The Many Faces of US Politics...

[Jeepers Creepers]

https://www.facebook.com/7976226799/posts/10158567052821800/?sfnsn=scwspwa&extid=YwTtBRD0byZIKIsq&d=w&vh=e

Watch this if you want to know inside the mind of a Trump voter.

[glens73]

https://www.facebook.com/7976226799/posts/10158567052821800/?sfnsn=scwspwa&extid=YwTtBRD0byZIKIsq&d=w&vh=e

Watch this if you want to know inside the mind of a Trump voter.

I've seen it, ridiculous but quite frightening in a way if you live there

[Gmac]

Trump said today live on tv that George Floyd will be looking down excited by the rise in employment figures.

looking at too much twitter not the truth.

[Gmac]

The brave men and women of the LAPD take out a key operative of the BLM/AntiFa/Soros/Democrat/rioter/looter cabal

another fake

[trailer]

Trump said today live on tv that George Floyd will be looking down excited by the rise in employment figures.

Like it is incredible that people are willing to associate themselves with him. He'll be remembered the same way as Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Charlie Haughey. A figure widely derided.

[whitey]

Trump said today live on tv that George Floyd will be looking down excited by the rise in employment figures.

Like it is incredible that people are willing to associate themselves with him. He'll be remembered the same way as Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Charlie Haughey. A figure widely derided.

Watch the video.....that has already been debunked

[Jeepers Creepers]

Trump said today live on tv that George Floyd will be looking down excited by the rise in employment figures.

looking at too much twitter not the truth.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2020/jun/05/george-floyd-protests-donald-trump-hydroxychloroquine-live

[J70]

The brave men and women of the LAPD take out a key operative of the BLM/AntiFa/Soros/Democrat/rioter/looter cabal

another fake

Source?

[whitey]

I think it's real

Homeless guy hit in the eye with a rubber bullet

Caught in crossfire between cops and a group refusing to disperse

[trailer]

Trump said today live on tv that George Floyd will be looking down excited by the rise in employment figures.

Like it is incredible that people are willing to associate themselves with him. He'll be remembered the same way as Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Charlie Haughey. A figure widely derided.

Watch the video.....that has already been debunked

What video? What has been debunked? That'll he'll not be remembered as one of the most dangerous people in recent times?

[sid waddell]

There really are 2 protests going on one is about George Floyd and police violence and the other is about trump , the question is do people let the protesters who are bandwagonBig iGeorge Floyd push them into voting for Biden or do they double down with trump . 6 monthxx Sc is a long time in politics.

We've had exactly five years of his circus freakshow dominating US politics, 3 1/2 of them with him in power.

Anyone who doesn't get it what he is and what he will bring at this point is a complete moron.

That's a lot of morons - how do you reverse their thinking - lobotomy?

A lot of them are reveling in his scorched earth presidency. As long it makes the libtards cry!

One would hope though that a sufficient amount of those turned off by Hillary and willing to give him a tentative vote last time out will be having buyers remorse. If their conscience found Hillary objectionable, I can't even imagine how they sleep at night having voted for him.

Christ even Senator Murkowski of Alaska, a Republican and staunch conservative, said publicly that she is not sure if she can vote for him this year.

We've had enough of these cowardly "this is very troubling" or "this is deeply concerning" weasel words from Republicans like Murkowski, Collins, Flake, Sasse, Ryan etc.

What is needed is real political action.

Amash, maybe McCain before him and to a much lesser extent Romney, are the only Republicans who can have anything even resembling a clear conscience in that regard.

Really, what is needed is resignation from the Republican party and repudiation of it. Only Amash has done that.

The rest of the party has been Vichy-like in its collaborationism - but then again, one could very reasonably say they weren't un-Vichy like before that anyway.

They're scared out of their wits because if they don't prostrate themselves in front of the Dear Leader, they will be primaried by someone who will.

That, and the fact that quite a few of them are true believers in the bullshit Trump is selling anyway.

Anne Applebaum has a very good article here on the different motives for collaboration with an authoritarian regime.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/trumps-collaborators/612250/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

You'd probably want a couple of hours as it's long.

Here's what she says about the fear motive:

I am afraid to speak out.

Fear, of course, is the most important reason any inhabitant of an authoritarian or totalitarian society does not protest or resign, even when the leader commits crimes, violates his official ideology, or forces people to do things that they know to be wrong. In extreme dictatorships like Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia, people fear for their lives. In softer dictatorships, like East Germany after 1950 and Putin's Russia today, people fear losing their jobs or their apartments. Fear works as a motivation even when violence is a memory rather than a reality. When I was a student in Leningrad in the 1980s, some people still stepped back in horror when I asked for directions on the street, in my accented Russian: No one was going to be arrested for speaking to a foreigner in 1984, but 30 years earlier they might have been, and the cultural memory remained.

Republican leaders don't seem to know that similar waves of fear have helped transform other democracies into dictatorships.
In the United States of America, it is hard to imagine how fear could be a motivation for anybody. There are no mass murders of the regime's political enemies, and there never have been. Political opposition is legal; free press and free speech are guaranteed in the Constitution. And yet even in one of the world's oldest and most stable democracies, fear is a motive. The same former administration official who observed the importance of apocalyptic Christianity in Trump's Washington also told me, with grim disgust, that "they are all scared."

They are scared not of prison, the official said, but of being attacked by Trump on Twitter. They are scared he will make up a nickname for them. They are scared that they will be mocked, or embarrassed, like Mitt Romney has been. They are scared of losing their social circles, of being disinvited to parties. They are scared that their friends and supporters, and especially their donors, will desert them. John Bolton has his own super PAC and a lot of plans for how he wants to use it; no wonder he resisted testifying against Trump. Former Speaker Paul Ryan is among the dozens of House Republicans who have left Congress since the beginning of this administration, in one of the most striking personnel turnovers in congressional history. They left because they hated what Trump was doing to their party—and the country. Yet even after they left, they did not speak out.

They are scared, and yet they don't seem to know that this fear has precedents, or that it could have consequences. They don't know that similar waves of fear have helped transform other democracies into dictatorships. They don't seem to realize that the American Senate really could become the Russian Duma, or the Hungarian Parliament, a group of exalted men and women who sit in an elegant building, with no influence and no power. Indeed, we are already much closer to that reality than many could ever have imagined.

I found this category particularly persuasive:

My side might be flawed, but the political opposition is much worse.

When Marshal Philippe Pétain, the leader of collaborationist France, took over the Vichy government, he did so in the name of the restoration of a France that he believed had been lost. Pétain had been a fierce critic of the French Republic, and once he was in control, he replaced its famous creed—Liberté, égalité, fraternité, or "Liberty, equality, fraternity"—with a different slogan: Travail, famille, patrie, or "Work, family, fatherland." Instead of the "false idea of the natural equality of man," he proposed bringing back "social hierarchy"—order, tradition, and religion. Instead of accepting modernity, Pétain sought to turn back the clock.

By Pétain's reckoning, collaboration with the Germans was not merely an embarrassing necessity. It was crucial, because it gave patriots the ability to fight the real enemy: the French parliamentarians, socialists, anarchists, Jews, and other assorted leftists and democrats who, he believed, were undermining the nation, robbing it of its vitality, destroying its essence. "Rather Hitler than Blum," the saying went—Blum having been France's socialist (and Jewish) prime minister in the late 1930s. One Vichy minister, Pierre Laval, famously declared that he hoped Germany would conquer all of Europe. Otherwise, he asserted, "Bolshevism would tomorrow establish itself everywhere."

To Americans, this kind of justification should sound very familiar; we have been hearing versions of it since 2016. The existential nature of the threat from "the left" has been spelled out many times. "Our liberal-left present reality and future direction is incompatible with human nature," wrote Michael Anton, in "The Flight 93 Election." The Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham has warned that "massive demographic changes" threaten us too: "In some parts of the country it does seem like the America that we know and love doesn't exist anymore." This is the Vichy logic: The nation is dead or dying—so anything you can do to restore it is justified. Whatever criticisms might be made of Trump, whatever harm he has done to democracy and the rule of law, whatever corrupt deals he might make while in the White House—all of these shrink in comparison to the horrific alternative: the liberalism, socialism, moral decadence, demographic change, and cultural degradation that would have been the inevitable result of Hillary Clinton's presidency.

The Republican senators who are willing to express their disgust with Trump off the record but voted in February for him to remain in office all indulge a variation of this sentiment. (Trump enables them to get the judges they want, and those judges will help create the America they want.) So do the evangelical pastors who ought to be disgusted by Trump's personal behavior but argue, instead, that the current situation has scriptural precedents. Like King David in the Bible, the president is a sinner, a flawed vessel, but he nevertheless offers a path to salvation for a fallen nation.

The three most important members of Trump's Cabinet—Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General William Barr—are all profoundly shaped by Vichyite apocalyptic thinking. All three are clever enough to understand what Trumpism really means, that it has nothing to do with God or faith, that it is self-serving, greedy, and unpatriotic. Nevertheless, a former member of the administration (one of the few who did decide to resign) told me that both Pence and Pompeo "have convinced themselves that they are in a biblical moment." All of the things they care about—outlawing abortion and same-sex marriage, and (though this is never said out loud) maintaining a white majority in America—are under threat. Time is growing short. They believe that "we are approaching the Rapture, and this is a moment of deep religious significance." Barr, in a speech at Notre Dame, has also described his belief that "militant secularists" are destroying America, that "irreligion and secular values are being forced on people of faith." Whatever evil Trump does, whatever he damages or destroys, at least he enables Barr, Pence, and Pompeo to save America from a far worse fate. If you are convinced we are living in the End Times, then anything the president does can be forgiven.

[whitey]

LOL- I was supposed to be going to a wedding in Maine during the Summer that just got cancelled due to the virus. The grooms parents are some of our best Friends and absolutely hate Trump

My wife said she'd kill me if I forwarded on the clip of tonights Trump rally in Guilfors

Justin Reason (@uniQPatriot) Tweeted:
Guilford Maine Presidential visit today. Can you here the Roar of the crowd for the man himself. Of course our local news didn't give this man proper coverage of his supporters. What's new though huh? We are the News. Spread far and wide @POTUS @realDonaldTrump @DonaldJTrumpJr https://t.co/r9LaQnFRXl

[J70]

Thanks Sid. Excerpts are interesting with the historical context. And reminds me I have to renew my Atlantic subscription. Haven't had much time to read it since I've been teleworking and home schooling.

[J70]

Roger Goodell finally seeing the light on Kaepernick and players taking the knee??

https://twitter.com/NFL/status/1269034074552721408?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet

[sid waddell]

Thanks Sid. Excerpts are interesting with the historical context. And reminds me I have to renew my Atlantic subscription. Haven't had much time to read it since I've been teleworking and home schooling.

Who needs long articles and historical context when we have links to tweets by QAnon accounts here.