“Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination”
Will never not be gross to read. I know way too many good people poised by the non stop lies and they’ll never be the same after. Yes, I said good people who got caught up during the pandemic and now get news from some dude in his basement. Certain people I can’t even have simple conversations with because even the most basic things dip into complete nonsense based on this guy and his circus clowns.
People are complicated. A person can be “good” in some aspects while simultaneously being “very very very not good” in others. It’s more likely that the people you’re referring to have not changed at all, but have just been given the opportunity to express how very very very not good they are in aspects that they previously kept hidden.
They definitely dove off the cliff during the pandemic and I agree with what you said. I can accept complications but not fully brainwashed. These are people I had great in person politics talks with. The openness to admit they might be wrong, accepting new ideas, was all replaced with word for word GQP kool-aid.
Literally destroyed families, blew apart friendships, wrecked marriages and all for what in the end?
To be a Zlist celeb on some random podcast.
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
Carl Sagan
I’m not disagreeing with you btw, just felt this quote from one of my favorite people ever was appropriate. I can literally hear him speaking this in my head.
It’s a good quote, but something that doesn’t sit quite right with me is that it seems to be excusing people for being bamboozled. I get that there are situations where the charlatan has some existing power over their victim - the victim depends on them for food, shelter, security, something they really cannot do without for very long, and have limited capability of acquiring without the charlatan providing it.
These American Fascists are not that. They watch TV. They listen to the radio. They go online. They seek out the content that resonates with them. They are not victims.
I think Carl would be disgusted with where we’re at today if he were still alive, and he may want to revise the quote to be more fitting in today’s landscape.
Some of them are victims though I believe. Victims of being uneducated, which, of course, is by design. Many, or most, probably, are not victims, and choose to be ignorant, malicious, and filled with misplaced hatred.
Many of them are looking for comfort in the otherwise precarious economic existence that out capitalist society has imposed on most of us. There are a lot more victims of bad circumstances that make them vulnerable to propaganda, than a lot of us want to admit. But there are also a lot of bigots, racists, and high scoring sociopaths in the mix.
The right wing has embraced most of the latter group. And the not insignificant bamboozled group may be stuck for the reason Sagan described.
I always took Sagan’s quote to be about religion, and that’s the tactic the Right has taken in their indoctrination too.
There is, I suppose, a certain level of control when an “in group / out group” mentality has been created, and where failure to join the in group excludes you from it in essentially all aspects of your life. Or when the in group makes it clear that they are willing to perform acts of violence against the out group.
Maybe that’s where we are now, but that’s not where we started.
Most of my relatives are in this camp. Some have disowned more centrist or leftist relatives, and two of them are no long around after soaking up so much crappy 24/7 Fox News and OANN and whatever nut job they can find on YouTube or Twitter to back their opinions, to get anxiety, deep depression, have mental breakdowns and off themselves.
This sums it up perfectly. Just and endless loop of watching nothing but this.
Yeah, this really resonates with me. I have family and friends who I would describe as good people in general but for whom the maga era has completely unhinged their rational faculties. It’s really sad to see. It also makes it such that there’s really not much to discuss with them, because so much has been impacted by the MAGA lies. Politics, religion, current events, weather (it’s cool in the fall, so global warming isn’t real), local matters, what my kids are doing in school, the list of things that the MAGA infection has affected is stunning. I guess technically the MAGA movement has just exposed some of the brain rot that was already there in my family, but I also think it has actively made them less rational. Fucking populism.
Some of them were already lost in 80s and 90s even, but this dingle has only made it worse.
"Donald Trump’s decision to declassify evidence given by ex-British spy Christopher Steele over the former U.S. president’s alleged links with Russia led to the disappearance of two sources, Steele said in court documents made public on Tuesday,” Reuters reports.
“Steele said in a witness statement that Trump’s decision to declassify his 2017 testimony to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was ‘one of the most egregious breaches of intelligence rules and protocol by the US government in recent times.'”
Said Steele: “Two of the named Russian sources have not been seen or heard of since.”
Mueller concluded in 2019 that there was no evidence of a criminal conspiracy between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.
Is this true?
I thought it was more like… there’s some fuckin bullshit here but you can’t prosecute a sitting president so…
The actual phrasing in the report was very specific: no evidence of conspiracy with members of the Russian government. There was plenty of evidence of collusion with Russian oligarchs and shady non-governmental entities.
There was also a lengthy discussion on how that’s different from “nothing happened”, because of all the obstruction.
They “found no evidence” means no quid-pro-quo documents, no one (of the limited pool they were allowed to talk to) admitted to a quid-pro-quo plan or agreement, and that they couldn’t prove a causal link through specific Russian actors between Trump’s “Russia, if you’re listening…” and an allegedly Russian organization hacking the DNC. They couldn’t get any Russians to admit to an exchange of instructions with the Trump campaign, in part because they’re all in Russia and never interviewed.
They did find a lot of evidence of obstruction of justice, like Trump threatening people who’d be in position to know about quid-pro-quo plans and agreements and those people refusing to answer questions, and those are the accusations they claimed to be unable to make because of the sitting-President thing.
I guess a request for a hostile foreign nation to interfere in our elections by itself is legal? And Trump Jr. gladly accepting materials saying “If it’s what you say, I love it, especially later in the summer.” is not active and willing collusion with foreign intelligence? I guess that may be true but it beggars belief.
Jr got a pass on that one because Mueller concluded that, legally speaking, he was too stupid to understand it was wrong.
“Any inference or allegation that Mr Steele makes about my relationship with my daughter is untrue and disgraceful,” Trump added.
I love this sentence so much. Like a blanket denial before any is actually required.
“If Steele ever says that I keep a selection of ivanka’s shoes and several vials of her urine in my masturbatorium that is completely untrue.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Steele said in a witness statement that Trump’s decision to declassify his 2017 testimony to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was “one of the most egregious breaches of intelligence rules and protocol by the US government in recent times”.
His witness statement was made public on Tuesday, the day after Trump asked London’s High Court to allow his data protection lawsuit against a British private investigations firm co-founded by Steele to continue.
Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is suing Orbis Business Intelligence over the “Steele dossier” in order, he said in his own witness statement, to prove its claims were false.
Steele had given evidence in an interview with two FBI agents as part of Mueller’s probe into an alleged conspiracy between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.
He suggested Trump’s discovery of Steele’s friendship with his daughter Ivanka had damaged their relationship and also “deepened his animus towards me and is one of the reasons for his vindictive and vexatious conduct towards me and Orbis”.
In his witness statement, Trump said Ivanka was “completely irrelevant to this claim and any mention of her only serves to distract this court from (Orbis’) and Mr Steele’s reckless behavior”.
The original article contains 462 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 57%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
