Elections; 2024
POSTED BY: THG
UPDATED: Friday, November 21, 2025 00:12
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
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Just as appropriate would be a sign that said "Nikki = Irrelevant"
But then he'd also have to be wearing a shirt that said "I'm with Irrelevant".
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Just as appropriate would be a sign that said "Nikki = Irrelevant"
But then he'd also have to be wearing a shirt that said "I'm with Irrelevant".
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
Hahaha!!!!
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
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Trump’s intentions are out in the open for anyone paying attention. His statement to Hannity, that about “day one” and that “after that, I’m not a dictator,” is a bizarre response for a would-be American president. NYU Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, scholar in authoritarianism and author of the book Strongmen, had this to say:
I have studied dictators for decades and guess what they don't stop being dictators after one day
6:50 PM · Dec 6, 2023
https://twitter.com/ruthbenghiat/status/1732563236631814474
Download all Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s free books, including Strongmen from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Ruth+Ben-Ghiat
Quote:– Ruth Ben-Ghiat
“NO HISTORIAN CAN GET INSIDE the heads of the dead … But with sufficient documentation, we can detect patterns of thought and action,” writes Robert Darnton. This book aims to do just that by looking at the evolution of authoritarianism, defined as a political system in which executive power is asserted at the expense of the legislative and judicial branches of government. I focus on Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco Bahamonde, Muammar Gaddafi, Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, Mobutu Sese Seko, Silvio Berlusconi, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump, with Idi Amin, Mohamed Siad Barre, Jair Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte, Nahrendra Modi, Viktor Orbán, and others making cameo appearances.
Some readers may wonder why I do not discuss strong female leaders in modern history, such as Britain’s prime minister Margaret Thatcher or India’s prime minister Indira Gandhi. While some of these women may have had certain strongman traits (Thatcher’s nickname was “The Iron Lady”) or engaged in repressive actions against minority populations, none of them sought to destroy democracy, and so they are not addressed here.
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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A Reuters/Ipsos poll this week found that 52 percent of Republicans would not vote for him if he was in prison on Election Day.
Let's say that the relentless grind of polarization and partisanship shaves that number down to just 20 percent — this still would represent a landscape-altering disaster for the GOP. According to 2020 exit polls, self-identified Republicans were 36 percent of the more than 158 million Americans who cast a ballot in 2020, or about 57 million voters. 20 percent of that group is 11.4 million, and let's be especially charitable and assume that they just stay home. In 2020, that would have turned Biden's 4.5 point national popular vote win into a 12-point romp with an Electoral Vote total pushing 400.
If an imprisoned Trump, recently convicted of trying to illegally install himself in power as dictator, is down 12 points heading into Election Day, that could exert significant downward pressure on House and Senate candidates, handing Democrats the kind of broad-based repudiation of the GOP that they have dreamed of throughout the Trump era.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-ultimate-nightmare-scenari
o-for-trump-supporters-opinion/ar-AA1l9P9Z
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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Seven delusions plaguing the mind of the Trump base voter
By Myra Adam | 12/08/23 7:00 AM ET
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4345693-seven-delusions-plaguing-
the-mind-of-the-trump-base-voter/
When Capitol building cleaning crews were removing feces from the hallowed halls of Congress after the riot of Jan. 6, 2021, no one imagined that Donald Trump would be leading the 2024 Republican presidential primary field by a 48-point margin just three years later.
Two overarching reasons help explain this unusual circumstance.
First, his “Make America Great Again” base is immovable. Trump knew that already on Jan. 23, 2016, when at a rally in Iowa, he famously stated, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters. Okay?” This is, for example, why Trump can be so comfortable with careless conversations about the executive orders he wants to sign at the beginning of his second term, telling Sean Hannity that he would not be a dictator, “other than day one.”
Second, May poll data found that six out of ten Republicans still think the 2020 election was illegitimate. No wonder, since at his Iowa rally last Saturday, Trump repeatedly told the crowd that Democrats “rigged and stole the 2020 election.”
This delusion has poisoned Trump voters’ minds in seven distinct ways.
1. Deceptive Rationalization
Whatever Trump says or does — no matter the evidence to the contrary — loyal followers normalize, downplay, excuse, and rationalize his behaviors, speech, and legal issues. Indeed, any of dozens of instances of his controversial behavior would have doomed any traditional presidential candidate before June 2015, when he first descended the Trump Tower escalator.
No “traditional” presidential candidate could have survived two impeachments, indictments on 91 felony counts, and numerous investigations without the magic spell of deceptive rationalization. That is the superstructure reinforcing Trump’s movement.
Among my Trump-loyal friends, I often hear rationalizations such as, “I don’t like his personality, but I like his policies,” and “Our nation was stronger when he was president.”
When I ask, “What about Jan. 6, 2021?” the answer is, “That was overblown.” I say, “What about his trying to overturn the Constitution to stay in power?” The retort is, “It was justified, since the election was stolen.” Finally, I ask, “How about all his indictments?” Answer: “It is a Democrat scam to keep him from winning in 2024.”
Deceptive rationalization is the unbreakable feedback loop between Trump and his followers. Trump is perpetually the innocent victim who cannot lose or fail, and the star who always rises, vowing to undo any wrongs, improve your life, and strengthen the nation.
More at https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4345693-seven-delusions-plaguing-
the-mind-of-the-trump-base-voter/
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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Brainwashed waste of carbon. It's what you are.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Opinion | Why Fundamentalists Love Trump
By David French | Dec 7, 2023
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/opinion/donald-trump-fundamentalist
s-evangelical.html
I just finished reading Tim Alberta’s masterly new book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.” It’s a powerful and emotionally resonant account of the transformation in evangelical politics that has brought us to the current moment: A godless man, Donald Trump, may now possess more devoted support from white evangelical Christians than any other president in the history of the United States. And most worrisome of all, that support is now disproportionately concentrated among the most churchgoing segment of the Republican electorate.
One of the troubling aspects of the Trump era for me, as a churchgoing evangelical, has been watching the evolution of his support among white evangelicals. During the 2016 primaries, I took some solace in the fact that Trump’s support seemed to decline the more a voter went to church. According to the 2016 American National Election Studies Pilot Study, he received majority support from white evangelicals who seldom or never attended church, but he received barely over a third of the votes of white evangelicals who attended weekly.
As we headed into the general election, a self-justifying narrative emerged. Countless churchgoing evangelicals told friends and neighbors that Trump had been their last choice among Republicans but that they had to vote for him against Hillary Clinton as the only pro-life option remaining.
Soon enough, however, the churchgoing dynamic flipped. I noticed the change among people I knew before I saw it in the data. After Trump won, folks in the pews warmed up to him considerably, especially those who were most firmly ensconced in evangelical America. Most home-schooling families I knew became militantly pro-Trump. I watched many segments of Christian media become militantly pro-Trump. And I always noticed the same trend: the more fundamentalist the Christians, the more likely they were to be all in.
Then the data started to confirm my observations. In 2018, Paul Djupe, a Denison University professor, and Ryan Burge, a statistician and associate professor at Eastern Illinois University, reported that Republican approval for Trump was positively correlated with church attendance: The more often people went to church, the more likely they were to strongly approve of Trump. By 2020, white evangelicals who attended church monthly or more were more likely to support Trump than evangelical voters who attended rarely or not at all.
I’m certainly not arguing that all regular churchgoers are fundamentalists, but in my experience fundamentalists are virtually always regular churchgoers. To understand why they support Trump, it’s important to understand fundamentalism more broadly and to understand how Trump fits so neatly within the culture of fundamentalist Christianity.
For some readers, that might be a head-spinning idea. How on earth could a secular, twice-divorced, philandering reality television star fit in neatly with fundamentalist Christians? It makes no sense until you understand that the true distinction between fundamentalism and mainstream beliefs isn’t what fundamentalists believe but how fundamentalists believe. As Richard Land, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, once told me, “Fundamentalism is far more a psychology than a theology.” That’s why, for example, you can have competing Christian fundamentalisms, competing Muslim fundamentalisms and secular movements that possess fundamentalist characteristics.
I grew up in a church that most would describe as fundamentalist, and I’ve encountered fundamentalism of every stripe my entire life. And while fundamentalist ideas can often be quite variable and complex, I’ve never encountered a fundamentalist culture that didn’t combine three key traits: certainty, ferocity and solidarity.
Certainty is the key building bloc
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Opinion | Why Fundamentalists Love Trump
Opinion. On NYT of all places. 'Nuff said.
Don't show that article to Ted. He's always the guy posting articles about how fundamentalist Christians have turned their back on Trump.
You might make his poor little head explode.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Trump doubles down on ‘dictator’ desire
By Eugene Daniels, Ryan Lizza and Rachael Bade | 12/10/2023 11:32 AM EST
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2023/12/10/trump-doubles
-down-on-dictator-desire-00130973
At an event last night sponsored by the New York Young Republican Club, DONALD TRUMP unsurprisingly defended his comments at a Fox News town hall this week during which he said that if reelected, he would be a “dictator” — but only on Day One.
“I said I want to be a dictator for one day,” Trump told the MAGA faithful at Cipriani in Manhattan. “You know why I wanted to be a dictator? Because I want a wall, and I want to drill, drill, drill.”
Trump also insinuated that if he returns to the White House, he will use the force of the federal government to come after JOE BIDEN.
“He’s opened up a Pandora’s box that will never let our country be the same,” Trump said to the supportive crowd (which, Jason Beeferman reports, included both the “chairman of an Austrian political party founded by ex-Nazis [and] the conservative Twitter star behind the anti-trans Bud Light backlash”). “I can only say to Joe: Be very careful what you wish for, but [what] you have done is a terrible thing.” Reminder: There’s no evidence that the White House had anything to do with the indictments against Trump.
To the extent there was any subtlety to that sentiment, the underlying desire was laid bare in remarks by the organization’s chair, GAVIN WAX, who spoke before Trump.
“It will be a time for retribution,” Wax said of Trump’s potential return to power.
“Gavin, that was an excellent speech,” Trump said.
When a historian wrote an essay the other day warning that the election of former President Donald J. Trump next year could lead to dictatorship, one of Mr. Trump’s allies quickly responded by calling for the historian to be sent to prison. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/30/trump-dictator-2024
-election-robert-kagan/
It almost sounds like a parody: The response to concerns about dictatorship is to prosecute the author. But Mr. Trump and his allies are not going out of their way to reassure those worried about what a new term would bring by firmly rejecting the dictatorship charge. If anything, they seem to be leaning into it.
If Mr. Trump is returned to office, people close to him have vowed to “come after” the news media, open criminal investigations into onetime aides who broke with the former president and purge the government of civil servants deemed disloyal. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/us/politics/trump-kash-patel-journa
lists.html
When critics said Mr. Trump’s language about ridding Washington of “vermin” echoed that of Adolf Hitler, the former president’s spokesman said the critics’ “sad, miserable existence will be crushed” under a new Trump administration. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/us/politics/trump-vermin-rhetoric-f
ascists.html
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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