“Republican Senator elected in the Before Times, complains that this administration isn’t keeping its evil deeds quiet enough and people like Stephen Miller are embarrassing the members of Senate who want to be re-elected someday so they can keep getting the massive donations, so Thom Tillis wanted to get it on the record that he doesn’t approve of Miller as he eyed the midterms warily.”

There, fixed the story.

to select those who are most vocal about being against Trump

That’s not actually how it works right now. Maybe in the old days when conscription was done at the end of a sword or spear, but the military doesn’t want people who are potentially going to form groups to sabotage everything from within.

If they wanted to kill every Trump critic they would send ICE to your house and you would disappear, but they don’t have the infrastructure and manpower that Germany did so even their deathsquad plans are anemic and half-assed, like everything they do.

They are not going to do a draft because they’ll send in National Guard and reservists long before that, just like happened with Iraq, and thousands of middle-aged, midwest people who thought they were going to help sandbag against floods in their own communities end up getting their faces blown off in the mountains of Iran.

I’m torn in that I know what you mean and I want to agree, I’m sure it matters to some segment of the old-guard republicans, I just don’t think it matters where we need to the most, which is voting and political engagement.

I mean, if you want to see just how bad it is, read the 2024 exit polling where people are asked their politics and why they voted what they did… countless people who don’t like Trump voted for Trump. Countless people who voted for Obama and Biden voted for Trump. There are interviews with family members of people who have been detained, deported or even murdered by ICE who shrug and say they will still vote for Trump.

That all ain’t normal and I’ve been around a few. I feel strongly that something has shifted in public discourse and the only thing that will break the spell now will be if enough of these people who don’t seem to care if anything is real or not, suddenly become really, really uncomfortable as a consequence of politics, otherwise it’s all fake to them, it’s all theater and suspension of disbelief for the sake of being part of a narrative. The 2020’s and Covid have accelerated a lot of people into a kind of headspace that isn’t reasonable or logical and AI and slop media is making it worse every day.

I think the $100+ per barrel gas prices right now are probably going to do far more to swing conservatives and liberals than all the ceremony and tradition in the world.

The Coal Rollers are going to have to start using alternatives like graphite pigment dust, maybe play loud recordings of engine noises as their electric motor whirs away quietly under the hood.

This is the social attitude that forces of capital want every human on Earth to share, and it’s spreading like fucking fire through dry brush right now. It knows no borders, it’s just the the USA was the big dog on the block that everyone looks to, so we see it here first. It’s wrecking many other countries as we speak in the exact same way.

Good, the US needs to hit Europe prices to start appreciating how easy and insulated they are from the rest of the world. I genuinely hope our whole country grinds to a goddamn halt and people start gathering outside the white house with empty gas cans.

I mean, I would rather see people gathering outside the white house with FULL gas cans, but in this economy?

I guess I’m just not down with “petty civility politics” but I care a lot more about the fact that we’re starting another endless, pointless war that has already killed hundreds of children, designed to distract from the hundreds of children harmed by Epstein’s friends, as the climate starts to boil over and the most dangerous weapon we’ve ever invented is being deregulated, all to make rich men richer, than I care about if the guy who is figureheading the entire thing wore a fucking hat.

The families of the dead soldiers will take no comfort if he wore a hat or not. The families of the Iranian children and families won’t care, the families of the countless thousands killed in Gaza with the US support won’t care. the MILLION PEOPLE dead from cutting off USaid won’t care.

I hate that OP even shared this. Nobody is “ripping” anyone, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s more distraction, it’s more pandering. The right is getting their own version of the same exact fucking story that says “Libs ENRAGED over Trump’s hat instead of supporting our brave soldiers!” and neither side will ever, ever connect, capitulate or care what the other thinks. This is just pathetic masturbation about non-issues while the world literally burns.

kill Citizens

This is all they heard.

I barely consider twitter and 4chan “forums” in the sense that nobody goes there to learn anything or read people’s perspectives, it’s mindless mental carbohydrates.

4chan has always had this absurd mixture of completely learning-disabled homeschool chuds grown up smashing their faces against their keyboard to spam racist memes and incoherent slur posts, and like 2% conspiracy-mavens who post essays that make Ted Kaczynski look like a beacon of rationality. Some of them learn to reign it in enough to actually control the conversation and those are the really dangerous people.

But largely, the average percentage of MAGA americans and the percentage of americans who fall under the “functionally literate” threshold form a circular venn-diagram and I wish that was hyperbole with all my heart.

They don’t read. They certainly don’t read forums on the internet. They CERTAINLY don’t read lemmy. I’ve seen only a couple here in the last few years and they seemed like fakes/trolls.

Conservative citizens in the US are largely barely literate and can just barely engage on the level of all-caps tweets and improperly used memes on facebook.

They know, they don’t care.

The current DNC is operating on two principles:

1. It’s still 1995, and Israel is America’s lil’ darling colonizer startup that most moderate Americans are happy with. Yay for white middle-east, go 'get 'em you wacky apocalypse-prophecy fulfillers. Go go magic old-money.

2. They have the same donors as the GOP and serve the same masters.

Every neurodivergent in Lemmy wants to chime in with correct biological facts despite it completely undermining the context of the message.

deleted by creator

Good for them, I only wish that their letter of rejection was blunt instead of citing “scheduling conflicts.”

They could have gotten massive support if they just openly said “We aren’t going because the President and his administration are evil, stupid, cruel fuckwads and we would rather go in the woods and be eaten by bears than even be photographed in the same frame as the white house broadly. Someone please restore USAID because almost a million people have already died as a direct result of canceling that cheap program.”

By his logic

Nobody here is using that shit.

Logic that is.

This is meant to do what it always did, rile up stupid hicks against a manufactured enemy and provide leverage for politicians who want to succeed on the backs of a fearful mob of hicks.

Actual secrets are kept secret from people who have any chance of exposing secrets. There is no real such thing as overriding authority in matters of national security and technology that could turn wars. They keep that shit wrapped up until a situation gets so dire that there’s nothing left to lose.

Add to that, the commercialization of military tech, so that there are likely 100 different tech companies with huge secret programs and technology being tested who have no idea what each of the others are doing, and sure as shit won’t share anything “under oath” with congress or anyone else.

The “aliens” narrative has been a very convenient narrative for them too, just like how Q-anon was built as a misdirection from the actual child-sex cabal because nobody is going to take the claims seriously when they sound like the deranged ravings of conspiracy nuts.

The idea that we can have a “document reveal” or testimony that leads to actual conclusive anything is as absurd as the idea that we can have a document leak about Epstein that leads to anyone in power facing criminal charges.

Susan Collins has two modes:

Empowering nazi fascists proudly.

Frowning and wagging her finger while empowering nazi fascists (proudly.)

That’s half of USAID’s budget.

Cutting USAID is by far the most heinous and evil thing Trump has done in his entire time invading our space, and it gets maybe the least attention. The death-toll is already in the hundreds of thousands, maybe already over a million souls. The immediate consequence of a performative decision that cost us next to nothing compared to other spending.

Hundreds of thousands of children, of families, grandmothers and brothers and sisters, people’s wives and husbands and newborn babies. All just people just trying to survive a harsh world, cut off from medicine and nutrition and safe water and dying slowly in their family homes, tents or streets.

We are never going to see more than maybe a Frontline documentary on how horrific this act was, but the fact that we have a world that allows for one person who can just sign a squiggle on paper and watch millions of people die for fun should have us on the streets with high explosive devices.

a plurality did vote for this after he was convicted of crimes and they saw what he did in the first go around.

A lot of the exit polling suggested that most Trump voters who switched from supporting Obama and Sanders, really had no idea what was going on with Trump, his family, their legal accusations and literally everything else we all know.

They did not actually remember anything about the first round, because so very much of the USA is vast, vast swaths of millions of people working 7 days a week to afford having children in a suburban people-hatchery, and we have a capital system that has been given full, unrestricted access to our brains, eroding our attention-spans and desire to feel engaged with anything for more than 20 seconds.

This is what we’re fighting, not just an angry mass of armed racist goblins, but a vast pandemic of apathy and boredom with literally everything. A banal army of shrugging masses who do not make critical judgements, because what has critical thought done for us? What does anything matter? Just look at what’s in front of you and cast your vote based on how you feel at the moment. This is the prevailing attitude, whether explicit or buried under layers of rationalization.

For the frothing Crockett stans rushing in to defend the candidate that the GOP and establishment Dems are obviously not scared of, Colbert has had Crockett on at least three times. You can watch the interviews on Youtube.

From here you can contort and backflip if it “counts” but then you’re just going to bat for Trump’s cronies. This “rule” has never been enforced on or upheld by late-night talk shows who are not journalists and can do whatever they want.

I have nothing against Crockett, but between her zionist tendencies and lack of much substance past being sassy, I believe Talarico can do the most harm to the Trump administration, and so does the Trump administration. We don’t win with sass, we win with convincing a lot of back-country hicks that they can have safe, comforting, Christian democratic leadership without fearing being placed in reeducation camps. Despite most of them needing reeducation camps.

This is why everyone is scared of Talarico, he can do a lot to flip Texans and maybe the state broadly, as well as go a long way to purge Israel ties to Senate. (As far as I’m aware Crockett nor Talarico have taken AIPAC or related organizational funding, but at least on Crockett’s part it hasn’t been for lack of trying. They’re likely holding back until she’s seated in Senate.)