American Politics from 2019 on

[JimC]

[JimC]

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-23/ ... /106374092

Arab and Muslim nations have strongly condemned comments made by the US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.
Mr Huckabee suggested Israel could claim a biblical right to territory beyond its borders in the Middle East.
The foreign ministries of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Pakistan, Türkiye, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine labelled the comments "dangerous and inflammatory".

A sop to the fundamentalists within MAGA?

[Brian Peacock]

Not sure about that given the "Jews will not replace us" sentiments of the US right. Seems more like a declaration of support for the governors of a colonial outpost.

[Tero]

The US will return to somewhat more normal behavior after Trump. Years pass and the academics will have to make documentaries with interviews from this era. Otherwise future college students will not believe the size (30-40 million) of hard core Trump supporters. Trump was able to express what theu thought, but throwing in phrases that were code, like DEI. The reader of that future text book on politics (political histroy has little shelf space in bookstore, only ethnic and minority writers hava a section) will lose interest in 2 pages. You have to put in some terrible things that can be proven. Otherwise it all gets lumped as conspiracy.

[Tero]

Wealth

"The Federal Reserve, for example, found that by the third quarter of 2025, the share of total wealth held by the top 0.1 percent had grown to 14.4 percent from 8.6 percent in 1989. The share owned by those in the remaining part of the 1 percent grew to 17.3 from 14.2 percent."

"This is not about the proverbial pie getting much bigger. Those gains at the top have been at the expense of everyone below."

so the 1% owns 17% plus 14%
NYT Thomas B. Edsall

[Tero]

hstrandtandrews
21h
It’s the same mindset as the old Russian joke:
There once were two poor farmers, living side by side. Each poor farmer was barely scraping by, & each had an old cow.
One day, one of the farmers’ cows just gave up and died. The poor farmer raised his eyes to Heaven & pleaded with God to send help.
God said, “I have heard your pleas. How can I help? Perhaps another cow, to bring you better fortune.”
Poor Farmer: “I want you to kill my neighbor’s cow.
And this pretty much sums up MAGA.

[Tero]

Holy F**K!! A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers Monday that the Iran war was part of God's plan to user in the End Times and bring about Jesus Christ's second coming.

https://www.rawstory.com/military-2675544403/
https://www.threads.com/@deanobeidallah ... ZDK&slof=1

[Tero]

Graham Platner Isn’t Going Away, No Matter How Many Nazi Gaffes He Makes
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/g ... -he-makes/

Could the Maine Senate race determine the future of the Democratic party?
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2025/10/17 ... lins-maine

evemgold
4d
Replying to @dnmeinster
Who in a democratic primary has a Nazi tattoo?? Some context would be nice here.
adamdean18
4d
Graham Plattner who’s running in the democratic primary for senate in Maine. Got a Nazi tattoo on shore leave when he was in the Marines somewhere over in Eastern Europe iirc. Didn’t get it covered up until it came out last year it was a Nazi tattoo.

Maine primary is June 9
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Unit ... n_in_Maine

[Tero]

Hegseth wrote a book? Huh.

US House Speaker Mike Johnson said that Iranians' "misguided religion" causes them to hate Americans.

In February, the ambassador to Israel, evangelical Mike Huckabee, said that Israel has a Biblically guaranteed right to rule much of the Middle East, "from the river to the sea."

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, known as a Christian nationalist, has the Deus Vult war cry (meaning "God wills it") tattooed on his biceps, referring to the Catholic Church's Crusades, and the Jerusalem cross on his chest.

Read alsoThe pastor who mentored Donald Trump is on TV today – Documentary exposes extremists behind the scenes of the administration
The tattoos have been linked to both extreme Christianity and white supremacy. Hegseth has dismissed criticism of his tattoos as “anti-Christian bigotry” and said they only represent his religious views.

Pete Hegseth has called the fight against Islamists a modern-day crusade in his book The American Crusade . In his book, Hegseth also says that Islam itself is a threat to Western civilization.

https://www.iltalehti.fi/ulkomaat/a/2db ... 76f4815d09
The article is titled End Times Are Coming

[Svartalf]

that iran's religion is misguided, that's a fact, then again, that's true, at best, of every religion.
then again, maybe they hate Americans because they were being the ultraoppressive Pahlavi regime, they are behind all the problems the country has selling its oil and gas and participating in international trade, they are behind manoeuvers to destroy the Mollah republic and reinstate the pahlavi regime instead of fostering democracy, they are equally guilty with israel for all the bombs landing on the country....

[Tero]

MAGA: The elites are getting something! Why should I pay for medieval scholars and cancer research?

“Now the compact between the universities and the federal government has been broken, and maybe not just temporarily. The Trump Administration has deployed a brutally effective, previously unused technique for getting these institutions’ full attention: suspending their funds, even those appropriated by Congress and legally committed to in contracts. The Trump Administration is unusual in its disregard for the law, rough way of doing business, and heedlessness about the effects of its actions. Still, it isn’t completely out of touch with political reality. These actions are not nearly as unpopular as universities think they should be. The heart of this tragedy is that universities believe themselves to be devoted to the public good but fall far short of the level of public support they need. How did that happen?”

“The person who most effectively pulled together the élite and democratic strains in higher education was Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California, who built a three-tier system—research universities, state colleges, and community colleges—that was meant to educate the entire youth of the state and to direct them to their appropriate socioeconomic destinations, tuition-free. But it took hardly any time for the University of California to come under attack—first, from the left, via Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, which didn’t like its bureaucratic aspect and its rich diet of government defense contracts, and then, far more consequentially, from the right. Ronald Reagan began his political career with a successful race for governor of California in 1966, in which he promised to punish the university for being too tolerant of its student radicals. One of his early moves in office was to support the University of California Board of Regents’ ousting of Kerr."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026 ... university
The surprize is that there is not enough of an outrage. The technical fields are already crippled. And medical research will lost all our to scientists that do not happen to be American born.

[Tero]

more

“A dramatic decline of trust in universities among Republicans began during this (Obama) period, and so did significant decreases, from a low baseline, in the conservative presence on élite-university faculties, especially in the humanities and the social sciences. Gallup polls that measure the public’s trust in institutions have found that, between 2015 and 2024, Republicans’ trust in universities fell from fifty-six per cent to twenty per cent.

“At some universities, a divide has opened between grant-dependent scientists who support settling with the Trump Administration and grant-free humanists who don’t. Grant-funded science is far more expensive than most other university research; it involves elaborately equipped labs, staffs of graduate students and postdocs, animals used as research subjects, and considerable paperwork requirements. Universities typically have no way of keeping these labs going without multiyear grants; an abrupt halt, like the Trump Administration’s, can be disastrous.”

[Tero]

Not ICE but busy work with zip ties.

[Svartalf]

Congrats to the lady, she made her meaning quite obvious, and the cops are silly enough to show her right

[Tero]