strongly rumored - and also, obvious to everyone literate - that the major factchecking sites have either standing orders to find equal numbers of lies on both sides, or are staffed by people who think it's their job to hold both sides equally to account (the exception is Snopes, whose writers are just terrible at their jobs). In the name of this, Donald Trump can say something on camera only for it to be judged false, while a Democratic politician can be excoriated for mildly rounding down a figure in a speech. A factchecking website once determined that saying climate change was a threat to life on this planet was a lie, because climate change won't kill all life on this planet. Politifact's lie of the year one year was a Democrat saying a Republican plan would "end Medicare as we know it", which was judged to be a lie because it wouldn't literally end Medicare completely. Figurative language needs to be scoured, comments said directly on camera need to be made fuzzy. This makes factchecking sites worthless at factchecking, because what even is this?

It's not true that Donald Trump will refuse to accept the election results, because he's merely said he won't accept, and has said if he loses, it's only because the election was fraudulent. Okay, what, do you demand that people prove he said his plans in exact words? What is the actual, functional difference between "he said he won't accept it" and "he said if he loses it's because he won and they stole it from him, and he won't commit to saying he'll accept it"? What are you talking about, who is this for? When you go to the Logic and Reason Site for Debunking & end up having to puzzle out their convoluted logic and reasoning to understand anything, the plot's been lost a bit

The other is the idea that context is exonerating. Any context at all. If they said they didn't mean it, partially false. If they walked it back, partially false. If they said it was taken out of context, partially false. If they said it a certain number of years ago, partially false. If there's a longer video, even if it shows functionally the same thing, pants on fire, five pinocchios.

Again, we have footage of Trump saying this, and the footage in the ad is unedited, and the factchecking website is declaring something that OBJECTIVELY HAPPENED WITH HARD EVIDENCE IT HAPPENED didn't really happen bc we don't know his heart, maybe he believes something different now, we simply can't know for certain. But we do know for certain. Because "false" at least used to mean "didn't happen". But factchecking sites are now on those Beyond Belief definitions of "true" and "false" I guess

But the real problem here is that they just accept anything someone being factchecked says at face value. Because, and I can't believe I'm saying this

It seems like the people paid to determine if other people are lying...have forgotten that people lie sometimes

[prozach27]

The idea that voting for Harris and Walz means you don’t care about Gaza is such an uneducated position that it can just about only be justified as a psy-op. What exactly is it that you think voting is for? If it’s to show where your idealistic morality lies - what you would really LOVE for America to look like with a president - then of course it makes sense to not want to vote someone who isn’t as critical as you’d like of the Palestinian Genocide. But that’s not the world we live in. As American citizens, we are IMMENSELY privileged, and we cannot possibly understand the horrors and tribulations Palestinians have endured over the last year. The idea that Trump and Harris are “equally bad” for Palestine is a position of immense privilege that doesn’t value Gazan lives. Trump has told Israel to finish the war. Harris is calling for a temporary ceasefire. From a purely logical perspective, one party is promoting a position that could save Palestinian lives while the other is asking for an escalation of events. If you can’t see the difference between these two positions - the real-world, life-altering difference between these two positions for people in a war-zone - then it’s time to ask yourself if you’re morally grandstanding by demanding nothing less than a complete end to the war, or if you’re more concerned in saving even one additional life.

There is no 3rd-party presidential candidate with enough name recognition to make it in this election. If you want a third party, by all means, support them after the election and help them get a foothold. That doesn’t change that they’re not a viable option for 2024. So, do you choose Trump - who wants to escalate the war - or Harris, who wants to help it calm down? These positions are fundamentally different and will lead to changes in the number of Palestinians who survive. Leaving the Palestinian genocide aside, Trump and project 2025 have made it clear how they want to limit abortion access, higher education, transgender rights, gay rights, and DEI efforts while the Harris White House wouldn’t be trying to actively dismantle these things. These are, once again, clear cut issues that will alter how many people survive under each presidency.

If your position is that “unless they give exactly what I want, they don’t deserve to be in office,” then it’s clear you’re not willing or interested in making the actually hard choices in politics and your activism is performative. You aren’t voting for who’s a good person or who you like most - you’re voting for the enemy you want in office. Do the right thing. Vote for Harris and give people a chance to save more lives.

[kcokaine]

Hi sorry but people on twitter are saying you’re a nazi and I was just wondering if that was true??

Not only is this quite outrageous take on someone without like 0 actual proof. I can admit in the "proof"(the zionism thing which people mean as Nazism) people used against me was me at most being insensitive/ignorant which i already sincerely apologized for because i wasn't edjucated on the matter whatsoever. It was not right of me and I never repeated that after i found out about the truth of things.

But also this is ridiculous. I'm not american, I'm from a country that has been wartorn by nazis and communists. All my life I was taught about atrocities these two sides did to central europe and other countries. If you had a swastika tattooed on you here you would get literally arrested or killed on the street. But that isn't even an argument, that's just me stating how stupid and hypocritical it would be of anyone to support such things from the area i was raised in. I'm highly anti nazi, anti facist or anti anything that is even similar to that. I stand with civilians and innocent people that are being collateral damage to war and governments. Therefore I'm not a trump supporter, i was always left leaning i was always for rights. Hell I'm a bisexual woman, how could i ever support someone like Trump in my right mind?

I do not understand where this claim is absolutely coming from and i dont understand how people disregard the severity of saying this online with confidence. This is such a serious accusation that can ruin reputations unrightfully and just shows how people have no interest searching for more proof or anything before saying serious things because all they care about is drama and that the finger is not pointed at them in that moment. We as society got too comfortable about canceling and just saying anything, growing into complete parasocial relationship within each other. You are either no person to them, no human being or you are a glorified idea. Everyone is a person behind that screen and if they ever got over they pride and looked themselves in the core they would understand they also do mistakes and not everything is black and white.

I'm hurt by these accusations. This isn't anywhere close to calling someone names or weird for having odd preferences and stuff in fandoms. This is claiming that I support actual genocide, suffering of real people which is fucking awful. It makes me sad, deeply hurt. I'm not saying im better than anyone else, i dont need to be, I want this genocide to end same as anyone else would. I reflected, I took criticizm to heart and I'm now trying to truly do something with my following, i retweet donation links and donate to the charities with spare money i have.

The truth is, no matter what I say, it will never be enough for the people that just want to have moral highground, they act like they never made a mistake, like they were never ignorant in their life. I wonder how they would like it if someone took something terrible out of context and endlessly kept posting it on social media just to feel better without you having a proper chance to redeem yourself, always being seen as a "nazi" in some people's eyes because someone lied about you. It's sad and I'm sorry you keep seeing this lie about me. I think about it every day. And with this message I wanted to let you know what I truly feel and think. If you believe it is on you, but I'm finally putting my thoughts out there after months of thinking.

[princesserica84]

Howdy, let me start off with no hate for you just here trying to help clear up a few things it seems from your post you dont know which is normal since you no a US citizen. again just trying to help you understand not an attack just trying help. 1 on the whole nazi wave https://www.tumblr.com/busterballsblog/773398848248987648?source=share also post is not the full clip here https://youtu.be/5e5Dz2EvuOY?si=NPvB0sq5Qjk2NHDK these should help you better see the whole story and facts. 2 UK, CA, GR,FR all have hate speech as a legal thing in the USA its already been ruled by highest court and even liberal judges agreed no such thing as hate speech in this USA. where each of the nations i listed have jailed people based on their words some where even jokes on stage. but in USA we have the right to say anything but a DIRECT call to action. but just as we each have the right of free speech means all sides have a voice to say as they wish. something that very different our rights listed out in black and white cant be taken away by government for any reason where yours and UK, FR and GR can and have been in name of "Greater Good". in USA its about the 1 not the Greater Good when it comes to rights. 3 on whole trans topic here the the issue its illegal to force someone to talk a set way in the usa. just as your name is Erica you cant force people to call you that they can say HEY YOU or they can call you E all they want and no law is broken in the USA. next part of this is wanting tax payers to fund trans medical issues that are not life threatening is not our way not because they trans but because they have no right to my money. also their proof this has been forced on kids ie people under 18 which is in fact grounds to remove and sue a teacher for forcing their views on kids at school. 4 you clearly listen to USA media well do you know that ABC , NBC, CNN , MSNBC all paid out 100s of millions of dollars in just 3 lawsuits for openly lied about the story and people in it. ABC even had pay Trump 15 million for a lie they told about Trump. so frankly trusting them is not really an option even for liberals have had to admit they wrong. 5 you bring up removing of rights https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights-transcript please take a look at our rights and can you link abortions to any right you see listed. ( i am assuming this is right you talking about due to your words. mind you while your looking at our rights look at 2A and then notice how liberals seek to remove rights on guns. i use this as example of how the very view that the right seeks to take away rights is not based in any logic and in fact the left is seeking to remove a right openly. again i hope this helps you understand our system in a fair and balanced way. btw i been from quebec to toronto i will say being that im Texan i understand qubec people the best in CA i have a number of pals up their and yea. to give you idea why people like me love your snow is my city just got 3 inches of snow that all the snow we gotten since 2018 and my summers are 110 F or in the 40s C in the shade with 100% humidity. anyway hope this helps you understand better again no hate just trying to help and i will leave you with how Texans see the rest of north America LOL hope you enjoy the fun joke again no hate just trying help you smile. and if you have any question here or DM me is fine just trying share some help.

^^ I give you, the American education system

Look, I disagree with everything you are saying.

If you want to talk about taking rights away, I'll give you this. A lot of pregnant women have died recently because the hospitals are not able to perform abortions. Today, there was a school shooting in Nashville that killed a 17 year old and injured another. If abortions were legal, and you have gun laws in place that weren't written in the 17th century, many people would still be alive. This isn't opinion, this is fact.

Deaths in Canada caused by guns in 2023: less than 300

Deaths in USA caused by guns in 2023: over 43,000

There's honestly too much wrong with your entire message. I don't think I'm the right person to respond so I will leave it to everyone else.

Also, just so you are aware, your "map" did not make me laugh. It offends me. Canada is my home and I would much rather live here (with free healthcare, gun laws that weren't written over 200 years ago, the right for me to make a decision on my own body, and a place where my transgender friends are free to be who they are) than live in fucking texas.

[karenandhenwilson]

I think I figured out, at least for myself, why the 9-1-1 fandom and part of the Buddie-or-Bust side of it feels so much more toxic than ever before when I know for a fact, those demanding Buddie has to become canon and who are looking for any tiny clue to be able to say it will become canon have always been this toxic. (I mean, with the exception of some people who came into the show because with Buck being bi the show was suddenly not queerbaiting anymore--lol, it hurts even just writing this as if it were really true--and then became die-hard Buddie fans or at least pretend to be to garner enough followers and clicks to make money out of fandom. But I'm not talking about them here.)

Before Bucktommy, there was no real opposition for them in the fandom. Buck and Eddie both had other LI and those had their fans (I know for a fact there are still people now shipping Buck with Taylor or Buck with Marisol or Eddie with Shannon). But those were very few fans and they created their own little spaces in fandom places and were barely noticeable. So the Buddie-or-Bust fans were able to mostly ignore them. And there have of course also been some small fanon ships for Eddie and Buck with other people, but those are barely noticed either.

But Bucktommy? That got huge in practically an instant. Because so many people were excited for bi story line with an established character and one in Buck's circumstances (not even Buck himself). And the Bucktommy fans were loud about their support of this new canon ship. So Buddie-or-Bust fans suddenly felt threatened and became much louder in their hate for anything not Buddie. Because now, for some reason, the fans of the other ship seem to be a threat to them. And also, for the first time for any of the LI of Eddie or Buck, they made an honest effort to set up Tommy and the relationship with him as something long-term. Which the Buddie-or-Bust fans recognize just as much as the Bucktommy fans, and so they try even harder to find fault in every single thing.

And that did change something in the behavior of the die-hard Buddie fans. At times, I've been neck-deep in Ana bashing, in Shannon bashing, in Taylor bashing, in Chimney bashing, in Abby bashing, in Maddie bashing. Because I enjoy a good bashing at times. It can be very cathartic. But you know what I've never seen there? I've never seen any of those characters being called derogatory names. Or their fans being called derogatory names and, in most cases, their fans didn't retaliate to the bashing either. (Though, at least for Chimney fans they sometimes very viciously go against people even just mentioning they don't like him and it came up a couple of times that Chimney fans found derogatory names for those bashing Chimney because that group of fans also seems to be unable to avoid content bashing their fav and instead sought it out deliberately to complaint about it.)

I can't even count anymore how many derogatory names I've seen for Tommy or Bucktommy or Bucktommy fans. They seem to come up with a new name every other day. And they enjoy trumping each other in their creations and using those names to get around the boundaries others try to set for themselves by filtering out the already known names.

And I already see people coming at me with "Oh, but Bucktommy fans started it by calling us BoBs." and just: No. Once more, you get an F in reading comprehension. It's always been made very clear that BoBs stood for Buddie-or-Bust and I personally don't see anything derogatory here but also, it's always been made very clear it's a specific subset of Buddie fans who behave poorly to separate them from the Buddie fans who don't care about Bucktommy. Because those people using that term are very well aware that there are really just a couple of very loud bad apples in the Buddie side of fandom and the rest of the Buddie fans don't deserve to be lumped in with them. While, on the other hand, all Bucktommy fans are always called names as a whole.

And I think their biggest problem is not even necessarily the "threat" they perceive Bucktommy to be to their own ship, though that's clearly a big part still. Otherwise, they wouldn't come after authors and artists and other fans who once shipped and created for Buddie and are now creating for Bucktommy. And otherwise, they wouldn't tag so many Buddie fics as Bucktommy, too, in some kind of strange hope to convince Bucktommy fans to ship Buddie again. (Without noticing that all they are accomplishing is to make everyone annoyed at them. And yes, that includes those Buddie fans who don't care for Bucktommy at all because they need to curate the Buddie tag very carefully now, too.)

I think their biggest problem is this belief that their ship is only valid if it's canon.

Which is so strange. Fandom has always mostly been about ships that are very much not canon. And no one ever expected their ships to become canon in the past, as far as I know. (Except if it was promoted and then didn't happen. Looking at Sterek here.) Canon ships barely get any attention. I mean, look at all the 9-1-1 ships that are canon, including Tarlos, and how little content there is for any of them, and also how little engagement there is for this content compared to Buddie. That's always been a trend in fandom, that's not new with 9-1-1.

It's not only strange, I also think it's honestly sad for these fans. Because they have deliberately set themselves up to be disappointed and dig that hole of disappointment ever deeper. Even if Buddie should ever go canon, which I honestly don't think will happen, it won't be at all what they expect. And they'll either leave the fandom or turn on the ship they were so toxically addicted to before.

[fiveeven]

TikTok Ban: A Little Too Convenient?

The TikTok ban saga has been wild to watch unfold, but honestly, the closer you look, the more questions arise. Between members of Congress holding Meta stock and Facebook’s sudden interest in integrating TikTok accounts, it feels less like a genuine privacy concern and more like a potential power play. Let’s break this down.

Congress Loves Meta—And Hates TikTok Did you know that several members of Congress own Meta stock? A 2023 analysis revealed that lawmakers with financial interests in Meta, Alphabet, and Snap could stand to benefit if TikTok faces a U.S. ban. This raises potential conflicts of interest, especially when these same lawmakers are involved in crafting legislation that directly affects TikTok.

Meanwhile, Meta, despite its long history of privacy violations (remember Cambridge Analytica?), doesn’t seem to face the same scrutiny. It’s hard not to wonder why Congress is suddenly so concerned about user privacy when it comes to TikTok but continues to give Meta a pass.

Meta’s Sudden Interest in TikTok Integration With TikTok under threat of a U.S. ban, Facebook recently added features allowing TikTok users to link their accounts to their profiles. While this feature aligns with broader trends of social media integration, the timing feels a little too coincidental. It suggests a strategic move by Meta to retain users who might migrate away from TikTok or prepare for an influx of creators seeking alternative platforms.

Even If Trump “Saves” TikTok, I’m Not Buying It Let’s say Trump swoops in and “saves” TikTok at the last minute. I still have serious concerns about what that actually means. Trump is transactional—he doesn’t do anything unless it benefits him or his allies. If TikTok is “saved,” I can’t help but wonder:

Does it get sold—in name only—to a U.S. company like Meta, keeping the same issues but with a different logo?

Does it stick around but get neutered, suppressing content like other corporate-owned platforms?

Or does it become a tool for pushing American propaganda, especially with initiatives like Project 2025 on the horizon?

These are just questions, but I think they’re valid ones. If TikTok survives under Trump’s “protection,” it’s unlikely to remain the platform we know today.

Is This Really About Privacy? The ban is framed as a response to concerns over data privacy and national security, but critics argue it might be more about corporate competition and information control. TikTok’s algorithm has surpassed its competitors in engagement and reach, making it a significant threat to U.S.-based platforms like Meta.

It’s worth noting that many social media platforms collect similar levels of user data, and the difference often lies in who owns the company. In TikTok’s case, its ties to China have made it a target for U.S. lawmakers.

The Bigger Picture Regardless of what happens with TikTok, the implications of this ban extend far beyond one app. It sets a precedent for government control over digital platforms, raising questions about freedom of expression, competition, and corporate influence.

If we’re not questioning these decisions now, we risk handing over even more control to a small group of powerful entities—whether they’re corporations, governments, or both.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

It was wrong to treat Donald Trump as a series of absences. The standard critique has always been that he lacks something that we imagine to be a prerequisite for high office: breeding, or grammar, or diplomacy, or business acumen, or love of country. And he does lack all those things, as well as pretty much any conventional bourgeois virtue you can name.

Trump’s skills and talents go unrecognized when we see him as a conventional candidate—a person who seeks to explain policies that might improve lives, or who works to create the appearance of empathy. Yet this is our shortcoming more than his. Trump has always been a presence, not an absence: the presence of fascism. What does this mean?

When the Soviets called their enemies “fascists,” they turned the word into a meaningless insult. Putinist Russia has preserved the habit: a “fascist” is anyone who opposes the wishes of a Russian dictator. So Ukrainians defending their country from Russian invaders are “fascists.” This is a trick that Trump has copied. He, like Vladimir Putin, refers to his enemies as “fascists,” with no ideological significance at all. It is simply a term of opprobrium.

Putin and Trump are both, in fact, fascists. And their use of the word, though meant to confuse, reminds us of one of fascism’s essential characteristics. A fascist is unconcerned with the connection between words and meanings. He does not serve the language; the language serves him. When a fascist calls a liberal a “fascist,” the term begins to work in a different way, as the servant of a particular person, rather than as a bearer of meaning.

That is quite a fascist achievement. Faced with the complexity of history, liberals struggle with the overwhelming volume of questions to be asked, answers to be offered. Like communism, fascism is an answer to all questions, but a different kind of answer. Communism assures us that we can, thanks to science, find an underlying direction in all events, toward a better future. This is (or was) seductive. Fascism reduces the imbroglio of sensation to what the Leader says.

A liberal has to tell a hundred stories, or a thousand. A communist has one story, which might not turn out to be true. A fascist just has to be a storyteller. Because words do not attach to meanings, the stories don’t need to be consistent. They don’t need to accord with external reality. A fascist storyteller just has to find a pulse and hold it. This can proceed through rehearsal, as with Hitler, or by way of trial and error, as with Trump.

That requires presence, which Trump has always had. His charisma need not resonate with you: probably, Hitler’s and Mussolini’s would not have reached you, either. But it is nevertheless a talent. To be a fascist and to call someone else a fascist requires a cunning that is natural to Trump. And in that naming of the enemy, absurd as it is, we see the second major element of fascism.

A Leader (“Duce” and “Führer” mean just that) initiates politics by choosing an enemy. As the Nazi legal thinker Carl Schmitt maintained, the choice is arbitrary. It has little or no basis in reality. It takes its force from the decisive will of the Leader. The people who watched Trump’s television ads during sporting events had not been harmed by a transgender person, or by an immigrant, or by a woman of color. The magic lies in the daring it takes to declare a weaker group to be part of an overwhelming conspiracy.

The one thing that is not arbitrary about the choice of an enemy is that it must exploit vulnerabilities. The Trump ads projected a fantasy of Kamala Harris allowing millions of sex-changed foreigners to take jobs from Americans. This touches, all at once, on gender, economic, and sexual vulnerability. We are unprotected and impoverished and will be replaced by something alien. And this is all orchestrated by a shadowy enemy in the background—in this case, a woman of color who knows how to laugh.

The “great replacement” theory is an example of an unoriginal fascist lie: conspirators will make you impotent and bring others to take your place in the world. The apparent complexity of the world resolves itself as a conspiracy, just as the attendant anxiety is resolved by hatred. This works with almost any combination of enemies. It can be a conspiracy of deep-state politicians to kidnap babies, or a conspiracy of Jews to corrupt women. Fascism wins when the enmity summoned begins to tell the story itself.

A fascist marries conspiracy and necessity. Not everyone can tell a spontaneous Big Lie, as Trump did, when he lost the 2020 election. And the Republicans around him did not challenge him. The Big Lie came to life when his followers stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Crucially, he paid no price for that. That made the Big Lie true, in a fascist sense. His de-facto impunity and then de-jure immunity also generated a sense of the untouchable, the heroic.

Trump’s presence has always been a co-creation: his and ours. From the moment when he first came down the Trump Tower escalator in 2015, he was treated as a source of spectacle. Because he was good for television, he was accepted as a legitimate candidate. In the print media, he grew through the doctrine of both-sides-ism: no matter how awful his deeds, his opponent had to be presented as equally bad. This empowered him to be both wicked and normal. During every campaign’s final months, polling had a similar effect. By displacing policy differences and reducing politics to two faces or two colors, polls reinforce the notion that Trump belonged where he was, and that politics was just a matter of us or them.

What amplifies Trump’s presence more than any other medium is the Internet. He is a natural with its quirky rhythms. And its algorithms make the rest of us open to exactly his sort of talky fascism. On social media, we are drawn away from people of complexity and toward blunt stereotypes. We ourselves are categorized, and are then fed content that brings out, in Václav Havel’s term, our “most probable states.” The Internet does not just spread specific conspiracy theories; it primes our minds for them. This was already true before Elon Musk reshaped Twitter in Trump’s image.

Our engagement with the machine illuminates a difference between the fascists of the twenty-twenties and the fascists of the nineteen-twenties. Back then, the machine was seen as bold and beautiful, a brutal instrument that would return us to our nature by wrenching us from the hold of soft civilization. The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti had an epiphany after an automobile accident in 1908, which led him to Futurism and then to fascism. For Hitler, the internal-combustion engine hastened a “Blitzsieg,” a lightning victory. The superior race with the superior technology exterminates other races, takes other peoples’ land, and thrives.

We are still driving around using internal-combustion engines, as we were a century ago; what has changed more than our means of locomotion is our means of staying put. When the Nazis dreamed of a radio in every home or a newsreel before every film, they did not imagine Germans motionlessly staring at screens for most of the day, as we all do now. Fascists a hundred years ago liked the male body, physical fitness, and marching around outside. Fascism today involves a masculinity softened by screen time. In both eras of fascism, women were explicitly deemed inferior. If the old fascism depended on a fantasy of accelerated male prowess, today’s rests on the anxiety of mechanical inability.

The fascist fantasy traditionally involved a return to nature. The Leader’s voice guided us into a competition with other races for habitat. Hitler was obsessed with coming ecological catastrophe, and he argued, in “Mein Kampf,” that Germans had to seize land or starve. That was incorrect. But, a hundred years later, those internal-combustion engines and other archaic technologies actually have changed the climate to the point of causing droughts and storms, as we saw during this electoral season. When such disasters occur, today’s fascists react as Trump and J. D. Vance did: they blame the victims and the immigrants, and invent conspiracy theories. If the old fascism killed for the sake of a dream of uniting with nature, the new fascism will kill by a politics of catastrophe, a deliberate acceleration of global warming, and its exploitation in the service of the politics of us and them.

A century ago, socialists wanted to believe that fascism was just another sign of the decay of capitalism. And they were right, at least insofar as businessmen then didn’t understand that fascism would reshape all of politics and society, and not just suppress labor unions and undermine democracy. Today, though, the point would be much sharper. Trump does not actually have a lot of money, but he pretends to—getting away with that lie is part of his presence. And his close fascist allies, Musk and Putin, are probably the two wealthiest people in the world. The fascism of today is nestled between the digital oligarchy (Musk) and the hydrocarbon oligarchy (Putin). Trump has pledged himself to America’s own hydrocarbon oligarchs, thereby insuring climate disaster, suffering, immigration, and even more occasions for division.

The oligarchs bring to our fascism its libertarian entry point: they preach that government is the source of all evil. As we yield to that logic, the hydrocarbon oligarchs drill away at the earth and the digital oligarchs at our minds. A weakened government can control neither, nor can it promise sound infrastructure or the welfare state. In these conditions, freedom is viewed not only as a struggle against the government but also as a struggle against one’s own neighbors. The people who claim to want individual freedom are the same people who clamor for mass deportations. America’s hydrocarbon and digital oligarchs support this kind of libertarianism; it is social media that guides men (and it is usually men) away from the idea that they are solitary heroes to the conviction that other groups must be punished.

Fascism is now in the algorithms, the neural pathways, the social interactions. How did we fail to see all this? Part of it was our belief that history is over, that the great rivals to liberalism were dead or exhausted. Part of it was American exceptionalism: “it can’t happen here” and so on. But most of it was simple self-absorption: we wanted to see Trump in terms of his absences, so that our way of seeing the world would go unchallenged. So we failed to see his fascist presence. And, because we ignored the fascism, we were unable to make the easy predictions of what he would do next. Or, worse, we learned to thrill at our own mistakes, because he always did something more outrageous than we expected.

It was predictable that Trump would deny the results of the 2020 election. It was predictable that his Big Lie would change American politics. It is predictable, today, that he will give free rein to the oligarchs who, he knows, will continue to generate the social and digital bases of a politics of us and them. It is predictable that, in returning to power, he will seek to change the system so that he can remain in power until death. It is predictable that he will use deportations to divide us, to accustom us to violence, and to make accomplices of us. It is predictable that he will create a cult out of the martyrs of January 6th. It is predictable that he will coöperate with similarly minded rulers abroad.

When the historian Robert Paxton was asked about Trump and fascism a few weeks ago, he made an important point. Of course, Trump is a fascist, Paxton concluded. It was fine to compare him to Mussolini and Hitler, but there was a larger point. It took some luck for those two to come to power. “The Trump phenomenon looks like it has a much more solid social base,” Paxton said, “which neither Hitler nor Mussolini would have had.”

Fascism is a phenomenon, not a person. Just as Trump was always a presence, so is the movement he has created. It is not just a matter of the actual fascists in his movement, who are scarcely hiding, nor of his own friendly references to Hitler or his use of Hitlerian language (“vermin,” “enemy within���). He bears responsibility for what comes next, as do his allies and supporters.

Yet some, and probably more, of the blame rests with our actions and analysis. Again and again, our major institutions, from the media to the judiciary, have amplified Trump’s presence; again and again, we have failed to name the consequences. Fascism can be defeated, but not when we are on its side. ♦

Published in the print edition of the November 18, 2024, issue, with the headline “American Fascist.”

[crossdreamers]

Trump presents plan for using K-12 schools for racist and transphobic propaganda

President Donald Trump signed a toxic executive order Wednesday, barring federally funded schools from recognizing transgender students’ names and pronouns that align with their gender identity, Advocate reports.

By Jack Molay

The measure specifically targets social transitioning, which includes using chosen names, dressing in accordance with gender identity, and adopting preferred pronouns.

The order also mandates that schools notify parents if a student requests to use a different name or pronoun, a policy critics warn could forcibly out transgender youth, possibly leading to invalidation and violence at home.

The sweeping directive also prohibits transgender students from using bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender and prevents them from participating on sports teams consistent with their identity.

This is a fascist text

What is missing from much on the reporting on this case (including Advocate's) is the fascist nature of the text. The Trump administration is no longer hiding that the goal is to create an education system that instills "a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation and the values for which we stand."

“Patriotic education”  means "an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding and foundational principles."

We doubt that the extermination of Native Americans, the practice of slavery and the persecution of LGBTQ people can be seen as "ennobling".

The goal is clearly meant to stop any teaching that make students question the racist past of the US and the current terror against transgender kids. The administration is turning the American education system into a propaganda machine for a cishet white supremacy. Real education is to be replaced with nationalistic propaganda.

The language used in the order is extremely toxic, using slurs and defamation to stigmatize those that support an open, just and democratic society. Any disagreement is seen as "indoctrination", "anti-American, "subversive", "harmful" and "false".

All of these words could rightfully be used to describe the Trump-administration's policy, but that is what fascists do: They project their own crimes upon those who go up against them.

Do not discuss real racism

The message given is that any substantial discussion of racism is bad.

The order will stop federal funding of any K-12 school that teaches what they call “discriminatory equity ideology”, which means "an ideology that treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups, rather than as individuals, and minimizes agency, merit, and capability in favor of immoral generalizations."

Concepts like “White Privilege” or “unconscious bias” (which are real, observable, social phenomena) are to be banned in schools receiving federal funding.

Any policy aimed at helping people of color in a white society is seen as some kind of reverse racism targeting white Americans.

A war against transgender people

There is broad agreement among researchers and medical experts (and their organizations) that gender incongruence and gender dysphoria are real phenomena, that they do not represent mental illnesses and that trans kids benefit greatly from the help the health system can provide them.

In spite of this the document is filled with insulting lies about trans people.

Gender affirming health care is presented as "surgical and chemical mutilation" . Trans women are presented as men.

This fits the rhetoric found in the previous Executive Order on "Protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation," which states that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) lacks "scientific integrity". (Who cares about real science, right?) Kids are apparently undergoing "female genital mutilation". They are not. The use of puberty blockers does not include surgery.

So this is all about creating a false narrative that makes the social exclusion of all transgender people possible. They will definitely come for adult trans people next.

Protests

Advocacy groups swiftly denounced the order, arguing it effectively erases the existence of transgender people in schools and puts LGBTQ+ youth at greater risk of harm.

Nicholas Hite, an attorney with LGBTQ+ rights group Lambda Legal, condemned the move as “patently unconstitutional nonsense” designed to marginalize transgender students. He warned the order endangers youth by exposing them to increased bullying and discrimination.

The Human Rights Campaign also criticized the order, with its president, Kelley Robinson, saying that “All students deserve to feel safe and welcome in school. But this new administration is making it clear they want to dictate to children, their parents, and educators what they can read, what they can learn, what they can say, and who they can be.”

Trump may lack the authority to do what he’s promising, Jonathan Zimmerman, a University of Pennsylvania professor tells the Washington Post. He argues that the Every Student Succeeds Act, passed in 2015, forbids the federal government from mandating or incentivizing states to adopt or use any particular set of academic standards.

The order directs the education secretary to provide a plan to end “indoctrination” in schools within 90 days. Lambda Legal and others are considering legal action to challenge the directive.

But the legal approach must not be the only one. Pro-democracy activists and politicians have to stop beating around the bush and start telling the public that what we see here is fascism, plain and simple.

The photo is of an American school with kids saluting the American flag using the so-called Bellamy salute. For some bizarre reason many Americans did not find the similarity to the Nazi salute disturbing, not even during the Second World War.

[uboat53]

Forget who won or lost last night's debate, let's face it, vice-presidential debates rarely do much to alter a presidential race and it's just an excuse for pundits to milk more paycheck. No, I want to talk about something a bit more important, did anyone else notice that J.D. Vance got very offended when the moderator dared to state factual information relevant to something he said?

This isn't a one-off either, Trump and most of his supporters have been outraged at fact-checkers generally ever since he started campaigning back in 2015. They've been working tirelessly ever since to try to define fact-checking out of the job of journalism.

In doing so, they use excuses like "well, if the other side disagrees then they can fact-check", but I want to make sure that every single person is clear as to why that's a terrible idea, because it is. Let's talk about the Gish Gallop.

Dwayne Gish was a creationist in the 1980s and, as was the style at the time, he would travel the country participating in formal debates with proponents of evolution. Over time, he developed the method that eventually was named after him, the Gish Gallop. The idea behind Gish Gallop is very simple, you make a bunch of statements in rapid succession. Each statement takes only a second or two to say, but would take minutes or longer to disprove. In a debate where only two sides are allowed to speak, this forces the other side to either let your statements go unchallenged or to spend all of their time disputing them, failing to make any points or their own and probably also failing to disprove all of them in the time allotted.

In other words, a debate where there is no requirement to make factual statements or back up anything you say with factual evidence is a debate that favors the liar.

Now, I reviewed a few fact-checks of the vice-presidential debate and one thing becomes immediately clear, J.D. Vance lied a lot more than Tim Walz did. Politifact checked Walz at 6 true statements to 2 false while Vance was at 6 false to 1 true, the AP had Vance at 5 false statements to Walz's 2, and Factcheck.org had Vance at 10 to Walz's 2 false staments.

Should Walz have been forced to use all of his debate time rebutting Vance's lies? More importantly, even if he did, was there any reliable way for the audience to tell, without outside information, which of them was telling the truth? Without a moderator whose job it is to point out factual information when one side or the other lies in their argument, there's no way for the side that is being truthful to win.

Now, if you're a Trumpist, that's obviously the goal, Trump lies a lot and everyone who follows him does too; setting the rules up for liars to win is obviously good for them. For the rest of us, though, anyone who isn't mindlessly dedicated to the cult of Trump, why would we want a system that rewards lying and penalizes the truth? I hope you can see that we wouldn't.

More importantly, think about what it means that one side is relentlessly pushing for rules of debate that massively advantage liars. The media itself also isn't blameless here, the Gish Gallop has been well known since the 1980s and the fact that the news media after nearly a full decade of Trump still hasn't taken the most basic lessons of how to deal with it is absurd and it's a huge failing of the so-called "bulwark of democracy".

Ultimately, though, you, as a citizen of a democracy, have the ability to make up your own mind. Whatever else you think, whatever policies you may prefer or whatever your political preferences may be, I want you to ask yourself one question:

Do you want people who incentivize lying to govern this country?

[dicapiito]

Since Black People share zero blame about what happened in the election and why Trump won again; let’s do a master post on who’s to blame as to why Trump won again:

1. White people. They are never to be trusted to actually pay attention to shit so they will believe anything anyone tells them to. If someone is promising to get rid of anyone who’s not white; white people will vote for that candidate. White men vote for violence and white women vote in hopes to be like white men. I mean, Roe V Wade SHOULDVE been important …until I remember those stories from nurses at Planned Parenthood mentioning how obnoxious white women are about the service. White people who are actual allies are very rare and they know if they admitted to being hateful; they’d be all alone watching Fox News.

2. The mainstream media. MSNBC, CNN, Bill Maher, John Oliver, Jon Stewart ( the biggest douchefuck), Chris Hayes, Anderson Cooper, Joy Reid, among others (who I can’t name because I refuse to hate-watch their media). They spent all their fucking time bashing Biden and the Democrats. They let the lunatic leftists have a platform and they treated Trump like he’s no threat until it was way too late. They figured it’s better for their audiences to not take what Trump did in 2016-2020 seriously and just be mean towards Biden, Harris and the Democrats who actually work towards better.

Any one of these jokers could’ve taken an actual stand and report actual news about Biden but once Covid got calmer thanks to Biden and the White House became boring again because the Biden Administration was busy ACTUALLY WORKING; it just wasn’t enough for them. Once they knew leftists also found another cause they could hijack for themselves to “ stick it to the Dems” they also let these fuckers on their show to help spread more lies about the Democrats. But nope! They latched onto the “ Free Palestine” movement and sold that shit, knowing full fuckin well that it’s not America’s problem about the conflict and Biden and Harris were making sure to get a two state solution.

Their buyers remorse media is not cute and they are only doing this because they know they are a major reason why Trump won again. They’re also scared of retaliation so they’re going to act like they “ regretted it” and that Biden “ wasn’t so bad” while not ever really apologetic but their audiences will eat it up.

3. Nonblack PoC. Latino, Asian/ Pacific Islander community ( I’m not even shocked. I’m apart of this group and they love antiblackness), Arab Americans ( Rashida Tlaib is antiblack but because leftists are stupid; they couldn’t see something so obvious). The desperation to be accepted by white people and also the xenophobia in all these communities had them voting for Trump. They have the “ I’m one of the good ones” mentality and well they’re about to see that antiblackness and xenophobia has screwed themselves .

4. Social media websites letting misinformation spread, and I include tumblr since yet again this happened. I appreciate that X has a community note and people tried to fight it but it was just way too great. Too many bots were getting through. Facebook, tumblr, Twitter, TikTok, likely Instagram as well. And once the elections are over; it’s like they treat the election interference shit like it didn’t happen.

5. Leftists. As usual, since they’re bored and rich, they do this protesting “ the establishment” every four years because they don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes. They went right along with the Free Palestine bullshit because it has worked for them before. Susan Sarandon , remember her? She helped fuck over 2000 as well as 2016 and let the GOP into the White House. Since leftist includes being racist/antiblack and antisemitic; it’s a great way to get more stupid white people to not vote or “ protest vote” and help the GOP win. Now that they have; we won’t see the likes of Jill Stein or any third party candidates. They are only around to help fuck over the Democrats and yet this lesson seems to have to keep being repeated and holy fuck it’s fucking annoying.

6. Nancy Pelosi. I know I haven’t said much but she wanted Biden to step down. She wanted an open Democratic primary to get a new candidate and to go right past Kamala Harris. Her bullshit has been known for awhile, especially if you live in the Bay Area. People forgot because of Covid and because of the whack job who attacked her husband. But remember; she’s also Gavin Newsom’s aunt and well…do with that what you will. If Democrats have any chance at getting their base back; Pelosi needs to step aside and let Hakeem Jeffries be Speaker. Pelosi knew damn well if it was not Kamala Harris; Black People would not show up but she is a white woman first so of course she did what she did. And for her to act like Biden was too old when she’s in the same age group was even more moronic since he won against Trump the first fuckin time

7. antisemitism also played a huge part. Remember Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff is Jewish so if it wasn’t antiblackness; antisemitism was also at play here. Even though people won’t say it just like they won’t say their true reasons why they didn’t vote for Kamala Harris. Jewish People were the only allies along with the lgbt community who overwhelmingly voted for Kamala Harris. Every group has knuckleheads but the knuckleheads were extremely smaller than everyone else.

8. The Squad members. AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Jayapal, Cori Bush, Summer Lee and Jamaal Bowman. It’s time to get rid of these idiot DSA morons and the fact that Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman are out is awesome. They always wanted to fuck over the Democrats because they want to appear like they’re activists while they really just sell “ someday it’ll be better” while making $176K a year. They need the GOP in charge so they can coast in the House. Too bad leftists don’t get that.

So now that we all know who’s to blame; maybe now take some fuckin responsibility and hope to fucking heaven that Trump won’t have SCOTUS overturn shit but who are we kidding? With Elon Musk around; a lot of things will be rolled back but let’s see if people learn anything from it. Oh who am I kidding ?

Oh and thinking of moving to Canada? Lmao Justin Trudeau already went “ AHT AHT”. Best believe other countries are already following suit so y’all are going to be owning up to who you voted for lol.

But ya know, Biden was “ too old” and Harris was “ too joyful”

[feastingonchrist]

Progressive "Christianity" is nothing but Marxism, weaponizing empathy and love, while not even understanding what true love is (ONLY found through the Gospel),watering down the gospel and only preaching half of it, making God into your own image, denying biblical truth and authority along with God's authority, denying Jesus' identity while not being grounded in the one and only identity only found in Jesus Christ - but finding their identity in the world/sin, straight up blaspheming God in some circumstances, not taking sin seriously and even encouraging it (otherwise you're a bigoted, homophobic, transphobe, etc.) and only using scripture when it's convenient to furthering the political agenda which is constantly being updated because it's not rooted in truth; only lies, bullying and manipulation. They have traded THE ONE TRUE GOD for the god of politics, social justice and god of self. I could probably say more but this wasn't scripted and it has been on my mind for a little while today after seeing that straight up joke of a bishop "preaching" in that church while the Trump and Vance families were in attendance.

These are the wolves in sheep's clothing we have been warned about in scripture. It grieves me that these people have invaded and taken over the Church so rapidly and have caused many denominations to split. Look at what they have done to the United Methodist Church... it has split apart because of this. I'm in a Methodist church that used to be UMC until the church split int the GMC because people are fed up with the nonsense. They have also invaded the Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopal and Anglican churches, too. They take over our long standing, historical churches that are full of beauty, richness and tradition and make faithful Christ followers want to leave, while force feeding a bunch of political ideology into the ears of the attendants. They still find some sort of value in liturgy and tradition, though, but i do not think they are doing it in any sense of reverence toward God. It seems as though they are only doing it because it looks "nice" and "religious". I mean for goodness sakes, they take COMMUNION in these services... that is a serious offense to Christ. They have no business leading our churches or a new and vulnerable congregation of people who seem to be wanting to come to Christ who are led astray from Him right in the same buildings that we are to be learning about Him and gathering together to worship Him. This is why i say they weaponize empathy and love in the name of tolerance because they bully and manipulate people into bowing down to their god of politics and keep the law of social justice and political correctness and are putting so much confidence in themselves to change the world, which is nothing but idolatry and self glorification. If you go against their beliefs you are a heretical blasphemer who will be sentenced to being canceled and possibly even doxxed. That is not pleasing to God, only their flesh. They are their own gods and they think they can control people and have the authority to tell others what to do and punish them when they don't comply. So whatever they say, think, feel and do is perfectly okay in their eyes and that is why they are so offended when people are pro-life because it challenges their excess needs for control and pleasure. These people are like the blind leading the blind and their souls are headed towards destruction. It really just makes me sick and angry and i really do grieve for these people. They do not take any of this stuff seriously. We have a lot of praying to do for these people and for our Churches. This needs to stop.

So: at what point do we stop calling progressive "Christianity"; "Christianity" and their services "church"? Because at this point it really is just a social and political club. Go find your OWN buildings and leave ours alone. Notice how none of their behavior is bearing any good fruit or Christ-like behavior and attitudes? It's because it's NOT OF GOD. They may read from the Bible and praise His name in service, but it is all empty and meaningless. I really am so fed up over all of it. I pray we can take our churches back and get back to upholding and defending biblical truths and traditions. You cannot rewrite Christianity or change who God is or what the gospel is in the same way that politics keep evolving and expanding because God doesn't change and neither does the truth of His word. Stop calling progressive "Christianity" TRUE CHRISTIANITY because it's NOT AND NEVER WILL BE. Leftist ideology and Christianity will never mix so stop trying to make it happen.

[car-o-line]

can you do a tpn scenario with antisocial, terrifyingly smart, very quiet fem! reader of few words, when she reveals her secret plan that she created all by herself to Mom, Isabella is terrified of her when reader refers to her as her real name and is even more scared when she realizes that reader outplayed literally everyone and that she manipulated and orchestrated Sister Krone's shipment so that Isabella would think she won and when asked why she would do this, reader answers with a chilling smile and answers "Because I could. Thank you. This was so much fun!" and disappears as quickly as she appeared

A.N: y/n needs to relax🙄✋ I wasn’t sure if this was a supposed to be a one shot or hcs so I just did hcs

WARNING: Spoilers for Tpn/and fem!reader.

Isabella with a quiet, and terrifyingly smart fem!reader(did one with the trio so part 2??)

She’s used to antisocial children, I mean Ray is literally he son-

At least you’re not emo.

You’re definitely apart of Emma’s group and are well known in the orphanage.

Isabella thought it was adorable.

Everyone thought you and Norman were head to head in intelligence but it was actually much more than that.

You were very smart. More than Isabella herself even.

So you probably figured out the secret before Emma and Norman, Ray noticed you did. Somehow.

He confronted you about it and.. you didn’t speak on it.

“You know the secret about this place, right?”

“😕”

“This is serious-”

So you both had secret meetings, a one sided meeting actually.

You make Ray seem like an extrovert tbh.

This went on for a bit until Emma and Norman found out.

Then when they found out Ray was the traitor he revealed both of you’re secret meetings(Emma shook ur shoulders while yelling at u, Norman stopped her but was displeased)

Then Sister Krone arrived, another enemy.

You didn’t like that, and you didn’t even find her likable. But that’s not a valid reason.

And as always, you had a plan.

And you always get your way.

Apparently Krone had information about the orphanage, and you used that towards your advantage.

But you had to speak with her, ew.

She figured you as her trump card. A way to become a mother and get Isabella fired.

But your goal was to just get rid of her, while keeping Isabella at bay.

Were you going to tell Norman, Ray, or Emma?

Pff! no.

You later gained Krone’s trust and she started to rely on you for certain information.

To which you lied to her, making normal things that were true seem false.

It went one for a few weeks before she started to lose it.

Krone started to act out of order and started going past the guidelines of being a sister.

Soon enough Isabella had enough of her behavior.

So she got rid of her, or “eliminated” her.

Isabella thought she won, that she got rid of a nuisance, that was until she realized the last words Sister told her.

“If you have anyone to blame it’d be y/n! AGH-”

She thought about it for a bit before calling you to her room.

“What did you say to Sister Krone?”

“Hmm..?”

“I asked you. What did you say to Sister Krone.”

She was a bit nervous to say to least.

A child planning a shipment for a Sister was a worry she had planned.

“Isabella..?”

“Huh?” “Do you..think I did something bad?”

Unfortunately that answers her question.

And calling her by her real name was just the cherry on top.

“Why…why would you do this?”

“Because I could.”

A small sweat went down her face.

Because you could? She could do many things. You’re just a child, no, your meat.

“Thank you. This was so much fun!”

Then a smile, something your friends would pay to see, appeared on your face.

Isabella just stared at you, her little girl. All grown up.

Then you never talk for 100 centuries ever again🤪

[hhkdtn]

I know a lot of people are feeling powerless right now, so I just want to remind everyone (especially anyone feeling suicidal) that your actions could have a bigger impact on your community than ever before.

If you are social media literate, a large part of our downfall is that the Democratic Party isn’t. Every time you see someone posting hateful nonsense it’s an opportunity to show calm, logical, FACT BASED rebuttals to their followers. Doing this once could keep dozens of people from believing lies that could have made them extremists.

If you don’t think you can do calm and logical, men are openly threatening rape because they think there are no repercussions. If we sent them the same kind of (anonymous) hate mail that feminists get I bet they’d shut up real fast.

Meanwhile check your facts and then (anonymously please, don’t use real names) post what Trumps doing, with sources, in majority conservative social sites. This will make it harder for them to later blame democrats for their own actions, and it could pull some people who’ve already fallen back out of the cult.

In real life, every person who learns how to fight/disarm an opponent is someone who makes physical attacks riskier. Everyone who protests or calls politicians makes their local representative scared to lose their seat if they follow Trump’s nonsense. Everyone who volunteers if services are cut saves the lives of the people who need those services.

So many people are going to need help, and that hurts, but it means you matter so much right now. There are so many places where what you do can change a life for the better.

We were all miserable the last time this clown was elected and it didn’t help anything. This time let’s be pissed as hell and ready to act.

[misfitwashere]

October 15, 2024 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

OCT 16

After Trump’s bizarre performance last night in Oaks, Pennsylvania, when he stopped taking questions and just swayed to his self-curated playlist for 39 minutes, his campaign this morning canceled a scheduled interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, according to co-host of the show Joe Kernen. The campaign did not, though, cancel a scheduled live interview today with Bloomberg News and the Economic Club of Chicago. That interview echoed last night’s train wreck. 

Trump showed up almost an hour late to the event with moderator John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News. When he arrived, things went downhill fast. Micklethwait asked real questions about Trump’s approach to the economy, but the former president answered with aimless rants and campaign slogans that Micklethwait corrected, repeatedly redirecting Trump back to his actual questions. Trump quickly grew angry and combative.

When Micklethwait corrected Trump’s misunderstanding of the way tariffs work, Trump replied in front of a room full of people who understand the economy: “It must be hard for you to, you know, spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you're totally wrong.” Referring to analysis that his plans would explode the national debt, including analysis by the Wall Street Journal—hardly a left-wing outlet, as Mickelthwait pointed out—Trump replied: “What does the Wall Street Journal know? They’ve been wrong about everything. So have you, by the way….. You’ve been wrong about everything…. You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff.”

The economy is supposed to be Trump’s strong suit.

The former president seemed unable to stay on any topic, jumping from one idea to another randomly, or to answer anything, instead making statements that play well at his rallies—referring to people with insulting names, for example—or by rehashing old grievances and threatening to end traditional U.S. freedoms. He made it clear he intends to "straighten out our press,” for example. “Because,” he said, “we have a corrupt press."

As Micklethwait tried to keep him on task, Trump asserted stories that were more and more outlandish. He claimed that children could do the work of U.S. autoworkers in South Carolina, for example, and that he would be a better chair of the Federal Reserve than Jerome Powell. 

Micklethwait did not fight with Trump, but he didn’t indulge him either. When Trump explained that “you don’t put old in” the federal judiciary because “they’re there for two years, or three years,” Micklethwait replied: “You’re a 78-year-old man running for president.” 

And therein lies the rub. 

Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who watches and clips Trump’s speeches, called the appearance “bonkers.” Journalist David Rothkopf of Deep State Radio wrote: “The past 24 hours seem to have been a dividing line in the Trump campaign...and in Trump. He went from being periodically adrift and sporadically demented to being 24/7 unfit and in need of permanent medical attention. He's one cloudless night away from baying at the moon.” 

Likely reflecting this shift, trading in shares of Trump media, the parent company of Trump’s Truth Social social media site, was stopped briefly today as the price plummeted in unusually heavy trading. Trump took to social media to hawk tokens for his new crypto project, although the nature of the project is still unclear and investing simply offers voting rights in the new platform. The website crashed repeatedly during the day. 

Trump’s issues make it likely that a second Trump presidency would really mean a J.D. Vance presidency, even if Trump nominally remains in office. 

Currently an Ohio senator, J.D. Vance is just 39, and if voters put Trump into the White House, Vance will be one of the most inexperienced vice presidents in our history. He has held an elected office for just 18 months, winning the office thanks to the backing of entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who first employed Vance, then invested in his venture capital firm, and then contributed an unprecedented $15 million to his Senate campaign. 

Vance and Thiel make common cause with others who are open about their determination to dismantle the federal government. Although different groups came to that mission from different places, they are sometimes collectively called a “New Right” (although at least one scholar has questioned just how new it really is). Some of the thinkers both Vance and Thiel follow, notably dystopian blogger Curtis Yarvin, argue that America’s democratic institutions have created a society that is, as James Pogue put it in a 2022 Vanity Fairarticle, “at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning.” Such a system must be pulled to pieces.

Thiel has expressed the belief that the modern government stifles innovation by enforcing social values like equality and anti-monopoly. Those limits have caused society to stagnate, a situation he warns could lead to an apocalypse. “We are in a deadly race between politics and technology,” Thiel wrote in 2009. To move society forward, he calls for freedom for technological leaders to plan a utopian future without government interference. 

It is at least partly the promise of dismantling the administrative state and its regulation of technology that has brought other technology elites, most notably Elon Musk, to support the Trump-Vance campaign. These technology entrepreneurs envision themselves, rather than a government, planning and then creating the future. New campaign records filed today show that in just over two months, from July to the beginning of September, Musk invested almost $75 million in his pro-Trump America PAC to get Trump and Vance elected.  

Like Thiel, Vance has spoken extensively about the need to destroy the U.S. government, but while Thiel emphasizes the potential of a technological future unencumbered by democratic baggage, Vance emphasizes what he sees as the decadence of today’s America and the need to address that decadence by purging the government of secular leaders. A 2019 convert to right-wing Catholicism, Vance said he was attracted to the religion in part because he wanted to see the Republican Party use the government to work for what he considers the common good by imposing laws that would enforce his version of morality. 

Their worldview requires a few strong leaders to impose their will on the majority, and both Thiel and Vance have rejected secular democracy. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009. 

In 2021, Vance called American universities “the enemy” and said on a podcast that people like him needed to “seize the institutions of the left, and turn them against the left.” In a different interview, he clarified: American “conservatives…have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said. 

Vance told an interviewer he would urge Trump to “[f]ire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” This plan is central to Project 2025, whose main author, Kevin Roberts, has a book covering those ideas coming out soon—it was supposed to come out this month but was postponed when Project 2025 became a lightning rod for the election—for which Vance wrote the foreword. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay [sic] ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon,” Vance wrote. 

Like Roberts, Vance wants to dismantle the secular state. He wants to replace that state with a Christian nationalism that enforces what he considers traditional values: an end to immigration—hence the lies about the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio—and an end to LGBTQ+ rights. He supports abortion bans and the establishment of a patriarchy in which women function as wives and mothers even if it means staying in abusive marriages. Vance insists this social structure will be more fulfilling for women than becoming “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.“

That desire to get rid of the current “ruling class” and replace it with people like him has prompted Vance to say that if he had been vice president on January 6, 2021, he would have done what former vice president Mike Pence would not: he would have refused to count the certified electoral ballots for President Joe Biden. 

“Let’s be clear,” former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) said. “This is illegal and unconstitutional. The American people had voted. The courts had ruled. The Electoral College had met and voted. The Governor in every state had certified the results and sent a legal slate of electors to the Congress to be counted. The Vice President has no constitutional authority to tell states to submit alternative slates of electors because his candidate lost. That is tyranny.”

Early voting began today in Georgia, where more than 328,000 voters smashed the previous record of 136,000 set in 2020, during the worst of the pandemic. One of those voters was former president Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 on October 1 and said over the summer he was trying to stay alive to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.

At a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, tonight, a slurring, low-energy Donald Trump told the audience: “If you don’t win, win, win, we’ve all had a good time, but it’s not gonna matter, right? Sadly. Because what we’ve done is amazing. Three nominations in a row…. If we don’t win it’s like, ah, it was all, it was all for not very much. We can’t, uh, we can’t let that happen.”

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[justinspoliticalcorner]

Harry Litman at Talking Feds:

It reflects the brutality of the constitutional attack that Trump has unleashed during his first two weeks in office that conduct resembling the actions that led to two impeachments four years ago has barely registered among the dizzying blitzkrieg of assaults. The episode that I have in mind took place last week, but originates from a (meritless) lawsuit that he filed against CBS as a private citizen last October. The outlandish $10 billion lawsuit alleged that CBS edited an interview with Kamala Harris in a biased fashion. The interview was part of the traditional campaign sit downs with both candidates. Trump declined to participate, but he wound up complaining bitterly about an answer Harris gave concerning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump’s beef was that the network aired one version of the answer on “Face the Nation” and a different (he alleged better) version that evening on “60 Minutes.”

In a screed dressed up as a legal complaint, Trump launched scattershot charges such as “CBS and other legal legacy media organizations have gone into overdrive to get Kamala elected… [n]otwithstanding her well documented deep unpopularity even with her own Party.” He asserted that CBS engaged in malicious distortion to “tip the scales” in favor of the Democratic ticket. Trump brought the case under Texas state law against deceptive business practice. Why Texas state law? Well for starters, there’s no viable lawsuit based on federal law. More importantly, the state law theory permitted Trump to bring the case in the Amarillo division of the federal court in the Northern District of Texas, because the constitution allows parties to bring state law cases in federal courts where the parties are from different states (aka diversity jurisdiction). What’s so special about Amarillo? It meant that he was virtually guaranteed to get the federal judge who sits there. That would be Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. The name will likely ring a bell. Known for his ardent devotion to conservative social causes, Kacsmaryk is the judge who suspended the FSA’s approval of mifepristone, among many other highly controversial rulings. Trump was engaging in naked forum shopping, exploiting a gaping design defect in the system that needs to be corrected. At the time Trump brought the lawsuit, CBS described it as “completely without merit” and pledged to defend itself vigorously. It said that the Harris interview was edited solely for time constraints on “60 Minutes”—routine editorial stuff—and they denied Trump’s charge that the tape had been doctored.

[...] As soon as he took office, Trump appointed Brendan Carr, a Republican ally whom he appointed to the Commission during his first term, as FCC Chair. In a way that is highly unusual for a regulatory appointee, Carr has been an outspoken advocate for Trump and conservative causes. He has accused Adam Schiff of overseeing a "secret and partisan surveillance machine." He has continuously leveled accusations against the media for supposed bias against Trump. In an interview with Lou Dobbs, he alleged that "[s]ince the 2016 election, the far left has hopped from hoax to hoax to hoax to explain how it lost to President Trump at the ballot box." Most notably, Carr authored the FCC section of Project 2025, which proposed lower legal shields to lawsuits and other policies to bolster conservative speech. Trump in turn has called Carr a “warrior for Free Speech.” Translated, that means a willing henchman in Trump’s shakedown efforts to force media into more favorable coverage and muddle over of his endless stream of lies. Immediately after assuming the Chair, Carr revived the investigations that the FCC had dismissed against CBS, ABC, and NBC (but not Fox). Then last Thursday he launched new investigations into PBS and NPR, both of which Project 2025 calls to defund. Those moves were already high-handed and likely unlawful: The Communications Act of 1934 affirms (and the First Amendment already provides) that the FCC cannot impose content-based restrictions on broadcasters. The FCC has no right to order what the Washington Post and LA Times have of late done voluntarily: gentler (and less honest) coverage of Trump.

On Wednesday, the FCC sent CBS a “Letter of Inquiry” seeking the full unedited transcript and camera feeds from the Harris interview. Like other networks, “60 Minutes” normally doesn’t release interview transcripts to avoid public second-guessing of its editing process. Moreover, the move was nonsensical and highly intrusive: it suggested that the FCC wants to pass judgment not only on what CBS broadcasted but what it didn’t broadcast and how it edited the material it collected for the story. There is no plausible, much less tenable, theory of FCC power that would countenance any scrutiny of that internal process. It was, in fact, a kneecap move. And the kneecap in question is the application of CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, for a merger with Skydance Media, the film studio run by the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. The merger is an $8 billion deal in its closing stages that will create a new company worth about $28 billion.

[...] In its essential structure, Trump’s tactics are no different from his attempted shakedowns of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as well as his effort to enlist the Department of Justice to help him steal the 2020 election. With Zelenskyy, Trump, in what he has never varied in describing as a “perfect conversation,” tried to hold aid hostage to the Ukrainian president’s agreement to falsely certify corruption by Joe and Hunter Biden. The first articles of impeachment alleged that Trump had abused his power and obstructed Congress for personal political benefit, as was essentially undeniable. (Importantly, Congress had already appropriated the aid that Trump was using to bribe Zelensky; his actions are echoed in his recent effort to freeze nearly all aid and grants, which critics contend violates the anti-impoundment principle of the constitution.) Lead House manager Adam Schiff presciently told the country in closing argument that if Trump were not removed, he would violate the Constitution again. Trump tried to pull the same swindle in the aftermath of his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden. Conspiring with a hand-picked mid-level DOJ official Jeff Clark, whom he proposed to make the Acting Attorney General, Trump tried to manipulate the Department of Justice into sending a letter to Georgia officials suggesting falsely that the Department had found fraud in the election results. As Trump said to the actual Acting Attorney General, Jeff Rosen, "just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.” But in a dramatic standoff in the Oval Office, Rosen and other Department officials threatened a mass resignation that forced Trump to back down. Trump and Carr’s shakedown of CBS is structurally identical to these two first term outrages. Trump is seeking to force CBS to pay off his lawsuit that he brought as a private citizen based on a claims that have no possible connection to his official responsibilities.

[...] In fact, Trump tried a similar caper in his first administration, trying to strong arm Time Warner, parent company of CNN, based on its proposed merger with AT&T. But since it was clear at the time (as it is now, despite the FCC’s will assertions otherwise) that the FCC merger review doesn’t take account of CNN’s editorial practices, AT&T and Time Warner were able to successfully push back on Trump’s attempts to intervene. This almost certainly is not the end of Trump’s war on the media, whom he has assailed with the same furor he reserves for DEI and illegal immigrants. Trump has called for ABC to lose its license. He has said NBC should be investigated for treason. He crowed in a campaign rally about forcing journalists to reveal their sources by throwing them in jail, saying “When this person realizes that he’s going to be the bride of another person shortly, he will say ‘I’d very much like to tell you exactly who that was.’” And, along with other recent moves like pardoning the January 6 rioters and withdrawing security detail from his political enemies, Trump’s demonization of the media threatens violence. Numerous studies have found increased threats of physical violence, as well as actual violence, against journalists, and anecdotal evidence confirms harassment is rampant at Trump rallies. After the election, a former Marine was arrested for attempting to strangle a Pacific Islander TV news reporter while taunting, “Are you even a US citizen? This is Trump’s America now.” The bottom line is that the kind of behavior every bit as corrupt as what led to the two impeachments, and that poses a grave threat to freedom of the press, now passes by as a page 3 story easily overlooked in the avalanche of outrages with immediate tangible impact, such as the OMB’s recent effort to halt nearly all federal assistance, or unelected mischief maker Elon Musk’s infiltration of the US Treasury’s payment system.

Tyrant 47 doing the same stuff he got impeached for twice in his first go. It’s time to impeach 47! #Impeach47