#trump will pull out of nato | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

jangillman · 22 days

Text

President Trump's Achievements

Hey!! What has Donald Trump done while he was in office (as at July, 2017)!!!

1.Supreme Court Judge Gorsuch

2.59 missiles dropped in Syria.

3.He took us out of TPP

4.Illegal immigration is now down 70%( the lowest in 17 years)

5.Consumer confidence highest since 2000 at index125.6

6.Mortgage applications for new homes rise to a 7 year high.

7.Arranged 20% Tariff on soft lumber from Canada.

8.Bids for border wall are well underway.

9.Pulled out of the lopsided Paris accord.

10.Keystone pipeline approved.

11.NATO allies boost spending by 4.3%

12.Allowing VA to terminate bad employees.

13.Allowing private healthcare choices for veterans.

14.More than 600,000. Jobs created

15. Median household income at a 7 year high.

16. The Stock Market is at the highest ever In its history.

17. China agreed to American import of beef.

18. $89 Billion saved in regulation rollbacks.

19. Rollback of A Regulation to boost coal mining.

20. MOAB for ISIS

21. Travel ban reinstated.

22. Executive order for religious freedom.

23. Jump started NASA

24. $600 million cut from UN peacekeeping budget.

25. Targeting of MS13 gangs

26. Deporting violent illegal immigrants.

27. Signed 41 bills to date

28. Created a commission on child trafficking

29. Created a commission on voter fraud

30. Created a commission for opioids addiction.

31. Giving power to states to drug test unemployment recipients.

32. Unemployment lowest since may 2007.

33. Historic Black College University initiative

34. Women In Entrepreneurship Act

35. Created an office or illegal immigrant crime victims.

36. Reversed Dodd-Frank

37. Repealed DOT ruling which would have taken power away from local governments for infrastructure planning

38. Order to stop crime against law enforcement.

39. End of DAPA program.

40. Stopped companies from moving out of America.

41. Promoted businesses to create American Jobs.

42. Encouraged country to once again

43. 'Buy American and hire American

44. Cutting regulations 2 for every one created.

45. Review of all trade agreements to make sure they are America first.

46. Apprentice program

47. Highest manufacturing surge in 3 years.

48 $78 Billion promised reinvestment from major businesses like Exxon, Bayer, Apple, SoftBank, Toyota...

49. Denied FBI a new building.

50. $700 million saved with F-35 renegotiation.

51. Saves $22 million by reducing white house payroll.

52. Dept of treasury reports a $182 billion surplus for April 2017

(2nd largest in history.

53. Negotiated the release of 6 US humanitarian workers held captive in egypt.

54. Gas prices lowest in more than 12 years.

55. Signed An Executive Order To Promote Energy Independence And Economic Growth

56. Has already accomplished more to stop government interference into people's lives than any President in the history of America.

57. President Trump has worked with Congress to pass more legislation in his first 100 days than any President since Truman.

58. Has given head executive of each branches 6 month time Frame dated march 15 2017, to trim the fat. restructure and improve efficacy of their branch.

Observe the pushback the leaks the lies as entrenched POWER refuses to go silently into that good night!

I hope each and every one of you copy and paste this everywhere, every time you hear some dim wit say Trump hadn't done a thing!

THANK YOU!!!

Oh, yeah, and there's this..........

#politics #us politics #democrats are corrupt #democrats will destroy america #wake up democrats!!#societal collapse #the communist manifesto #commandant kamala #kamala harris #the great awakening #truth justice and the american way #president trump #i'm more maga than ever!#maga 2024

26 notes · View notes

deadpresidents · 1 month

Note

Random question, but something I've wondered for the last few years: concerning Afghanistan, should the US have considered leaving a few thousand troops in Kabul indefinitely while withdrawing troops from the rest of the country?

It seems like the capital city would've been relatively easy for American troops to defend, and their presence there could have blocked the Taliban from fully returning to power. A singular focus on protecting Kabul might've been one way to prevent the worst possible outcome.

When President Trump left office and President Biden was inaugurated in January 2021, there were only 2,500 American troops left in Afghanistan. The Trump Administration had made a deal with the Taliban to withdraw all American troops by May 2021, and Biden pushed that back by a few months, but if the U.S. wanted to defend Kabul we almost certainly would have had to commit to another surge of American troops and that simply wasn't going to happen. It would have required a bigger fight against the Taliban because we would have been pulling out of the deal that the Trump Administration negotiated and the Taliban was already in the process of rapidly regaining control of the country by that time.

Even when he was Vice President, Joe Biden strongly believed that the United States needed to get out of Afghanistan because the only other option was to be there forever. Twenty years of training and equipping Afghan troops still hadn't resulted in a national force that could stand on its own, so Biden had argued against troop surges since the earliest days of the Obama Administration. There was no way that Biden was going to surge the number of troops once he became President, and Trump was so determined to withdraw all the troops from Afghanistan before the end of his term that his Defense Department had to beg him to pump the brakes.

Just to defend Kabul would have required much more than those 2,500 American troops left in the country on the day Biden was inaugurated. And the Afghan government of Ashraf Ghani was an unreliable partner that was corrupt and often seemed oblivious to what was actually happening throughout the country. You used the word "indefinitely" and that's exactly what Biden (and Trump, to be fair) wanted to avoid. We had already been in Afghanistan for 20 years, and things weren't heading in the right direction.

I certainly don't agree that we should have been there indefinitely. I think we probably should have bolstered the American forces in Kabul for a short and specific amount of time in order to ensure that the withdrawal was less chaotic. But it was always going to be an ugly end. There was never going to be a victory in Afghanistan, and I supported the decision to withdraw American troops. I wish we would have done a far better job at protecting the Afghan people who worked for ISAF/NATO and ended up left behind to fend for themselves as the Taliban took over once again. It's a tragedy that those final days were such a mess, but one of our leaders was going to have to make the difficult decision to definitively end the neverending war that we were never going to win, and I think history will eventually see President Biden's decisive action in a different light, much like President Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon is understood differently today.

#Afghanistan #American withdrawal from Afghanistan #Fall of Kabul #Joe Biden #President Biden #Donald Trump #President Trump #Afghanistan War #War on Terror #Taliban #War

21 notes · View notes

justinspoliticalcorner · 2 months

Text

Mark Sumner at Daily Kos:

President Joe Biden is no longer a candidate for 2024. However, no one should be less than incredibly enthusiastic—and grateful—when it comes to his accomplishments during his term. Biden is simply the greatest progressive president of our lifetimes. Full stop. Biden pulled America from the death, despair, and economic hardships generated by Donald Trump's criminal mismanagement of the pandemic that was killing 20,000 Americans per week when he took office. He steered the nation around a recession that economists considered inevitable, generated a surge in manufacturing that is still just getting started, brought new business creation to record levels, broke records on creating jobs and reducing unemployment, and shored up the importance of unions as the heart of the middle class.

He restored faith in America around the world, healed the rift Trump created with our allies by strengthening and expanding NATO, and kept faith with Ukraine as it struggled against an illegal and unprovoked invasion by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. He put America back into the fight against the climate crisis, oversaw record levels of new renewable energy, took serious steps to address long-festering environmental issues, steered U.S. auto manufacturing toward the future, and did it all while reaching record levels of oil production and destroying OPEC’s hold over the United States. He demonstrated compassion and took action to protect society's most vulnerable members in the face of rising Republican hate. He ushered in an era of declining crime, declining gun sales, and rising opportunity.

[...] People are going to be driving on better roads, crossing safe bridges, and enjoying improved public facilities for years thanks to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The American Rescue Plan not only provided the vaccine that pulled the nation through the worst of the pandemic, but kept money in people’s pockets, kept families in their homes, and kept businesses in business at a time when other economies around the world were suffering. Technology jobs and factories that had been bleeding away from the United States for decades came racing back thanks to the CHIPS and Science Act, and that same bill is stimulating basic research whose benefit will be felt for decades. The Inflation Reduction Act not only helped address its namesake issue, but provided funds for electric vehicles, renewable energy, and the protection of both farmlands and wild spaces.

This is a far from exhaustive list. Biden accomplished more in the last three and a half years than any other president has done in two terms. He did it while never sinking into treating his political opponents as any less than his fellow Americans. He never surrendered his boundless faith in American institutions and our founding principles. And he did it while attending church each Sunday before visiting the graves of his first wife and two of his children, all lost to tragedy.

Joe Biden in his one term as President did a lot of good for America, as he helped get America out of the mess as a result of COVID and got several influential bills passed.

#Joe Biden #Biden Administration #2024 Presidential Election #2024 Elections #CHIPS Act #Inflation Reduction Act #American Rescue Plan #Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act #Coronavirus Vaccines #Coronavirus

20 notes · View notes

theaceofwords · 4 months

Text

Like. We do very much all understand that Russia is trying to interfere in all western elections, right? Russia, China, and Iran have ideological and territorial goals which they cannot realise in the existing global status quo.

Russia wants Ukraine (and really I think they want as much of Europe as they can get). They want to own it, stomp out everybody who fights back, and force them all to speak Russian. But they know also that the EU (and, I guess, NATO, the e bugs of the situation) will supply Ukraine with weapons as long as they keep fighting (which I also think is monstrous, frankly, but that's another thread).

China's government wants Taiwan. The US has been one of Taiwan's most vehement allies (which. you know. not always a good thing), but until recently it was taken as a simple fact that any move China made towards Taiwan would get stomped into the channel by the nearest US aircraft carrier.

Iran's leadership wants more regional control--they sponsor a variety of, let's say passionate nongovernmental activists, throughout the surrounding nations, and their current government is pretty strongly opposed to "modern" (Western) values like freedom of speech, human rights, etc. They're also pretty boxed-in by nations which are propped up by oil money, mostly US oil money.

These nations are coordinating. We know this for a fact; in the most obvious example, Russia is using Iranian drones and Chinese manufacturing to supply its ongoing violence against Ukraine. They all understand that their foreign policy objectives are perfectly compatible, and in fact more than compatible, are mutually reinforcing--because the cases of Ukraine and Taiwan are analogous, these industrial/agricultural centers which are not ostensibly part of regional alliances but which have been trying to join the modern world for decades.

But here's the thing. Now we have these hard-right political movements brewing throughout Europe and the Americas. Not by accident--hard-right groups are coordinating and sharing notes in south, central, and north America, as well as in the EU. And these hard-right political parties are not at all interested in the status quo of Western force projection--they take an isolationist, authoritarian view of foreign policy where the great powers do what they like and the small countries deal with it and are absorbed.

Russia, China, Iran, and the smaller, shittier nations that work with them (the governments of which are shut out of the modern world largely for being such shitbag authoritarian despots that even the US can't swallow working with them)--these nations all recognize that their best chance to achieve their goals is to help the hard right win in Europe. In America. Everywhere. Anywhere they can get someone into party who, like Trump, will refuse to honor treaties with Ukraine and Taiwan--who will go on record saying that he doesn't give a shit about Europe, that the US should pull out of NATO.

This is the state of the world. Do you understand that this is the state of the world? This is why Russia/China are pushing such massive disinformation on the internet, why there is so much pro-PRC and pro-Russian brigading on reddit and Twitter and Tumblr. It's not because they're nebulously evil Red Threats that we think are malevolent for no reason. They have extremely specific policy goals which they cannot achieve without a shift in the current world order. This means they have a strong interest in changing the world order as quickly and radically as possible.

These relationships are not the matter of speculation. These are not my personal conspiracy theories, they are facts. The A to B in this situation is extraordinarily clear.

The internet is not a neutral ground. There are hostile actors here who have decided that the internet is one of the best means by which to realise goals which are antithetical to free, open, and civilized society. You cannot take information here at face value. You must do your own research, confirm facts across multiple sources with different interests, draw and hold your own convictions and change your opinions when the evidence dictates it.

And above all else, do not be taken in by the idea that the world is awful and nothing can be done to save it. That nihilism is being pushed upon you. If you believe the world can do nothing, there is no point in defending Ukraine. If you believe the world is beyond saving, there's no reason to recognize Taiwan. If you believe both sides are awful, there is no point to pressing for Palestinian statehood.

Apathy does not serve a brighter tomorrow--because the world never remains good. It is made good every day by the effort of billions. The world we live in is the result of centuries of people giving their lives to push the needle further to peace. To international cooperation and understanding.

Get your head in the game. It's the only game going around here. You're playing whether you like it or not, so you might as well know who you're playing against.

#politics

19 notes · View notes

mariacallous · 9 months

Text

The Times has a rather odd piece today about Radek Sikorski, the new Polish foreign minister. Headlined “Why Poland’s new foreign minister reminds people of Boris Johnson,” it points out that Radek, like Johnson and indeed David Cameron, went to Oxford and joined the Bullingdon Club.

Well, yes, he did, and thank you for reminding us, but we should not hold that against him because there is one glaring and obvious difference between Boris Johnson and Radek Sikorski. Unlike so many Conservatives and Republicans, Sikorski did not succumb to populism. His return to power in Poland is an optimistic moment as it came as part of the regime change that drove the crank right law and justice party from power.

Sikorski fell out with Johnson over Brexit. He knew perfectly well that Johnson did not believe in leaving the EU because had Johnson had told him as much. But then 2016 rolled along and Johnson realised that Brexit was the cause that could propel him to power.

The story of their relationship is told by Sikorski’s wife Anne Applebaum in her memoir Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends, one of the best accounts of the rise of the new right in Europe, the UK and the US I have read.

When I gave it a glowing review in the Observer, a few readers complained. Why was I praising a conservative? I pointed out that her background meant that she understood the extent of the right’s betrayal of free markets and free societies better than any leftist. Give me a compromised insider over a purist outsider any day. The insiders know where the bodies are buried.

Here is what I wrote

Anne Applebaum can look at the wreck of democratic politics and understand it with a completeness few contemporary writers can match. When she asks who sent Britain into the unending Brexit crisis, or inflicted the Trump administration on America, or turned Poland and Hungary into one-party states, she does not need to search press cuttings. Her friends did it, she replies. Or, rather, her former friends. For if they are now embarrassed to have once known her, the feeling is reciprocated.

Applebaum’s latest book, Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends, opens with a scene a novelist could steal. On 31 December 1999, Applebaum and her husband, Radosław Sikorski, a minister in Poland’s then centre-right government, threw a party. It was a Millennium Eve housewarming for a manor house in the western Poland they had helped rebuild from ruins. The company of Poles, Brits, Americans and Russians could say that they had rebuilt a ruined world. Unlike the bulk of the left of the age, they had stood up against the Soviet empire and played a part in the fall of a cruel and suffocating tyranny. They had supported free markets, free elections, the rule of law and democracies sticking together in the EU and Nato, because these causes – surely – were the best ways for nations to help their people lead better lives as they faced Russian and Chinese power, Islamism and climate change.

They were young and happy. History’s winners. “At about three in the morning,” Applebaum recalls, “one of the wackier Polish guests pulled a pistol from her handbag and shot blanks into the air out of sheer exuberance.”

Applebaum was at the centre of the overlapping circles of guests. For the Americans, she was a child of the Republican establishment. Her father was a lawyer in Washington DC and she was educated at Yale and Oxford universities. Now her Republican friends are divided between a principled minority, who know that defeating Trump is the only way to save the American constitution, and the rest, who have, to use a word she repeats often, “collaborated” as surely as the east Europeans she studied as a historian collaborated with the invading Soviet forces after 1945.

Even when she was young, you could see the signs of the inquiring spirit that has made her a great historian. She went to work as a freelance journalist in eastern Europe while it was still under Soviet occupation and too drab and secretive a posting for most young reporters. She then made a standard career move and joined the Economist. But it was too dull for her liking and she moved to the Spectator in the early 1990s. The dilettante style of English conservatism charmed her. “These people don’t take themselves seriously and could never do serious harm,” she thought, as she watched Simon Heffer and his colleagues compete to see who could deliver the best Enoch Powell impersonation. She came to know the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton and Margaret Thatcher’s speechwriter John O’Sullivan, figures taken with unwarranted seriousness at the time. They had helped east European dissidents struggling against Soviet power in the 1980s and appeared to believe in democracy. Why would she doubt it? How could she foresee that Scruton and O’Sullivan would one day accept honours from Viktor Orbán, as he established a dictatorship in Hungary, whose rigged elections and state-controlled judiciary and media are now not so far away from the communists’ one-party state.

What was life in the English right like then, I asked in a call to her Polish lockdown in that restored manor house in the countryside between Warsaw and the German border. “It was fun,” she said.

It isn’t now.

Her husband knew Boris Johnson. They were both members of the Bullingdon Club at Oxford. She assumed that he was as much a liberal internationalist as Sikorski was. When the couple met Johnson for dinner in 2014, she noted his laziness and “all-consuming narcissism”, as well as the undoubted charisma that was to seduce and then ruin his country. In those days, Johnson appeared friendly. He was alarmed by the global challenge to democracy, he told them, and wanted to defend “the culture of freedom and openness and tolerance”. They asked about Europe. “No one serious wants to leave the EU,” he replied, which was true enough as Johnson was to prove when he came out for Brexit.

As for the Poles at the party, they knew Applebaum as a friend who had co-authored a Polish cookbook, and published histories of communism, which never forgot its victims.

Today she is a heretical figure across the right in Europe and America. Many of her guests would damage their careers if they admitted to their new masters they had once broken bread at her table.

Heretics make the best writers. They understand a movement better than outsiders, and can relate its faults because they have seen them close up. Religions can tolerate pagans. They are mere unbelievers who have never known the way, the truth and the light. The heretic has the advantages of the inside trader. She can use her knowledge to expose and betray the faithful. One question always hangs in the air, however: who is betraying whom? Although Applebaum has left the right, and stopped voting Conservative in Britain in 2015 and Republican in the US in 2008, she can make a convincing case that the right betrayed her.

In person, Applebaum combines intense concentration with an exuberant delight in human folly. You can be in the middle of a deadly serious conversation and suddenly she will break into a grin as the memory of a politician’s hypocrisy or an incomprehensible stupidity hits her. As the western crisis has deepened, the intensity has come to dominate her writing as she provides urgently needed insights.

You can read thousands of discussions of the “root causes” of what we insipidly call “populism”. The academic studies aren’t all wrong, although too many are suspiciously partial. The left says austerity and inequality caused Brexit and Trump, proving they had always been right to oppose austerity and inequality. The right blames woke politics and excessive immigration, and again you can hear the self-satisfaction in the explanation.

Applebaum offers an overdue corrective. She knows the personal behind the political. She understands that the nationalist counter-revolution did not just happen. Politicians hungry for office, plutocrats wanting the world to obey their commands, second-rate journalists sniffing a chance of recognition after years of obscurity, and Twitter mob-raisers and fake news fraudsters, who find a sadist’s pleasure in humiliating their opponents, propelled causes that would satisfy them.

Applebaum let out a snort that must have been heard for miles around her Polish home when I mentioned the journalist and author David Goodhart’s pro-Brexit formulation that we are living through an uprising by the “people from somewhere” against the “people from nowhere” – a modern variant on the old communist condemnations of “rootless cosmopolitans”, incidentally. It’s a war of one part of the elite against another part of the elite, she says. Brexit was an elite project. “The game was to get everyone to go along with it”. Were all the southern Tories who voted for it a part of the oppressed masses? “And who do you think funded the campaign?”

She is as wary of the commonplace view that supporters of Trump, say, are conformists, who have been brainwashed online or by Fox News. They may be now in some part, but brainwashing does not explain how populist movements begin. Their leaders weren’t from small towns full of abandoned shops and drug-ridden streets. They were metropolitans, with degrees from Oxford in the case of Johnson and Dominic Cummings. The men and women Applebaum knew were not loyal drones but filled with a dark restlessness. They may pose as the tribunes of the common people now but they were members of the intellectual and educated elite willing to launch a war on the rest of the intellectual and educated elite.

Populist activists are outsiders only in that they feel insufficiently rewarded. And their opponents should never underestimate what their self-pitying vanity can make them do.

One of Applebaum’s closest Polish friends, the godmother of one of her children, and a guest at the 1999 party, provided her with the most striking example. She moved from being a comfortable but obscure figure to become a celebrated Warsaw hostess and a confidante to Poland’s new rulers. She signalled her break and opened her prospects for advancement with a call to Applebaum within days of the Smolensk air crash of April 2010. She let her know she was adopting a conspiracy theory that would make future friendship impossible.

Outsiders need to take a deep breath before trying to understand it. Among the dead was Lech Kaczyński, the president of Poland, who controlled the rightwing populist party Law and Justice with his twin brother, Jarosław Kaczyński. The party has grown to dominate Polish politics, and the supposedly independent courts, media and civil service. The flight recorder showed that the pilot had come in too low in thick fog, and that was an end to it. Jarosław Kaczyński and his underlings insist that the Russians were behind the crash, or that political rivals in Warsaw, including Applebaum’s husband, allowed the president to fly in a faulty plane, or that it was an assassination. Repeating the lie was the price of admission to Law and Justice’s ruling circles and the public sector jobs they controlled. As Applebaum noted in the Atlantic magazine: “Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie – it’s to make people fear the liar.” Acknowledge the liar’s power, and your career takes off without the need to pass exams or to display an elementary level of competence.

Other friends from the party showed their fealty to the new order by promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories. The darker their fantasies became, the more airtime Polish state broadcasters gave them. “They had not suffered or been ‘left behind’ in any way,” Applebaum says. Yet they happily worked for propaganda sites that targeted her family. Because she is married to a political opponent of Law and Justice, and because she writes critical pieces in the international press, Applebaum, who had faced no racism in Poland until Law and Justice came to power, was turned by the regime’s creatures into the clandestine Jewish coordinator of “anti-Polish activity”.

I once believed you should never let politics destroy a friendship. But that maxim depends on politics not turning into a danger to you and those you love. Applebaum could not stay friends with women who would not protest as the state they supported went for her and husband.

The Anglo-Saxon world is not so different from Poland and Hungary. Britain has handled Covid-19 so disastrously because only servile nobodies, willing to pretend that a no-deal Brexit would not harm the country, could gain admittance to Boris Johnson’s cabinet. As Johnson politicises the public sector, showing “fear of the liar” looks like becoming the best way to secure a job in the higher ranks of the civil service as well. American Republicans have had to go along with every lie Trump has told since his birther slur on Barack Obama. As for breaking friendships, British Jews broke theirs when they watched friends in Labour cheer on Jeremy Corbyn and thought: “If they ever came for me and my family, you would stand by, wouldn’t you?”

Careerism is too glib an explanation for selling out, and Applebaum is too good a historian to offer it. Likewise, bigotry and racial prejudice were never enough on their own to move her friends away from liberal democracy. Among Applebaum’s acquaintances is one of Orbán’s greatest cheerleaders. She has a gay son, but that has not stopped her espousing the cause of a homophobic regime. Laura Ingraham, a Fox News presenter, became one of the earliest supporters of Trump, despite the fact that she has adopted three immigrant children.

Rather than grab at standard explanations, Applebaum understands that a society based on merit may sound fine if you want to live in a country run by talented people. But what if you are not yourself talented? Since the 1950s, criticisms of meritocracy have become so commonplace they have passed into cliche. Not one I have read or indeed written stops to consider how one-party states represent the anti-meritocratic society in its purest form. Among her friends who became the servants of authoritarian movements, Applebaum sees the consequences of the lust for status among resentful men and women, who believe the old world never gave them their due.

They were privileged by normal standards but nowhere near as privileged as they expected to be. Talking to Applebaum, I imagined a British government abolishing press freedom and the independence of the judiciary and the civil service. I didn’t doubt for a moment that there would be thousands of mediocre journalists, broadcasters, lawyers and administrators who would happily work for the new regime if it pandered to their vanity by giving them the jobs they could never have taken on merit. Hannah Arendt wrote of the communists and fascists that they replaced “first-rate talents” with “crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity” was the best guarantee of their loyalty. She might have been talking about contemporary Poland, Britain and America.

“Given the right conditions any society can turn against democracy,” Applebaum says, and explains why better than any modern writer I know. To the political consequences of offended vanity – Why am I not more important? Why does the BBC never call? – a sense of despair is vital. If you believe, like the American right, that godless enemies want to destroy your Christian country, and prove their malice by not giving you the rewards you deserve, or think, like Scruton and the Telegraph crowd of the 1990s, that English culture and history is being thrown in the bin, and you are being chucked away with it, or agree with the supporters of the new tyrants of eastern Europe that a liberal elite is plotting to extinguish your culture by importing Muslim immigrants, and proving its contempt for all that is decent by laughing at you, then any swine will do as long as the swine can stop it. You will pay any price and abandon any principle in the struggle against a demonic enemy.

Shouldn’t she have seen it coming, I ask her. Shouldn’t she have realised that the world she inhabited included authoritarians, who would turn on her and everything she believed in. Typically, instead of huffing, puffing, and trying to pretend she has never been in the wrong, she laughs and admits that she probably should have asked harder questions sooner of her former friends.

Readers should be glad she bided her time. Applebaum can bring a candle into the darkness of the populist right precisely because she stayed on the right for so long. She does not know whether it can be beaten. She’s a journalist not a soothsayer. But I know that if you want to fight it, her writing is an arsenal that stores the sharpest weapons to hand.

44 notes · View notes

republicansaredomesticterrorists · 10 months

Text

The Republikkkans have been covertly funding minor 3rd party candidates for decades. The RepubliKKKlans are a vocal “numerical MINORITY.” To be successful, which they are more often than the Dems, they must pull out all the stops and do everything possible to siphon votes away from the Dems. They suppress black votes, or any group or geographic region which tends to lean blue. They also fund the “my vote doesn’t matter” and “both parties are the same” propaganda that keeps people who would have other wise voted blue from voting at all. At the local level the often fund someone with a similar name to their Dem rival. They encourage Kanye in the hopes of diverting black votes and they are pushing RFK junior in the hopes of diverting uniformed Dems. RFK Jr is the black sheep of the family and shares No Democratic values with his strongly Democratic family but many people don’t know that.

Putin and the GOP oligarchs channeled money into Jill Stein in 2016 and again this year. The Green Party always siphons off votes from the Dems since they both support the same ideals. The “Bernie or Bust” movement was pushed heavily by oligarch political operatives to siphon off first time voters from Hilary. Many of those voters didn’t understand the primary process where you first vote the person who most represents you before rallying around the party in the general election. A low-level Republican operative even claims to have started the Bernie or Bust movement although this is debatable.

Ralph Nader has said that had he known he would cost Dem Al Gore the win in 2000 that he would not have run. That blunder doomed us to two terms of dumb ass George “Dubya” Bush/Darth Cheney, which in many ways was worse than Trump. Those two clowns (Cheney was literally the shadow president) gave us the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those wars turned the entire Muslim world against us and strained relations with our NATO allies, cost us trillions, led to tens of thousands of American soldiers being killed or maimed, and raised the deficit to unheard of levels. They also caused two energy crises,one before 9/11 and one after Katrina, that led to record high gas prices that were higher than pandemic levels in many parts of the country. They also allowed a major city, New Orleans, to be wiped off the map and forcibly relocated its residents its poor and minority communities across the country at gun point.

Republikkkans win because they always vote as a solid block in every single election and they do it as if their very lives depended on it. Now some might rebut this by bringing up the Libertarian Party. This lunatic fringe party is basically the same as the Republicans. Most of them in the general election will end up voting GOP but an insignificant number spread out nationwide.

The Dems need to stop trying to claim every single group out their and desperately need to help recreate their union base which Republicans, starting with Reagan, have been killing off. The Dems claim both the Jewish and Muslim people but both groups largely vote Republican. The Dems try to claim all immigrant groups but many don’t vote, aren’t citizens yet, or lean to the autocratic Republican Party because it reminds them of the strongmen of their home countries. The Hispanics are claimed by the Dems but fully one third of them are registered Republicans with the rest going either way. How many elections have the south Florida Cubans cost us with their unyielding support of Republicans wanting to endlessly punish the Castro brothers in Cuba?

The left needs to realize the Hispanics are not a solid block and need to launch a massive outreach program to those who could be swayed left. A disproportionate number of Hispanics are white or white passing and heavily favor the racist Republicans. The letting go of unions and the failure to recruit Hispanics are the two biggest ongoing mistakes of the Dems. But the Dems aren’t as organized or as well funded as the GOP which has unlimited dark money from neo-Nazi autocrats. The legions of dumb ass Evangelicals and racist alt-right groups also help in bringing the Dems down and that’s something else entirely that needs to be addressed. We can’t win playing the game of division. We need to win over voters in massive numbers and do it asap. Dem leadership needs to convince the rank and file that the GOP only supports the wealthy, the religious fringe, and the deplorable racists.

#voting #republican assholes

66 notes · View notes

twopoppies · 2 months

Note

Hi Gina, I hope you doing well. I would like to know your opinion;a person who is from US about the US election

- What does the majority of society think

- does Kamala have a chance to be president

- Did Trump say anything about leaving NATO in his campaigns

- Will the participation be high, or will people don't decide to vote

(Sorry for so many questions. You know, the media of other countries tell the news according to their interests, and I would like to know what the American people think.)

Hi, sweetheart. It seems that overall people here are extremely excited about Kamala and feel really energized by the opportunity to vote for her. The overall tone of conversation has really changed since Biden stepped down.

I live in a blue state and most people I know are democrats anyway, so I’m taking my cues from what I see in the media, but these enormous zoom meetings (literally hundreds of thousands of people raising millions in just the last week) and events like the golf cart rally in Florida (in the retirement community that until now was staunchly pro-Trump) have really given me hope.

I have seen other politicians say Trump plans to pull out of NATO, although I didn’t see him say it myself. But I honestly wouldn’t be surprised. He’s literally telling people at rallies that if he wins no one will have to vote ever again (in other words, he’ll just get rid of those pesky elections and install himself as dictator until death).

I think voter participation will be much higher than if Biden had decided to stay in the race. Polls right now are showing she’s ahead of Trump in battleground states. There are Republican leaders publicly endorsing her over Trump which I don’t think would be happening if they didn’t feel she had a chance to win.

Overall, I think people just felt Trump was an inevitability and had given up. But Kamala has given us a new lease on life. Obviously, Trump still has a lot of minions supporters, but there are is a lot more hope right now. Every vote is still going to count. And the wider the margin of victory, the better because we all know he’s not going to accept defeat. But there’s hope.

#us politics

14 notes · View notes

qqueenofhades · 1 year

Note

Hwy dod we even need to send more money to Ukraine tho like we’ve already supported them plenty! But let Europe pull their weight and we can go back to spending that money on American policies

Do you read like, any news outside Tumblr, any Ukrainian perspectives, any basic analyses of the conflict, any rationale from Democrats or Congress, or anything? Because, in brief:

Ukrainians are currently facing a full-scale genocide. It has been going on for over a year and Russian military leadership has every plan to continue until fruition. If they stop resisting, there will be no more Ukraine or Ukrainians. So all the "appeasers" or "realists" insisting that Ukraine should "give up land for peace" (which notably worked so well with Czechoslovakia and Hitler in 1938) are basically deciding that it's fine to let the genocide be carried out, if it's even minorly inconvenient for us. Putin and cronies have repeatedly stated that if they are successful in taking Ukraine, they will go further. This is the exact scenario that leads to the "escalation" and/or WWIII that various people keep wringing their hands over. It is far more just and safe for Ukraine to be supported now and to stop that before it gets even worse.

America is not actually giving over buckets of black cash, regardless of what various bad-faith takes claim. They are handing over weapons valued at various amounts of money, along with some financial and budgetary aid. A lot of these weapons are older and would cost more to decommission than they cost to give to a sovereign democracy fighting for its life against an imperialist autocratic neighbor. This is some tiny amount like 5% (if that) of America's bloated military budget. And again: it's actual weapons valued at a certain dollar amount. These cannot be spent on American domestic policies.

The idea that helping Ukraine is directly coming out of our own pockets or preventing us from spending as needed on our own needs is propaganda. It is not good to repeat it.

I wrote this post the other day about why Putin is trying so hard to break American/Western support for Ukraine, and why the hard-right MAGA has enabled him in it. Putin's Russia is the motivating nexus, coordination, and funding center for Russian/European/American far-right theocratic fascism. This whole "America Only" is the exact rationale that appeals to said far-right domestic fascists and gives Putin and other imperial expansionist kleptocrats the justification to just throw away post-WWII international order and declare that any larger and more powerful state can systematically eradicate any neighboring country, claim its territory, destroy its government, kill its people, and get away with it. Because why would they stop, if there aren't any consequences and they are rewarded for it?

Putin has repeatedly interfered in American elections to help Trump and the Republicans. That should tell you something about who he sees as most favorable to his interests and what he would do again if allowed to emerge victorious.

Europe IS actually pulling its weight! They just brought all 27 defense ministers to Kyiv, they have been working on Ukraine's accession talks, they have committed all types of weapons (including the long-range missiles that the US still won't clearly authorize), they've committed a new tranche of 5 billion euros in long-term assistance, etc. But the whole "we should pull out of NATO and leave Europe to fend for itself" was a key isolationist and xenophobic Trump idea. We can see what that led to.

American aid is vital to Ukraine's continued existence as a sovereign country, period, and it is in American interests to continue to provide it as agreed upon. Not least because such an egregious betrayal of a democratic ally would empower the fascists of the world, both Russian and American, and because as noted, if this conflict was not stopped and got bigger, it would then involve American troops. It is a moral, democratic, political, and ethical imperative. This is not a difficult call or a complicated situation, regardless of what the Online Leftist tankies and the MAGA-world nutcases (because horseshoe theory) want you to think.

Слава Україні.

The end.

#anonymous #ask #russia ukraine war

455 notes · View notes

mugiwara-lucy · 1 month

Text

So given Jill Stein wants to talk smack to Kamala Harris and a certain vocal minority wants to bash her and say Third Party candidates are the most moral (not saying they all aren’t!), I figured why don’t we just go over the main three Third Party Candidates that everyone talks about, shall we?

First off we have Jill Stein and her connections to Putin have long since been exposed:

And people love to say how she’s Anti-Genocide but she not only supports Russia genociding Ukraine but wants to pull America out of NATO (you know the reason we even have ALLIES in the first place?!):

Next up is Cornel West who not only owes half a MILLION in back taxes and child support:

And he ALSO wants to pull us out of NATO and supports Isreal too:

And lastly is RFK Jr who is not only a prolific Anti-Vaxxer, but also declined to take down a Confederate Soldier, played with a DEAD ANIMAL BODY AT 60 and was exposed to LITERALLY be a way to help Trump get back in the office:

But yeah they’re the most moral candidates, right? 🥴

In this election; Third Party votes along with Non-Votes ARE in of effect votes for Trumps. Indirect ones but still so PLEASE vote Blue for everyone you all know and love.

Thank You 🙏

16 notes · View notes

centrally-unplanned · 7 months

Text

There is a particular brand of Trump Apologism from the Wonk Standpoint that I particularly hate, that tries to Well Actually something by shifting the goalposts. MR is giving me one today it seems, about the NATO comments:

Long-time MR readers will know I am not fond of Trump, either as a president or otherwise. (And I am very fond of NATO.) But on this issue I think he is basically correct. Yes, I know all about backlash effects. But so many NATO members do not keep up serious defense capabilities. And for decades none of our jawboning has worked. Personally, I would not have proceeded or spoken as Trump did, and I do not address the collective action problems in my own sphere of work and life in a comparable manner (“if you’re not ready with enough publications for tenure, we’ll let Bukele take you!” or “Spinoza, if you don’t stop scratching the couch, I won’t protect you against the coyotes!”). So if you wish to take that as a condemnation of Trump, so be it. Nonetheless, I cannot help but feel there is some room for an “unreasonable” approach on this issue, whether or not I am the one to carry that ball.

This idea, that like "oh you know he may have phrased it weirdly but this is a real NATO problem ya know" is hopelessly disingenuous: how he phrased it is the problem! If he just talked about how NATO allies are free-riding on defense procurement, a thing everyone has been saying for 20 years, it wouldn't be news! The news is that he just casually mentions the idea that he would love to see our allies invaded! He is running for President! Its literally a diplomat job! He sucks at it to a hilarious degree! That is why this is a story!!

It actually is fine to, behind closed doors, go to NATO partners and say "okay, we are gonna set a deadline that if you don't reach force readiness the US is leaving NATO" or w/e. I don't think that is wise, NATO is still a net win for the US, you gotta appreciate that these things work dynamically - note how NATO partner Poland is stepping up to the plate right now because they have a strong reason to, and NATO makes that easier for everyone involved. But anyway, fine enough if you think the gambit can work.

But what you don't do is publicly cast ambiguity over your mutual security deterrents when you yourself haven't decided on them. Will Trump pull out of NATO? Who knows! He hasn't said he will. Will he back NATO allies in war? Idk he publicly says maaaaaaybe not. But if you are Russia, and you hear public comments like this, perhaps you might think huh, you know, I could roll the dice, invade Estonia! And then Trump doesn't back down because its Tuesday or w/e, and suddenly you are all at war. Because you intentionally cast doubt on if your alliance was real because you felt pissy one day!

I spend my life shitting on how basic IR theory is, because it is, but sometimes life makes you realize exactly how much more basic everyone else is. However, Tyler Cown, you are not basic. You are a very smart person. You know all this. Stop trying to be a uwu Straussian Hot Take clever little baby boy and score "both sides" points on the ledger in your status brain to appease your audience.

I don’t usually blog on “candidate topics” or “Trump topics” but

That "but" is a war crime against rhetoric, I would convict you at Nuremburg for that alone.

30 notes · View notes