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Ongoing US GOP Debacle Thread: Seditious Republicans march toward authoritarianism

Demonwolverine said:
On a similar note, has anyone stopped to think that the backlash Trump supporters face is partially because Trump himself accepts 0 responsibility? What I mean is that Trump indirectly throws his constituents under the bus with his lack of shame and refusal to bear any burden what-so-ever. With Obama, love him or hate him, he acknowledged his faults and gave his supporters a way to relate and say "he's not perfect, but I trust that he is trying and doing what he believes is best." With Trump, his supporters are forced to be perfect and to not accept that anything he has done could even potentially be wrong, because that's what Trump himself says/portrays. Trump could relieve the bashing his voters receive if he wanted to, but it would come at the cost of his own image, and we all know he wouldn't risk that because it's all he's got.
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Completely agree, I also think it is in their nature to be stubborn and defensive in the face of factual arguments contrary to their position.
 
WakeForestRanger said:
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Ha. I mean, unless these staffers are just looking for one-night stands, and perhaps they are, you can't really blame someone for rejecting immediately someone they would refuse to date or later break up with for their despicable political views anyway.
 
WFUtoUSC said:
I don't really care. Do u?
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As they say, elections have consequences. Although, I think the young staffers and aides mentioned in this article didn't think that phrase would apply to them for the next four years. Yet another example of how Trumpites mock liberals as whiny snowflakes, yet here they are whining about how they can't get dates because their boss is loathed and his policies are seen as repulsive and immoral by vast numbers of people. Well, toughen up, buttercup - that's what your party claims to stand for, isn't it?
 
A new study reveals striking similarities between rural areas with opioid addiction and their 2016 vote for Trump. The article is based partly on Medicare data.

From the NPR summary: "It's easy to see similarities between the places hardest hit by the opioid epidemic and a map of Trump strongholds. "When we look at the two maps, there was a clear overlap between counties that had high opioid use ... and the vote for Donald Trump," says Dr. James S. Goodwin, chair of geriatrics at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and the study's lead author. "There were blogs from various people saying there was this overlap. But we had national data."

Link to the actual article (It's a pdf): https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2685627

NPR summary: https://www.npr.org/sections/health...ign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20180623
 
WakeForestRanger said:
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This.

The self-serving lies and distortions and utter disregard for truth, rule of law, independent DOJ, the obvious dictatorial or autocratic proclivity, etc.

And yet 90% of Pubs approve. Truly amazing and almost unbelievable. Except to consider that we are not in truth “exceptional” but rather subject to the same human weaknesses that have plagued our species forever.
 
 
Newenglanddeac said:
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So, members of her own party, including county and city leaders, have called her "a stupid Asian not even born in America" (she was adopted by American parents and raised here), made repeated racial insults, and she admits that she receives "hate-filled email and social media messages on a daily basis". And, there's all of the other insults directed at her by her fellow Republicans described above. Yet, all she'll say is that this horrible treatment is "starting to get to me", refuses to blame Trump for helping to start all of this or to call him a racist (in spite of everything he's said, tweeted, or done over the past two years), and wants to remain as GOP chair in Minnesota so she can help him to win again in 2020. All while facing the abuse from her own party described above, on a daily basis. The cognitive dissonance is strong with this one.
 
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She’s right that racism didn’t start with Trump.
 
PhDeac said:
She’s right that racism didn’t start with Trump.
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Of course, but she does seem extremely reluctant to condemn the stuff he has done or said since becoming president, and her claim that he isn't a racist is certainly up for dispute. I don't think there's much doubt that Trump's election and behavior as POTUS has emboldened a lot of racists and sexists in the country.
 
The dude lead the birther movement and engages in more dog whistle bigotry than you can shake a stick at.

He is either

a. A racist

b. A conniving opportunist who is inciting the racism in his base.

b is worse than a.
 
The GOP seems to have a huge network of politicians, pundits, fundraisers, operatives, staffers, reporters, bloggers, etc whose entire livelihood depends on their loyalty to the party.

It seems much larger and far less cohesive than the Dems. Dems are more committed to specific issues. They’ll turn on the party in a heartbeat.
 
Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

"To grasp what is going on in the world right now, we need to reflect on two things. One is that we are in a phase of trial runs. The other is that what is being trialled is fascism – a word that should be used carefully but not shirked when it is so clearly on the horizon. Forget “post-fascist” – what we are living with is pre-fascism.

It is easy to dismiss Donald Trump as an ignoramus, not least because he is. But he has an acute understanding of one thing: test marketing. He created himself in the gossip pages of the New York tabloids, where celebrity is manufactured by planting outrageous stories that you can later confirm or deny depending on how they go down. And he recreated himself in reality TV where the storylines can be adjusted according to the ratings. Put something out there, pull it back, adjust, go again.

Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.

One of the basic tools of fascism is the rigging of elections – we’ve seen that trialled in the election of Trump, in the Brexit referendum and (less successfully) in the French presidential elections. Another is the generation of tribal identities, the division of society into mutually exclusive polarities. Fascism does not need a majority – it typically comes to power with about 40 per cent support and then uses control and intimidation to consolidate that power. So it doesn’t matter if most people hate you, as long as your 40 per cent is fanatically committed. That’s been tested out too. And fascism of course needs a propaganda machine so effective that it creates for its followers a universe of “alternative facts” impervious to unwanted realities. Again, the testing for this is very far advanced.


But when you’ve done all this, there is a crucial next step, usually the trickiest of all. You have to undermine moral boundaries, inure people to the acceptance of acts of extreme cruelty. Like hounds, people have to be blooded. They have to be given the taste for savagery. Fascism does this by building up the sense of threat from a despised out-group. This allows the members of that group to be dehumanised. Once that has been achieved, you can gradually up the ante, working through the stages from breaking windows to extermination.

It is this next step that is being test-marketed now. It is being done in Italy by the far-right leader and minister for the interior Matteo Salvini. How would it go down if we turn away boatloads of refugees? Let’s do a screening of the rough-cut of registering all the Roma and see what buttons the audience will press. And it has been trialled by Trump: let’s see how my fans feel about crying babies in cages. I wonder how it will go down with Rupert Murdoch.

To see, as most commentary has done, the deliberate traumatisation of migrant children as a “mistake” by Trump is culpable naivety. It is a trial run – and the trial has been a huge success. Trump’s claim last week that immigrants “infest” the US is a test-marketing of whether his fans are ready for the next step-up in language, which is of course “vermin”. And the generation of images of toddlers being dragged from their parents is a test of whether those words can be turned into sounds and pictures. It was always an experiment – it ended (but only in part) because the results were in.

And the results are quite satisfactory. There is good news on two fronts. First, Rupert Murdoch is happy with it – his Fox News mouthpieces outdid themselves in barbaric crassness: making animal noises at the mention of a Down syndrome child, describing crying children as actors. They went the whole swinish hog: even the brown babies are liars. Those sobs of anguish are typical of the manipulative behaviour of the strangers coming to infest us – should we not fear a race whose very infants can be so devious? Second, the hardcore fans loved it: 58 per cent of Republicans are in favour of this brutality. Trump’s overall approval ratings are up to 42.5 per cent.

This is greatly encouraging for the pre-fascist agenda. The blooding process has begun within the democratic world. The muscles that the propaganda machines need for defending the indefensible are being toned up. Millions and millions of Europeans and Americans are learning to think the unthinkable. So what if those black people drown in the sea? So what if those brown toddlers are scarred for life? They have already, in their minds, crossed the boundaries of morality. They are, like Macbeth, “yet but young in deed”. But the tests will be refined, the results analysed, the methods perfected, the messages sharpened. And then the deeds can follow."







https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-trial-runs-for-fascism-are-in-full-flow-1.3543375
 
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