A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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What J. D. Vance Once Knew
Ten years ago, the vice president wrote that one day, voters would realize the truth about Donald Trump. That day has now arrived.
By Peter Wehner | Jul 4, 2026
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/jd-vance-trump-independence-
day/687779/
TEN YEARS AGO TODAY, in the middle of the presidential campaign, an essay in The Atlantic set out to explain the appeal of Donald Trump. Its author traced that appeal to the social decline and cultural trauma he had known firsthand, in an impoverished childhood. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/opioid-of-the-mas
ses/489911/
The author, J. D. Vance, had only days earlier published Hillbilly Elegy, which went on to sell roughly 3 million copies and made him, almost overnight, the country’s designated interpreter of working-class grievances. And he was quite good at it.
In the July 4, 2016, essay, Vance described the places from which the pain came—factories that downsized or ceased to exist, along with the jobs they had provided; the aesthetic decline in once beautiful and vibrant towns; families that were shattering or never forming in the first place; and anger and frustration with a government that had broken the trust with the people it was meant to serve. “During this election season,” Vance wrote, “it appears that many Americans have reached for a new pain reliever.” His name was Donald Trump.
In the midst of a social crisis, Vance observed, Trump offered “an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution.” But, he argued, such promises were a cheap high. “He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.”
“Trump is cultural heroin,” Vance wrote. “He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.”
“One day” is today.
THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY, while still quite dangerous, is also collapsing, cracking under the weight of its own choices. The main driver is the economy, which he sold as his strong point. We’re seeing tariff-driven price increases, gas prices that spiked from less than $3 to more than $4 a gallon during a 100-day war against Iran that America lost, wages failing to keep pace with the cost of living, and inflation ticking back up. Manufacturing jobs, which Trump promised to bring roaring back, are still being lost. Health care has gotten much more expensive on his watch, and millions have lost coverage.
At the top of the nation’s health agencies sits Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who in a single year moved to cut the list of recommended childhood vaccines nearly in half, fired the government’s vaccine advisers and replaced them with skeptics, and presided over the worst measles outbreak in 30 years. The National Institutes of Health, the crown jewel of American biomedical science, has seen billions in research cut, clinical trials canceled, and labs closed, resulting in a “brain drain” that rival nations are racing to exploit. And the dismantling of USAID, along with the gutting of PEPFAR—the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the bipartisan AIDS-relief program credited with saving more than 25 million lives—has, by credible estimates, already cost the lives of hundreds of thousands, most of them children, with projections of as many as 14 million more by 2030 if the cuts hold.
Americans are deeply divided and intensely polarized, with pessimism at or near a multidecade high. Faith in nearly every major institution—government, the press, universities, religious leaders—sits at or near the bottom of the modern record.
It’s no surprise, then, that Trump’s approval rating is anemic. (In one recent poll, it’s down to 30 percent.) His remaining support is soft, while the unhappiness with him is intense. Republican members of Congress are beginning to break with him. His MAGA base is fracturing. Former stalwart supporters, such as Tucker Carlson, are openly mocking the president. (“Shut up, bitch! I don’t take you seriou
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The Judeo-Bolshevist Target
Popular memory in the West tends to separate the Holocaust from the German war against the Soviet Union, but for the Nazi regime they were two faces of the same undertaking.
By Omer Bartov | July 23, 2026 issue
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/07/23/the-judeo-bolshevist-targe
t-jochen-hellbeck/
Reviewed:
World Enemy No. 1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews
by Jochen Hellbeck
Penguin Press, 536 pp., $35.00
Free download of Jochen Hellbeck's books from https://z-lib.sk/s/Jochen%20Hellbeck
Sometime in early 1983, toward the end of my time as a graduate student at Oxford University, I met with the military historian Michael Howard, who had served as an officer during World War II and fought in the Italian campaign. As I followed this distinguished, rather reserved scholar toward the entrance of All Souls College, where he was a fellow, he sensed my unease at walking across the immaculate lawn. Grinning discreetly, he muttered, “They’d shoot you were you to do this on your own.”
By then Howard had already read much of my Ph.D. thesis on the war crimes committed by the Wehrmacht (the German armed forces) against Red Army troops and Soviet civilians, for which I had used German army documents to demonstrate that regular combat units—influenced by a combination of intense indoctrination, orders from the high command, brutal discipline, and fierce fighting at the front—had killed civilians and prisoners of war on an unprecedented scale. The number of crimes I described, he told me, had astonished him.
Howard explained that for much of the Italian campaign his battalion had fought against the same German unit. When they captured one of the German officers, they invited him to the mess and shared a glass of cognac before sending him to a POW camp. They expected the same treatment from the Germans.
I was taken aback that Howard, one of the preeminent military historians of his time, was surprised to learn of the atrocities on the Eastern Front. But at that point few scholars in the United Kingdom or the United States seemed to understand that in Europe World War II had been conducted as two very different wars. In Western Europe the fighting was quite conventional, despite its frequent ferocity. The war in Eastern Europe, by contrast, was precisely what Adolf Hitler ordered his generals to carry out: a Vernichtungskrieg, or war of annihilation, against subhuman enemies to be exterminated or enslaved.
During the war Americans and Europeans paid close attention to the daily news that documented the fighting on the Eastern Front—and for good reason. For much of the war, most of the German military was fighting in the East, which is also where it sustained its greatest defeats and most of its casualties. It is hard to imagine that the Western Allies could have freed Europe from Hitler and his collaborators without the Red Army’s relentless drive to Berlin, which came at great cost: the Soviet military lost as many as 11 million men and women.
But no sooner had the fighting come to an end than competing national memories of the Eastern Front started to take shape. In the Soviet Union the war became a foundational event binding together a vast and complex society. The collective memory of the war continues to play this role to this day: official commemoration emphasized the sacrifice and heroism of everyday Soviet citizens for freedom around the world. As the cold war began, however, the British and the Americans came to see the Soviet Union as essentially the equivalent of Nazi Germany—one totalitarian regime that replaced another. By the early 1950s the war was increasingly recalled as a struggle against tyranny by the forces of democracy, and America’s “unholy alliance” with the USSR—now a bitter adversary—as a necessary evil.
Most popular accounts of the war in America fixated on those fronts where the US Army had been engaged; the war in the East, where the bulk of the Wehrmacht was destroyed, drew relatively little attention. The titles
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Liberals Don't Understand Conservatives & It's Why They Can't Fight Back
Conservatives aren't hypocrites, you just don't understand their views.
Ben Wheeler
Jun 25, 2026
https://benwheeler.substack.com/p/liberals-dont-understand-conservativ
es
A lot can be said of the past year and a half of Trump’s second term, but one thing that seems to be ringing off the inside of my skull as of late is the degree to which American Liberals completely misunderstand their conservative peers.
A lot has happened that should have triggered a crisis of conscience on the political right such as masked men grabbing people off the street, attempts by the government to strip LGBTQ+ Americans of their guns, widespread domestic surveillance of liberals, and the mass pardoning of the January 6th insurrectionists. The liberal response has been to call conservatives hypocrites and blind sheep, and while I don’t inherently disagree with that characterization, I do think it comes from a place of complete misunderstanding.
There is, from the outside looking in, an inherent contradiction in American conservative ideology, and it’s most obvious with their two most popular slogans being “Don’t Tread On Me” and “Back the Blue”. It is true that police are members of our communities and families, but they are also agents of the state. The police enforce the laws and orders of the government, and they are - more than any other part of government - the most likely to tread on you. So how can it be that conservatives can believe both of these and not feel embarrassed by the contradiction? How can conservatives believe in law and order while also supporting a President who is objectively the biggest crook to ever reach the White House?
In short, there is no contradiction to be embarrassed by, because these principles were never symmetric to them. Frank Wilhoit wrote that the backbone of conservatism is that “there must be in-groups the law protects but does not bind, and out-groups the law binds but does not protect”. Why must there be in-groups and out-groups in the conservative view though? Conservatism at its core is about believing in a strict hierarchical society. Corey Robin wrote in The Reactionary Mind that conservatism across two centuries is fundamentally the defense of established hierarchy against threats from below. Rather than a philosophy of liberty or tradition, the right is actually a reactionary movement defending power, privilege, and inequality.
This can be best understood by looking at our own history. The loyalists, the enslavers, and the segregationists in American history were conservatives. The loyalists would have maintained their power and status had the colonists not revolted against the crown. The enslavers and then later the segregationists were defending their power and privilege by continuing the subjugation of an entire race for 200 years. The same political sect that supports ICE grabbing random people off the street, also supported slave catchers. The law bound Black Americans while offering them no protection whatsoever. The law also protected White Americans but did not bind them when they waged violence on Black Americans. . . .
. . . The police do not exist to enforce abstract, neutral statutes; they exist to maintain the boundary line between the protected rulers and the bound subjects. Therefore, a conservative feels no shame when the state targets marginalized groups, liberals, or immigrants, because the law is performing its proper, asymmetrical function: binding the out-group while offering them no protection. This also explains why Trump’s overt criminality does not alienate his base, but rather reinforces his appeal as the ultimate patriarch. The ruler is completely above human law and answerable only to God or the preservation of the hierarchy itself. To his followers, Trump is not a crook breaking the law; he is an absolute sovereign exercising his natural prerogative to protect the in-group and punish the out-group. He is the modern embodiment of the monarch who
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Wow dude.
You managed to find an even bigger faggot than Kevin Drum.
Congrats.
ETA:
Whattya know though...
Not unlike Kevin Drum was, Ben here is also a fat sack of shit.
Was expecting black plastic frame glasses too though. Disappointed.
Hey, Ben.
Democrats ARE hypocrites, on every single issue under the sun.
Until you figure that out and/or admit it, your party is dead.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:The Founding Fathers didn't like what they saw when their revolution was taken over by evil men like Trump, who was voted into office by complete assholes like 6ixStringJoker and the Trumptards, the kind of people who cannot tell the difference between good and evil, the kind who would be #RootinForPutin.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Hey, Ben.
Democrats ARE hypocrites, on every single issue under the sun.
Until you figure that out and/or admit it, your party is dead.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
A Natural Aristocracy Among Men
Posted on Monday, Jul 13, 2026 6:00AM by Michael Liss
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/07/a-natural-aristocracy-am
ong-men.html
In the end, they were, like so many other citizens of this exasperating if often great and good land, men of impulse, of passion, of ambition and of regrets. Washington himself, a demigod in his lifetime, still left office soured by the partisan sniping, some of which was directed at him. Franklin, the twinkle-eyed inventor, patriot, diplomat, and elder statesman, one of the great figures of the 18th century, felt aggrieved over some attitude of Congress that he felt did not appreciate his point of view. John Adams, unceremoniously shown the door by the electorate in 1800, remained an outsider for the rest of his long life, periodically railing at the uncouth, the undemocratic, the unmeritocratic, and the uneducated. James Madison watched the beautiful Swiss-watch-like mechanism of his Constitution challenged by the reality of it being used by men who very often had little more than personal and tribal advancement in mind. And, of course, there’s Jefferson.
In Gordon S. Wood’s telling in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1993 book, The Radicalism Of the American Revolution, this result was entirely rational. “A new generation of democratic Americans was no longer interested in the revolutionaries’ dream of building a classical republic of elitist virtue out of the inherited materials of the old world.”
Download the book for free at https://annas-archive.gl/search?q=The+Radicalism+Of+the+American+Revol
ution
or
https://z-lib.gl/s/The%20Radicalism%20Of%20the%20American%20Revolution
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Wow dude.
You managed to find an even bigger faggot than Kevin Drum.
Congrats.
ETA:
Whattya know though...
Not unlike Kevin Drum was, Ben here is also a fat sack of shit.
Was expecting black plastic frame glasses too though. Disappointed.
Hey, Ben.
Democrats ARE hypocrites, on every single issue under the sun.
Until you figure that out and/or admit it, your party is dead.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Thanks for the bump jack
T
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Thanks for the bump jack
T
Oh. I missed this one.
You haven't been a part of this conversation since April, retard.
Go bounce, faggot.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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US at 'turning point' in Trump’s imperial project: top historian
Opinion by Nick Hilden
Jul 20
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/us-at-turning-point-in-trump-s-
imperial-project-top-historian/ar-AA28jETt
A leading historian says the United States has reached a “turning point” due to President Donald Trump’s authoritarian project, and that it could determine the future integrity of the country, both in terms of its reputation and its existence as a state.
This is according to renowned historian Timothy Snyder, whose scholarly work has focused on authoritarian regimes in Russia and Germany. While appearing on the podcast of researcher Robinson Erhardt, Snyder discussed how democracies collapse and historical parallels to the U.S. under Trump. His assessment was not optimistic.
“The fact that the U.S. exists and is celebrating 250 years doesn't mean that it'll exist in 5 years or 10 years or 15 years — states have a beginning and they have an end,” he said. “I think that the Trump people are much more likely to wreck the U.S. as an entity than they are to succeed in generating some kind of homogeneous tyranny from the Pacific to the Atlantic.”
While he ultimately thinks it will fail to materialize, Snyder said one corollary came to mind in terms of the type of state the U.S. is moving toward under Trump, explaining, “Many of the things that have happened in the United States happened first in Russia. And many of the clues of what post-modern tyranny or fascism will look like, you can get first from observing Russia.” He provided several examples of these “clues,” from Russia’s reliance on hydrocarbons for fuel and economic generation, the centralization of media and the destruction of local reporting, and how social media can be wielded to promote “authoritarian politics” — all trends he suggests are being repeated in the U.S.
Rather than transforming into a stable autocracy, however, Snyder thinks the U.S. is headed toward outright decline.
“As far as general historical moments,” he said, “I think we're at an imperial turning point.” He nodded to past examples when people took the existing “imperial order for granted,” saying, “The question is, how do you react when it breaks up? How do we deal with it when we no longer exercise the same kind of power that we used to? Are we able to exercise power in new ways? Or do we choose to fall upon one another?”
Snyder suggests that the future of the country may be less a matter of resisting tyranny than a “rebuilding paradigm” in which the country must recover from the damage done by Trump, both domestically and in terms of its international relations as well. As the U.S. deals with the negative aspects of its heritage, Snyder questions, “Do we choose to focus on how we were always right…and thereby lose any sort of possibility for building a post-imperial kind of state? Or do we instead continue a conversation inside the United States which allows us to present ourselves as a credible power outside the United States?”
Related Articles:
• Watch: Trump Acts More Like a Russian than an American, Says Yale Historian on Maher Show
https://www.alternet.org/2017/03/watch-trump-acts-more-russian-america
n-says-yale-historian-maher-show/
• Top historian says Trump is committing 'superpower suicide'
https://www.alternet.org/superpower-trump/
• Trump joins the ranks of authoritarian 'superlosers:' top historian
https://www.alternet.org/msn-uk/trump-loser-2676932023/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Look at you faggots freak out.
Your entire world fell apart.
So sad.
Everybody hates you. All of you. 
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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