WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 14, 2024
A candidate's crazy claims: Just a guess:
The bullroar was general over St. Cloud when the candidate in question made the highlighted statements:
TRUMP (7/27/24): You know what's a friendly rally? This is a friendly rally!
AUDIENCE: USA! USA! USA! USA!
TRUMP: By the way, I feel so bad. There are 25,000 people outside that cannot—
If you people all go and vote— Now look—
[ROAR FROM CROWD]
[...]
TRUMP: We've always had the biggest crowds in history—there's never been anything like this.
No, you ought to see. We drove from the airport to here, and practically the whole way there were just thousands and thousands of people. It's incredible, right?
[ROARING CROWD]
According to the Associated Press, the hopeful was speaking in an arena which seats 5,159 people. The crowd was very enthusiastic, as is their perfect right.
The candidate said there were 25,000 additional people outside—people who couldn't get in.
Everything is possible! That said, the candidate always says things like that, even when empty seats are visible at his rallies. On this day, he added a highly improbable claim about the "thousands and thousands of people" who lined the boulevards of St. Cloud as he was motored in.
We find no reference to those "thousands and thousands of people" in news reports about the event. According to MapQuest, the distance was roughly eight miles.
With respect to the picture the candidate drew, we think again of Sandburg's account of what President-elect Lincoln's beloved stepmother thought as she said goodbye to her stepson for the final time.
Here's Sandburg, near the end of his two-volume work, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years:
SANDBURG (1939): He was her boy more than any born to her. He gave her a photograph of her boy, a hungry picture of him standing and wanting, wanting. He stroked her face a last time, kissed good-by, and went away.
She knew his heart would go roaming back often, that even when he rode in an open carriage in New York or Washington with soldiers, flags or cheering thousands along the streets, he might just as like be thinking of her in the old log farmhouse out in Coles County, Illinois.
The sunshine of the prairie summer and fall months would come sifting down with healing and strength; between harvest and corn-plowing there would be rains beating and blizzards howling; and then there would be silence after snowstorms with white drifts piled against the fences, barns, and trees.
In that passage, Sandburg imagined what Sally Bush Lincoln had imagined. In St. Cloud, on June 27, the candidate painted a similar picture of cheering throngs in the streets.
We'll guess that those "thousands and thousands of people" had possibly been imagined. Also, as noted in the New York Times, the candidate said quite a few other things on this particular day:
GOLD (7/28/24): Mr. Trump on Saturday once more escalated his attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, now the presumptive Democratic nominee.
During a speech lasting roughly 90 minutes, Mr. Trump called Ms. Harris “evil,” “unhinged” and “sick.” He lied about her views on abortion in an effort to paint her as extreme, and he mocked her laugh and her demeanor.
“We have a brand-new victim,” Mr. Trump told thousands of people inside the Herb Brooks National Hockey Center in St. Cloud, Minn. “And, honestly, she’s a radical left lunatic.”
The candidate told the crowd that he's running against an evil, sick, radical lunatic. So it went, up in St. Cloud, on this summer day.
For better or worse, also this:
As we detailed yesterday, the candidate offered his latest claims about the way "they" had stolen the 2020 election. Beyond that, he told the enthusiastic crowd that "they" were going to try to steal the election again this year.
By any normal standard, such remarks are highly inflammatory. You'd think a candidate would be held to a very high standard of evidence when he chose to advance such claims.
By now, of course, claims of this type have become quite familiar in the case of the current candidate. One week later, on Saturday, August 2, the candidate made similar claims—as he routinely does—during a boisterous campaign rally in Atlanta.
Did "they" steal the 2020 election? Are "they" planning to do so again? In the case of the current candidate, such claims have been repeated so often that a person could convincingly say they've been "normalized."
Here's what we mean by that:
These remarkable, inflammatory claims have become so routine that they tend to pass with little notice within the mainstream press. As a general matter, these remarkable, inflammatory claims pass without being mentioned at all on the various programs of the Fox News Channel.
At the candidate's campaign events, cheering crowds hear these claims again and again and again. Within the American press—within the American discourse, such as it is—they've come to be seen as background noise, without attention being paid.
Without attention being paid! With attention possibly being paid to newer strange statements instead.
It isn't like the nation's mainstream journalists are ignoring this candidate's statements. Just yesterday, the Washington Post's Aaron Blake offered a compendium of new peculiar claims by this particular hopeful.
More specifically, Blake listed "10 of the most recent examples." The dual headline on his report says this:
Trump’s laundry list of increasingly bizarre claims
His ridiculous claim about Kamala Harris’s “A.I.’d” rally crowd being non-existent is merely the latest.
That was the dual headline atop Blake's laundry list. As he started, Blake said this:
Trump’s laundry list of increasingly bizarre claims
Donald Trump on Sunday claimed that a large gathering of plainly evident people who greeted Vice President Kamala Harris at a rally in a Detroit airport hangar “DIDN’T EXIST.”
“Nobody was there,” the former president claimed on Truth Social, accusing the Harris campaign of using artificial intelligence to superimpose the crowd both on the tarmac and at other rallies.
This is bonkers, even by Trump’s own conspiratorial and falsehood-laden standards.
The rally was attended by reporters from The Washington Post and other outlets who observed the large crowd, which was estimated at around 15,000 people by local news outlet MLive. It was documented by plenty of video and photos, including those from many people in the crowd.
But it was merely the latest in a string of bizarre claims from the former president in recent days, weeks and months...
So it went at the start of Blake's report. As he continued, he listed nine other peculiar claims by the candidate in question. Included were such claims as these:
Peculiar claims by Candidate Trump:
President Biden faked his recent bout with Covid.
President Biden is going to try to reclaim his party's nomination at the Democratic National Convention.
President Biden was "locked & loaded ready to take me out" during the August 2022 court-approved search of Mar-a-Lago.
Vice President Harris has only recently "turned black" (began to identify as black).
Those are four of the additional nine. As a general matter, claims like these are never mentioned on programs on the Fox News Channel.
Such peculiar claims are disappeared by people like Doocy, Earhardt, Kilmeade and Jones, with weekend help from Hegseth, Cain and Campos-Duffy.
Claims like these are disappeared by reams of other Fox News Channel employees. In turn, the silence of such corporate players is disappeared by people on MSNBC, but also by people like Aaron Blake.
This is the way our imitation of national discourse operates at the present time.
In fairness to our mainstream journalists, we'll state an obvious point. It isn't easy to know how to cover a candidate who makes as many remarkable claims as the candidate in question.
Having said that, we'll offer these plans for the next two days:
Tomorrow, we'll show you what happened when CNN's Pamela Brown decided to challenge the claims the candidate made in St. Cloud—specifically, the claims he made about the way "they" keep stealing elections.
Tomorrow, we'll look at Brown's attempt to challenge those inflammatory claims.
On Friday, we'll turn to a different question—a question concerning the way the mainstream press corps covers such transparently crazy claims as the transparently crazy claim the candidate made about that non-existent crowd at the Harris rally.
If you listen to this candidate, there are "thousands and thousands of people" lining the boulevards as he's transported to his events.
By way of contrast, no one is present at Harris' rallies. Claims to the contrary have been invented. "They" have dreamed such claims up!
It seems to us that the candidate's claims about stolen elections have been thoroughly normalized—by the silence of people like Doocy and Earhardt, but also, in many ways, by the work of the mainstream press.
A second type of "normalization" has been underway for some time. That involves a decision which was made sixty years ago, for reasons which were perfectly valid at that point in time.
In recent years, the normalizations have been numerous—have been general—over much of the failing American discourse. We'll explore those two specific normalizations in the next two days.
Tomorrow: (Pamela) Brown attempts to push back
Omer Bartov, Israeli veteran, historian of genocide:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/israel-gaza-historian-omer-bartov
DavidInCal, about your question from yesterday about stolen election in Venezuela: Biden-Harris can’t say anything about the integrity of elections in Venezuela – it will be like the pot calling the kettle black. But, who knows? All Harris has to do is put out some random word salad about significance of elections. NYT, CNN and others will have an orgasm, and they will marvel at how this woman who identifies as black explains everything so beautifully.
ReplyDelete10:28,
DeleteThe media works for Republicans. If a Republican calls and tells the media to report something they do it.
The problem for Republicans is they can't make the argument that Harris is (or isn't) black, because they've spent 3+ decades having the media report that they don't see color.
#actionshaveconsequences
Today Tom Sullivan at Digby's Hullabaloo expresses dismay about the way the NY Times is portraying Donald Trump as representative of American opinion on Ukraine. The NY Times seems to be working for Republicans:
Deletehttps://digbysblog.net/2024/08/14/leader-of-what/
"Biden-Harris can’t say anything about the integrity of elections in Venezuela – it will be like the pot calling the kettle black."
DeleteI think it's adorable when little MAGA fraidy-birds summon up the courage to type something like this, and then when challenged for detail of where-oh-where there exists evidence for their big brave claims, they're never heard from again.
You need an ID to go to Kamala rally, board a plane or buy booze. But Dems insist that asking for some form of ID to vote is racist. The obvious intent here to goose up voting rolls and cheat. I’ll believe the results are fair if there is no 3am vote dump in 4 states that makes Dems winners in 15 minutes.
DeleteThe claim on the left is not that it is racist but that such requirements are aimed at suppressing votes of black people but also other minorities and the poor and elderly and disabled. That robs them of their right to vote, compared to people for whom such ID is not a barrier.
DeleteThe so-called 3AM vote dump occurs because the mail-in (absentee) votes were all counted as a group and that is when the counting ended. Different states have different rules about when such votes may begin to be counted. Some permit advance counting some require that they can only be counted after the in-person polls close. That is why these so-called dumps occur so late at night. It takes that long to count legitimate mail-in votes in those states. Yes, there is often a swing because the demographics of those who vote by mail may be different than those who vote in-person, and because some precincts have different demographics than the state as a whole. This isn't rocket science, and there is nothing illegal going on, but the Republicans have used these aspects of voting to suggest to gullible people that something wrong is occurring. Trump seems to not understand how voting works, and he may genuinely wonder about why these dumps happen, but I'm sure someone has explained it to him at least once. That makes these claims dishonest on the part of Republicans. You should do a little research and find out why requiring ID is unfair to the disabled, poor and minorities, and why "dumps" during counting do not mean anything illegal or unfair is happening. Among the groups voting by mail are college students, people in hospitals, and deployed military members. Failure to allow them to vote would be wrong.
There is a lot of age-related fraud when buying alcohol, but few people want to vote to the point of risking fines and jail time by faking their registration. They check people at polls by making them sign their names and then checking the signatures against the ones given when they originally registered. That is more strict and hard to fake than a fake ID, which can be purchased at most high schools. In practice, most voter fraud has been committed by Republicans, not the people who are targeted by these restrictive laws.
DeleteProcedures for voting without ID:
DeleteSome states may ask you to sign a form affirming your identity. Other states let you cast a provisional ballot.
States use provisional ballots if there's a question about a voter's eligibility.
They keep your provisional ballot separate until they investigate your eligibility. You may have to return to show an acceptable form of ID within a few days, or the ballot will not count.
"Everything is possible! That said, the candidate always says things like that, even when empty seats are visible at his rallies..."
ReplyDeleteEverything is not possible. If an arena seats 5,159, where would all those 25,000 people be, in the parking lots or streets surrounding the venue? It seems physically impossible for them to be there and that means "everything" is NOT possible.
Why does Somerby say stupid things like this? We might as well as why Trump tells such stupid, easily discredit lies. We know what Trump's problem is, but what is Somerby's damage?
He says things like that so you'll have a reason to go on living.
DeleteHe says things like that so he'll have a reason to go on living. FTFY
DeleteA little of both.
DeleteSandburg has been criticized for inventing thoughts and feelings for historical figures. This kind of fictionalized history was even decried by Somerby once upon a time as a troubly new phenomenon, but he seems OK with it when it supports his own preferred narrative.
ReplyDelete"In that passage, Sandburg imagined what Sally Bush Lincoln had imagined. In St. Cloud, on June 27, the candidate painted a similar picture of cheering throngs in the streets."
DeleteSomerby says that Sandburg "imagined" those thoughts, because how could have known them otherwise. Then Somerby equates that with Trump's blatant lie about the throngs. The difference between an act of imagination is a lie is the we know when we are imagining and when we are lying, unless someone has dementia or brain injury to the frontal lobes. That is where "reality monitoring" takes place. Normal people can tell when they are thinking about something or it really happened, when we are imagining and when something is real, and when we wish for or think about saying or doing something and when it happens.
Somerby would love to claim that Trump is not lying about his crowds because he really believes in them, that they were there. But if that is the case, then there is something majorly wrong with Trump's brain, especially in the frontal lobes where judgment and reasoning reside. And that makes Trump a horrible choice for dogcatcher, much less president.
Sandburg didn't really think he knew what Sally Lincoln was thinking. Who can know that except that woman, long dead now? Equating that with Trump's lie about his crowd sizes is ridiculous, whether Trump knows he is lying or not.
And this is just as bad for Somerby as for Trump, since Somerby's equation of two entirely different mental experiences is just as mistaken as Trump's crowd lies. I have been worrying about Somerby's decline, and statements like this stupidity today do nothing to assuage my fears about his brain functioning. But Somerby is not running for president and Trump is.
But I think it would be a mistake to consider Somerby in full possession of his faculties, and a mistake to follow his lead when he reasons about Trump or anything else, including sacred Troy.
Bob is no longer cognitive.
DeleteTypo correction: "...The difference between an act of imagination AND a lie is THAT we know when we are imagining..." Sorry for any confusion.
DeleteDavid cares about the deficit, but he's almost alone.
ReplyDeletehttps://jabberwocking.com/does-anyone-care-about-the-deficit/
Repubs only care about deficits when Dems are in power, otherwise they say it does not matter.
Delete"It isn't like the nation's mainstream journalists are ignoring this candidate's statements. Just yesterday, the Washington Post's Aaron Blake offered a compendium of new peculiar claims by this particular hopeful."
ReplyDeleteSomerby complains because the press doesn't rehash Trump's claims (since 2020) that the election was stolen and that he actually won. The press has been labeling such statements "false" and calling them "lies" which doesn't satisfy Somerby. But apparently, by Somerby's own word, the press has been calling out Trump's new bizarre statements and fact checking them.
There is a reason the news is called news. It is because it reports on current events, not history and not old events. It chronicles what happens in real time and doesn't go back to talk about old stuff except for context, usually in the final paragraphs of a report. That is how journalism works.
Somerby has been complaining about this for centuries. He doesn't seem to understand how journalism works or what it is for. There are historians now writing about Trump's 2020 lies.
Someday Somerby will accept that the world doesn't function to his specifications but runs by its own rules and he will adjust to the way things are. Until then, he will have something to write about over and over and over. We can only hope that he is being paid by the word for his own rambling, which strongly resembles Trump's obsessions. He doesn't seem to have anything new to say himself, but then he is not writing about the world but only about the contents of his own brain, and those seem to be stuck judging by his broken-record writing.
"As a general matter, claims like these are never mentioned on programs on the Fox News Channel. "
ReplyDeleteDuh! Somerby surely knows that Fox is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican party, devoted to pro-Trump propaganda and spreading right wing talking points. Once upon a time, Somerby knew that. Then he started watching Fox 24/7 (by his own admission) and now he sounds more and more like David in Cal. while pretending to be liberal. Somerby's fantasy world is as florid as Trump's.
"A second type of "normalization" has been underway for some time. That involves a decision which was made sixty years ago, for reasons which were perfectly valid at that point in time."
ReplyDeleteA few days ago, a commenter here referred cryptically to something that happened 60 years ago, being responsible for today's problems. Now Somerby echoes that figure. I think that supports the idea that Somerby at least reads his comments, if not being the guy who made that comment himself. I don't agree with the idea that Trump was caused by something 60 years back because I believe Trump was groomed to run for president by Russian oligarchs who pretty much owned him (financially) around the time he started dabbling in politics. I don't think it has anything to do with American politics. The dynamics of cults and the characteristics of cult leaders have been part of social psychology since the doomsday cults were studied by John Lofland and earlier by Leon Festinger. There is nothing special about Trump except that the right wing has been riding his coattails for their own personal gain.
Somerby's new favorite word is normalization, but that is a trivial part of what has happened on the right, politically. Trump is himself far from normal and getting worse every week. His time is nearly over. The Republicans now need to decide what kind of party they will become without Trump's influence. I don't hear Somerby talking about that at all, but then this blog is about blame not change or recovery. It always has been.
It was Somerby who first mentioned something that happened “60 years ago”, and it was pointed out that that was the year the civil rights act was passed. Until he specifies what he means, it’s just guesswork.
DeleteResearchers have also studied the characteristics of authoritarian dictators and the conditions that produce them. The only thing "new" about Trump is that he has been embraced by the right in our country, which has never been threatened with a dictator before. It may be "normalizing" to compare Trump to other authoritarian dictators worldwide, but it gives Trump too much credit NOT to show how similar he is to others of his ilk.
DeleteLike everything in the universe, right wingers are on a spectrum, prior to Reagan, Republicans generally operated under a liberal consensus.
DeleteThe significant shift came with movement conservatives, not 60 years ago, but more like 70+ years ago, roughly correlating with a rise in corporate power that movement conservatives used to gain influence.
Bob is not a student of history.
As movement conservatives pushed for a more dog eat dog world, American lives became more precarious which then feeds into a cycle of conditions that enables an increasing emergence of right wing dominance.
11:22 — I’ll put my marker down on what Somerby says happened 60 years ago, for what it’s worth. I’ll bet he’s referring to Goldwater’s run for the presidency and the Goldwater Rule.
DeleteI believe that over time Somerby has changed his mind about this Rule, and I hope he explains his thinking about this.
Somerby does not know history well, nor how to interpret it.
DeleteThe Goldwater Rule dates from '73 and applies only to psychiatrists, not psychologists, and does not prevent them from offering their expertise, but does discourage offering diagnoses of public individuals. The rule does make a clear qualifier from the outset:
"A physician shall recognize a responsibility to participate in activities contributing to the improvement of the community and the betterment of public health."
As 1:07 notes, the roots of what we are dealing with now predates Goldwater, but Somerby does not need to know history to put his thumb on the scale to push a misguided narrative.
From The Politics of Renewal ....; Brian M. Conley; Researchgate, April 2014:
DeleteWhat had started as an improbable movement to draft Goldwater for president in 1964 emerged, amid the political and social turmoil of the decade, as the dominant force within the Republican Party. But what has not received as much attention is the significant role that the national Republican Party leadership and the emphasis it placed on party renewal, rather than reform, played in the Right's rapid post-Goldwater ascent. [This article] examines how the process of party renewal, specifically the emergence of a national “service party” structure, helped not only to unify the GOP after the 1964 Goldwater loss, but also led to the development of a more conservative Republican Party during the second half of the 1960s.
[Addition to @ 2:45]
DeleteThe Religious Right in America; Michael J. Mc Vicar; doi.org, March 2016:
By the 1960s a large number of evangelical leaders had begun to question the isolationism of a previous generation of fundamentalist leaders. Neo-evangelicalism and anti-Communist fundamentalism reflected more than a half-century’s worth of controversy regarding engagement with and withdrawal from the broader culture. A small number of younger evangelicals rejected the status quo conservatism of neo-evangelicalism and anti-Communist fundamentalists and turned to anti–Vietnam War, anti-segregation, and anti-poverty activism.5 A larger coalition of evangelicals and fundamentalists turned toward aggressive political organizing and built new relationships with the Republican Party. In the GOP, they found politicians willing to embrace conservative social and economic issues in a way that resonated with white evangelical Christians living in the American South, the West, and beyond.
DiC - CPI 2.9% YoY. Ho-hum, moderating inflation gliding to a perfect soft landing. What else is new?
ReplyDeleteDiC — Step back a bit. Can you believe the last couple of years of spectacular readings for the economy? It’s getting so a jobs report of “only” 114K jobs is considered disappointing.
DeleteFeds are deficit spending at 6% of GDP, and yet the GDP growth is <3%. That is not a healthy economy. What would growth be if the budget is balanced?
Delete11:49,
DeleteMost on the Right would say GDP growth is being stymied because we made the rich and corporations pay their fair share to balance the budget.
What about you? Do you think GDP would be higher or lower?
Why should the budget be balanced at its current level of spending. It makes more sense for us to determine the optimal level of spending in order to maintain the well-being of our nation (all of its people), then increase taxes to support that level with a balanced budget.
DeleteComparing our national budget to a household budget, it makes no sense to deny children food or get rid of other necessities simply to have a balanced budget. Most families in need increase their income to meet their necessities when they can, because it is better for them to work two jobs (or both be employed) than to become homeless or without transportation in order to live within the current budget. People do the best they can under such circumstances, but it is crazy to think about making unreasonable cuts that hurt our country simply to live within our means (without asking the rich to pay their fair share or even giving cuts to the rich).
Balancing the current budget would entail cuts that would put our economy in a tailspin.
DeleteW Bush crashed the economy (deficit to GDP hitting 9.8%), then Obama brought down the deficit to GDP ratio (to a low of 2.4%), then under Trump the deficit to GDP started rising again hitting 4.6% before Trump crashed the economy by mishandling Covid so deficit to GDP shot up to 14.7% under Trump's guidance, then Biden started bringing it back down, this fiscal year it is 5.6%, about where it was back in '83 when Reagan crashed the economy.
A balanced budget is unwise, essentially it indicates that there is less money for citizens and more money for the fat cats in government that then use it to appease their wealthy minders, which then crashes the economy.
1:49 - We're seeing strong growth, rising real wages, full employment, rising stock markets, and stable prices. We're in the middle of a boom.
DeleteThe doom and gloom of Trump/Vance is no longer potent.
DeleteUnless you're a couch.
@Anon 11:49
Delete"What would growth be if the budget is balanced?"
Quite possibly, growth would be smaller. Government spending is a component of GDP.
It's a tossup on who's the emptier suit, Jerome Powell or Merrick Garland.
DeleteHow can you justify 6% of GDP deficit spending when there is no recession, war or pandemic (ie what should be normal times)?
DeleteIt isn't a justification but an explanation -- Trump gave a huge tax cut to corporations and rich people, putting the budget way out of balance in terms of having enough money to pay for our nation's legitimate needs.
Delete3:04 baseless ad hominem comment
DeleteWhen the media started calling trump a liar for his election fraud claims, that is the opposite of normalization, but Somerby objected, and demanded they call him mentally ill, or some such thing. It was hardly normalizing him when they heavily reported on his legal issues, but Somerby mockingly objected to that focus as“Trump trump trump trump jail”. The Jan 6 committee investigated Trump’s election lies, but Somerby thought the committee was biased. His conviction for fraud in the Stormy Daniels case was met with scorn by Somerby, who once suggested that Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen should get a Medal of Honor for concealing Daniels’ story.
ReplyDeleteThe 60 or so losing Trump lawsuits alleging fraud after the 2020 election were examined, debunked, and in some of the more frivolous cases, ridiculed in real time. The crazy claims from Arizona were reported, and the certification of the results by officials there after lengthy review was noted. Georgia as well. A normal person would accept these results and move on, but Trump keeps making these claims, and instead of dumping Trump, the gop and right wing media have fully gotten behind his claims. And by right wing media I mean Fox, newsmax, etc, but also the dozens of Sinclair-owned local TV stations.
Somerby offers advice to Fox News to be more effective in their endeavor, whereas with other cable news, Somerby just feels that they are hopeless (since they do not support his views as greedily as Fox News).
DeleteThere is a counterintuitive point to explore here: right wingers may be more clever in some specific ways than those on the left since right wingers have to construct and maintain an unnatural worldview house of cards which requires a certain amount of brain power, whereas those on the left are simply people who operate moreso based on our innate human nature.
This is like saying that villains must be crafty or they'll get caught. I think in reality, most criminals are stupid and the large majority in prison can't read and have no skills or ability to support themselves. Trump would not have succeeded at anything except grifting if it were not for his father's fortune.
DeleteOn the left, people are trying to improve society and help solve problems, so it isn't as if we are not using our brains. We are using them for different purposes.
2:52 fair enough, but that does not negate 1:19’s point which I think is interesting and has some validity.
DeleteI don't need to be normalized because I'm already normal.
ReplyDelete"NORMALIZATION(S): Have crazy statements been normalized?"
ReplyDeleteIt isn't the crazy statements that have been normalized but all of Trump's behavior, from his sexual assaults to his bankruptcies, to his Putin-loving. None of that is normal behavior for anyone.
This goes beyond the media to include the MAGA cult members who idolize Trump and will accept any amount or kind of bad behavior from him, simply because he is powerful (i.e., has a lot of money) and they identify with him when he gets away with illegal, unkind and stupid acts. He is their outlaw hero.
The question is how our society reached the point where bad guys are exalted by a subculture that thinks it is OK to harm others. I thinks gun ownership deserves some of the blame, and perhaps Hollywood anti-heroes are also responsible but is there a kind of alienation that contributes to right wing MAGA extremism and Trump worship? Are we too tolerant of our fringes? Why aren't MAGAs shunned by normal people? Why is it possible to wear a "Fuck Your Feelings" T-shirt outside a Trump rally?
I am not advocating abrogation of our consitutional rights, including free expression, but I do not understand how our culture has evolved so that unkindness, theft and other anti-social acts have become mainstream. Deadpool is now a superhero!
Tim Walz is admired by the left for his goodness, but why is JD Vance admired by the right when he is so screwed up? Or maybe the right doesn't like him any more than anyone else, and he is just VP because Trump likes him? He is worse than DeSantis in terms of personal charm.
Delete"A Democratic-aligned political action committee filed a complaint with federal election regulators accusing Donald Trump, his campaign and the social media site X of violating federal election laws during Trump's interview with tech billionaire Elon Musk.
ReplyDeleteTrump's lengthy interview with Musk on Monday "violated" federal rules banning corporations from making contributions to federal candidates, and barring federal candidates from accepting such contributions," alleged the complaint filed Tuesday by the group End Citizens United.
The group said the interview "amounted to a virtual campaign event for Donald J. Trump financed by X."
"Such a brazen corporate contribution undermines the anti-corruption aims of the Act, and the [Federal Election] Commission should immediately investigate these violations and take appropriate remedial action," the complaint said.
Campaign Treasurer Bradley T. Crate was also named in the complaint."
From Rawstory
Trump believes that rules do not apply to him. It is part of his abnormality that others validate and normalize. He just does whatever he wants. It may be a fantasy of childish Americans to want to do the same. I hope they nail him for yet another campaign violation (like the one that he was convicted of in the hush money trial). And I hope he takes Musk down with him.
Well good luck getting the FEC to lift a finger to sanction Trump.
Delete