Donald Trump 2020

[HenryJames 65890]

 

[mdmost 42866]

Translation: he really doesn't give a shit about calming things when he can use the boogeyman, Antifa, to chum up the waters for the morons who follow him. Never has a President more abdicated their duty in a time of crisis than this chuckle fuck. 

[Guest Lobo]

43 minutes ago, Horn Under a Bad Sign said:

American cities burned last night. Trump's first tweet of the day is to tweet something Brian Kilmeade said on Fox this morning.  Of course, he can't even spell "supremacist."
 

 

"Supremest" is how his dumbass followers would spell their own protest signs, "We are not White Supremests!  We just care about the Rule of Law!"  

And we all know who "supremest groups" is...Diana Ross & The Supremes.  In fact, it was the supergroup of its day. 

I gotta get nit-picky on one thing...I'm fucking sick of the 40% of Americans are Trumpers.  Or the 42% "of this country is..."  this or that.  It's not fucking true.  

254 mm Americans 18 and over.  Now yeah, a lot of them don't vote, some are in prison, some are in comas, some are so old---they don't know what country they live in anymore.  And 129mm Americans voted last time around.  

That leaves 125mm Americans (95% of whom are eligible to vote and participate in society).  I don't care about getting out the vote, I'm never joining the Democratic Party, etc.  

Here's my point.  190 mm adult Americans DID NOT FUCKING VOTE FOR TRUMP.  He doesn't have 40-46% of the country.  They're certainly loud as shit and feel like that amount of people, but they are not that many people.  And fewer of his voters have kids to influence than either of the two other two segments I mentioned (Democratic voters & all non-voters).  

So his 63mm votes (to be generous) of the adult population translates to  just 25%, and 20% of the total overall population.

I know that the 40-46% is critical for the 2020 Election.  But when we make these sweeping generalizations about how 46% of the country us dumb, 40% of the country falls for anything he says, 42% of Americans are MAGA idiots.  It's fucking bullshit and it feeds this narrative that we're split down the middle and fucked for the future. 

He commands 25% of the adult population.  That's it.  That's all who fall for his shit.  That's not that bad.  That's not the civil war both sides keep painting.  It's asinine, but it's easily overcome.  125mm adult Americans didn't fall for his shit then, and we're not falling for it now.  

Only 25% of the country is all this shit you guys keep throwing around about how fucked we are.  MAGA, Trumpers, Trumpkins, et. al.  It's 25% of the nation.  Now they certainly punch well above their weight politically and in the media.  And aside from maybe 10 million of that 125mm of us in the middle, that big chunk doesn't much matter because it's gonna sit out election season for myriad reasons.  Our all-time high is 139mm, I think the absolute ceiling even now is 150mm.  Again from that 125mm, maybe 10mm get out and vote this time around.  Trump and Biden get their mid-high 40's, and 2% splinter off for third parties.  Same as usual.  

But my point is as a country, as a body politic, as the human fabric of our nation...we are not 50/50.  We are 25/50/25.  MAGA is not around every corner.  I've got into it on other threads, that they are not going away quietly though in 2021.  But we'll get another thread on that.  46% of my country is not dumb Trumpers who block meaningful progress. They're 25% and if you don't see that massive difference, you're as dumb as they are (hint, it ain't a 21% difference, it's over twice that).  

tl; dr------I'm all Biden this time around.  46% of the country is not pro-Trump, just 46% of the voters who turned out.  That's a distinction without a difference on Election Day.  But the other 364 days this year.....my country is only 25% pro-Trump.  Damn right that makes a difference.  

 

[Beantown Express 2.0 6555]

2 hours ago, Dbeasy said:

This post is clearly fake. No software developers leave their bedrooms except to get another Mountain Dew.

This guy is older and a manager.  I bet all the people that report to him are the Mountain Dew types though.

[Beantown Express 2.0 6555]

43 minutes ago, tantric superman said:

Kind of swarthy too, no?

I think he might be a "globalist" also but you never know.

[TornACL 7680]

24 minutes ago, HenryJames said:

 

What about the rest of the country which may be unsure and anxious and needing to hear from our elected leader?

This administration is a never ending clown show. 

[Brisketexan 104653]

1 minute ago, Lobo said:

"Supremest" is how his dumbass followers would spell their own protest signs, "We are not White Supremests!  We just care about the Rule of Law!"  

And we all know who "supremest groups" is...Diana Ross & The Supremes.  In fact, it was the supergroup of its day. 

I gotta get nit-picky on one thing...I'm fucking sick of the 40% of Americans are Trumpers.  Or the 42% "of this country is..."  this or that.  It's not fucking true.  

254 mm Americans 18 and over.  Now yeah, a lot of them don't vote, some are in prison, some are in comas, some are so old---they don't know what country they live in anymore.  And 129mm Americans voted last time around.  

That leaves 125mm Americans (95% of whom are eligible to vote and participate in society).  I don't care about getting out the vote, I'm never joining the Democratic Party, etc.  

Here's my point.  190 mm adult Americans DID NOT FUCKING VOTE FOR TRUMP.  He doesn't have 40-46% of the country.  They're certainly loud as shit and feel like that amount of people, but they are not that many people.  And fewer of his voters have kids to influence than either of the two other two segments I mentioned (Democratic voters & all non-voters).  

So his 63mm votes (to be generous) of the adult population translates to  just 25%, and 20% of the total overall population.

I know that the 40-46% is critical for the 2020 Election.  But when we make these sweeping generalizations about how 46% of the country us dumb, 40% of the country falls for anything he says, 42% of Americans are MAGA idiots.  It's fucking bullshit and it feeds this narrative that we're split down the middle and fucked for the future. 

He commands 25% of the adult population.  That's it.  That's all who fall for his shit.  That's not that bad.  That's not the civil war both sides keep painting.  It's asinine, but it's easily overcome.  125mm adult Americans didn't fall for his shit then, and we're not falling for it now.  

Only 25% of the country is all this shit you guys keep throwing around about how fucked we are.  MAGA, Trumpers, Trumpkins, et. al.  It's 25% of the nation.  Now they certainly punch well above their weight politically and in the media.  And aside from maybe 10 million of that 125mm of us in the middle, that big chunk doesn't much matter because it's gonna sit out election season for myriad reasons.  Our all-time high is 139mm, I think the absolute ceiling even now is 150mm.  Again from that 125mm, maybe 10mm get out and vote this time around.  Trump and Biden get their mid-high 40's, and 2% splinter off for third parties.  Same as usual.  

But my point is as a country, as a body politic, as the human fabric of our nation...we are not 50/50.  We are 25/50/25.  MAGA is not around every corner.  I've got into it on other threads, that they are not going away quietly though in 2021.  But we'll get another thread on that.  46% of my country is not dumb Trumpers who block meaningful progress. They're 25% and if you don't see that massive difference, you're as dumb as they are (hint, it ain't a 21% difference, it's over twice that).  

tl; dr------I'm all Biden this time around.  46% of the country is not pro-Trump, just 46% of the voters who turned out.  That's a distinction without a difference on Election Day.  But the other 364 days this year.....my country is only 25% pro-Trump.  Damn right that makes a difference.  

 

Well....except for the current polling, which is not just of people who voted in the last election, but is of all people.  His support is closer to 40%, maybe higher.  Shit, the May 13th Gallup aggregation had him with net APPROVAL, 49% to 48%.  I know we WANT to believe that only 25% of Americans are shitty....but it's a lot more than that.

[Biff Tannen 45500]

2 minutes ago, Lobo said:

46% of the country is not pro-Trump, just 46% of the voters who turned out.  That's a distinction without a difference on Election Day.  But the other 364 days this year.....my country is only 25% pro-Trump.  Damn right that makes a difference.  

This is like saying I make a million dollars a year before taxes.  Great, that doesn't make you a millionaire.  It may make you feel better to know there are a ton of people in this nation that aren't trumpkins, but they also just don't give a shit.  They may as well be invisible if they don't come out to vote.  

I have to hope that we see a big jump in voter participation this election, but if not, then we can celebrate all we want that there's a silent majority of people that didn't fucking help, but we'll be just as fucked.

[4th&Five 41461]

,Plus!

 

[plimon 190]

10 minutes ago, Lobo said:

"Supremest" is how his dumbass followers would spell their own protest signs, "We are not White Supremests!  We just care about the Rule of Law!"  

And we all know who "supremest groups" is...Diana Ross & The Supremes.  In fact, it was the supergroup of its day. 

I gotta get nit-picky on one thing...I'm fucking sick of the 40% of Americans are Trumpers.  Or the 42% "of this country is..."  this or that.  It's not fucking true.  

254 mm Americans 18 and over.  Now yeah, a lot of them don't vote, some are in prison, some are in comas, some are so old---they don't know what country they live in anymore.  And 129mm Americans voted last time around.  

That leaves 125mm Americans (95% of whom are eligible to vote and participate in society).  I don't care about getting out the vote, I'm never joining the Democratic Party, etc.  

Here's my point.  190 mm adult Americans DID NOT FUCKING VOTE FOR TRUMP.  He doesn't have 40-46% of the country.  They're certainly loud as shit and feel like that amount of people, but they are not that many people.  And fewer of his voters have kids to influence than either of the two other two segments I mentioned (Democratic voters & all non-voters).  

So his 63mm votes (to be generous) of the adult population translates to  just 25%, and 20% of the total overall population.

I know that the 40-46% is critical for the 2020 Election.  But when we make these sweeping generalizations about how 46% of the country us dumb, 40% of the country falls for anything he says, 42% of Americans are MAGA idiots.  It's fucking bullshit and it feeds this narrative that we're split down the middle and fucked for the future. 

He commands 25% of the adult population.  That's it.  That's all who fall for his shit.  That's not that bad.  That's not the civil war both sides keep painting.  It's asinine, but it's easily overcome.  125mm adult Americans didn't fall for his shit then, and we're not falling for it now.  

Only 25% of the country is all this shit you guys keep throwing around about how fucked we are.  MAGA, Trumpers, Trumpkins, et. al.  It's 25% of the nation.  Now they certainly punch well above their weight politically and in the media.  And aside from maybe 10 million of that 125mm of us in the middle, that big chunk doesn't much matter because it's gonna sit out election season for myriad reasons.  Our all-time high is 139mm, I think the absolute ceiling even now is 150mm.  Again from that 125mm, maybe 10mm get out and vote this time around.  Trump and Biden get their mid-high 40's, and 2% splinter off for third parties.  Same as usual.  

But my point is as a country, as a body politic, as the human fabric of our nation...we are not 50/50.  We are 25/50/25.  MAGA is not around every corner.  I've got into it on other threads, that they are not going away quietly though in 2021.  But we'll get another thread on that.  46% of my country is not dumb Trumpers who block meaningful progress. They're 25% and if you don't see that massive difference, you're as dumb as they are (hint, it ain't a 21% difference, it's over twice that).  

tl; dr------I'm all Biden this time around.  46% of the country is not pro-Trump, just 46% of the voters who turned out.  That's a distinction without a difference on Election Day.  But the other 364 days this year.....my country is only 25% pro-Trump.  Damn right that makes a difference.  

 

The "politically disengaged" tend to be lower-income and less educated. They have the same biases and as the rest of the ones that do vote.

 

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/02/19/knight-nonvoter-study-decoding-2020-election-wild-card-115796

[Guest Lobo]

My point was clearly not about voter turnout.  It was about the soul of the country.  40% say they support him on landline polls, 46% of voters will cast a ballot for him.  But 46% of my country is not infected.  I'd prefer that big number in the middle to be actively against Trump, but it's misleading to say that they're not at all engaged.  Can I just cling to my 25%?  It made me feel better.  Now if 46% of ALL of AMERICA came out for Trump tomorrow, then yeah---we are going to have a Civil War in the next 5 years. 

Careful what you call them, the 125mm apathetic ones in the middle...may be the ones who save the country.  

Now of the 63mm who voted for him last time.  I've still yet to see really good polling breakdown of who they are and how they might behave in 2020.  How many were straight ticket voters who would have voted 'R', no matter who was at the top of the ticket?  How many came out just to vote for Trump regardless of the rest of the ballot?  How many were GOP loyalists who didn't like Trump but held their nose to defeat Hillary?  And how many were moderates, who peppered in some 'R' votes, some 'D' votes, and just went with him over Clinton because she ran such a shitty campaign?  I'd like to think, and we've seen my wishful thinking this morning on full display, that the two groups that are truly MAGA loyalists...the ones who came out to vote only so they could cast a vote for him and then there's the ones that didn't like Clinton and that was part of the vote, but they really liked Trump too and were gonna vote Republican/anti-Clinton regardless, but he just made voting even more fun and was a great cherry on top.  I'd say both those factions of his 63mm total 30-40mm of his voters.  I know we want to pain the whole block of 63mm as racist idiots.  What do y'all think? 

[Biff Tannen 45500]

4 minutes ago, 4th&Five said:

,Plus!

 

Quote

Big tax increases for all, Plus!

 

Worst streaming app ever.

[tantric superman 4667]

Sorry to be lowering the bar, but my thoughts are that even though close to 50% of Americans are misguided and ill informed and wrong to support Trump, that doesn't necessarily mean that close to 50% of Americans are vile and affirmatively and personally embrace racist and other odious views.  Yes, we live in pods, and something has to be done about warped views related to those pods, but it's the damn pods, more than an internal badness.

[Brisketexan 104653]

3 minutes ago, tantric superman said:

Sorry to be lowering the bar, but my thoughts are that even though close to 50% of Americans are misguided and ill informed and wrong to support Trump, that doesn't necessarily mean that close to 50% of Americans are vile and affirmatively and personally embrace racist and other odious views.  Yes, we live in pods, and something has to be done about warped views related to those pods, but it's the damn pods, more than an internal badness.

Dude.  Embrace the suck.  Denial ain't doing you any good.

[Thrawn 538]

Of course it is completely anecdotal and pretty much pulled from my ass, though with more than a small amount of time pondering the subject.  The number you are looking for is 37%.  That is the percentage of people that are die hard magats, that I consider to be totally lost and really just a waste of water at this point.  Shitty human beings doesn't even begin to describe this bunch.

[Hookah Horns 3082]

24 minutes ago, TornACL said:

What about the rest of the country which may be unsure and anxious and needing to hear from our elected leader?

This administration is a never ending clown show. 

No, stopping antifa is the only reason to ever do an oval office address. It's a wonder there has ever been one before. 

[triplehorn 2664]

[Thrawn 538]

1 minute ago, Hookah Horns said:

No, stopping antifa is the only reason to ever do an oval office address. It's a wonder there has ever been one before. 

You forgot MS13.  If his numbers stay shitty, look for the vast hordes of MS13 crossing our borders and infiltrating protests to soon be a thing that he pushes to his base.

[WhatTheBuck 28716]

8 hours ago, Hookah Horns said:

This Soros bullshit is bizarre. Seems to me this conspiracy theory stems from the fact that he's a billionaire leftist and absolutely nothing else. Am I missing anything? Has he ever been connected to the funding of antifa or anything like it? 

He's a favorite bogeyman of the far right. Check out the antisemitic campaign being waged against him by Viktor Orban, Hungary's ethnonationalist leader. 

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-viktor-orbans-war-on-george-soros-and-hungarys-jews/

[Beantown Express 2.0 6555]

2 minutes ago, Thrawn said:

You forgot MS13.  If his numbers stay shitty, look for the vast hordes of MS13 crossing our borders and infiltrating protests to soon be a thing that he pushes to his base.

It will be caravans of ANTIFA climbing over his big beautiful wall at around the end of October or beginning of November.

[Hookah Horns 3082]

4 minutes ago, WhatTheBuck said:

He's a favorite bogeyman of the far right. Check out the antisemitic campaign being waged against him by Viktor Orban, Hungary's ethnonationalist leader. 

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-viktor-orbans-war-on-george-soros-and-hungarys-jews/

I found and read that last night after my post. Absolutely terrifying how many people parrot this hateful nonsense. 

P.S. I also came across this interesting article on how the Rs became the conspiracy theory party. 

[DigglerontheHoof 21069]

4 minutes ago, Hookah Horns said:

I found and read that last night after my post. Absolutely terrifying how many people parrot this hateful nonsense. 

P.S. I also came across this interesting article on how the Rs became the conspiracy theory party. 

Could you copy/paste this article?  Gracias. 

[Biff Tannen 45500]

8 minutes ago, Hookah Horns said:

I found and read that last night after my post. Absolutely terrifying how many people parrot this hateful nonsense. 

P.S. I also came across this interesting article on how the Rs became the conspiracy theory party. 

paywall

[Hugo Stiglitz 23362]

Spygate, Obamagate, Uranium One, Benghazi, Whitewater, antifa, email server, unmasking, release the memo, FISA abuse, Burisma, Jade Helm, pizzagate, Qanon.

Repubs have been played so hard for years on manufactured horse manure and they keep getting screwed like Biff Tannen.

[Biff Tannen 45500]

7 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Spygate, Obamagate, Uranium One, Benghazi, Whitewater, antifa, email server, unmasking, release the memo, FISA abuse, Burisma, Jade Helm, pizzagate, Qanon.

Repubs have been played so hard for years on manufactured horse manure and they keep getting screwed like Biff Tannen.

I, too, hate manure.

[TheStoicPaisano 9904]

10 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

paywall

Quote

To explain the impeachment inquiry, the GOP has promulgated a flurry of baseless conspiracy theories about the forces arrayed against President Trump. It has been surreal to hear some of the nation’s most influential elected officials spouting ideas basically concocted from thin air. The House Intelligence Committee’s ranking Republican, Devin Nunes (Calif.), denounces “Ukrainian election meddling in 2016 . . . aimed against the Trump campaign.” The Judiciary Committee’s Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) claims that if Congress could only talk to a certain three Democratic officials, then “every fact of this investigation” would be unearthed. Conservatives online hold that former White House aide Fiona Hill was a mole planted by George Soros.

Outlook • Perspective

Matthew Dallek is a professor at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management, and is author of "Defenseless Under the Night: The Roosevelt Years and the Origins of Homeland Security."  Follow @MattDallek

Of course, no one purveys these theories with as much verve as Trump. The president has suggestedthat the nation’s first African American president was born abroad (he wasn’t), that the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) had a part in JFK’s assassination (he didn’t), that Ukraine rather than Russia was responsible for election interference (it wasn’t), that the Mueller investigation empaneled by his own administration was a Democratic plot against him, that the Clintons orchestrated the prison killing of accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein (who committed suicide, according to an autopsy) and that the Obama administration spied on his campaign, a claim most recently debunked by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

It certainly appears, more than ever, that “the truth itself is on trial,” as Peter Baker recently wrote in the New York Times. Some conservatives say Trump, and Trumpism, represent a new frontier of conspiratorial politics — that the theories are unique to Trump’s sensibility and peculiar to his paranoid White House. “Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication,” former president George W. Bush said in a 2017 speech. The “main problem” behind the proliferation of political conspiracy theories “is a president who is also a self-invented fabulist,” argued Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson.

But in truth, the stew of “alternative facts” has been simmering for more than half a century on the right fringe. The GOP had endless opportunities across the decades to banish these theories — about scheming bureaucrats, Jews, the Federal Reserve, the United Nations — and its leaders often saw them as absurd. But they were also useful, helping to rally support from an aggrieved government-hating base. So the party’s mandarins allowed them to fester and grow until they spread from the toxic fringe to the mainstream, which they have finally overtaken. It’s no wonder someone who embraced those ideas would become successful; Trump validates notions that his voters have long believed, ideas that the party refused to condemn and failed to repudiate.

Trump, then, isn’t what caused these conspiracy theories. He’s what happens when nobody stands in their way.

The intellectual life of the American right since Sen. Joe McCarthy’s rise to prominence in 1950 can be seen partially as a series of flirtations with conspiracists and a dedicated reluctance to read fringe crackpots out of its ranks. Yes, William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review attacked John Birch Society founder Robert Welch, who called Dwight Eisenhower a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy,” in an iconic moment of movement history.

But conservative leaders more typically embraced the passion and support of the Birchers at the grass roots. At its 1964 national convention, the GOP rejected a plank condemning the society, along with its conspiratorial beliefs. Birchers such as John Rousselot and John Schmitz served in Congress as Republicans in good standing, while conservative oilman and family patriarch Fred Koch was a founding member of the society. Birchers took active part in Republican election campaigns and ran right-wing bookstores packed with conspiratorial treatises such as John Stormer’s “None Dare Call It Treason” (about Soviet “infiltration of American government”) and Fred Schwarz’s “You Can Trust the Communists (to Be Communists).” They served as members of local school boards and state legislatures. Other Republicans rarely spoke up to debunk the Birch view that fluoride in drinking water was part of a communist plot to cause cancer or control Americans’ minds.

At times, the wild-eyed conspiracism came from the top. Vice President Spiro Agnew delivered speeches identifying a cabal of Washington- and New York-based power brokers who supposedly controlled the news media, whipping up what journalists at the time considered a frenzy of anti-Semitism on the far right. (In 1976, a few years after he’d been indicted on bribery and other charges, Agnew published a novel pushing the anti-Semitic trope that the media’s “Zionist lobby” was controlling America’s foreign policy in the Middle East.)

At other times, understanding that they had to court the conspiracy-minded activists of “the base,” the party’s leaders went out of their way to confer legitimacy on extremists. Take the GOP’s relationship with Christian Coalition leader Pat Robertson, who won four states in the 1988 Republican presidential primary contest. In 1991, Robertson published “The New World Order,” holding that scheming government pooh-bahs were working to set up “world government, a world police force, world courts, world banking and currency, and a world elite in charge of it all.” He even suggested that President George H.W. Bush was complicit in establishing this new world order. Still, Republicans wanted votes and donations from Robertson’s acolytes, so Newt Gingrich, Oliver North, William Bennett, Jack Kemp, Jesse Helms and Dinesh D’Souza all happily spoke at his “Road to Victory” conferences. Sen. Bob Dole, a pillar of the Republican establishment and at the time a presidential candidate, told Robertson’s followers in 1995 that “I am proud to stand up here and say that I’ve been awarded a 100 percent voting record in ’93 and 100 percent in 1994 and 100 percent in 1995” from the Christian Coalition.

During the Clinton years, the crackpot theorizing became harder and harder to distinguish from the Republican Party itself. Conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife sent investigators to Arkansas to dig up dirt on the president’s past, and when they failed, they settled for salacious fabrications that Bill Clinton was part of a drug-smuggling ring. Scaife became what The Washington Post called “a guiding force” behind Gingrich’s Contract With America and a later generation of tea party activists. The Rev. Jerry Falwell, a leader of the religious right (his son is a big Trump supporter), started selling a $43 videotape that, among other charges, said Clinton was responsible for the deaths of “countless people.”

Of course, Republican leaders didn’t always or uniformly tolerate gonzo conspiracy theories. Presidential nominee John McCain, for instance, contradicted one of his supporters at a 2008 campaign event, telling her that Barack Obama was not, in fact, “an Arab.” Onetime senator and 1996 presidential hopeful Arlen Specter (Pa.) also stuck up for the truth when he assailed two leading GOP conspiracy theorists, Robertson and Pat Buchanan, as leaders of the “intolerant right.”

Yet over the past seven decades, such voices — pro-fact, pro-science and pro-reason — lost the internal debate over how to treat the tinfoil-hat folks. And such moments of truth-telling by Republicans at all levels have been fleeting and rare.

While the GOP was actively courting allies who propagated conspiracy theories, the Democratic Party took much the opposite tack — mostly rejecting the outlandish left-wing theories that surfaced from time to time. Although some research has found a recent uptick in Democratic support for conspiracy theories (a jump caused by a lack of political power), elected Democrats have typically fenced their party off from wild-eyed claims promulgated on the left. They never embraced the theory that the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job” carried out by the Bush administration, for example. During the 2004 presidential primary race, even the most lefty antiwar candidates — Dennis Kucinich, Howard Dean, Carol Moseley Braun — largely eschewed conspiracy theories that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had gone to war for oil or to enrich their friends in the construction business. The left has its share of anti-vaxxers who believe that vaccines cause autism, yet Democratic officials have battled that lie (which Trump himself has promoted).

One reason is that Democrats have been reluctant to use anti-government theories to tear down the things they would prefer to burnish, such as government and international institutions that they believe work for social justice and economic progress. Republicans’ conspiracy theories about powerful secret actors are consistent with their small-government views; it is a shorter leap for conservatives to portray Washington as a swamp where individualism, justice and decency go to die.

Thanks to years of GOP tolerance for surreal thinking on the right, conspiracy theories have moved from the fringe to the center. One poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University foundthat 63 percent of registered voters subscribe to at least one such theory. Some social science research suggests that people who feel alienated from politics are more prone to thinking conspiratorially. Trump capitalized on that climate of suspicion.

It’s easy to see the line from older conspiracy theories to the fact-free claims by Trump supporters today. White House adviser Stephen Miller has drawn anti-immigration rhetoric from white-nationalist publications like the 1973 French novel “The Camp of the Saints,” which envisions hordes of immigrants obliterating Western civilization. Breitbart News has featured anti-immigrant, anti-gay and anti-blacktheories that could have been found in an earlier generation of far-right publications, including American Opinion and American Mercury.

Perhaps the biggest change of the Trump era is the approach of Republican leaders. In the past, they indulged these theories but never really espoused them. Today, elective officeholders embrace them openly, in the face of explicit counterevidence from the government they purport to run. National security officials have repeatedly stressed in recent weeks that Ukraine did not meddle in the 2016 election and that those who repeat the claim are advancing pro-Russian propaganda. Yet most Republican members of Congress now seem to believe this theory, pointing to a thin report in Politico that documented no top-down, coordinated interference. Trump’s racism (calling Mexican immigrants “rapists”; telling four congresswomen of color who are all U.S. citizens to “go back” to their “crime infested” home countries) and anti-Semitism(he implies Jews are loyal primarily to Israel and motivated mostly by money) align well with old allegations that Jewish bankers and assorted globalists have enriched themselves while inflicting economic havoc on “the people,” as his closing 2016 television ad suggested.

Polarization has also made mainstream American culture hospitable to ideas once relegated to the margins. Voters have grown more tolerant of political leaders’ failings as long as they adhere to the correct ideological positions, opening a space for someone like Trump to win the presidency and then govern with the support of a minority of the electorate. And grass-roots opinion has shifted in favor of conspiracy theories, a pattern that both follows the cues of political leaders and incentivizes those leaders’ abasements. For instance, Twitter equips Trump to instantaneously air any theory, no matter how nutty, to raucous and affirming plaudits. Fox News also capitalizes on this shift to amplify Trumpian claims (“Russia didn’t hack our democracy,” Fox host Tucker Carlson recently parroted). It’s no wonder that, as Gallup foundlast February, 30 percent of Republicans see Russia in a favorable light. One recent Post survey of attitudes toward 2016 election conspiracy theories found that 26 percent of Americans believed that CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, invented a story of Russian election meddling in order to hide Ukraine’s efforts to help Hillary Clinton.

Ultimately, Trump was the logical consequence of a posture followed for decades at the top echelons of the conservative movement: The batty screeds are silly, but since they help us, we won’t work zealously to purge them. Trump’s conspiracy-based capture of the GOP has less to do with him and his perspective than with a party that sought and often won the support of people who believe those notions.

[CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misstated the year of a Fairleigh Dickinson University poll about conspiracy theories.]

@DigglerontheHoof

Edited June 1, 2020 by TheStoicPaisano

[plimon 190]

9 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

paywall

Here is the article:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/01/02/dont-blame-trump-rise-right-wing-conspiracy-theories/?arc404=true

Quote

To explain the impeachment inquiry, the GOP has promulgated a flurry of baseless conspiracy theories about the forces arrayed against President Trump. It has been surreal to hear some of the nation’s most influential elected officials spouting ideas basically concocted from thin air. The House Intelligence Committee’s ranking Republican, Devin Nunes (Calif.), denounces “Ukrainian election meddling in 2016 . . . aimed against the Trump campaign.” The Judiciary Committee’s Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) claims that if Congress could only talk to a certain three Democratic officials, then “every fact of this investigation” would be unearthed. Conservatives online hold that former White House aide Fiona Hill was a mole planted by George Soros.

Of course, no one purveys these theories with as much verve as Trump. The president has suggested that the nation’s first African American president was born abroad (he wasn’t), that the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) had a part in JFK’s assassination (he didn’t), that Ukraine rather than Russia was responsible for election interference (it wasn’t), that the Mueller investigation empaneled by his own administration was a Democratic plot against him, that the Clintons orchestrated the prison killing of accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein (who committed suicide, according to an autopsy) and that the Obama administration spied on his campaign, a claim most recently debunked by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

It certainly appears, more than ever, that “the truth itself is on trial,” as Peter Baker recently wrote in the New York Times. Some conservatives say Trump, and Trumpism, represent a new frontier of conspiratorial politics — that the theories are unique to Trump’s sensibility and peculiar to his paranoid White House. “Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication,” former president George W. Bush said in a 2017 speech. The “main problem” behind the proliferation of political conspiracy theories “is a president who is also a self-invented fabulist,” argued Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson.

But in truth, the stew of “alternative facts” has been simmering for more than half a century on the right fringe. The GOP had endless opportunities across the decades to banish these theories — about scheming bureaucrats, Jews, the Federal Reserve, the United Nations — and its leaders often saw them as absurd. But they were also useful, helping to rally support from an aggrieved government-hating base. So the party’s mandarins allowed them to fester and grow until they spread from the toxic fringe to the mainstream, which they have finally overtaken. It’s no wonder someone who embraced those ideas would become successful; Trump validates notions that his voters have long believed, ideas that the party refused to condemn and failed to repudiate.

Trump, then, isn’t what caused these conspiracy theories. He’s what happens when nobody stands in their way.

The intellectual life of the American right since Sen. Joe McCarthy’s rise to prominence in 1950 can be seen partially as a series of flirtations with conspiracists and a dedicated reluctance to read fringe crackpots out of its ranks. Yes, William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review attacked John Birch Society founder Robert Welch, who called Dwight Eisenhower a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy,” in an iconic moment of movement history.

But conservative leaders more typically embraced the passion and support of the Birchers at the grass roots. At its 1964 national convention, the GOP rejected a plank condemning the society, along with its conspiratorial beliefs. Birchers such as John Rousselot and John Schmitz served in Congress as Republicans in good standing, while conservative oilman and family patriarch Fred Koch was a founding member of the society. Birchers took active part in Republican election campaigns and ran right-wing bookstores packed with conspiratorial treatises such as John Stormer’s “None Dare Call It Treason” (about Soviet “infiltration of American government”) and Fred Schwarz’s “You Can Trust the Communists (to Be Communists).” They served as members of local school boards and state legislatures. Other Republicans rarely spoke up to debunk the Birch view that fluoride in drinking water was part of a communist plot to cause cancer or control Americans’ minds.

At times, the wild-eyed conspiracism came from the top. Vice President Spiro Agnew delivered speeches identifying a cabal of Washington- and New York-based power brokers who supposedly controlled the news media, whipping up what journalists at the time considered a frenzy of anti-Semitism on the far right. (In 1976, a few years after he’d been indicted on bribery and other charges, Agnew published a novel pushing the anti-Semitic trope that the media’s “Zionist lobby” was controlling America’s foreign policy in the Middle East.)

At other times, understanding that they had to court the conspiracy-minded activists of “the base,” the party’s leaders went out of their way to confer legitimacy on extremists. Take the GOP’s relationship with Christian Coalition leader Pat Robertson, who won four states in the 1988 Republican presidential primary contest. In 1991, Robertson published “The New World Order,” holding that scheming government pooh-bahs were working to set up “world government, a world police force, world courts, world banking and currency, and a world elite in charge of it all.” He even suggested that President George H.W. Bush was complicit in establishing this new world order. Still, Republicans wanted votes and donations from Robertson’s acolytes, so Newt Gingrich, Oliver North, William Bennett, Jack Kemp, Jesse Helms and Dinesh D’Souza all happily spoke at his “Road to Victory” conferences. Sen. Bob Dole, a pillar of the Republican establishment and at the time a presidential candidate, told Robertson’s followers in 1995 that “I am proud to stand up here and say that I’ve been awarded a 100 percent voting record in ’93 and 100 percent in 1994 and 100 percent in 1995” from the Christian Coalition.

During the Clinton years, the crackpot theorizing became harder and harder to distinguish from the Republican Party itself. Conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife sent investigators to Arkansas to dig up dirt on the president’s past, and when they failed, they settled for salacious fabrications that Bill Clinton was part of a drug-smuggling ring. Scaife became what The Washington Post called “a guiding force” behind Gingrich’s Contract With America and a later generation of tea party activists. The Rev. Jerry Falwell, a leader of the religious right (his son is a big Trump supporter), started selling a $43 videotape that, among other charges, said Clinton was responsible for the deaths of “countless people.”

Of course, Republican leaders didn’t always or uniformly tolerate gonzo conspiracy theories. Presidential nominee John McCain, for instance, contradicted one of his supporters at a 2008 campaign event, telling her that Barack Obama was not, in fact, “an Arab.” Onetime senator and 1996 presidential hopeful Arlen Specter (Pa.) also stuck up for the truth when he assailed two leading GOP conspiracy theorists, Robertson and Pat Buchanan, as leaders of the “intolerant right.”

Yet over the past seven decades, such voices — pro-fact, pro-science and pro-reason — lost the internal debate over how to treat the tinfoil-hat folks. And such moments of truth-telling by Republicans at all levels have been fleeting and rare.

While the GOP was actively courting allies who propagated conspiracy theories, the Democratic Party took much the opposite tack — mostly rejecting the outlandish left-wing theories that surfaced from time to time. Although some research has found a recent uptick in Democratic support for conspiracy theories (a jump caused by a lack of political power), elected Democrats have typically fenced their party off from wild-eyed claims promulgated on the left. They never embraced the theory that the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job” carried out by the Bush administration, for example. During the 2004 presidential primary race, even the most lefty antiwar candidates — Dennis Kucinich, Howard Dean, Carol Moseley Braun — largely eschewed conspiracy theories that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had gone to war for oil or to enrich their friends in the construction business. The left has its share of anti-vaxxers who believe that vaccines cause autism, yet Democratic officials have battled that lie (which Trump himself has promoted).

One reason is that Democrats have been reluctant to use anti-government theories to tear down the things they would prefer to burnish, such as government and international institutions that they believe work for social justice and economic progress. Republicans’ conspiracy theories about powerful secret actors are consistent with their small-government views; it is a shorter leap for conservatives to portray Washington as a swamp where individualism, justice and decency go to die.

Thanks to years of GOP tolerance for surreal thinking on the right, conspiracy theories have moved from the fringe to the center. One poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University found that 63 percent of registered voters subscribe to at least one such theory. Some social science research suggests that people who feel alienated from politics are more prone to thinking conspiratorially. Trump capitalized on that climate of suspicion.

It’s easy to see the line from older conspiracy theories to the fact-free claims by Trump supporters today. White House adviser Stephen Miller has drawn anti-immigration rhetoric from white-nationalist publications like the 1973 French novel “The Camp of the Saints,” which envisions hordes of immigrants obliterating Western civilization. Breitbart News has featured anti-immigrant, anti-gay and anti-black theories that could have been found in an earlier generation of far-right publications, including American Opinion and American Mercury.

Perhaps the biggest change of the Trump era is the approach of Republican leaders. In the past, they indulged these theories but never really espoused them. Today, elective officeholders embrace them openly, in the face of explicit counterevidence from the government they purport to run. National security officials have repeatedly stressed in recent weeks that Ukraine did not meddle in the 2016 election and that those who repeat the claim are advancing pro-Russian propaganda. Yet most Republican members of Congress now seem to believe this theory, pointing to a thin report in Politico that documented no top-down, coordinated interference. Trump’s racism (calling Mexican immigrants “rapists”; telling four congresswomen of color who are all U.S. citizens to “go back” to their “crime infested” home countries) and anti-Semitism (he implies Jews are loyal primarily to Israel and motivated mostly by money) align well with old allegations that Jewish bankers and assorted globalists have enriched themselves while inflicting economic havoc on “the people,” as his closing 2016 television ad suggested.

Polarization has also made mainstream American culture hospitable to ideas once relegated to the margins. Voters have grown more tolerant of political leaders’ failings as long as they adhere to the correct ideological positions, opening a space for someone like Trump to win the presidency and then govern with the support of a minority of the electorate. And grass-roots opinion has shifted in favor of conspiracy theories, a pattern that both follows the cues of political leaders and incentivizes those leaders’ abasements. For instance, Twitter equips Trump to instantaneously air any theory, no matter how nutty, to raucous and affirming plaudits. Fox News also capitalizes on this shift to amplify Trumpian claims (“Russia didn’t hack our democracy,” Fox host Tucker Carlson recently parroted). It’s no wonder that, as Gallup found last February, 30 percent of Republicans see Russia in a favorable light. One recent Post survey of attitudes toward 2016 election conspiracy theories found that 26 percent of Americans believed that CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, invented a story of Russian election meddling in order to hide Ukraine’s efforts to help Hillary Clinton.

Ultimately, Trump was the logical consequence of a posture followed for decades at the top echelons of the conservative movement: The batty screeds are silly, but since they help us, we won’t work zealously to purge them. Trump’s conspiracy-based capture of the GOP has less to do with him and his perspective than with a party that sought and often won the support of people who believe those notions.

 

[Jive Turkey 12568]

2 hours ago, Horn Under a Bad Sign said:

American cities burned last night. Trump's first tweet of the day is to tweet something Brian Kilmeade said on Fox this morning.  Of course, he can't even spell "supremacist."
 

 

"We have the Supremest Court.  So Supreme.  More supreme than under Obama.  They were weak.  Some say its the most Supremest Court in the history of the country.  I did that."

[Kel Varnsen 8430]

18 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

I, too, hate manure.

Horse manure's not that bad. I don't even mind the word 'manure.' You know, it's, it's 'newer,' which is good. And a 'ma' in front of it. MA-NURE. When you consider the other choices, 'manure' is actually pretty refreshing.

[Guest Lobo]

It makes sense Trump would tweet "White Supremes" considering that's what he makes Ivanka call him during BDSM.  

Plus, isn't that what Trump is, a "Supreme"...the Taco Bell President?  Just the same sack of shit piled into a crappy tortilla, and dressed up with tomato, sour cream, and cheese to avoid thinking about the real core of the item being devoid of taste and integrity?  

[Pancho 44492]

So the WH is reaching out to Black leaders for a "listening session."   What are the odds it will be Diamond & Silk and Tim Scott?

[WhatTheBuck 28716]

37 minutes ago, Hookah Horns said:

P.S. I also came across this interesting article on how the Rs became the conspiracy theory party. 

"The Rev. Jerry Falwell, a leader of the religious right (his son is a big Trump supporter), started selling a $43 videotape that, among other charges, said Clinton was responsible for the deaths of 'countless people.'"

The Clinton Chronicles. My uncle had a copy. I rember going home one Thanksgiving and watching in horror as my whole family sat glued to the television and gobbled that shit up. You can watch it on YouTube if you're so inclined. 

 

[RPM 26231]

16 minutes ago, Jive Turkey said:

"We have the Supremest Court.  So Supreme.  More supreme than under Obama.  They were weak.  Some say its the most Supremest Court in the history of the country.  I did that."

I'm not much of a praying man, but I'm calling in a big one for RBG.

[Lagunamadre 1975]

6 minutes ago, Pancho said:

So the WH is reaching out to Black leaders for a "listening session."   What are the odds it will be Diamond & Silk and Tim Scott?

Ben Carson will be there and will fall asleep. 

[Jive Turkey 12568]

3 minutes ago, RPM said:

I'm not much of a praying man, but I'm calling in a big one for RBG.

the same people who have remained silent about George Floyd's death, and who have been complaining about the protesters, will be cheering for joy if RBG dies during Trump's term.  they won't be able to hide their glee.

[mdmost 42866]

7 minutes ago, Pancho said:

So the WH is reaching out to Black leaders for a "listening session."   What are the odds it will be Diamond & Silk and Tim Scott?

He'll probably listen about as much as he listened to George Floyd's brother the other day. 

[Ths71 472]

American cities burned last night. Trump's first tweet of the day is to tweet something Brian Kilmeade said on Fox this morning.  Of course, he can't even spell "supremacist."
 
 

Well, maybe there was at least some indication.....
Department of Safety Commissioner John Harrington said they are contact-tracing the arrested and added that an investigation is underway about white nationalist groups posting online to encourage their members to use the protests as a cover to create chaos.

He said some of the 40 arrests made in the Twin Cities Friday night were of people linked to white supremacist groups and organized crime.

https://www.courthousenews.com/minnesota-officials-link-arrested-looters-to-white-supremacist-groups/


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[mdmost 42866]

Yet again, running laps around Bunker Boy

 

[HenryJames 65890]

[4th&Five 41461]

He’s a wannabe dictator. Republicans love him for it. 

[mdmost 42866]

Nope, not an authoritarian at all. He really learned his lesson, Susan Collins. 

[Bruh Man 3160]

He is letting shit burn in hopes that the images from the protests scare enough white people to vote for him. Let's see if it works but that's 100% the strategy. 

[Message Board User 12389]

Cool as a cumcumber in a crisis.

[Pancho 44492]

1 minute ago, Bruh Man said:

He is letting shit burn in hopes that the images from the protests scare enough white people to vote for him. Let's see if it works but that's 100% the strategy. 

Pretty clear this is the strategy. 

[Red Five 40667]

I don't understand that strategy. It's like Herman intentionally losing football games. "You want to lose like this, but even more? Then you better not fire me."

[Grandioso 2592]

I was reading an article in Russia Today about a proposed bill that would give a 10 year sentence for encouraging minors to protest. 

[Underdog 28457]

2 hours ago, mdmost said:

Translation: he really doesn't give a shit about calming things when he can use the boogeyman, Antifa, to chum up the waters for the morons who follow him. Never has a President more abdicated their duty in a time of crisis than this chuckle fuck. 

Plus, with all of this going on his hooligans in the administration can continue to fleece/loot America like they’ve done his whole time in office. 

[4th&Five 41461]

“I alone can fix it.”

[Dirk X West 772]

How do you address long standing and widely held concerns about police brutality?  Use the police and military to beat the the American populace into submission.  Makes total sense.

Edited June 1, 2020 by Dirk X West

[Biff Tannen 45500]

Just now, Dirk X West said:

How do address long standing and widely held concerns about police brutality?  Use the police and military to beat the the American populace into submission.  Makes total sense.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.