The hysterical, fearful diatribe below came from my Facebook feed. This is a friend. A very nice guy. I don’t have the energy or heart to fisk it; if you feel like making the effort, even if you just do part of it, go ahead. It won’t be hard.
I am very angry at the people, officials, celebrities and publications responsible for doing this to my friend. I’m sure he really believes everything he has written. He’s an innocent, caring, trusting soul who was a sitting duck for the diabolical propaganda the Axis marinated good people like him in for almost ten years for their own political agendas.
It can’t feel good believing you and your friends are at “mortal risk.” Deceiving people like my friend so they are terrified of the future is despicably cruel. Yes, my friend is an artist and artists are emotional and often politically unsophisticated and under-educated (and our civic education is terrible anyway.) It is not just artists though. I know lawyers who are expressing essentially the same fears.
Bad, cynical, ruthless and unethical people are responsible for all this crazy panic. Today, the execrable Karine Jean-Pierre was pressed on this point by a Fox News reporter: If Biden was telling the truth about how a Trump administration would create an existential danger to the republic, that if he was elected “rights would be stripped away” and “democracy would crumble,” why did the President say in his remarks today that everything is going to be okay?
Karine, who would have a hard time answering a question about what her favorite color is, gave a rambling non-answer, then complained that the question was unfair, and left the room in a huff. But we know the answer, don’t we? Biden and the Democrats always knew all of that Hitler fearmongering and the “last election ever” warnings were pure nonsense, but they thought it might win the election. If trusting souls like my friend were reduced to permanent anxiety, eh, well, so what? Collateral damage. The ends justifies the means. Screw ’em.
This is who today’s Democrats are. Remember.
How here’s my poor friend….
***
“I live in Washington, DC. That means Ground Zero for this inevitable MAGA Administration. States generally have the power to make and enforce laws, to create their own agencies, and to manage their affairs free from interference from the federal government. They also have voting representation in both Houses of Congress. This is not the case for DC.
LACK OF AUTONOMY
Trump, specifically, hates our mayor because she, lawfully, honored Americans rights to assemble peacefully across from “his” White House. Trump wanted to turn military guns on us. Thankfully he couldn’t because his cabinet took their oath to the constitution to heart.
Most importantly, in DC all legislation enacted, including the annual budget, must be submitted to Congress. Congress has 30 legislative days (days Congress is in session) to review the legislation, 60 days in the case of certain laws related to criminal proceedings. There are no exceptions, and any piece of legislation may be amended or overturned by Congress.
My THOUGHTS:
MAGA WILL take over governing the District Of Columbia. OK. But what does that mean?
The “Republican” Senate (actually MAGA and Project 25) calls for a “Christian Nation” for “Americans and Americans only” and a majority of Americas have voted for this. The new administration sees this as a mandate. The LGBT Community here in DC and the many Latino immigrants, whether here legally or undocumented, are most at risk. All Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender people here in DC are at mortal risk. And the lives and well-being of ALL Hispanics, legally here or not, are at risk.
This MAGA Administration will legally (as if that ever stopped them before) take control of DC and make “an example” of us.
I expect gay bars being shut down across DC and the business owners will either lose their businesses or stay open and cater to the “True Americans” and will pledge allegiance to MAGA, and cater to the new “government” employees.
I expect MAGA gangs storming our restaurants and dragging our line cooks and other employees away.
I expect gay-bashing and other hate crimes to increase exponentially with little to no recourse. I expect trauma.
Project 25 will allow the firing over over 60% of federal workers. Therefore, restaurants, bars, and independent businesses will close because our population will be severely depleted and will not be viable.
In short, in the first 100 days of this DC, The Land Of The Free will quickly become The Land Of White, Straight American.
I have never hoped to be wrong in all my life. I hope I am wrong now but I’m not going to wait to find out.
For those of you who have voted for this, I condemn you. Because you did not listen to nearly EVERYONE IN HIS LAST CABINET.
THEY TOLD YOU HOW DANGEROUS HE IS. THEY TOLD YOU IN NO UNCERTAIN TERMS HE IS A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY.
I only hope I am alive to say “I told you so.” But I doubt I will be if I don’t set my life into upheaval and try to find a safer place to live.
Ethics Alarms 
The Rust Belt says ‘howdy.’
Other than knowing that it’s complete nonsense, I don’t even know what that paragraph means.
I should probably do a post about the whole Project 25 charade…
Your friend seems to think tax-paying Americans are somehow morally obligated to support a bloated and ever-growing federal bureaucracy, even if they find they aren’t getting value for their money, indeed even if that bureaucracy is inimical to their interests and to democracy.
Why? Well apparently because it’s his meal ticket. Or the meal ticket of businesses in the area. I recall no such concern as Detroit shrank from 1.8M people to just 600,000 over the past 70 years.
I wish I thought he was as coherent as that. He’s an actor/singer. He’s toured in a one man Frank Sinatra show. He’s normally a happy, friendly, non political mensch. I don’t think he’s capable or inclined to construct an actual argument that goes beyond “AAAAAAAAAARGHHHHH!”
My current favorite way to summarize it is: “This is not a political argument. This is a cluster-B personality disorder masquerading as a political argument.”
This morning’s most amusing Trump-Deranged post from a previously intelligent and rational FBF: “Propaganda works. Authoritarianism take over.” If propaganda really worked as well as the news media thought it would, Harris would have been elected. Propaganda worked on the poor guy who posted that garbage, which is why he thinks the sky is falling.
*sighs wearily.
I really don’t know what to tell you. I suppose you could wait until the 100 days are up and point out that none of those things have happened. It won’t matter. The psyches of these people have been damaged by relentless propaganda for years.
My siblings and I do a Zoom call once a week. One of the first rules made was no politics. We don’t discuss it. We all disagree on it. No good comes of it.
Last night, we received a message from my Trump-deranged sister.
“First of all. I love you both. Secondly, I am hurt to my core right now over the election. Alot of grieving. A lot of pivots being taken in the lives of myself, my children, my students, my university. I’m entering an angry phase right now so I feel it is best to not be on zoom calls or social media for a few weeks. Until I can see my future and the future of my kids with any hope or clarity, I will not be on our call. Give me a few weeks please to get myself together.”
My sister is 53 years old. Her children are in their mid-to-late 20s. Her students are in college. Her university is a place intended for adults.
Get off social media? Sure. I wholeheartedly support that. Doomscrolling while others feed your fear with misinformation and paranoia doesn’t help. How healthy that will be while surrounded by academics on a liberal campus is questionable.
But avoiding the Zoom call? Where politics is verboten? I can’t help but take that personally. This didn’t happen in 2016.
The Democrats have a lot to answer for, but what they’ve done to people’s minds is unconscionable.
My sister has ghosted me since Tuesday. Since my wife died and we are both living alone, we routinely call each other several times a day to make sure we aren’t dead, talk about law, etc. She apparently holds me responsible for Trump winning, or something. I WISH I had that kind of power…I was almost certain that he would win, but I wasn’t publicizing that conclusion until at her house on Halloween, when a friend of hers dressed as Kamala Harris (pretty good likeness too, and MUCH smarter) asked me point blank whom I thought would win. I said : “Trump is going to win, maybe in a landslide .”(My Reagan-Carter comparison: did you know that RR got a smaller % of the popular vote in 1980 than Trump did on Tuesday?) You would have thought I had predicted the Apocalypse. Damn right the Axis has a lot to answer for…
I got the same treatment from a now former (very good, I thought) friend. He treated me as if I was personally and singularly responsible for Trump’s being president simply because I was not rendered apoplectic by his existence.
Based on what she said, I’m pretty sure she means that she’s so obsessed with politics that she knows she won’t be able to avoid bringing it up, which would only lead to hurt feelings because she doesn’t know how to handle the disagreement. I’m glad she’s at least showing the minimum standard of emotional maturity: removing oneself from a situation where one is likely to take out one’s stress on others.
I hope that’s the reason. I just fear that she doesn’t want to look at the rest of us because we’re reminders of the hope bubble that burst on her.
A shirttail relative posted this:
“I’ve heard it all….”he didn’t say that” “he isn’t doing that” “it’s really not that extreme”
It IS that extreme…the amount of people today who blatantly do not care or even know the polices they voted for is insane!! And don’t try the “I voted for him cuz I’m tired of paying high grocery bills” CRITICAL THINKING IS SO IMPORTANT! Be real, say why you actually voted for him. You genuinely don’t give a fuck about human decency. Don’t say you care about people then vote against them. Also you’re voting against your own best interest. “Medical is expensive” “daycare is expensive” I TRULY HOPE HE TEARS IT DOWN TO THE STUDS AND IT PERSONALLY AFFECTS THOSE OF YOU WHO VOTED FOR HIM.”
The meme that went with this tirade said that they are not comfortable being around people who is homophobic, racist and hates women.
I got invited to thanksgiving dinner where the relative that posted the above will be. Though we don’t discuss politics with family, I’m concerned the person (who just married someone who drove their car drunk into their ex-wives house is in prison for the next 2 years for it) will blather on and I won’t be able to play nice after a while. So, I may sit this one out.
Well, the good news is my sister is speaking with me again and only briefly touched on the election when we did speak for an hour today. I enjoyed Trump choosing a woman for his new Chief of Staff. Interesting how he’ll put his trust in a woman holding the most important position for any President, even though he hates her. Boy, he really is demented!
You’re right. That is a tragedy, and there is no way I would abuse this poor deluded soul by pointing out the obvious. I just hope that this is the result of naivete and not genuine mental illness, for your sake and that of your friend, because it reads like the latter.
How do we make the Left answer for this crime against humanity without taking stark revenge, or appearing to? That’s the conundrum I think America and the new administration will be facing.
But it’s not just up to them. We, as Americans, are culpable in allowing the Left to get away with this propagandizing nonsense by continuing to consume their content and pay their bills. I am not a big believer in boycotts, like you, but somehow the average sane American has to find a way to deliver the message to these ethics corrupters that this cannot continue without major consequences.
Electing Trump is probably not enough to get that done.
Society has transitioned from logical to emotional over the last 60 years. We used to value people who could reason, think independently, and remain logic based.
Today, we embrace feelings and emotions over logic. Society tells us what words we can say so we don’t hurt others. We label things as hate crimes, based on feelings. Our children are growing up expecting safe spaces to calm their feelings.
The outcome of this election was always going to be drama. It was just a question of how much drama. It’s still a question of how much drama. Trump isn’t in the White House yet. The opposition is working themselves up, using each other’s feelings to justify every bad thought they have, every bad deed they want to do, every terrible thing they say to anyone they suspect is a Trump supporter.
You cannot change their position with logic, no matter how calm and articulate your reasoning might be. These individuals seem to relish their feelings, they’re giddy with horror at the garbage humans surrounding them. They name call, wail and gnash teeth in an effort to demonstrate just how bad things are. You won’t be able to help your friend, because he’s enjoying his despair. Logic can’t penetrate that cloud of doom, society keeps feeding it by liking those types of screeds.
So much this.
I have been beating this drum for years. The Greeks, who gave us much of our current culture, prized logic and rationality over emotionalism.
Our culture has devolved radically. If we plan to continue this great experiment, we must find our way back to rationality. We don’t need to become Vulcans, but the pendulum has swung into literal emotional illness and a kind of weird, emo insanity.
Changing that will require excision of the woke mind virus from our schools, and that’s going to be really hard.
I recently had a debate with a rabid Harris supporter. The post was related to requiring boys to get vasectomies rather than denying women abortions. For a couple of minutes, I was certain my brain was completely broken.
I finally gathered enough of my wits to ask if she was really promoting sterilizing children so adult women and men could avoid personal responsibility for reproduction. The response was swift and typical – I was no woman if I could say something like that, and I needed to take medication. Additionally, women do not use abortion as birth control. When I countered with only 12% of abortions are deemed medically necessary, so what did she imagine the rest were, she told me to turn off Fox news. How can you possibly hope to reason with someone like that?
We raised an entire generation of children on participation trophies and getting ahead by gender or skin color. We taught them what they FEEL is more important than what IS. When feelings are all that matter, there will never be a middle ground or compromise, because every individual is for themselves. How can you reason with a feeling?
I hope Trump does manage to change the structure of education. It’s the only hope for future generations.
The Fox News line has been used against me a lot, and one of my responses is that it Fox News is saying the same thing I’m saying, maybe they are reading my blog, because I sure don’t follow Fox News. It’s the “attack the messenger if you don’t like the message” tactic.
Incredible. My armchair psychologist’s diagnosis is that this woman you debated is mentally unwell, perhaps even clinically diagnosable.
In fact, I have seen evidence of this all over the place. LibsOfTikTok’s twitter feed is littered with such people, and not just hers. It is sobering (and sometimes funny until you realize these people are truly serious). The most frightening thing is that 90% of them are female.
I am not sure there is enough time left to us to see this damage undone. In my case, I’m almost sure of it.
“I expect FAKED gay-bashing and other hate crimes to increase exponentially with little to no recourse.
fixed
PWS
We’re not in C.J. Hopkins’ (IMO) highfreakin’larious The Year Of The Headless Liberal Chicken territory…..yet.
PWS
The NYT video embedded in this Twitchy thread speaks volumes:
https://twitchy.com/brettt/2024/11/07/opinion-columnists-shoot-a-video-to-warn-us-of-whats-coming-n2403456
WOW, the Trump Deranged really think all their Magic 8 Ball predictions are a matter of absolute fact and they’re allowing what appears to be clinical paranoia to eat them alive. These imbeciles are banking on their absurd predictions being fact; this is delusional thinking. In my opinion, people like this are psychologically consumed by their anti-Trump hate and will believe any negative anti-Trump propaganda as absolute fact, I think they truly need psychological help.
Speaking of over the edge of reality TDS, I just did a search on Fox News for “internment camps” and got these results…
Here is a question that begs to be asked:
What makes people that have completely swallowed progressive ideology so susceptible to blatantly obvious fear-mongering propaganda?
Indoctrinated?
Brainwashed?
Psychologically gullible?
Something else?
This really is a serious question.
My late Studies in Propaganda professor Joseph Farah, who would have surely drunk the Progressive Kool-Aid today were he still alive, told us that educated people were more likely to fall for propaganda simply because they thought they couldn’t. Lesser-educated people are more skeptical of the government and less willing to take what it says at face value.
A M Golden wrote, “…educated people were more likely to fall for propaganda simply because they thought they couldn’t.”
It’s been my experience that educated people, especially in the sciences, have literally been taught to be skeptical, require real proof, verify facts, etc, etc?
Personally, I think there’s something else going on, but I can’t nail it down. You’d think that since it is negatively affecting lots and lots of people, it wouldn’t be so hard to identify the root cause.
You’re right, Steve, there are multiple factors in play here. The issue is that people who are educated in one mindset may be missing another.
Analysis mindset evaluates ideas based on internal consistency and consistency with observed evidence. It figures out how systems work and identifies what is happening and why.
Semantics mindset is similar to analysis, but uses intuition to take some shortcuts. It simplifies interactions by applying generalities. With labels and rules, it quickly fits events into a preexisting paradigm and determines how to respond to them, as well as how to communicate this information to others. Semantics is more for communicating within established assumptions than for judging the validity of those assumptions, although it is obviously possible to make rules about which sets of rules in different situations.
Mindsets build models of different aspects of reality, which make predictions to help us navigate different situations. These models also act as filters to screen out irrelevant information so that our brains don’t get overloaded trying to make sense of everything. However, if a mindset’s model of reality starts filtering out information that might otherwise lead us to realize the model is flawed, then our model starts drifting farther and farther from reality and we start acting on inaccurate assumptions. The mindset is “depleted”–starving itself of the information that it needs to update its model.
Observation mindset addresses depletion by partially or completely suspending our models of reality, peeling back the filters so we can absorb moments and reflect on what is literally happening. (There is a balance to this practice, though, as being too quick to suspend our models leads to “saturation”–if we can’t filter out irrelevant information and rely on reasonable assumptions, we can’t act with confidence when it matters.)
The “educated” people A M Golden refers to are using depleted semantics, and maybe some depleted analysis. They have highly elaborate models of how things work, and they aren’t looking for the inconsistencies which would tell them they need to reevaluate their models.
The educated people you are referring to, Steve, are people who have learned to realize that they are missing something, that their model of reality isn’t accounting for what’s going on, and use observation mindset to enrich their analysis and/or semantics with new information. The rationalist community calls this “noticing one’s confusion.”
Does that make sense?
I think we’re dealing with the “Hive mindset”. It’s essentially cultural bullying. It’s how phrases like “the right side of history” and “you aren’t this if you this…” became so popular. Beat enough people into submission, and eventually the “hive mindset” prevails.
Good point; I was focused on describing people’s individual thought processes and overlooked the peer pressure aspect of the situation. An unhealthy culture will have no way to resolve disagreements through mutual learning and creativity, so it is more prone to groupthink. That’s the problem I’m currently helping people address with the Values Reconciliation Workshop.
Michelle K wrote, “I think we’re dealing with the ‘Hive mindset’.”
In my opinion, that directly implies cultish brainwashing.
I agree. Brainwashing is brainwashing. Whether it happens in a cult or in a widely accepted cultural practice, the end result is the same. It’s all a numbers game. In cultural brainwashing, the more people you infect, the more people you can infect. After enough people believe, then you can sit back and reap the results.
I don’t know how the culture can shift enough to correct itself now, but I firmly believe the desire for a shift was the driving factor in electing Trump.
Michelle K wrote, “I firmly believe the desire for a shift was the driving factor in electing Trump.”
I agree and I literally just now posted a blog about that very thing.
Extradimensional Cephalopod asked, “Does that make sense?”
Sure, but does it have to be that complicated? I was thinking more along the lines of something a bit more simple as a root cause.
Can’t we use K.I.S.S. and nail it down to something that others in this thread have alluded to. How about, we’ve got a multiple generations of psychological snowflakes that have dozens upon dozens of participation trophies in their psychological display cases because they’ve been intentionally taught (indoctrinated) that their emotions are far, far more important to their decision making process than common sense, critical thinking, and logic?
I honestly think that indoctrination doesn’t quite cover what we’ve seen, I think it goes much deeper than that.
Personally I think there is a wide swath of our population that are psychologically gullible because they’ve been indoctrinated to the level of cultish brainwashing and I mean that quite literally.
Steps Involved in Brainwashing
1. Assault on identity
2. Guilt
3. Self-betrayal
4. Breaking point
5. Leniency
6. Compulsion to confess
7. Channeling of guilt
8. Releasing of guilt
9. Progress and harmony
10. Final confession and rebirth.
That is a line by line description of what the ideological extremists in our society have been doing to ram their delusional ideology down the throats of We the People. Sure it might start with a core of simple indoctrination, as Cornelius_Gotchberg suggests, but I think it goes much, much further.
The Gotch would suggest it’s INDOCTRICATION
PWS
There’s an antidote for the hysteria…
Jack, I would recommend that you not discuss anything but the latest Spiderman comic with this person. He or she or they will never evaluate alternative points of view because the screed above suggest the person want to live as a perennial victim.
MAGA WILL take over governing the District Of Columbia. OK. But what does that mean?
Actually, there was discussion in Congress about this long before Trump won due the crime problems and other issues. The issue of home rule in DC has been on the table for quite a few years given the relative poor management of the city. It should be pointed out to your friend that the district was designed to be a federal enclave and not a sovereign political subdivision because it could blackmail Congress by withholding services to get its way. Congress gave the people who CHOSE to live in the enclave the ability to manage some of its affairs independently but with supervision. Congress can rescind that if it chooses to. If the people of DC want to be in a state for representation then we can redraw all the boundaries so that they live in MD. Virginia has already gotten back the territory it provided.
Trump, specifically, hates our mayor because she, lawfully, honored Americans rights to assemble peacefully across from “his” White House. Trump wanted to turn military guns on us.
I assume he means when Trump had to be taken to the safe room when federal officers were pelted with bottles of frozen water and aimed fireworks at police as the crowd tried to breach the fences. If I recall correctly a public restroom in Lafayette Park was burned as well as a fire started in the Church of the Presidents. Trump merely waved a Bible in the aftermath. There were no guns trained on the protesters. The only gun trained on anyone was by a Black Capitol Police officer Michael Byrd on a white woman named Ashely Babbitt who was shot to death by Byrd for trespassing on January 6. Byrd was heralded as a hero for killing the 35 year old air force veteran.
The “Republican” Senate (actually MAGA and Project 25) calls for a “Christian Nation” for “Americans and Americans only” and a majority of Americas have voted for this. The new administration sees this as a mandate. The LGBT Community here in DC and the many Latino immigrants, whether here legally or undocumented, are most at risk. All Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender people here in DC are at mortal risk. And the lives and well-being of ALL Hispanics, legally here or not, are at risk.
First, we were established under Judeo-Christian ideals but the founders understood that theocracies were to be avoided. A Christian nation does not mean that one must be a follower of Jesus it just means that we try to live up to the ideals Jesus and others professed. Christianity has many different ways of evaluating those ideals. Episcopal teaching is quite different than Catholicism but the fundamental ideals of the sanctity of life, charity, benevolence are common among them all. No Christian believes that one must be a Christian in order to be permitted to have human rights. Other religions do. Nonetheless, there is no MAGA ideology that only Christians should be in America. Quite the contrary we believe that all religions have a place in our society. We do however object to religious tenets that disrespect women and gays and promote violence towards those with differing beliefs.
Being an American means respecting inalienable human rights. It also means placing more value on individual choices to evaluate total human satisfaction or welfare than some arbitrary assignment of collective social good by a bureaucrat. So yes I want America for Americans because Americans value what it means to be an American. I don’t want the United states to be a balkanized group of competing cutures like the Shia and Sunni cultures or the Croation and Serbians. I don’t want America to have “No Go zones as are found in western Europe. We saw that effect in the CHOP district in Seattle. I don’t want someone coming from a distant land telling me that I cannot say what I think because it might hurt someone’s feelings, or defend myself, my family or even another from mortal danger using a weapon of my choice (Europe, New Zealand, Australia). Hell I don’t want someone from my own country telling me how to think or else I will suffer some consequence. I don’t want a culture that devalues women to such a degree that they forced the abortion of female fetuses to limit population growth (China). I don’t want a culture that would throw a gay person off a roof because of who they find sexually attractive (Extremist Muslim patriarchal theocracies). And no, I don’t want people who DO NOT want to be Americans immigrating into our nation for the purpose of undermining our values while consuming socially provided resources while our citizen have to do without. Please note there is a big difference between someone entering the nation illegally and a legal immigrant. Please stop conflating the two and instilling fear in the hearts of immigrants who are legally entitled to be here.
You want to protest our government that’s fine but do so under the American banner not a Palestinian or other nation’s flag. When you do that you are saying you are aligning with a foreign power thus you could be considered an adversary.
I expect gay bars being shut down across DC and the business owners will either lose their businesses or stay open and cater to the “True Americans” and will pledge allegiance to MAGA, and cater to the new “government” employees.
Businesses serve anyone in order to make a profit. Why would gay bars be shut down if profits were to be made. Pure hysteria. Restaurants routinely change to serve changing tastes and preferences. Those that do not go out of business. If the Gay community fails to support those enterprises that cater to them that is on them not another business that caters to different tastes and preferences. Out of curiosity, why do you need to have bars and restaurants that cater to only non-heterosexuals? why do they discriminate. High end establishments make no distinction among its customers except through their prices.
Significant federal employee turnover is routine following elections when one party supplants another. This has nothing to do with hate otherwise the Biden group was hateful of the Trump people when it came in 2021.
I expect MAGA gangs storming our restaurants and dragging our line cooks and other employees away.
Maybe in Gaza, Pakistan or Iran but not here.
This MAGA Administration will legally (as if that ever stopped them before) take control of DC and make “an example” of us.
When Trump’s policies were overturned by the courts he respected the court processes. Biden ignored the SCOTUS on several occasions when they ruled his actions were unconstitutional.
Project 25 will allow the firing over over 60% of federal workers. Therefore, restaurants, bars, and independent businesses will close because our population will be severely depleted and will not be viable.
Project 2025 cannot allow anything as it is not law nor was it ever presented as potential law by any candidate. Project 2025 is compendium of conservative writers put together by the Heritage Foundation that began long before Trump’s first term. It was offered to both Republicans and Democrats. Progressives have their own agenda 2025 which basically will blow up the national debt if implemented. This agenda is proposed by lawmakers and got 103 votes in the Progressive Congressional Caucus. Progressive Caucus Agenda For 2025 – DocumentCloud
In short, in the first 100 days of this DC, The Land Of The Free will quickly become The Land Of White, Straight American. This is a baseless allegation which suggests you are a heterophobe. No one cares to eliminate gays from society. This is not 1950. Stop trotting out these tropes to make yourself some type of victim. This argument is no different than when some called blacks shiftless and lazy.
A fantastic dissection, Chris. Thanks so much!!
One of my friends on facebook posted: Recommended reading if you’re wondering “how?” or “what do we do now?
Then posted a picture of two books:
“The Cult of Trump” by Steven Hassan
“Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present” by Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Another friend responded: So I’m in a cult? If you really wanted to know “how”, you’d actually ask the people who voted for him WHY they voted for him over Harris.
The first friend responded:
What a lie – of course the post was directed at her as part of the bloc of Trump voters. In other words, my Trump deranged friend wasn’t interested in a conversation but wanted to continue with the idea that Trump voters are either motivated by hate, have been manipulated or are just stupid. Her response of why she hates Trump built entirely on a bullet point list of the leftwing interpretation of events surrounding Trump as opposed to asking the other friend’s interpretation of these events is important here.
I have observed, for the last 8 years, a political party acting like the German ultrarightwing circa 1919, complete with their own Stab in the Back®™ conspiracy theory.
My longtime Usenet ally, Christopher Charles Morton, made this comparison after the 2016 election on the Cleveland Plain Dealer comments section.
Chris was proven right.
I have another analogy: the 1938 “War of the Worlds” panic. A bunch of people, not paying attention, accepted a ridiculous premise and went bananas, looking like fools in the process. Thinking Trump is Hitler is even more ridiculous than thinking the Martians have landed. But to be fair, the media has been claiming that for years. It only took Orson Welles one night to use the radio to convince a lot of weak-minded people that we were doomed.
I pasted that reply to various Threads posts whining about the election results.
I suspect the overwhelming majority of likes were from people who did not know whom Chris was referring to.
Here’s the fisking. If he’s actually supposed to read this, I’d want to make a few modifications for tone and add some reassurances. Ideally I’d actually want to talk with him.
There are several assumptions here.
Given that the alternative was Harris, I strongly suspect at least some of them realize that many people considered them the lesser of two evils, and that even among those who voted for Trump, most aren’t necessarily on board with 100% of the Republican platform. That’s not to mention the Republican public figures who have been emphasizing respect for their opponents and an opposition to the tyranny of the majority. The opinions of almost half the country still matter even if they didn’t vote for the winning candidate. You’d be hard-pressed to find a Republican who didn’t at least pay lip-service to that concept, and you can hold them to it if you get enough people paying attention.
Not only is that unconstitutional, but I’m fairly certain that a supermajority of Americans will oppose on principle any attempts to have the government enforce Christianity. There are plenty of Christians that respect the separation of church and state.
From whom? Who do we think is going to go around and kill innocent people, and why would everyone else let them do so if they weren’t already?
How many people do you think are in the DC area who saw that Trump was elected and said to themselves, “Oh, boy! Now I can commit hate crimes with impunity!”? And if you trusted local law enforcement to keep you safe before, why would that change with a new president?
That actually sounds like a good prediction. Good foresight. Moving out might be a sensible idea, depending on what your job is. There may be a way to calculate the minimum level that the economy would settle at. There will still be plenty of legislators and their staff who live there for at least part of the year, and they’ll need infrastructure. There will also still be lobbyists, unfortunately. We can also look at which agencies can establish they deliver a decent return on investment to figure out how many people will still be employed by them.
You thought Harris would win because Donald Trump was too odious. Instead, Donald Trump won. You assume that’s because half the country is also odious, but consider the possibility that it’s because Trump isn’t quite as odious as you’ve been told.
If he’s actually supposed to read this…
Oh GOD no.
Lots of memes, tiktok vids, etc. popping up. Many from the left deranged hysterical rants, head-shaving vids, and maybe even evidence of child abuse if some of what they’re relaying about their children’s reactions is true. Many from the right are humorous.
As far as mass-deportation, this one is my favorite so far (don’t be put off by your initial impression; give it a minute).
https://www.youtube.com/embed/7hCpTudJNvA?si=cls2RS9UjBcDI1U9
I can’t tell if the white narrator is playing along in character, or just doesn’t get the joke.
https://x.com/shylockh/status/1855872507271639539?s=46
That shape again.