American Politics from 2019 on

[Tero]

It really was time in Alaska already. What are we waiting for. Mar a Lago can be his new permanent home.
https://bsky.app/profile/tero88gervais. ... ccelcs322o

[Tero]

bears.naked.news
Trump
22m
Remember when Elon Musk made nice with Donald Trump at Charlie Kirk’s funeral? Well, now we know the message he was there to deliver, per someone familiar with what was said. And I quote:
“'if we don't hang together we will surely hang separately….”
Wow. He knows. He knows what they’re up against with the mssses they’ve been gaslighting.

georgehtakei
19h
Elon Musk has joined a chorus of far-right voices calling for people to cancel their Netflix subscriptions over claims that the streaming giant is pushing transgender ideology on kids and is "discriminating against white people."

Musk wrote "Cancel Netflix" in two separate posts in which he shared content from far-right influencer Chaya Raichik, the mind behind the conservative social media account "Libs of TikTok."
Raichik has made a name for herself by using "Libs of TikTok" to post hostile, mocking, or derogatory commentary about LGBTQ+ people and promotes harassment against teachers, medical providers and children's hospitals
In one post, she claimed that the series The Babysitters Club "pushes TRANSGENDERISM on KIDS, shames characters for "misgendering" and demands hospital staff refer to and treat a boy as a girl."

[macdoc]

The view from an ANTIFA landing craft June 6th 1944 courtesy BlueSky

[Tero]

And...it's not about healthcare. Specifically. It's about anything that goes directly to people. All gone soon. No benefits of any sort from feds.
Mike Johnson: "Let me look right into the camera and tell you very clearly: Republicans are the ones concerned about healthcare. Republicans are the party working around the clock everyday to fix healthcare. This is not talking points for us: we've done it."

[Tero]

A journalist just said we have to develop antibodies to the presence of military in our cities. I sort of know what she was trying to say. But...

[JimC]

Antifa antibodies!

[Tero]

Yale Law professor John Fabian Witt in NYT

"As democracy in the United States spirals into a widening gyre of distrust, demagogy and violence, a question has been loosed in minds across America: How does this all end? The historical analogies seem bleak. Germany’s interwar political dysfunction looms largest because of its descent into fascism. Yet there is a more hopeful example, overlooked though much closer at hand: the United States of a century ago."

"Even presidential elections eerily converge. In 1920, national frustration over an infirm and aging president helped sweep the Democratic Party out of the White House in favor of a Republican candidate offering the nostalgic promise of returning America to greatness, or at least to normalcy. A faltering President Woodrow Wilson gave way to Warren Harding and one-party control over all three branches of the federal government.

"Yet what is striking about the 1920s is that, unlike the German interwar crisis, America’s dangerous decade led not to fascism and the end of democracy but to the New Deal and the civil rights era. Across the sequence of emergencies that followed — the Great Depression and eventually World War II — the United States ushered in an era of working-class political empowerment and prosperity. The nation ended Jim Crow in the South and established free speech with court-backed protections for the first time in its history."

"In some respects, 1920s America was much further down the road of political distrust and internal hatred than where we find ourselves today. Formal state-sponsored racial subordination in the form of Jim Crow blocked political participation by most Black people in the South. Political violence reached heights not seen since. A bombing campaign by hard-left anarchists roiled the country. Mail bombs were targeted at roughly 30 of the nation’s most prominent figures. A horse-drawn wagon filled with dynamite and loaded with shrapnel blew up on Wall Street in 1920, where its damage can still be seen."
"We, too, have our resistance, organized into groups built on the model of the 1920s. Some, like the A.C.L.U. and the N.A.A.C.P., are legacy organizations from the democratic crises of the past. But where are the parallels to the deeper, more innovative efforts of a century ago, the experiments that aimed to go to the heart of our social life and create new institutions for a more decent and democratic future? Where are the new organizational forms for connecting great masses of Americans to one another and to the society in which we live? Where are the movements that promise to craft new institutions adequate to the task of aligning the people’s interests with the structure and scale of the contemporary world?"

"What American democracy needs now is grand experiments like those of a century ago: new institutional forms that provide a way for tens of millions of increasingly alienated Americans to connect to one another and to the prosperity of the richest nation in the world."

"Many leading candidates for new ordering institutions come from the right. MAGA’s America First ethic bids, fitfully, to establish a cross-ethnicity and cross-race nationalist solidarity — an effort that 2024 exit polls among Black and Latin voters seemed to boost and that has surprising overlap with the cross-race efforts of Du Bois and the Garland Fund. Controversial new Republican-backed rules to extend tax exemptions for churches pose risks of politicizing religious faith, but also promise to connect political engagement to institutions where tens of millions of Americans gather."

[Tero]

Undecided voter..or low information voter? Why parties seem unconnected to the voter
https://esapolitics.blogspot.com/2025/0 ... voter.html

[Brian Peacock]

Yale Law professor John Fabian Witt in NYT

"As democracy in the United States spirals into a widening gyre of distrust, demagogy and violence, a question has been loosed in minds across America: How does this all end?...

It ends in the restoration of the purity of the American race, a race secure within an impenetrable border and guided by The Almighty.

[Sean Hayden]

For the Republicans American politics is just the art of avoiding consequences. Every lie they tell makes perfect sense as a means of avoiding accountability for what they’re doing. It’s crazy making, it’s abuse, and I wish more people would frame it as such.

[pErvinalia]

I don't know that the Dems are much better in that regard. It seems inherent to being a politician.

[Sean Hayden]

Well, they’re all free to get real at any time.

[L'Emmerdeur]

It's apparent that Trump is deeply dishonest as well as increasingly delusional. On the other hand the dirtbags in his administration are mostly just using his playbook of incessant mendacity. I could be wrong but I think vanishingly few genuinely believe the nonsense they spew.

With Homeland Security Secretary Noem though, it's hard to tell. She may actually believe they've arrested the girlfriend of 'one of the founders of antifa' and that there really is a powerful, shadowy yet well-organized cabal behind the protests against the Trump regime. Attorney General Bondi on the other hand is simply a liar who's on board with advancing a fascist agenda.

'Trump and Cabinet Pledge War on "Sophisticated" Antifa Network'

During Wednesday’s White House roundtable on “Antifa,” Trump Cabinet secretaries compared it to international drug cartels and vowed to dismantle it “brick by brick,” while the President described Antifa as “treasonous, probably.”

Antifa, which the President has labeled a “domestic terrorist organization,” is widely seen as a movement of people opposed to fascism and racism. It is not believed to be a formal organization. BBC News describes it as “a loosely organized, leftist movement that opposes far-right, racist and fascist groups,” and which “lacks a distinct leader, membership list or structure. In 2020, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress that Antifa was better defined as an ideology than as a formal organization.”

U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem told roundtable attendees, “One of the individuals we arrested recently in Portland was the girlfriend of one of the founders of Antifa.”

Secretary Noem said they are “hoping that as we go after her, interview her and prosecute her, we will get more and more information about the network and how we can root them out, and eliminate them from the existence of American society.”

She also said that “this network of Antifa is just as sophisticated as MS-13, as TdA, as ISIS, as Hezbollah, as Hamas, as all of them.”

“They are just as dangerous. They have an agenda to destroy us, just like the other terrorists we’ve dealt with for many, many years. And today is the day that we have a president that won’t tolerate it, and will stand up and fight for the American people.”

Similarly, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that “fighting crime is more than just getting the bad guy off the streets. It’s breaking down the organization, brick by brick. Just like we did with cartels. We are going to take the same approach, President Trump, with Antifa, destroy the entire organization from top to bottom. We’re going to take them apart.”

“Their hatred for President Trump, and for law and order agendas, fuels their violence,” Bondi said. “We saw what’s happening in Portland and Chicago, and you saw what happened in Dallas. No longer. It is not activism, it’s anarchy. We can’t, and we will not, let masked terrorists burn our buildings, attack our law enforcement, and intimidate our communities.”

[Tero]

Republican buys voting machine producer

Dominion Voting Systems, the company at the center of false fraud claims about the 2020 election, has been acquired by an entity called Liberty Vote.

"As of today, Dominion is gone," the company said in a press release Thursday. "Liberty Vote assumes full ownership and operational control." Dominion's website now redirects to libertyvote.com.
Most U.S. voters already vote using hand-marked paper ballots. Much of Trump's March executive order on voting has been halted by federal judges.

The new company is founded by Scott Leiendecker, a onetime St. Louis Republican election director who founded an election technology company that's broadly used by election officials.

https://www.npr.org/2025/10/09/nx-s1-55 ... lse-claims

[JimC]

In civilised countries, all aspects of voting are controlled by independent electoral commissions of some sort. Bye bye, US democracy...