Optics. Because we’re the ones launching them.

Oh god now I remembered that whole episode. Guess we have more of that sort of shit to look forward to 🫠

I’ll be a liiiiitle surprised if even the GOP senate allows him through

Lmao no fucking way. That’s hilarious

It’s cute that you think things like “laws” and “precedent” are going to give Trump + the Nationalist Christians even a fraction of a second of pause.

Frankly, I’m expecting laws and divisions of power to be broken quite flagrantly, and nothing will be done about it.

Ok so I’m like… not upset about this at all. Also, I know this is the millennial equivalent of “get off my lawn”, but fuck me if I don’t find the concept of “being an influencer” fucking dumb. Do a thing you love, post the content if you think you’re good, and be a known expert with a following. Don’t just PR for the sake of doing PR and then hope people listen to you. What the fuck even is that?

Damn, Worf changed his uniform real damn quick

• Because his job will now never be completed
• Because this also slightly diminishes the possibility that he’ll be politically prosecuted by the incoming admin - though to be clear, I fully expect the Trump DoJ to make Smith’s life a living hell, and to throw him in jail if they can, and perhaps even execute him if they can figure out how to kangaroo court things to that degree. That is not a joke. This is an entirely serious comment.

gestures vaguely at the last week in particular

Nobody’s saying it’d be lawful. But personally, were I a military officer, given a choice between doing a thing to save my institution and then falling on my sword, or doing nothing and watching an institution I love get corrupted and turned against the country and oaths its supposed to serve… I imagine I’d pick the former.

It’s very much a catch-22 situation. But at the same time, there’s clearly a less catastrophic (in the long-term) choice available here.

I honestly can’t believe I’m looking at the prospect of a military coup with a grain of hope at this point, but here we are. What a time to be alive.

The J6 crowd are going to get a blanket pardon. This will form (or, I should say, has already formed) the nascent core of what I can only describe as an American Sturmabteilung. They will be fanatically devoted to Trump, because he personally, and in a very real sense, will have saved them from languishing in jail, and “redeemed” them with a pardon (putting aside the fact that, in legal parlance, that is categorically not what a pardon does). I will be shocked if we do not have a Krystallnacht 2: electric boogaloo inside of a year from Trump taking office again.

People need to start taking this shit seriously and to prepare accordingly. There is a playbook here, and they’re following it. It’s from history. It’s a very, very dangerous playbook. You know what I’m talking about.

What would Luthen Rael do?

No the fuck they did not.

They contributed to this outcome. But the real root cause is that the DNC thought it would be a great idea to just straight up ignore the base, ignore the fact that despite the fact that “the economy is great”, normal fucking people in the middle and lower class have been struggling for like a decade and a half. The middle class is being hollowed out, and the lower class is being crushed to death. THAT is the primary reason Harris lost: nobody believes the idiotic platitudes the DNC shills anymore, because there’s never fucking ANY follow through. Single issue voters were just the frosting on that cake.

All that said: dropping that many voters from the base should be grounds for fully excommunicating any and all party leadership from the DNC. And if they aren’t , the Democratic Party genuinely cannot be considered a serious political party anymore (but they’ll surely shamble on for years due to mega donors).

Agreed on all but one point:

Ukraine won’t cease to exist. They’ll just fulfill their threat to execute a crash nuclear weapons development program, if that truly becomes their only option.

At this point, I’m starting to find a lot of this shit darkly hilarious.

It bears repeating: “unaffiliated” != “independent”. And that confusion is not helped by the fact that the media calls unaffiliated politicians “independent”, and that there’s ALSO an “American Independent Party” that you can register for.

On your registration, if your state has semi-open primaries, you need to pick “unaffiliated/no party”. You should NOT pick “Independent” (note the capital I), unless you specifically mean to.

If there’s anything American society has taught me over the years, it’s that good things happen to rich people - whether they’re good or bad is irrelevant.

Precisely this.

He wants to emulate the command structure of the Russian Army - not because it’s more effective (it’s demonstrably not), but because the power structure is far more linear and top-down, and he doesn’t want any intelligent and conscientious officers or noncoms refusing orders and getting away with it, regardless of whether or not said orders are blatantly illegal.

Interesting! Thank you for the information! And yeah, while “center-right” isn’t something I’m enthusiastic about, tbh it’d be hard to do worse than Orban, imo.

Yep, I’m an American, and also a history enthusiast with a particular interest in the 20th century, and I’m straight up losing my mind watching this happen dude