A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:Fears of white people losing out permeate Capitol rioters’ towns, study finds
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Well, my search is over!
I think I found Q's representative HERE, and it must be SECONDRATE!
I mean, look HOW MUCH! SECONDRATE posts about Q, and how much SECONDRATE seems to know! Clearly, only a representative of Q would bring all this info to the board!
When the political scientist Robert Pape began studying the issues that motivated the 380 or so people arrested in connection with the attack against the Capitol on Jan. 6, he expected to find that the rioters were driven to violence by the lingering effects of the 2008 Great Recession.
But instead he found something very different: Most of the people who took part in the assault came from places, his polling and demographic data showed, that were awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture.
If Mr. Pape’s initial conclusions — published on Tuesday in The Washington Post — hold true, they would suggest that the Capitol attack has historical echoes reaching back to before the Civil War, he said in an interview over the weekend. In the shorter term, he added, the study would appear to connect Jan. 6 not only to the once-fringe right-wing theory called the Great Replacement, which holds that minorities and immigrants are seeking to take over the country, but also to events like the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 where crowds of white men marched with torches chanting, “Jews will not replace us!”
“If you look back in history, there has always been a series of far-right extremist movements responding to new waves of immigration to the United States or to movements for civil rights by minority groups,” Mr. Pape said. “You see a common pattern in the Capitol insurrectionists. They are mainly middle-class to upper-middle-class whites who are worried that, as social changes occur around them, they will see a decline in their status in the future.”
One fact stood out in Mr. Pape’s study, conducted with the help of researchers at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, a think tank he runs at the University of Chicago. Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic white population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists. This finding held true, Mr. Pape determined, even when controlling for population size, distance to Washington, unemployment rate and urban or rural location.
More at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/us/politics/capitol-riot-study.html
Mr. Pape's career has mostly been focused on international terrorism. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he created a database of suicide bombers from around the world. His research led to a remarkable discovery: Most of the bombers were secular, not religious, and had killed themselves not out of zealotry, but rather in response to military occupations.
American officials eventually used the findings to persuade some Sunnis in Iraq to break with their religious allies and join the United States in a nationalist movement known as the Anbar Awakening.
Recalling his early work with suicide bombers, Mr. Pape suggested that the country’s understanding of what happened on Jan. 6 was only starting to take shape, much like its understanding of international terrorism slowly grew after Sept. 11.
“We really still are at the beginning stages,” he said.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Fears of white people losing out permeate Capitol rioters’ towns, study finds
No they don't.
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Imagine the hypocrisy of a government who will allow businesses to card people to get a job or buy groceries, but won't card people to vote in elections and gives millions of non-citizens free money from taxpayers.
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Jen Psaki humiliates Fox reporter over ridiculous rightwing question
"Let me just refute the 1st point you made."
What she really wanted to say was "Dude don't you do your homework before coming here and embarrassing yourself on National Television?"
He's from Fox, so of course, the answer is "No."
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Rudy Giuliani: I'm the REAL Victim of My MASSIVE Trump Election LIES
This is what passes for credible with the trumptards.
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Most Americans Know Nothing About Politics. Nothing.
Even when I try really hard to take into account that most people don't know much about politics, I still overestimate how much they know.
Do they know that Republicans filibuster everything? Nah. Do they know that most Republicans think the election was stolen? Not really. Do they know anything at all about policy issues? Probably not, unless there happens to be one that impinges on their day jobs.
Frankly, for the vast majority of Americans, your best bet is to assume not that they are "low information voters" but that they know nothing about politics. Literally nothing. (Many, of course, know less than nothing because they listen to Fox News and come away with misinformation that makes them mad. They forget about the misinformation quickly, but they don't forget that they're mad.)
No matter how little you think most people know, cut it in half and then cut it in half again. That should get you somewhere close to the truth.
https://jabberwocking.com/most-americans-know-nothing-about-politics-n
othing/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Noam Chomsky wrote:
Hume was a great philosopher. He wrote an important essay, “Of the First Principles of Government” (1741), one of the classic texts on what we now call political philosophy or political science. He opens his study by raising a question. He’s surprised, he says, to see the “easiness” with which people subordinate themselves to power systems. That’s a mystery, because the people themselves really have the power. Why do they subject themselves to masters? The answer, he says, must be consent: the masters succeed in what we now call manufacturing consent. They keep the public in line by their belief that they must subordinate themselves to power systems. And he says this miracle occurs in all societies, no matter how brutal or how free.
Hume was writing in the wake of the first democratic revolution, the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, which led to what we call the British constitution—basically, that the king will be subordinate to parliament. Parliament at that time basically meant merchants and manufacturers. Hume’s close friend, Adam Smith, wrote about the consequences of the revolution. In his own famous book The Wealth of Nations (1776), he pointed out that the now sovereign “merchants and manufacturers” are the true “masters of mankind.” They used their power to control the government and to ensure that their own interests are very well taken care of, no matter how “grievous” the effect on the people of England—and even worse, on those who are subject to what he called “the savage injustice of the Europeans,” referring mainly to the British rule in India.
The year before Smith published The Wealth of Nations, the American Revolution broke out. About a decade later the American Constitution was formed, very much like during the first democratic uprising. That’s presented as a conflict between the king and parliament. And it ended, as I said, with the king being subordinate to parliament, the rising merchant and manufacturing class.
But that’s not the whole story. There was also the general public, which didn’t want to be ruled by either king or parliament. It was a lively pamphlet period. Itinerant workers and ministers reached much of the general public. Their pamphlets and talks called for being ruled by fellow countrymen, who know the people’s wants, not by knights and gentlemen who only want to oppress the people. They called for universal health, universal education, and many things. But they were ultimately crushed. Hume and Smith both wrote after the victory of the merchants and manufacturers in Britain—not only over the king, but over the general public.
This was reenacted in the American Constitution, as Michael Klarman documents in his book The Framers’ Coup (2016). The public wanted democracy. The Framers—wealthy men, nearly half of them slave owners—wanted to prevent the threat of democracy, much like the men of “best quality,” as they called themselves during the first democratic revolution. It didn’t take more than a few years for James Madison to realize what Smith had realized before. In 1791 he wrote a letter to his friend Thomas Jefferson in which he deplored the collapse of the democratic system that he hoped he had established—not too much democracy, but at least some. The stock-jobbers—in our day that means the financial institutions—had taken so much power, Madison deplored, that they had become the “tool and tyrant” of government. They work for government but they also control government, working for their own interests.
Many of the same problems exist today. More at https://bostonreview.net/class-inequality-politics/noam-chomsky-david-
barsamian-mole
Download a free copy of The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution
from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.club/search.php?req=The+Framers+Coup+The+Maki
ng+of+the+United+States+Constitution
or https://libgen.is/search.php?req=The+Framers+Coup+The+Making+of+the+Un
ited+States+Constitution
or http://library.lol/main/940F53EE19E9AC1C408DA01A214A07D8
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Most Americans Know Nothing About Politics. Nothing.
Even when I try really hard to take into account that most people don't know much about politics, I still overestimate how much they know.
Do they know that Republicans filibuster everything? Nah. Do they know that most Republicans think the election was stolen? Not really. Do they know anything at all about policy issues? Probably not, unless there happens to be one that impinges on their day jobs.
Frankly, for the vast majority of Americans, your best bet is to assume not that they are "low information voters" but that they know nothing about politics. Literally nothing. (Many, of course, know less than nothing because they listen to Fox News and come away with misinformation that makes them mad. They forget about the misinformation quickly, but they don't forget that they're mad.)
No matter how little you think most people know, cut it in half and then cut it in half again. That should get you somewhere close to the truth.
https://jabberwocking.com/most-americans-know-nothing-about-politics-n
othing/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
This started out as a good article.
Then it went into fantasyland when it pretended that anybody who watches CNN or MSNBC or reads jabberwocking is any better off than somebody who watches Fox or Newsmax.
--------------------------------------------------
Imagine the hypocrisy of a government who will allow businesses to card people to get a job or buy groceries, but won't card people to vote in elections and gives millions of non-citizens free money from taxpayers.
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Quote:That is a fact, not an opinion.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
This started out as a good article.
Then it went into fantasyland when it pretended that anybody who watches CNN or MSNBC or reads jabberwocking is any better off than somebody who watches Fox or Newsmax.
https://trofire.com/2020/08/08/another-study-confirms-that-fox-news-ma
kes-you-stupid/
https://www.businessinsider.com/study-watching-fox-news-makes-you-less
-informed-than-watching-no-news-at-all-2012-5
http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/politics/fox-news-viewers-tend-to-b
e-less-informed-says-new-study/article/433762
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/07/21/a-rigorous-scientific-lo
ok-into-the-fox-news-effect/?sh=6ea3493812ab
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Legal reporter reveals how the Supreme Court 'radically altered' a key part of US law in the dark of night
https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/religious-liberty-supreme-court/?utm_
source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=6950
Vladeck told Stern, "Friday night was the seventh time this term that the Supreme Court has issued an emergency injunction pending appeal. All seven were in COVID free-exercise cases…. Those who like these decisions are getting increasingly comfortable with the court flouting and defying its own internal standards and rules for this kind of relief simply because they like the result. In the process, they attack critics for being insufficiently sensitive to religious liberty. And that's a preposterous claim."
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Trump finally jumps the shark
https://theweek.com/articles/976786/trump-finally-jumps-shark
When Trump ran for president in 2016, he bonded with his audiences mainly on their terms, placing himself in their camp, defending and championing them against all the fools and crooks who had turned the country into a "disaster" (his favorite adjective during the general election campaign). Once he'd ascended to the White House and found himself in the position of having to defend himself against charges of collusion with Russia and other misdeeds, Trump's public remarks were much more defensive and focused on himself. But he was also the president, which allowed his fixation on "deep state" antagonists to be transmuted into a battle for Republican survival more generally.
But now? Either Trump is the sorest loser in the history of American democracy — the Big Baby his critics always claimed he was — or else he really did win in a landslide and yet nonetheless allowed himself to be deposed and banished to South Florida while Joe Biden effortlessly took over the White House in a coup. Either way, he looks very small indeed.
Now, none of this means that Trump is going to slink away to hide under a rock — or that Republican Party officials will be able get out from under his thumb anytime soon. Because Trump needs money, big time. And the surest way to get it is to attempt to remain a kingmaker within the party for as long as possible, so his most loyal supporters think it's reasonable to keep clicking the "Donate" button on his website (or just not notice for a good long while that the "autorenewal" button has been prechecked).
So Trump will keep trying to remain relevant — but he will do so, I suspect, with steeply declining returns.
I don't for a minute believe that Trump will be able to manage the launch of his own social media platform. (It would actually be quite difficult and expensive to pull that off, and unlikely to succeed.) Will people even show up to rallies if he tries to hold them? Who wants to listen to an angry old man rant and rave about how he was robbed and outsmarted in 2020 by people he labels as dumb? There's a performative contradiction there that even a populist of Trump's considerable talents is going to have a hell of a job trying to surmount. The most likely outcome is that, with each passing month, he will sound more and more like a petulant crank railing impotently against his enemies, real and imagined.
The great irony here is that Trump has been so successful at remaking the GOP in his own image that the party doesn't really need him anymore. Sure, they'll try to avoid provoking his wrath. But every viable candidate for president in 2024 is going to be following Trump's lead on immigration, trade, and waging a rhetorically ferocious culture war against the left — and most of them will be doing it without Trump's own considerable personal liabilities, including the hatred of a large swath of the electorate.
Put in slightly different terms, the 2020 election results show that Trump has given Republicans a potentially fruitful way forward — but also that he can't be the one to lead the way there because he's a drag on the party. Trump's own dead weight, and not some cockamamie conspiracy, is what accounts for his loss last year despite Republicans doing so well down ballot.
Trump will likely go down in history as a blunt instrument who shattered a staid consensus on the right but who was far too widely loathed and incompetent at governing to deliver the party to the Promised Land himself. That's never been clearer than it is right now. And it's bound to grow clearer still as more broadly appealing politicians try their hands at domesticating Trumpian politics on a national level.
It's too soon to know who is going end up at the head of the GOP. But it's not too soon to know that it's exceedingly unlikely to be Trump.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, w
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