A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 724 of 725
This sheer terror is driving Trump's 2 a.m. rage tweeting
By Thom Hartmann | July 21, 2026 5:30AM ET
https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/trump-prison/
Last week, Donald Trump essentially told us exactly what he will do this November. When reports start coming in that the Democrats are winning, he will send in the troops.
He’ll point back to last week's national address and tell the nation:
“I told you so. I warned you. They rigged the election for the Democrats and now I have to stop it.”
He’ll mobilize ICE and the National Guard’s “Rapid Reaction Force” that he’s assembled over the past six months to seize ballot boxes and crush the inevitable “insurrection” — protests in the streets against his seizing ballot boxes — by “left-wing communist radical domestic terrorists.”
He’ll declare a state of emergency, invoke his NSPM-7, and blame it on a foreign country and/or “Antifa.” He’ll declare protesting a crime, and tear gas will fill our streets.
This is easy for me to imagine: I was there in 1967 when Lyndon Johnson did nearly the same thing, although for an entirely different purpose, and I’ve worked in several countries where this very scenario had already played out.
And those same white supremacists Trump has already pardoned can also easily imagine how it should play out when he calls them out to attack protesters; they’ve been terrorizing minority communities for centuries and are very good at it.
This includes his tens of thousands of well-armed loyalist cult members who’re salivating at the idea of splitting that $1.776 billion they believe they’ll get when he seizes absolute control of the country.
As Senator Amy Klobuchar said on MSNOW:
“This is a man desperate to hold onto his power and he will do anything to keep that power.”
Would he actually be so audacious as to try that? Could he actually pull it off?
He could, he will, because he’s already tried it once.
The difference is that six years ago — the last time he tried to overturn an election he lost — his Attorney General, FBI Director, Director of National Intelligence, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, DHS Secretary, and Chief of the National Guard would all have refused such an order, so he called on thousands of violent thugs to attack the Capitol, stop the election certification, and murder the vice president.
This time, in a classically Putin-esque move, he’s replaced all of those people with lickspittles like Blanche and true believer fanatics like Miller and Homan who’ll do exactly what he tells them to.
Many of them sat in the room with him, in the front row in front of the teleprompter, watching and nodding along with his lies. They know that if Democrats win and the election is certified this fall many of them, too, will end up on the wrong end of civil and criminal investigations.
Trump has recently declared, officially, that Democrats are traitors, communists, potential terrorists, and should be deported. The only thing he hasn’t demanded is for Democrats to be arrested for our politics, and that may well come in just a few months.
After all, he can’t afford to allow the House or Senate to fall into Democratic hands, because then he’ll be investigated with the power of law and subpoena for the many crimes he is currently committing.
He wouldn’t survive that politically, and he believes the Senate this time will actually convict him: they know that once he’s convicted and has thus lost his power, there’s no way he can regain it and he’ll no longer represent a threat to their political careers.
This is all why he’ll say or do anything to hang onto his power, because he knows if he loses that power his entire house of cards collapses.
He and his children go to prison or are forced into exile. His wife gets to reinvent her life the way she wants. What’s left of his properties gets sold off at auction like his casinos were the last time he went bankrupt.
This is what he’s imagining at 2 o’clock in the morning when he’s rage-tweeting. He’s also remembering the terri
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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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Wealth Concentration and Oligarchy
By Paul Krugman | Jul 25, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/talking-again-with-gabriel-zucman
There’s a fundamental tension in democratic societies between extreme wealth and the very possibility of a well-functioning democracy. And it’s not a new idea. All the thinkers of democracy have written about this, all the way back to Aristotle.
Most people have very little wealth. Wealth is highly concentrated, and what most people have is income. But the very top has wealth, and in some sense, the wealth-to-income ratio is telling you how many minions they can buy, how much influence they can buy in the economy and in politics.
Expressing their wealth relative to total income gives a sense of the influence they have, how much they can spend on buying media companies, on funding electoral campaigns. Billionaires accounted for nineteen percent of total political spending during the 2024 federal election cycle.
What’s your take on why total wealth has grown faster than income?
Zucman: There are different stories, and I think the one that makes most sense to me and that seems most consistent with the data is that there’s been a number of policy changes since the 1980s that have favored wealth and capital, broadly speaking. So, for instance, you used to have rent controls for housing in many countries; when you lift rent controls, the value of housing wealth tends to go up. Many countries used to have pretty high corporate income tax rates, of almost fifty percent on average at the world level in the 1980s. Well, when the government takes half of the profits of companies, it capitalizes into stock prices; it reduces the market value of companies. But then when governments slash the corporate tax—and it has declined from about 45–50% to about 20–25% today at the global level—well, that again capitalizes into stock prices, and now it boosts the market value of companies, of equities.
And you’ve had deregulation in many sectors that has boosted the profitability of corporations. You’ve had a significant change in the division of value added between labor and capital—the rise of the capital share, the decline in the labor share. That means more profits, more income for shareholders; again, it boosts the value of corporate equity. So all of these changes, they don’t happen like that out of nowhere. They are, of course, heavily influenced by policy.
So, for instance, changes in factor shares—labor and capital shares—have been partly affected by the decline in union power. When unions are stronger, you tend to get a bigger labor share. When unions are weaker, you get a bigger capital share. Also in the way that we organize international economic relations, globalization. When we organize things without any kind of international tax coordination, or to put it differently, if we organize global economic integration by allowing total tax competition—no minimum taxes, no minimum tax rates—then capital owners can threaten to outsource production or to shift profits to low-tax places, and again, it reinforces the power of capital, hence the value of wealth.
Much more at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/talking-again-with-gabriel-zucman
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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I see your idiot asshole doesn't want to talk about how many Trillionaires were made during YOUR Covid, or how much money Jeff Bezos made during that time.
Fuck Paul Krugman and Fuck You, Shit Golem.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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The ongoing show trial of Fauci motivated this post
Reality is a Communist Plot
Of MAGA and the totalitarian mindset
By Paul Krugman | Jul 30, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/reality-is-a-communist-plot
The Covid vaccine didn’t work, and vaccines cause autism. But hydroxychloroquine worked, and so did ivermectin. Anthony Fauci killed millions of people.
Climate change is a hoax. Wind power caused a massive TV blackout during the Trump-Biden debate. Solar power is useless because the sun doesn’t shine at night, and batteries don’t exist. Smoke blanketed North America, not because of climate change, but because Canada didn’t rake its 2 million square miles of boreal forest.
We’ve destroyed Iran’s military, and the Iranian regime is begging for a deal. Also, the U.S. isn’t running out of precision weapons as a result of the Iran war, and furthermore the shortage is Joe Biden’s fault.
The economy is in a “golden age.” Prices are down. And Trump has a 59 percent approval rating.
Trump won the 2020 election.
Communism is the greatest threat facing America.
The modern American right is very good at hating. MAGA hates immigrants (unless they’re white South Africans); it hates liberals; it hates scientists.
What the ongoing show trial of Fauci — which motivated this post — has really driven home, however, is that what Trump and his supporters hate most of all is reality. They know what they want to believe. They fly into paroxysms of rage whenever someone points out that the world isn’t what they want it to be. And they always want to shoot the messenger.
Of course, motivated reasoning isn’t confined to the right. Some people on the left insist that zoning restrictions have no role in causing high housing prices, that it’s all about Wall Street greed. Many centrists insist that being in the middle on a left-right scale — which isn’t even how most voters think about politics — is the secret to electoral victory. And so on.
I’m not immune to the temptation to believe what I want to be true. I try to fight it, but don’t always succeed. Still, I try to acknowledge and admit it when I have let wishful thinking warp my judgement.
But what we’re seeing now isn’t run-of-the-mill motivated reasoning. It’s something far more extreme.
If believing something suits MAGA’s prejudices and interests, they don’t hesitate: they simply insist that it’s true. They routinely dismiss scientific and statistical evidence, but they don’t stop there. They’re perfectly willing to deny reality even if the truth is staring them in the face.
Thus, Trump urged Americans to remember that 2024 TV blackout, which nobody remembers because it didn’t happen. He insists that California has “blackouts and brownouts every weekend,” when the state’s 39 million residents can tell you it doesn’t. He says that you must show ID to buy groceries, which everyone who buys their own food knows isn’t so.
Do Trump and his followers actually believe these things? As I see it, that’s a category error, starting from the presumption that they even accept that objective facts exist. All the evidence (Hah! “Evidence!”) says that they don’t.
George Orwell, whose work seems more relevant by the day, knew all about this mindset. In his essay “Looking back on the Spanish war” he wrote about how the rise of totalitarianism had changed the rules:
In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone.
Totalitarians, however, denied that objective facts existed. Furthermore, reality is mutable, changing with the leader’s whims:
If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, t
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Conservatives Perfected the Ideal Legal Tactic. It’s Time for Liberals to Use It.
By Mark Joseph Stern
Aug 03, 2026
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/08/supreme-court-analysis-lib
eral-antonin-scalia-guns.html
In 1991, former Chief Justice Warren Burger renounced the then-nascent push to reinterpret the Second Amendment as an individual right to bear arms. Appearing on PBS NewsHour, the conservative jurist condemned this campaign as “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American people by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.” Burger, a Richard Nixon appointee, was no outlier: Across the partisan spectrum, leading constitutional lawyers agreed that the Constitution did not create a personal right to possess guns. A year earlier, Erwin Griswold, solicitor general for Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, said that the pro-gun argument “exceeds the limits of principled advocacy.” Shortly before that, the far-right Judge Robert Bork—formerly Nixon’s solicitor general and attorney general—said that the Second Amendment protects state militias, not individuals. Bork, whose own nomination for the Supreme Court was famously defeated over his extreme right-wing views, deemed all state gun restrictions “probably constitutional.”
Less than 20 years later, the Supreme Court announced in D.C. v. Heller that Burger, Bork, and their contemporaries had it all wrong: The Second Amendment had guaranteed an individual right to bear arms the whole time. Of course, the constitutional text remained the same. What changed was the nation’s understanding of it. Over decades, gun rights activists transformed a position dismissed by Burger and Bork into a cornerstone of conservative constitutional identity. They built a political movement around their ahistorical, atextual interpretation. Buoyed by lavish funding from the industries that stood to benefit, these activists elected lawmakers who embraced their view, then elevated judges who would translate it into law. By the time Heller reached the Supreme Court, the individual-right theory did not appear radical to the conservative majority. It looked inevitable.
Second Amendment advocates like to frame Heller as a triumph of originalism, and SCOTUS certainly sold it that way. But in truth, it is popular constitutionalism all the way down. Yale Law professor Reva Siegel laid out this fact in a renowned law review article months after the decision came down, and her observation has only grown more prescient with time. The Republican-appointed supermajority has spent the past four years steadily expanding the right it created in 2008, to the point that it now deems all restrictions on “armed self-defense” to be “presumptively unconstitutional.” Under Heller and its progeny, courts have struck down state laws that ban guns from zoos, libraries, and museums; that prohibit the removal of serial numbers from weapons; and that outlaw machine guns. SCOTUS has struggled to keep pace with the revolution that it unleashed and has sometimes seemed embarrassed by the consequences of its own rulings.
The modern Second Amendment has thus become both a paragon of popular constitutionalism and its own dark mirror. Gun rights advocates followed much of the popcon playbook, but never truly built majority support for their broader aims: Many of their legal demands today—like unlicensed public carry and easy access to assault weapons—are unpopular with the broader public. It seems fair to say that the average American who wants to keep a handgun at home did not sign up for unpermitted open carry of an AR-15 at the zoo. Heller is not just a case study in popular constitutionalism; it is also a warning that industry-backed interest groups can mimic a mass movement, then leverage it to create a constitutional right that extends far beyond anything the citizenry ever demanded.
Siegel’s early account of the Second Amendment’s rise remains unimpeachable as a straightforward chronicle of how moneyed interests can manufacture constitut
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More crybabism from you faggots.
I'll bet you're really fucking happy that the Democrats weren't able to get rid of the filibuster now, aren't you Shit Golem?
Oh, how you villainized Sinema and Manchin at the time.
Do you know how fucked you'd be right now if that happened?
You are a fucking idiot.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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The Oligarchs are Doubling Down on Republicans
And Democrats should make the most of it
By Paul Krugman | Aug 04, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-oligarchs-are-doubling-down-on
Inauguration Day 2025 looked and felt like a coronation, as Donald Trump was installed in a position of immense, unprecedented power. Since he had returned to office despite the Jan. 6 insurrection, it was obvious that time-honored checks and balances on presidential authority wouldn’t apply to him. And the megabillionaires who had spent vast sums to assure Trump’s victory had no qualms about appearing as the new MAGA oligarchy. Through their political and monetary fealty to Trump, they had positioned themselves to dictate policy, free from petty democratic constraints and concern for public welfare. They evidently expected that they would spend years effectively ruling the nation in their interests, along with the president they had bought.
Now, a year and a half later, the oligarchs’ victory celebrations look premature. Newly elected presidents usually experience a few months of positive net approval, but Trump’s “honeymoon” barely lasted a month. He is now plumbing new depths of public disapproval:
Furthermore, Trump’s plunge is like a vortex pulling the entire Republican Party down with him. G. Elliott Morris’s model gives Democrats an 85 percent chance of taking the House despite extreme GOP gerrymandering. He also gives the Democrats a 55 percent chance of taking the Senate, despite its overrepresentation of small, rural states that strongly tilts its composition towards the Republicans.
And you know what has an even worse approval rating than Donald Trump? AI data centers:
There are substantive reasons to oppose these centers, but beyond concerns over rising electricity bills, pollution, water depletion and noise, the controversy over data centers has become a proxy for public backlash against the power of the broligarchs and their disregard for the welfare of ordinary Americans.
According to historical experience, this kind of massive shift in public sentiment should have induced hedging on the part of the big money. That is, based on past patterns we would have expected billionaires to give more money to Democrats during the midterm elections compared to the 2024 election as a way to maintain influence if the balance of power in Washington shifts.
But that’s not what is happening this time: instead, oligarchs are doubling down on MAGA. An analysis by the Washington Post finds that megadonors have already spent more than $1.6 billion on the November midterms. Here’s how that spending breaks down:
What’s the rationale here? Why are the billionaires doubling down in support of a hugely unpopular president and his hugely unpopular agenda?
This partly reflects a change in the nature of billionaires’ relationship with the extreme right. Twenty years ago American conservatism was dominated by a “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” strategy in which corporations and the wealthy used racism and bigotry to advance their goals — tax cuts and deregulation — without necessarily being racists and bigots themselves. Today Elon Musk isn’t putting on a show of being a neo-Nazi, because that’s who he really is.
Beyond that, Trump’s second presidency is so pervasively corrupt, abusive and destructive that it will be virtually impossible for anyone who supported him to move on and rehabilitate themselves. Outside of MAGA, who will ever be willing to trust Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos again? Frankly, what political hopeful would be stupid or venal enough to associate with them?
Indeed, I believe and hope that if Democrats regain power, they won’t repeat past mistakes by trying to “move on” from the corruption and scandals of the previous regime. It’s now clear that Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, enabled Trump’s return to power by slow-walking the investigation of January 6th. Earlier, Barack Obama let Republicans off the hook by not pursuing the lies that led to the Iraq war. Let’s
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Biden’s sad cancer news explains uncomfortable realities for Democrats
Jim Geraghty | August 11, 2026
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/08/11/biden-debacle-is-st
ill-hurting-democrats/
If Biden, his family and his most ardent supporters had gotten their way, and he had somehow managed to get reelected for another term in 2024, he almost certainly would have had to resign the presidency over these debilitating health issues by now.
As of February 2024, an astounding 86 percent of Americans believed that Joe Biden was too old to serve another term. (Try getting 86 percent of any group to agree on anything.)
But throughout the first half of the most recent presidential election year, Biden, his family and most of the Democratic Party establishment refused to acknowledge any possibility that another nominee might be a better option, or that there was any reason to discuss it. And then on June 27, 2024, Biden turned in his terrible debate performance. (Hunter told the BBC he believes his father’s bad showing that night may have been affected by the undetected cancer within him.)
Biden’s delayed withdrawal, taking another three weeks to announce a decision that felt inevitable, damaged the party. Biden later insisted that if he had stayed in the race, he would have beaten Donald Trump. (The polling strongly indicated otherwise.)
Why are today’s Democratic grassroots up in arms against the establishment and embracing far-left and socialist candidates? In theory, establishment candidates and incumbents are supposed to have all the advantages — name ID, fundraising, long-established close ties to interest groups.
But if you’re a Democrat, nothing that happened in 2024 reassured you about your party’s establishment. Almost everyone in the country thought the octogenarian Biden was too old to serve another four years; the party establishment insisted it would be fine. Then Biden flubbed the debate, and Democrats were told that there was no time and no need for a primary and that Vice President Kamala Harris was the only appropriate substitute. (Would a ticket of any two Democrats who had been elected statewide from any two swing states have done better?)
Had Harris won, the party establishment could argue it knew what it was doing. Harris enjoyed the convention she wanted, won her debate with Trump, and her campaign raised and spent $1.5 billion in 15 weeks.
But not only did she lose, including the popular vote, but she also went 0 for 7 in the key swing states.
One last painful wrinkle was the country learning that the president had prostate cancer and had probably had it for several years and not known it because his doctors had stopped running PSA tests on his blood in 2014. Most Americans figured that doctors were watching an elderly president’s health like hawks; even Barack Obama’s White House physician, Jeffrey Kuhlman, said Biden should have been given a cognitive test during his final year as president.
After the multilayered debacle of 2024, the Democratic Party rank and file have every reason to ask the establishment, “Why should we trust you? In every key decision, you’ve gotten it wrong.”
You know who didn’t have anything to do with the Democratic Party’s bad decisions in the 2024 cycle? Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), along with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and other left-wing voices in the party.
And now we see left-wing and Democratic Socialists of America-aligned candidates like Abdul El-Sayed winning key Democratic primaries in the midterms.
Joe Biden left the stage in January 2025, but the fallout from the way he exited, and the consequent mistrust and loss of confidence in his party’s leaders, is lingering far longer.
Full Debate: Biden and Trump in the First 2024 Presidential Debate | WSJ
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Enter the political strategists who said, ‘Oh wow…this country has a gigantic pool of angry, insecure underachievers who will believe absolutely anything that absolves them of responsibility. If we just tell them they’re right and everyone else is wrong, they’ll worship us.’
Agent Self FBI @RetroAgent12 wrote
• MAGA isn’t drawn to Trump because he’s smart or competent. They’re drawn to him because he tells uneducated, insecure, angry people that their stupidity and ignorance is actually strength.
• He gives them a script where nothing is ever their fault. Blame immigrants. Blame “elites.” Blame Democrats, blame anyone except the person in the mirror.
• He turns racism and sexism into a political identity. He makes being uninformed feel heroic.
• And MAGA eats it up because it saves them from having to grow, learn, or change.
• They don’t want leadership. They want validation for being ignorant. And Trump gives it to them every single day.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/Speakupboldly/posts/4196834140646990
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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