GOP Belatedly Realizes Its Embrace Of Propaganda And Conspiracy Results In Bizarre And Unpopular Candidates
from the head-full-of-pudding-and-hate dept
Frustrated by factual reality, science, and an independent press, the GOP and its wealthy backers have spent the better part of forty years building an alternative reality propaganda machine across AM radio, local broadcasting (with the help of Sinclair Broadcasting), fake “pink slime” local newspapers, cable news (OANN, Newsmax, Fox), and now the Internet.
While this propaganda machine has adequately insulated the modern Trump and Desantis GOP from the pesky menace of factual reality, there have been some downsides. The GOP’s belief that it no longer has to participate in public debates, for example, has resulted in a crop of insular, unpopular, and strange candidates who don’t have broader appeal — because they’re not participating in factual reality.
Amusingly, at least some Republican advisors appear to have realized this, and are urging the party to spend more time participating in real debates hosted by actual journalists. Or, at least, having debates where actual journalists are in attendance for some window dressing:
A Republican familiar with the conversations said the RNC is considering pairing mainstream outlets with conservative outlets as co-moderators, a regular feature of 2016 debates as well, to address member concerns about bias. The RNC’s proposal request includes a section for networks to fill out that dives into whether they’d be open to partnerships.
But part of the goal, the person said, would be to ensure candidates don’t get “softball questions that aren’t of substance” and that they are forced to “talk about policy and give answers.” The RNC meeting notably comes after a midterms in which a number of candidates popular in conservative media circles struggled to connect with independent voters in the general election.
Semafor, like most mainstream U.S. political outlets, can’t candidly acknowledge that Republicans built a hugely influential and successful propaganda machine, lest it upset sources, advertisers, or event sponsors. So their story kind of amusingly tap dances around the fact that a lot of the party’s problems in the midterms stemmed from out of touch delusion built on the back of a massively successful party propaganda machine.
It’s not clear that the party of Trump and Desantis, whose entire political careers involve agitating and dividing Americans using a rotating platter of unhinged conspiracy, bigotry, and outrage over everything from more energy efficient game consoles to inclusive candy branding, will ever actually listen to the handful of advisors warning about the impact of this isolation. In part because outrage and division is genuinely the only semi-meaningful policies they have.
GOP propaganda exploits a parade of U.S. policy failures across media (consolidation, death of local news), education (poor to no media savviness training), journalism (failure to develop independent funding models for an independent press), and the Internet (centralized social media platforms susceptible to the whims of unhinged billionaires).
But at some point, you’d imagine that the discourse and culture will develop policy fixes for some of these issues, and an immune response to candidates whose entire platform relies on unhinged conspiracies, bottomless outrage over minutiae, and vicious bigotry.
The GOP is hopeful that gerrymandering and propaganda will shield it from both factual and electoral reality for decades to come. And so far, that’s proven to be a solid bet, keeping a party with few substantive policies neck and neck in major races. The problem, again, is that candidates with heads full of pudding, hatred, and conspiracy theories aren’t going to appeal to the public; especially younger Americans who increasingly realize the modern Trump GOP is routinely and violently full of shit.
Filed Under: debates, desantis, disinformation, flood the zone with shit, gop, media, media consolidation, media reform, politics, propaganda, trump
Comments on “GOP Belatedly Realizes Its Embrace Of Propaganda And Conspiracy Results In Bizarre And Unpopular Candidates”
Don’t forget the Trumpified judiciary!
Well, they are fairly vampiric, but it seems harsh to call them familiars. /s
Re:
Well it explains why McConnell is so old. He’s been feeding on the blood of babies to continue existing. In fact he’s probably older than what he says, for all we know he might’ve been here when Kentucky was just a new state.
Re: Continuing the sentence structure misinterpretation
“Hey, vampire! Are you with them or are you with us?”
“I’m with the conversations.”
Re: Wow, that was the comment of the day!
And so out of left field that it generated a genuine laugh. Thank you @Strawb.
Bit late for that when that sort of destructive ideology has been shipped out and taken root in countries other than the containment zone it was supposed to stay in.
Re: SSDD
Oh, idk ..
the art of bullshittery has been with humans for millennia
Re: Re:
Yes, I’m aware.
But sadly, when that white supremacy bullshit has been spread and taken root in my damn country, it becomes a very serious issue.
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Re:
Rando blando and the story of oblivion. “[You] and every other crackwhore” seems to be consistent.
Its the same ingredients as ultraprocessed food. Who the fuck cares if you don’t eat that shit. Thats for the poor people.
Re: Re:
It becomes MY issue when the government I am forced to live with adopts their fucking ideals and enshrines them as law.
You are overestimating the public
Such candidates perfectly well appeal to the public, and they do appeal to the largest uniform faction of it in particular. If you abandoned all pretense of government and let everything determined by lynch justice, that is the likely faction to survive.
It is not, however, the absolute majority of people, just the largest semi-uniform segment. But the margin of safety is not terribly large.
That is why de Santis is planning for the future and prohibiting anything but “patriotic” and “gender-normal” views to be presented in schools. It’s an investment into the future of a United States that will feel fully justified to terrorize any minority, or even not sufficiently aggressive majorities (like women).
Keeping the general public stupid and uneducated is a fallback to aristocratic times where the governing caste kept the majority in thrall by feeding them propaganda and goals and keeping other opinions and actions out of their reach.
It worked for millennia: it’s in our genes and they don’t change all that fast. The one thing that changed is our cultural environment, and Republicans are intent on turning the clock back on that.
And it may work.
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When a large proportion of a population vote for a party without looking at the candidate, there are constituency where any candidate will get elected if they stand for the right party. That does not mean they are popular, but rather that people are disengaged from politics and vote for a party because that is the party people like them support.
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White people? Sure, for the moment. But we’re in decline as an overall share of the population (which is really what the “younger generations are less Republican” statistic is all about). And slightly more than half of all white people are women, and the GOP’s doing its damnedest to alienate them.
Re: Re:
White republican women have, so far, been stuck in a “House slave vs field slave” mindset. But, looking at the results of the “Red Wave” (😂) in the midterms the GOP shot itself in the foot when they actually caught that car – Roe v Wade they’d been pretending to chase for so long.
I’m sure the amoral agnostics still remaining in major seats within the GOP looked at that and realized that this was what Goldwater warned them about when he condemned the religious nuts trying to take over the party.
And now they’re trying to roll out legislation right out of A Handmaid’s Tale across every red state that leaves a LOT of white republican women in those states wondering whether that’s really what they want for their s.o. and offspring.
I can imagine myself growing wings and flying across the country. That doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. I mean, more than 70 million people still voted for Trump in 2020 despite [gestures at the atrocities], so let’s not act like conservative grievance politics and policies are going anywhere any time soon. I mean, look at DeSantis’s Florida: They passed a law that legally turned certain kinds of speech from teachers into honest-to-gods “wrongspeak” that can be punished under the law.
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DeSantis is doing more to support factual reality than any woke ideologue ever has.
Woke gender ideology is false. Critical race theory is false. DIE initiatives are wasteful garbage. Migrants should not be allowed into the country without the federal government providing for them.
Calling out lies for what they are and prohibiting government employees from participating in them on company time is just what the country needs.
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“DeSantis is doing more to support factual reality than any woke ideologue ever has.”
Desantos and reality are mutually exclusive terms.
He is just another idiot dictator wannabe using the idiot dictator playbook, sans the orange face thankfully.
I have read that “woke” means being aware of .. so antiwoke means you should avoid being aware of whatever it is.
I am ignorant of many things but do not actively try to be so.
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Yes, I know that woke ideologues think that any democratically elected official who opposes them is a dictator. Democracy is not for the unenlightened wrongthinkers.
Wokeness is a constellation of hard-left factually incorrect beliefs about reality. Woke ideologues seek to force everyone who can see the truth to affirm the lies.
Re: Re: Re:2
Don’t blame everyone else for seeing how Republicans have drifted to fascism and authoritarianism as methods of what little “governance” they have an interest in carrying out.
The Democratic Party wants you to live your life any way you wish so long as it doesn’t impede with the rights of others. The GOP wants to impede everyone’s rights so they can be forced to live according to how the GOP believes they should live. If you think I’m wrong, ask yourself this: Which party, by virtue of its policies and platform, implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) believes in legally forcing pregnant people into carrying their pregnancies to term?
Re: Re: Re:2
Also: It’s hilarious that you quote 1984 in its context as a warning, then defend someone using 1984 as an actual political playbook by turning certain kinds of speech into legally enforced “wrongthink”. Methinks you didn’t even read the Cliff Notes of the book.
Re: Re: Re:2
What woke factoid do you consider to be the prime example of your claim it is incorrect? Please be specific because generalities are boring and nebulous.
Also, explain how a gerrymandered district produces a democratically elected official.
Side note, seems someone disagrees with you:
“Taryn Fenske, DeSantis’ Communications Director said “woke” was a “slang term for activism…progressive activism” and a general belief in systemic injustices in the country.”
https://www.motherjones.com/mojo-wire/2022/12/desantis-ron-woke-florida-officials/
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Let me guess. Gab is down for maintenance?
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Re: Re:
Hyman.
I will only say this once.
You and your ideological ilk are actual threats to humanity.
The only thing you understand is violence, and thus, the only thing YOU will respond to is two to your fucking head. Bullets, that is.
Since you also like the insurrection and all.
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Why was this truth censored?
Re: Re: Re:2
We may not like Hyman, Matty B, and their ilk around here, but we’re also not that fond of threats of violence. If that’s the only contribution someone wants to bring to a discussion, they can expect to get flagged just like they’re one of the trolls.
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Re: Re: Re:3
And I do my best to not whip them out.
Undortunately, there are times when those fine folk need to know.
It’s very hard, since they are immune to logic, reason and, you know, behaving and acting like a decent human being.
Re: Re: Re:4
Then take that shit to Tumblr, for fuck’s sake.
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Re: Re: Re:5
No.
Re: Re: Re:5
I’m not sure Tumblr’s community is into ryona, but then again, you never know.
Re: Re: Re:6
I’d tell you to stop giving them ideas, but they were the pioneers of unbirthing vore, so…
Re: Re: Re:7
There is no fetish that tumblr cannot invent and cannot celebrate. It’s telling that they have an intense need to extend the alphabet acronym beyond 26 letters just so every sexuality gets immortalized in stone.
To them fanart of Symmetra and Widowmaker getting shoved up Ashe’s anus and digested into a fart spray isn’t a bug, it’s entirely a feature. One that Stephen Stone gladly celebrates.
Re: Re:
And yet, under DeSantis’s new laws, a teacher who talks about slavery in terms that might “upset” white children could now be considered guilty of breaking the law. That could even mean saying something factual—like, say, the race/ethnicity of the people who were enslaved and the people who did the enslaving. Sounds to me that for all your talk about “woke ideologues” (whatever the fuck that’s actually supposed to mean) indoctrinating children and punishing “wrongspeak”, conservative assholes like you turn every accusation into a confession.
Like, can you actually point to an actual course in any Florida grade school that actually teaches the actual university-level critical race theory? Can you point to any factual proof that it was being done at any point before (or even after) DeSantis passed his wrongspeak laws?
You’re not the first person to whine about “getting back to teaching the basics”. You won’t be the last. And your unoriginal whining will never be worthy of anything more than mockery and derision.
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Remember, CRT is a Law School course of study, a subset of Critical Theory.
If you’re an Undergrad at State U, you won’t even see the stuff.
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Re: Re: Re:2
That’s not true at all, it’s all over education, though not always called that. The Virginia board of education was talking about it in primary ed on its website the exact same time the good little liberals were trying to tell us it doesn’t exist.
Also I find it kinda hilarious that you want to pretend because it’s taught in some law schools (it absolutely shouldn’t be) that means it’s not taught anywhere else in higher ed, let alone high school and below.
Re: Re: Re:3
“That’s not true at all”
Citation?
“though not always called that”
Oh, right. You people keep redefining words to pretend that your issue applies to things that have nothing to do with them.
“Also I find it kinda hilarious that you want to pretend because it’s taught in some law schools (it absolutely shouldn’t be) that means it’s not taught anywhere else in higher ed, let alone high school and below.”
Whereas I find it hilarious that because you were informed that “racial injustice exists in systems even if the individuals in that system are not themselves racist” is taught in college, that you decided it’s present in grade schools, and is a negative.
Re: Re: Re:3
Then you should be able to cite an actual course in any grade school in the United States that actually teaches the actual university-level critical race theory to grade school students.
Oh, so what is it called, then? And please cite examples of what it was teaching students.
Can you cite any factual evidence critical race theory is taught outside of law schools/higher education in general? (Remember: Opinions don’t count as factual evidence.)
Re: Re: Re:3
…said nobody not on hallucinogens, ever.
Re: Re: Re:2
“Republicans aren’t afraid of Critical Race Theory. They don’t even know what it is.
They don’t like theories critical of racists. They know who they are.”
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Re: Re: Re:
That’s not how any of that works and you are either deeply ignorant or lying.
Re: Re: Re:2
A more concise summary of your posts is difficult to imagine.
Re: Re: Re:2
Then you’ll have no problem proving me wrong. Nut up or shut up, bitch.
Re: Re:
Ok, so do you support that same prohibition from any government employee talking about election fraud that didn’t happen?
Re: Re:
…said no mentally competent human being n touch with factual reality, ever.
Re: Re:
Well that’s it hyman. I am going to switch to batch donations to trans youth charities. I hope you are proud of yourself for making the world a slightly better place.
Nah. They got a majority amongst voters in the House, which distributes by population. They don’t have that problem in particular, their policies (or lack thereof) are popular enough.
Re:
Population modulo gerrymandering, but yes. With optimal gerrymandering, almost half of the districts are 100% of your opposition, and a bit more than half of the districts are a bit more than 50% of your voters. Given similarly-sized districts and a two-party system, you need more than 25% of the votes to get an absolute majority by gerrymandering.
In practice, both parties perform in gerrymandering to some degree, and this 99%/51% split of district constituents is not nearly achievable.
However, “giving minorities some representation” in districting is gerrymandering. If that minority’s preferred choice of party would lead to 0 representation in agnostic districting, lumping some of them together into a district may result in them getting some representation.
Lumping all of them together will waste half the votes for a preordained outcome. So you have two ends of the spectrum in districting that can both be employed to underrepresent minorities: diluting their votes on districts they will not win, and wasting their votes on districts they will not lose.
When you are doing either, you can purport to act in good faith by claiming you were attempting to prevent the opposite mechanism of suppressing minorities.
That makes it sufficiently hard to be actually fair that it seems the purely local selection of representatives is unsuitable to end in proportional representation and instead some automatic post-election mechanism that “dithers” the national vote counts when selecting representatives should be employed. That might replace the national trickery for achieving overrepresentation with local trickery for doing the same, and the local trickery would at least average out at the national level.
Re: Re:
Not even modulo gerrymandering. They got a slim majority of seats but they also got 52% of voters no matter whether they got all the seats or none. That’s the scary part.
Re: Re:
So your saying land based districts, at the local level, are the problem. Sounds like the appropriate thing to do is to move to something more akin to proportional representation. That way 100% of minorities get counted and if they run there own party all they need is X% of the total to elect someone to represent them.
I am actully totally ok with this. You would then have a lot more shared power, require parties to work together if they dont get 51%, and split the hold on government that the GOP and Dems have.
Re: Re: Re:
Proportional to what? Why not remove race from the election?
Ranked voting has potential.
Re: Re: Re:2
Proportional to the total population, which technically does remove race.
The idea is that if you have 5 Parties, and you have a split of 20% each, each gets the voting power of 20%. So if a state got for example 5 reps, each rep would represent the 20% that voted for him.
This means you vote for a party not a person (most party’s have a front man or 2 so you know whos getting elected).
Since this results in a more fair result, obviously we cant have it because it empowers minority’s and disempowers racist assholes.
Re: Re: Re:3
“This means you vote for a party not a person ”
I thought that many people simply look for the (R) already.
“Since this results in a more fair result”
I fail to “see” it however.
I would rather vote on the issues.
Re: Re: Re:4
But do you vote on the issues? In national elections, you have the choice of 2 candidates, whose positions are largely defined as contrasts of the other. You aren’t voting on the issues because a candidate’s position on an issue more and more is defined by what the other guys does and what the national platform is. There isn’t room for nuanced takes on any issue. As a leftist, there aren’t politicians who represent me on most issues in a given election, and when they do, voting with the party is often more important than principle. My vote “on the issues” often devolves to “this guy caucuses with R, so his vote will support worse policies than the other candidate”. Because that’s the closest I can get to voting on the issues.
Federal PR makes third party representation more viable, reducing the effects of the glaring issues with first past the post systems that traditionally narrow options. That in turn makes more varied parties and more varied stances on the issues viable in the eyes of voters.
Re: Re: Re:4 Ranked choice voting can help you there
I’m not the person you replied to. I think they have their “party or person” backward. Ranked choice voting has nothing to do with voting for a party vs voting for a person. You can still rank the candidates according to each candidate’s stances on the issues.
The person you replied to is referring to single transferable vote (STV), a proportional representation method which the Fair Representation Act in the United States would establish for House elections if passed. STV is not to be confused with the ranked choice voting method known as instant-runoff voting (IR) or alternative vote. STV can’t apply to the presidency because STV is only relevant in the context of a pool of seats to give to a pool of candidates, but IR involves voting from a separate set of candidates for each seat and can be used for the presidential election. STV is more resistant to gerrymandering.
Any method which would move us away from the two-party system would make voters better able to vote on the issues instead of on the party or on the least terrible person. (As I think of it, a choice between two bad options is barely a choice at all.) With only two parties, it’s very unlikely for any party to align well with any voter on the issues. More parties = more candidates = more sets of stances on the issues = more nuance. First-past-the-post voting for congressional representatives is one of the major factors perpetuating the two-party system (some others being the electoral college and gerrymandering). First-past-the-post disregards any votes which aren’t for the winning candidate. STV as a proportional representation system is more likely to give seats to the most popular minority candidates, while IR allows people whose first choice turns out to be a losing candidate can have their secondary preferences decide the winner unless a candidate received a majority in the first stage. Both STV and IR require a majority of votes, and each of the two methods wastes fewer votes.
Re:
“majority amongst voters in the House”
Gerrymander does not care what the majority wants
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Glad To Debate
From the article:
“The Trump campaign attacked Scully for working for Biden roughly four decades earlier, leading the journalist to accidentally publicly reach out on Twitter to Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s short-lived White House communications director. When the outreach frustrated Republicans, Scully said he had been hacked, something he later admitted was not true. C-SPAN then placed Scully on “administrative leave” for lying.”
Not exactly an unbiased moderator who would have been qualified to run a presidential debate. The Commission committed reputational suicide, and is now paying the price. GOP candidates are likely okay with debates; they just don’t want to get railroaded.
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Prior to participating in a presidential election year debate, one might first want to have a platform.
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Re: Re:
Both political parties hold a convention in the summer of the election year, and announce their political platforms. No doubt, both parties will announce their 2024 platforms next year, as well.
Re: Re: Re:
Do you think the GOP will do what they did in 2020 and simply put forth the exact same platform, with the exact same text, as it did in 2016 because Trump was the 2020 candidate and the party saw no need to yank back on the sort of bullshit that ultimately sank Trump’s 2020 campaign and resulted in last year’s midterms “Red Wave” becoming little more than a crimson creek?
Re: Re: Re:
CPAC said we are all terrorists, will that be part of the gop platform?
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You know, of course, that a slew of republican candidates pulled out of debates across the ticket in the last election cycle, right? Bad GOP candidates refused to debate even other republicans for fear of revealing they have nothing but culture war BS.
Re: Bravely sir Koby ran away
“Glad To Debate”
Cool so I just have one question about…. and he’s gone!
Re: Re: Koby
He just comes here to get ratioed.
Masochists gonna masochist.
They come to this conclusion every few years but keep on getting crazier as the people who lap up fox news culture war content are the ones who vote in primaries so the candidates they offer keep on getting crazier. The ones who aren’t out of their minds have to play along or get purged.
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And even at Fox News, Murdoch faces a dilemma between his desire to win elections and his desire for ratings. He wants to steer his viewers away from unelectable lunatics, but his most popular shows are the ones that broadcast from inside the asylum.
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If I recall right, the 2012 victory of Barack Obama led the GOP to perform an intra-party “autopsy” that outlined many of the same problems that still plague the party today. Then Donald Trump became the GOP candidate for 2016 and that whole autopsy was thrown out in favor of embracing TRASH speech and grievance politics.
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This has nothing to do with tech
This has to do with you being a whiny little liberal bitch who can’t stand that some people have different ideas than you.
And RNC didn’t withdraw “from public debates” you moron, they withdrew from a specific “bipartisan commission” that didn’t appear to be bipartisan at all and allowed Biden to hide in his basement, masking his now visible decline.
Re:
LOL – wut now?
Don’t bogart that joint my friend, pass it down.
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Re:
I expected Maz’s TDS to persist. It doesn’t seem to cure itself without treatment. But now that Karl has it too, I’m starting to think that it’s communicable. This may be more serious than we realized.
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Re: Re:
And the only cure is to exterminate filth like you.
Re: Re: Re:
Bratty matty you aren’t fooling anyone.
Re: Re: Re:2
That was me, not Matthew “totally not an active threat to democracy” Bennett.
White supremacists only understand violence.
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Re: Re: Re:3
And when my very reasonable response to your hate is “my side has all the guns” you nitwits accuse me of threatening violence.
You are exhibit A that liberals are just hateful and rabid.
Re: Re: Re:4
By far the most common victims of gun violence are gun owners and their immediate families, you know.
Re: Re: Re:4
“when my very reasonable response to your hate is “my side has all the guns” you nitwits accuse me of threatening violence”
Why would you bring up a false point about owning weapons if your point is not that you’re threatening to use them?
“You are exhibit A that liberals are just hateful and rabid.”
Yeah, people tend to react poorly to threats of violence when they’re trying to ask that less innocent people suffer from violence.
Re: Re: Re:4
It’s almost as if your immediate reaction to vitriolic language being “we’ll shoot ya if you really piss us off” is something to be genuinely afraid of given the rash of gun violence in the United States. Imagine that~.
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Re: Re: Re:4
So you’re saying the only language you understand is violence.
Good.
I’m not a liberal as well. Conservative by upbringing, actually.
Again, the only language you understand is violence, and the only way to communicate with you…
…is through means that are very much illegal and considered assault and battery at least.
You are a white supremacist, and that is the only language you will ever understand.
“My side has the guns” is a VEILED THREAT.
Yes, I understand that I will get flagged, so be it. There’s no talking to people who gaslight, harass and threaten, in any case.
Re: Re: Re:5
“If I could just kill all the violent people, there’d be no more violent people” is not really going to work out as intended.
Re: Re: Re:5
And yet, here you are.
Re: Re: Re:4
What, exactly, were you suggesting with the statement that your side has all the weaponry, if not as an implicit threat of potentially using them?
The one silver lining on the fact that your side holds most of the guns is that you’ll probably end up shooting each other with how many accidents occur. With the amount of intelligence and self-control you regularly demonstrate, most of you will end up Darwin Awardsing yourselves.
Re: Re: Re:3 Don't feed them
Then don’t play along. You won’t change their minds if that’s the case. If you don’t have anything helpful to say then don’t say it
Re: Re: Re:4
And that got Trump elected.
That got their ideology out into the wider world instead of the FBI arresting every single one of them.
That didn’t stop them from setting up shop and harassing Mike and the site.
And we can’t ignore them any longer.
Re: Re: Re:5
I’m sure you’re aware that you’re on a website called Techdirt whose comment section feuds have little influence on elections. That aside:
Here’s my rule of thumb if you take nothing else away from this:
If a troll posts lies, you should reply with the truth (for the benefit of ignorant onlookers) or you should keep quiet.
Re: Re:
TDS afects those people who think that Diaper Donnie is in anyway qualified for public office.
This is the guy who thought a cognitive test was an intelligence test for crying out loud. And kept bragging about it. Why wasn’t the question asked about why the president was being given a cognitive test?
Re: Re:
Its people who think that TDS is a thing that are deranged, as the are ignoring reality to follow a conman,
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Re:
And the only thing YOU deserve is death.
A violent one.
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No wonder you ran screaming from the idea of a debate if “whiny little liberal bitch” is the best rebuttal you can come up with.
Though, to be fair, at least you spelled it correctly.
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…he said as he whined about someone’s different ideas.
And as Masnick has explained, it’s his site and his rules, which means that they will write about whatever they please. You know what you can do about that? Don’t read the shit you don’t like.
Re: Re:
…he said as he whined about someone’s different ideas.
Every accusation a confession, every self-given label a rejection of.
The real question...
Will the US descend into a fascist dumpster fire before the GOP collapses in on itself like a black hole of idiocy?
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Re:
The generational divide is obvious. They can only make rabid low IQ nobodies spew that broken English trash.
Segregation already has merit. That makes laughing at psuedo-left and psuedo-right easy.
Same cesspool, different name.
GOP: “Am I out of touch?”
GOP:”…”
GOP: “No it’s the woke liberals who are wrong.”
Isn't it funny?
Every single time a Republican whines about “the main stream media” remind them of their own talking point. “Fox News is the most widely watched cable news channel. Sounds pretty main stream to me.”
A power grab?
Here’s what the For the People Act will accomplish:
• Makes Election Day a holiday
• Ends gerrymandering
• Combats anti-voting laws working their way through state legislatures
• Requires states to allow 15 days of early voting (including 2 weekends)
• Massively expands voting access through automatic voter registration and election day registration
• Increases election security by creating a national standard for voter verified paper ballots
• Implements a national voter ID standard with reasonable alternatives like utility bills or bank statements
• Requires voting machines be made in the United States
• Protects nonpartisan election officials from partisan interference
• Shines a light on dark money
• Makes it harder for billionaires and special interests to buy elections
—-
For the People Act was passed in the House. In the Senate, it is being blocked by the usual GOP suspects as well as Manchin and Sinema. McConnell calls it a “power grab”. It is a “power grab” – grabbing power for the citizens.
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According to a January 2021 poll conducted by progressive think tank Data for Progress, American voters broadly support the Freedom to Vote Act, with nearly 67% supporting the bill, even after participants were provided opposition messaging. According to the poll, 77% of Democratic voters, 68% of independent voters, and 56% of Republican voters support the act. – (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_People_Act)
Kinda hard to remove the only thing you've got left
GOP election planner 1: Okay, if we cut out the extremist batshittery to better appeal to younger voters what do we have left?
GOP election planner 2: Uhhhh….
Election planner 1: Come on, we’ve got to have something we can use to tell people about our party and why they should support us? What about all our conservative values, how about we remind people about those?!
Election Planner 2: … those are on the chopping block if we cut out all the extremist batshittery.
Election planner 1: … Shit.
Election planner 2: Yeah.
Election planner 1: … So, stick with playing to the most deranged people we can find with victim complexes and blaming anything bad on anyone but us?
Election planner 2: It’s been working great so far, and when it hasn’t-
Both: ‘It’s all the fault of the liberals!’
Republicans are stuck...
“We can’t talk about our policies, because we don’t have any. We can’t talk about our results, because our past performance, the results are terrible. We can’t talk about our candidate’s character because our candidates are liars, bigots, racists, and fools. We can’t talk about our future plans, because we don’t have any besides revenge and vindictiveness.”
Republicans are stuck. The only thing they have left is distraction, more lies, and denials. So of course the consultants will propose putting a bandage on their terminal illnesses, and then the party “leaders” will deny they need it, and double-down on ‘stupid’ and ‘lies’ instead. Witness “George Santos.” Witness McCarthy’s inability to articulate any specifics on his “cut spending” ultimatum. Fools and liars.
Republicans – the party of lies and liars.
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“Witness “George Santos.”
He’s a weird outlier. Although it’s a great example of how some people will vote against their stated aims to get their “team” in place, there’s a good argument that nobody who voted for him voted for a real candidate and they voted for a fictional character.
Which, I’m sure, many people wish the fringe nutters were as well, but some of the other demons were honest about who they were I suppose.
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The most fucked up thing about George Santos is that he only skates on his bullshit (for now) because he’s a Republican. If he were a Democrat, the chances that he would’ve been ousted from his seat by now would be incredibly high.
Factual reality? Fuck me, it's come to this
Really, it’s insane we’ve gotten to the point where this term is needed, and not for some fringe types, it’s needed to discuss the leadership and majority of one of our parties. It’s surreal. One of my favorite classes back in my college days was a course in Anthropology called “Non-ordinary Reality”, we read a couple of Carlos Castaneda’s books and a book or two on Shamanism and the like. Now, they’re going to need to offer courses with the same name but it’ll be in poli-sci.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, AKA the DSM, the ‘bible’ for psychology to catalog all the known mental disorders and the criteria to identify them in patients, would actually not classify these yahoos as delusional as it defines it with a ridiculous exemption:
“delusion A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly
held despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture (i.e., it is not an article of religious faith).”
It’s no surprise that most of the most deluded are also wedded to religious zealotry. But FFS, why is mass delusion no longer delusion? It’s simple enough, we have to call out these cultures or subcultures [or subhuman cultures] as delusional. That’s obviously true, being adamantly impervious to facts IS a mental disorder.
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Yesssss. Insult their imaginary friend, shame them into oblivion, and fly the freak flags over every nation. A thong on every cock and a futa in every vagina. Justice will be ours.
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Is that what keeps you awake at night?
rather sad don’t ya think?
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Honey, my pegging keeps a slew of white boys awake at night.
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You can’t hide the fabulous.
Downvoting the black new world order is racism and homophobia. That makes you a terrorist.
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This site should be banned
1: Trump should have seized power using the Insurrection Act before the fraudulent 2020 elections.
2: Trump should have then banned Left-wing propaganda sites like Techdirt from the Internet, including full demonetization.
Sadly, he didn’t. Now we have to wait for the Left-wingers to slaughter each other in a Cambodia-style autogenocide before we can have sanity restored… 🙁
“Free speech” is a fraud.
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lol no that’s not going to happen. You boomers are all going to die first from old age or COVID, and then your pathetic soy boy offspring is going to off themselves sucking off each other’s pump-action shotguns while masturbating to the Confederacy flag.
The age of futanari enbys is coming. Your ass is ours, or your ass is grass.
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fuckin russian idiots
being drunk does not make you strong
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Yes, because nothing says democracy for the people than a losing president using the insurrection act to lead an insurrection against America.
BTW… if you have any real evidence of fraud in the 2020 election, I’m sure Mike Lindell would love to hear about it.
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