Nah, he was just looking out for himself and liked his odds better with the armed officers than with the angry mob. Fact is if he thought he could get away with imposing his ideal Christian dictatorship on all of us he’d do it in a heartbeat.

He’s an asshole and an idiot who was stupid enough to work for Donald Trump in the first place, and thinking that moron dirtbags like him have anything valuable to say is only going to dig America into a deeper hole.

I’m not who you were asking, but I’ve got at least two problems with this,

The biggest problem is cherry picking examples to reach a conclusion while ignoring contradicting evidence. We had plenty of more successful pop culture stuff that had overtly progressive and feminist themes, and conservative stuff doing well isn’t really a new phenomenon this year (the article even points this out where it talks about American Sniper and Passion of the Christ).

The second biggest problem is that the numbers underlying this are suspect - it’s easy to manipulate streaming numbers and book sales, and church groups are taking whole congregations to movies if they think it’s a culture war win. Also, reading Sydney Sweeney and hawk-tuah girl as conservative wins are stretches that the author never really justifies (not to mention seeing Beyonce getting shit out by the CMAs as anything other than a sign that country music executives don’t like independent black women who already have successful music careers beyond their influence).

Which gets to a problem that might only bug me, but this article has nothing to say about any of the art it’s bringing up and misses what I think could be an actually interesting conversation - what does the kind of art conservatives are getting into tell us about them? Like, the fact that they’ve meme-d around hawk-tuah girl, when did conservatives get “sex positive”? (rape positive if we’re being honest, but that’d be a conclusion an article could build towards by actually engaging with the material)

e; ttpos

Who fucking cares what Mike Pence thinks? Republicans hate his guts since Trump turned on him and everyone else has always hated him, and he doesn’t have any political power, so his opinion has like negative news value these days. I guess mainstream media companies just can’t resist his dynamic intellect and incredible charisma /s (that “/s” doesn’t really feel sufficient, he makes Jeff Sessions look smart and Jared Kushner seem human)

Meanwhile, the success of Chappell Roan, Inside Out 2, and the Fallout TV series tell us absolutely nothing /s

Did Trump actually win more young voters overall or just a larger percentage of the voters who bothered to show up?

This only matters if people in the federal government are willing to say “You don’t have any legal authority to tell me to do anything and I don’t want to help you, so go away” which I wouldn’t count on always being the case

A redundant efficiency department with no direct way to make changes, it’s like nominating a sex trafficker to be the attorney general or something

In related news

While Trump has functionally escaped legal jeopardy by winning the election, the other criminal defendant breathing a sigh of relief after Trump’s election is Mayor Eric Adams, who is currently scheduled to go on trial in April on corruption charges. Thanks to Trump, the mayor’s day in court may never come.

Damien Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District whose office indicted Adams, is a presidential appointee who will almost certainly be replaced by Trump. Recall that back in 2017, less than two months into the first Trump term, his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, abruptly and publicly fired 46 U.S. Attorneys who had been appointed by President Obama. That list included Preet Bharara, a mentor and predecessor of Williams.

After getting rid of Bharara, Trump named — and later fired — Geoffrey Berman as his successor. Berman’s days were numbered when he began investigating and prosecuting members of Trump’s inner circle; Berman was replaced by Jay Clayton, a Wall Street securities attorney and golf buddy of the president.

It’s hard to imagine that Williams will not be replaced by Trump and gone long before Adams’s trial date. And that’s where things get interesting.

It’s not at all clear that a new Trump-picked prosecutor will continue the corruption case against Adams, especially in light of the subtle political quasi-alliance between Trump and the mayor. “I know what it’s like to be persecuted by the DOJ for speaking out against open borders,” Trump semi-joked at the nationally televised Al Smith charity dinner. “We were persecuted, Eric. I was persecuted, and so are you, Eric.”

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20241113121556/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trumps-big-win-was-also-a-win-for-eric-adams.html

Also, the bullet that was dodged hit the radiator of the car that could’ve taken us to the hospital

Related article that’s not as good and on a crappier website, but has at least one passage that makes an important observation in passing - holy crap were there a lot of highly educated and highly paid legal experts who went on TV and said obvious bullshit

It was clear after Trump’s loss in 2020 — even before Jan. 6 — that his conduct warranted serious legal scrutiny by the Justice Department, particularly in the area of potential financial crimes. But that probe, which could and should have been pursued by Biden’s U.S. Attorney and aspiring attorney general in Manhattan, somehow never materialized.

…

Garland’s defenders over the years — including many Democratic lawyers who regularly appear on cable news — claimed that Garland and the department were simply following a standard, “bottom-up” investigative effort. Prosecutors would start with the rioters, on this theory, and then eventually get to Trump.

This never made any sense.

It did not reflect some unwritten playbook for criminal investigations. In fact, in criminal cases involving large and potentially overlapping groups of participants — as well as serious time sensitivity — good prosecutors try to get to the top as quickly as possible.

The Justice Department can — and should — have quickly pursued the rioters and Trump in parallel. The fact that many legal pundits actually defended this gross dereliction of duty — and actually argued that this was the appropriate course — continues to amaze me.

Archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/aWmXf

There’s the Trumpist Republicans, who are unified and devoted, but then there’s everyone else.

Ftfy, there is no such thing as a good Republican, there was decades of bullshit from them that led us to this point and they’ll be fascist scum after Trump is gone. Anybody who can’t admit that simple truth is either too dumb or too cowardly to be given political power.

Me: oh boy i cant wait to unify against all the republican jerks that have been messing stuff up for literally my whole life

Harris: i promise to put a republican on my cabinet have you met my friend liz

Me: oh boy i can’t wait to die

Beyond the brain drain, the school to prison pipeline is going to get opened wide, they’re going to jam as many cops into public schools as they can and have them going law and order on kids over stupid shit

I think both things play a factor, but ditching shitty policies and messaging would be a lot more straightforward process than reducing the number of raging misogynists in America

I mean, tens of thousands (sometimes hundreds of thousands) of people are deported from the country every year already, whether Democrat or Republican presidents are in office,

Sure, I agree that the Democratic party’s collaboration with fascism has been awful. No time like the present to fight for a change in what we’ve been doing.

it’s hard to say what would happen under Trump.

We can make some pretty good guesses about what Republicans will attempt to do. Nothing’s guaranteed but it virtually inevitable they will try to make the situation worse.

From 2016 to 2020 they actually fell to a low of 27k for at least a little bit.

Feels like you’re cherry picking a bit here, but yeah - general Republican antipathy towards bureaucracies and bureaucratic administration sometimes makes them bad at being able to follow through on their plans to hurt people and that’s probably something we can try to take advantage of.

Thanks, good luck to you and your family too. Wherever you go, talk to your neighbors and lawmakers, that’s the only way we can make and maintain societies worth living in.

There will be some token deportations of undocumented immigrants that were going to be deported anyways,

Fuck that bullshit, this makes as much sense as saying “well, there probably will be some summary executions of people charged with crimes, but they were gonna be found guilty anyway”.

The only thing working in our favor is Trump’s general incompetence and chaotic headspace, he’s his own biggest enemy sometimes.

He’s got fascist toadies who are very intent on this in his administration who will keep him organized and focused. What we have in our favor is hundreds of millions of Americans who think xenophobia is idiotic hateful bullshit.

My family is emigrating because we will not be taking that risk.

Honestly, good for you, but you can’t blame the people who don’t have that option for trying to come up with some sort of strategy to resist American fascism. I’m not saying Trump won’t be bad, I’m saying here’s what we might be able to throw at him. No idea if it will be effective, but I will not go quietly.

I simply refuse to believe America is done

I honestly have no idea whether it is or not, but I don’t see any way that giving into hopeless despair and giving up helps us, so I’m going to operate under the assumption that it’s not. If nothing else, let’s make the fascists fight every single step of the way by throwing every inconvenience we can at them.

Speaking of which - Dems still have enough Senate seats to filibuster, right?

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