The Democrats were been so certain it was they nominated an black asian woman. I like Harris but obviously rednecks aren’t ready for that.
It wasn’t the rednecks that decided not to have a primary and run a man so senile they made Trump look lucid.
Because half the fucking country is treating it like sports.
I thought I understood this as a Canadian until this current World Series. “My team good, your team bad.” Then I saw comments from the fanbases of the teams that the Blue Jays faced, and now I understand that people are absolutely deranged. Calling for violence for opposing players for daring to face their team? Yikes.
And this is literally just a game. It doesn’t actually have a bearing on people’s lives in the long term. (Except the actual teams, I guess.) No wonder American politics is the way it is. Unfortunately, parts of Canada are trying to emulate this here, too.
There’s something going on for sure. For many years, we were able to have sports without death threats.
I suspect it has something to do with the current attempts to manipulate people. We have news and politicians trying to pit us against each other and calling for violence against non-violent people. It’s the Jose took your lunch kind of thing, and the conditioning feels like it’s running rampant.
I worry about Canada; I don’t think your people are emulating it. I think they’re being influenced and are the next target.
I’m awfully tired of unprecedented times, but I fear we’re setting the new bar for precedent.
I’ll never understand how Biden just let that go. He should have made it impossible for Trump or any of the other criminals from the previous administration to participate in politics again.
A legacy of cordiality and decorum that allowed fascism back in.
If I were Biden, locking all those traitors up would have been priority number one. Had they done that, the world would be a much better place.
They all should have been on a plane to Gitmo before the sun set on inauguration day.
If not then, the very instant the supreme court ruled that anything the president does is legal as long as it’s an official act.
Limp dick energy dating back to Andrew Johnson?
Oh come on, he’s not THAT old. /s
I agree with you, though I don’t know what measures he could have taken, specifically, to ensure that.
This nation has a long history of precedent for dealing with traitors and criminals.
Issue being that Americans collectively no longer agree on what those words mean.
We don’t have to agree. He was in power, he can decide. Just like Trump is deciding what counts as “hate speech” now.
We do agree. It’s just like I said, I am not sure what mechanism he could use exactly to do this. Presidents don’t just declare people traitors and criminals and jail them. If they could, Trump would have the entire Democratic Party in the slammer. There might have been more Biden could do, I just don’t know exactly what. And you don’t seem to either.
The supreme court literally said that anything the president does is legal as long as it’s an offical act. He should have done whatever needed to be done. Regardless of the law. If people had problems with it we could have dealt with him after the fact and revised whatever laws needed to be revised. He’s old as shit anyway so had nothing to lose. Instead he sat on his hands and allowed Trump to regain power leaving us to deal with the consequences while he will be dead before long anyway.
He waited almost two years to take any action on this because he didn’t want to look like it was a political attack but trump was going to play that card either way. If he had told them to start working from day one this wouldn’t be happening. There was plenty he could have done but he was too wrapped up in the old system of traditions to understand that things have changed.
Because sadly, the attitudes and views of people making up Jan 6 are shared by a large proportion of the US population, even if they would not have participated given the means/opportunity.
Jan 6 is viewed by them with analogous sentiment to how the left views civil disobedience for civil rights movements, regardless of the substance/justice of the event.
If the pussy grabbing thing wasn’t, nothing ever will be.
Or the making fun of the disabled news reporter. Or the not renting to black people, or the using a charity as his personal piggy bank. I’m sure the list goes on and on
Or trying to have 5 young brown children executed for a crime they were later proven to have not committed.
Honestly the racism I (sadly) understand. But to see the support for him not only continue but increase after violently trying to overthrow the government was truly a shock. For a brief moment it looked like he lost the support of Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham among other “traditional” Republicans but within days it was back to business as usual.
The people we are talking about are seeking simple answers, because they are overwhelmed by the complexity of our times. A strong man telling them what to think, an autocrat telling them that elections are unnecessary ballast, a führer telling them who to hate. Someone who leads them by their emotions, not by their intellect. The less educated the people are, the better this works, because the educated and those who have been in contact with other cultures know better than to fall for the simple path that demonizes an outgroup - they know it’s not a solution. The US education system has been under attack for a long time, while the economy did their best to modify higher education to their needs, warping higher education from something which offers critical thinking skills to a conveyor belt feeding the industry.
I agree with all you said, but I also think that “complexity of our times” is whitewashing what I would describe as an “intentionally stressful situation forced upon working class people by the wealthy”.
I believe that humanity has the technology and resources to make our times feel quite simple!
For the average person life is overwhelmingly more complex than 200 years ago. Industrialization and Globalization have created a whole host of issues that simply didn’t exist before - stuff like climate change and awareness of global issues weren’t a thing before, and there is a lot more pressure due to the increased complexity of our societies.
An average villager didn’t have to care about things like ethical consumption or conflicts half a globe away, our family networks were a lot larger and individualism lead to a much less homogeneous society than before. Even the reach of the wealthy was a lot more limited and the messaging was a lot simpler - you had to care about the local nobility, and we weren’t bombarded with the huge amount of information that technology has brought to our doorsteps. Propaganda was a lot less pervasive before the creation of mass media.
Conflicts and issues were a lot more concrete and clear-cut than they are today, because the average person was a lot more rooted in a slowly changing environment. Especially technology has created the exact opposite of what you are postulating.
Climate change is actually a great example of what I was getting at, because it has a relatively simple and known solution, and humanity has possessed the technology to implement that solution it for essentially as long as we have known about climate change itself.
To put it in context of this conversation: climate change has only increased the “complexity of our times” for working class people, because the people with power and money chose this path. They could have been building windmills, and nuclear power plants and hydroelectric dams to power our electric cars, but there was less profit in that.
The mental stress of “ethical consumption” doesn’t exist in a world of ethical production.
Because he wins elections. Once he dies and no Trump Jr. can get the same number of votes, they will turn their backs on the Trumps and denounce them.
I am telling you. This all falls apart without the one guy. Just you watch.My conspiracy theory is that the Epstein stuff staying on the front pages of social media for long (despite tech CEOs all being strongly MAGA) was an attempt by the Peter Theil / Russel Vought faction to move on from Trump. Which if you think about it is even scarier if they feel they don’t need him any more.
the question is will the gop fall apart with him, most of the OLD guard republicans are gone, or neutered. i doubt putin will stop the propaganda for right wing on social media though.
Sadly, I don’t think it will soon even matter if the leader is unpopular.
vance is nothing more than wet noodle, he wont capture the maga, thiel thinks he can reign in maga through vance.
Only if there still will be elections when he dies…
mitch and lindsey lost control of trump, and jumped shipped after that. mitch was afraid of getting continually be the blame by the magas, so he had another patsy take his place, HE uses “his freezes” to avoid talking about anything.
You can excuse the racism?
Not my comment, but “understand” is not “excuse”.
I love how people in the fediverse have a finger ready to wag at all times. People like you cannot wait to go off half cocked and judge something incorrectly as long as it makes you feel morally superior.
It’s just a reference from Community, it’s not even a serious comment.
But it’s okay, it was ambiguous enough that people don’t pick up on that right away
Apologies. Yes, I didn’t get the reference.
Yes, exactly what I am referring to
Of course everybody with two functioning brain cells knew from the start that this fucker is spectacularly unqualified. But when this came out, it was very plain to see for everybody that all the values “conservatives” claimed to stand for meant absolutely nothing to him.
I’ve repeated this many times.
After the ‘pussy’ tape came out, a Conservative woman went on The View TV show to defend Trump. One of the other women on the panel kept repeating ‘pussy’ over and over. Finally the Conservative woman demand that the other panelist stop using that vulgar term.
I remember you saying this in a previous comment!
Eyebleach
that’s when you ************ so much your ************ turns ************ right?
I was actually going to go for something else, but when I saw it in my queue I had to share it.
Go Team Venture.
Or claiming Veterans who were killed or were captured were losers. I thought Americans were proud of their armed forces.
Mine was George Floyd. When I saw so many people stand up and say that man deserved death over a bounced check I knew they lost their damn mind.
The idea that death is an acceptable outcome from being suspected of any minor infraction underpins the conversation around basically every police killing, with every single person on the side justifying it being tacitly accepting of that premise.
It’s lunacy.
A few years after 9-11 for me. I grew up watching my classmates sing songs about indiscriminately bombing people in Afghanistan, and news reports of people being beaten or killed in the US for wearing any clothing that appeared Middle-Eastern. It made me sick to my stomach.
Nobody deserves to die… Even if they’re… uh… charlie kirk… No I think that one’s ok.
My take on Charlie is that I’m not surprised.
My take on Charlie and similar killings is that we’re in a war, and war is never nice. I don’t believe anyone should be assassinated, but I also don’t believe we’re playing by the rules of civility when we have hundreds of people being disappeared every day by masked agents on our street; and the government is tweeting out Nazi propaganda.
I heard his neck just did that
I disagree (with the title but agree with you the post), Jan 6th should truly be the dealbreaker. Why? Cause it’s not even politics, it’s simple rules of games.
If you can’t accept when you lose, you don’t get to play anymore.
They had 4 years to jail him over treason and they didn’t. I said it before and I’ll say it again, Biden should have jailed him for Jan 6th.
Biden should have used the bully pulpit and pushed hard to prosecute. Merrick Garland is technically the one who sat on his ass for 2 years before getting started, which is how Trump was able to delay through the election then throw out his own cases.
Based on the strong bipartisan coverup of the Epstein Files, clearly there are reasons Biden’s donors didn’t want to prosecute one of “their own.” So they didn’t, because the people don’t get represented in America, only capital owners do.
Biden should have had him and the rest of the isurrectionists executed for trying to overthrow throw democracy. Jailing them just changes their platform for inciting rebellion.
All the trumpers would have risen up to do violence, but fuck it: execute them, too.
The only reason the Jan 6th rioters got in the Capitol is because Donald Trump specifically chose not to call in the National Guard to protect the Capitol. If MAGA had attempted a second insurrection when Trump was jailed and Biden was in office, they wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.
This is the kinda stuff I laughed about pre-last election when MAGA was calling for civil war if Kamala won. It’s not funny now, but the truth remains. An outright seizure of the Capitol/White House/SCotUS is nigh impossible unless our leader wants it. Now, the Jan 6th crowd was exceptionally stupid in not even being able to navigate the Capitol floor; but navigation abilities won’t matter when you get gunned down approaching the entrance.
also racism, they have to be careful around White people who are committing crimes too, without angering white voter base in general. alot of them pretend to be on the left, but act very wierdly around POCs.
It is what they plan for the rest of us. Fascism has always been a sort of “blindly obey the leader or die” sort of thing.
The second major problem is that a whole bunch of people are then killed, first for being the wrong ethnicity, or killed for having the wrong beliefs, or maybe you just live on land that some rich asshole wants to steal. These people will never even be given a chance to “obey” but will likely be told that they are being killed for disobedience. Or someone will be told.
And the lie will be believed, because it will be convenient to do so.
Merrick Garland deserves a place in hell with Newt Gingrich, The Koch Family, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Mitch McConnell.
Now I personally believe that Garland was just that incompetent rather than malicious as the others are.
However, his incompetence is dammingly damaging to the future of the entire planet.
There are Americans that believe Trump has never lied. Like ever. About anything. He is truth. Some Americans actually believe this.
So they have no capacity to think logically, not even a tiny bit? Or do they just have no capacity in remembering stuff?
They don’t want to think. At all. Just listen to what they’re told by fox or Facebook and get comfort in hating some group(s) “ worse than them “ while they believe they’re better than most people. They’re fully delusional.
Nah, worse than that. The root of the conservative pathology is self-hatred. They fear that they are worthless, shit people. A person who believes that they are better than everybody else can sit smugly in the corner and be superior in peace. Conservatives need near-constant reassurance that other people are worse than themselves, hence the performative cruelty they crave.
They are also too cowardly to live freely, so they end up hating actual freedom and those that enjoy it because they hate themselves for allowing their freedom to be robbed by their ideology.
They are literally brainwashed. I do not know what the solution to that is.
They are terminally uncurious. Explaining to his cult individually that he has said things himself they can listen to is baffling to them. They only hear it through their filter of choice.
I think you are giving them far too much credit. Just as there are short people and tall people and skinny and fat, there are people that don’t have a lot going on upstairs. When I heard that 50% of people don’t have an inner monologue I was astounded. I thought it not to be true. That someone had to have fucked up. Seeing all this play out, it makes way more sense.
It’s a real problem if you ask me. The older I get the easier it is to notice in people.
That just breaks my brain.
Propaganda
Fox news Oann Newsmax
All propaganda channels that literally only publish lies. Fox news sued (and won) for the right to call itself a news channel yet lie their asses off without any legal problems
I’m just amazed that nobody saw this coming since at least 2-3 decades ago
waves hands I’ve been watching this train for decades… no one listens.
Why would people think it was a big deal when the entire news media played it down, and then the guy who did it was allowed to run for the highest political office again.
Yup, the Republican party allowed Trump to go after the nomination, and his Republican opponents in the primaries never brought Jan 6 up for the disgusting act it was. Instead they all protected Trump by repeating the Big Lie.
Imagine Fox News right now, if Jan 6 had been Democrats and Obama. Seriously, they would be screaming for the dismantling of the Democratic party.
And that’s the difference, the Left has NOTHING like Fox News and Newsmax, MSNBC doesn’t even get CLOSE.
the closest thing to a left wing on TV at least, is DEMocracy now. and its not even that left, plus its also on late night where nobody else watches it.
every other one is center right or right wing, that glorfies the military to keep up enlistment numbers. movies and shows: copaganda, and right-wing ganda helps too.
i noticed its coordinated with right wing influencers/grifters also downplayed or dint bother discussing the insurrection. its not by accident its all coordinated through troll farms.
…me, neither…
Look, all you have to do is accept my one and only axiom: Most people on this planet are total and absolute idiots.
Actually this always was a point against democracy
Even the smart people aren’t smart enough.
I’m not inclined to agree with “most”, but the idiot:not-idiot ratio in society is way higher than I’m comfortable with. It’s almost enough to make the question the wisdom of putting so many people on the road, driving their own cars.
The part that really shook me is when I talked to enough people to figure out that stupidity isn’t always obvious. A person can speak well, be exposed to a lot of different news sources, have ample access to information, graduate from a decent school, and still be a total moron when it comes to a lot of things. Like functional illiteracy, grown adults learn how to cope and mask in ways that are shockingly good, considering they cover for huge deficits at the same time.
I mean 50% of the population literally is less intelligent than the average.
Only if the median and mean coincide
If we assume IQ is a proper representation of intelligence than sure they do.
I agree, and I think I’m among them too (no I don’t say that because I voted Trump, I’m not American)
Admit it, you voted third party! Just so you know: thats like voting for Trump but indirectly.
Huh?
varnia is suggesting you didn’t vote for the Democrats. Which, considering you’re not American, seems highly likely.
Oh haha okay I had no idea what they meant.
I did vote for Nicusor Dan in Romania and that guy is as much of a democrat as they get around here haha
Well the answer to “why did people still support Trump after Jan 6th” is actually “Jan 6th.”
Those people that came to DC and walked to the Capitol and stormed out are Americans who were a) pissed off and b) willing and able to travel and march and attack on behalf of Trump.
That’s not nothing in terms of power and influence. And it’s indicative of a BUNCH of people who met condition (a) but not (b). Like probably an order of magnitude or more.
Since no Republican stepped up to steal those supporters from Trump by pointing out how absolutely un-American Jan 6th was, they stayed loyal to him. So the politicians followed, the owners followed, and the media followed.
That’s not quite correct. In 2021 we saw quite a few Republicans calling out January 6th as un-American, unacceptable political violence, etc, etc. The prosecution of the J6 ringleaders had wide bipartisan support. Plenty of Republicans tried to take the mantle of leadership from Trump in the belief that Republicans wouldn’t support a criminal who’d attempted a coup.
But here’s the thing: You’re absolutely correct to say a ton of Americans implicitly supported January 6th. There were an enormous number of Americans who believed the 2020 election was stolen, or who, at the very least, had questions about it. There were a lot of conservative Americans who supported J6 because they believed having a conservative President was more important than following the law. And then there were the anons who believed in the Q conspiracy and were cheering on January 6th because they believed Trump was finally, as prophesied, going to declare martial law, dissolve the US government, and purge America of the secret cabal of billionaire Democrat child abusers - and if I remember the polls correctly, roughly one in four Republicans believed in Q.
And almost everyone in the United States - including those Republican Party leaders who tried to take the mantle of leadership from Trump - underestimated how widespread support for J6 was on the right.
And the more Biden’s FBI tried to tie Trump to January 6th, tried to get him on whatever charges they could manage, the more Trump looked like a victim of political persecution instead of a failed candidate who couldn’t accept defeat. The more Biden pressured social media to censor “election denial”, the more it looked like the Biden administration had something to hide.
So as time passed, the “election deniers” got more and more common, and got more and more influence in the Republican Party - and ordinary rank and file Republicans heard over and over again that Trump was a victim of persecution and ordinary conservatives were being censored for supporting him, and became more and more loyal to Trump. Supporting Trump in 2024 became a loyalty test - Republicans supported him because Biden was trying so hard to have him convicted and disqualified from running for office, and choosing another candidate felt like giving in.
And as they rose in power, the Republicans who thought January 6th was unacceptable got quieter and quieter, because it became more and more obvious Trump was going to be the candidate in 2024, and they knew better than to piss him off.
In other words - as disgustingly ironic as it is - Democratic attempts to get justice for January 6th were one of the biggest reasons Trump was reelected in 2024.
I don’t understand why AIPAC, Citizens United, exorbitant health care and education costs, tax rates for the rich, slavery in prisons, and every other goddamned ridiculous thing that other first world countries don’t have wasn’t a deal breaker.
While I agree, what would it mean for these to be “dealbreakers”?
Bill Clinton gave tax rates for the rich, but he didn’t run on that – he ran on expanding the Middle Class. Barack Obama ran on a platform of fixing healthcare, and he sorta did. Citizens United v FEC was decided in 2010. The next election, Bernie Sanders’ common-sense social safety nets were wildly popular among Democats and purple state voters – not enough to beat the entire Democratic line-up that gave their delegates to Hillary Clinton, but still very popular.
On the debate stage, Donald Trump called out the same ridiculous Republican warmongering and perils of the USAmerican people that Bernie called out. In doing so, Trump sweeped out Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and every other preferred neo-conservative candidate – while being a billionaire rapist fraudster who owned a gold-plated apartment. Trump continued that diagonalization campaign strategy in 2024, to great success. He’s naming real issues, and rallying up support with it, because people are exactly as fed up as you presume they should be. This is why MAGA voters are so aggressive. This is what the Jan 6th insurrectionists thought they were fighting for.
While I curse out the generation before me who allowed this country to get this way, I can’t really say what they should have done differently. It’s not like there weren’t massive anti-war protests. It’s not like the USA populace wanted to be deployed in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Iran. Bush hid the facts. It’s not like people want these massive medical costs and unreasonable student loans… but what do we do? Changes were being teased in Congress; there was hope in the Supreme Court; presidential campaigns promised prosperity and ease, and USAmericans clung to that hope.
So did we sleepwalk through it all? Yes – But I don’t see how people could have been persuaded differently with anything short of foresight of exactly this reality of the year 2025. Reformists aren’t going to burn down the Capitol when Congress is debating Medicare For All, even if it’s the 40th year debating this issue; even after the vote fails.
You touched on it; Citizens United. Change that and we’re back to a coherent timeline.
I also think the consolidation of media outlets into massive billionaire-controlled mouthpieces of industry alongside with Cambridge Analytica opening the flood gates on social medianl propagandization were crucial, but Citizens United will always be the death of the USA for me; it just took a few years for the corpse to start really stinking up the place.
I think we can only make more laws and regulations against it moving forward. High school requirements on media literacy and propaganda to graduate. Also, mandatory elections after 30 days of shutdowns. Laws that no votes in a state can be counted until every able voter has cast a ballot. Term limits. Taxes higher as income increases. Assets can’t be hidden as corporate property. Billionaires taxed out of existence. We just have to prevent more shit like it happening again.
January 6 gave the Nazis hope and basically exposed how easy it is to topple the government if they have law enforcement on their side.
