Real World Event Discussions

Elections; 2024

POSTED BY: THG
UPDATED: Friday, November 21, 2025 00:12
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PAGE 13 of 514

Tuesday, February 28, 2023 3:55 PM

Gov. Ron DeSantis Oversaw Torture In Guantánamo As A Military Lawyer

A new interview with former Guantánamo detainee Mansoor Adayfi reveals shocking details about DeSantis’s past.
https://therealnews.com/gov-ron-desantis-oversaw-torture-in-guantanamo
-as-a-military-lawyer


On the issue of torture — Trump’s view may not be much different from DeSantis’s.

Ron DeSantis's Military Secrets: Torture & War Crimes



Donald Trump: Torture works



The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, March 1, 2023 9:14 PM

Donald Trump is mentioned in Chapter 10 "Believe in truth"
from On Tyranny _ Twenty lessons from the twentieth century (2017) by Timothy Snyder

You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual—and thus the collapse of any political system that depends upon individualism. As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed.

The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The president does this at a high rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78 percent of his factual claims were false. This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction. Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld.

The second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable. The systematic use of nicknames such as “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary” displaced certain character traits that might more appropriately have been affixed to the president himself. Yet through blunt repetition over Twitter, our president managed the transformation of individuals into stereotypes that people then spoke aloud. At rallies, the repeated chants of “Build that wall” and “Lock her up” did not describe anything that the president had specific plans to do, but their very grandiosity established a connection between him and his audience.

The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. The president’s campaign involved the promises of cutting taxes for everyone, eliminating the national debt, and increasing spending on both social policy and national defense. These promises mutually contradict. It is as if a farmer said he were taking an egg from the henhouse, boiling it whole and serving it to his wife, and also poaching it and serving it to his children, and then returning it to the hen unbroken, and then watching as the chick hatches.

Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason. Klemperer’s descriptions of losing friends in Germany in 1933 over the issue of magical thinking ring eerily true today. One of his former students implored him to “abandon yourself to your feelings, and you must always focus on the Führer’s greatness, rather than on the discomfort you are feeling at present.” Twelve years later, after all the atrocities, and at the end of a war that Germany had clearly lost, an amputated soldier told Klemperer that Hitler “has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler.”

The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims the president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your voice.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer.”

Download for free Timothy Snyder's books from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.bio/search.php?req=Timothy+Snyder

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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THG
Wednesday, March 1, 2023 11:43 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by second:

Banning ideas and authors is not a ‘culture war’ – it’s fascism






Totally

T

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THG
Wednesday, March 1, 2023 11:46 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by second:

You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.





Again, totally.

T

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Thursday, March 2, 2023 7:46 PM

Trump says he won’t cut Medicare or Social Security. Don’t believe him.
Trump has made similar promises in the past. They were lies.

Some Republican lawmakers who have long favored cuts are openly frustrated by Trump’s positioning: “It got him elected the first time, and I think it will get him elected the second time,” Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa told Politico. “But it doesn’t do anything for our children and grandchildren that aren’t going to have a program that I’m enjoying right now.”

We’ve seen this gambit before. In his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly pledged that he wouldn’t cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. It was a sharp break from GOP orthodoxy, and it got him a great deal of attention. As a right-wing nationalist, Trump wasn’t ideologically drawn toward the old Republican establishment’s emphasis on “fiscal responsibility” and gutting government services; his chief economic concerns were tied to trade, manufacturing and immigration. He also knew that entitlement programs — especially Social Security and Medicare — are popular across the country and supported by huge swaths of the Republican base and that past attempts to “reform” them with cuts have failed because of their centrality to the American social safety net. It was a win-win.

But after he entered office, all of Trump's White House budget proposals included cuts to Medicare and Social Security. The health care legislation he worked on with Republicans entailed big cuts to Medicaid. Not cutting Social Security and Medicare was only an election gimmick.

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-lying-medicare-socia
l-security-cuts-rcna72884


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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THG
Thursday, March 2, 2023 8:09 PM

Trump will be indicted before the general election. Even if by a miracle he is not. The voters will be constantly reminded of what he wanted to do to Medicare and Social Security.

T

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THG
Thursday, March 2, 2023 8:09 PM

Trump will be indicted before the general election. Even if by a miracle he is not. The voters will be constantly reminded of what he wanted to do to Medicare and Social Security.

T

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THG
Saturday, March 4, 2023 4:29 AM

T

Steve Schmidt reveals who he thinks could be the next great American President




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Saturday, March 4, 2023 5:05 AM

Trump will be fine.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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THG
Saturday, March 4, 2023 8:07 PM

The Republicans are eating their own at CPAC. Too funny...

T



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