The early 2000s Republicans are the same people as 2025 Republicans.
Some of them changed their beliefs. They moved right - or were moved right by an incredibly effective decades-long propaganda campaign.
And some of them didn’t change their beliefs at all - they’re simply more emboldened to express beliefs that weren’t acceptable twenty years ago.
Give it twenty more years and Democrats will be where Republicans are now.
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Which is why groups that aren’t targeted should be out there being supportive IRL and making it safer for targeted groups. Strength in numbers.
I’m a big fan of IRL, personally.
The plan is to argue that only two consecutive terms bar someone from running for a third term, and have the Supreme Court’s Republican majority rubber stamp it, so Trump can run and Obama can’t.
Newsom has generally been pivoting conservative over the last few years, most commenters think in preparation for a 2028 presidential run, and has turned it up since Trump was elected.
The American people aren’t stupid. They’re poorly educated and brainwashed by propaganda.
When a kid without developmental disabilities gets to 12th grade and still can’t read or write his own name, we don’t blame the kid for being stupid - or at least we shouldn’t - we blame the parents and teachers. The kid was failed by the people who had the responsibility to teach him.
Same with politics. Voters don’t have degrees in political science. They make the best decisions they can based on the information they have. Biden presided over the worst economy for the poor and middle class and the biggest wealth transfer to the ultra rich in my lifetime, Harris told voters “I’m not going to do anything different from Biden but Trump will destroy America so vote for me”, Trump told voters “I know you’re hurting, Biden and Harris failed you, and my policies will help you”, and voters made the best decision they knew how to make.
Which was a stupid fucking decision. Granted. But the lion’s share of the blame has to go to Biden, Harris, and their enablers. They were the experts. It was their job to keep America from making that stupid fucking decision. And they failed America.
Immigration law is based on the idea that deportation is not a punishment. So people in immigration court don’t get the same protections people in criminal court do - lower standards for evidence, no right to an attorney, guilty until proven innocent instead of the reverse, etc.
Because technically (coughbullshitcough) we’re not convicting or sentencing them, we’re just sending them back to their home country.
Which has always been offensive and cruel, but with the goal of this administration being to hurt as many immigrants as possible as badly as possible, the cruelty is turned up to 11.
It is weird. Except, thinking about it, it’s not.
All sides of American politics have been encouraged to hate and fear other Americans who disagree with them politically.
So when liberals have a choice between blaming their own political leaders for fucking up, or blaming the conservative Americans they hate anyway, a lot of them will make the wrong choice. Just like conservatives do when their leaders fuck up.
The plan was Project 2025. Trump didn’t write it but he certainly followed it.
The economic failures of the Biden administration consisted of what, failing to have a populous who votes for a good legislative branch?
“The people” are not an unchanging monolith. A Republican-led House and Senate were not a foregone conclusion.
If Joe Biden and his staff actually cared about getting stuff through Congress they would have been out stumping for local and state candidates every day in 2022, pushing a very simple message: here’s our big ambitious plan, here’s what we want to do, here’s how it will make your life better, these senators and representatives are stopping us, give us the House and Senate and we will transform America for the better.
And if they failed to get the Congressional support they needed in 2022, Biden and Harris needed to come back in 2024 with that big ambitious plan, and tell Americans what they tried to do, and what they would do in their second term, and what they need from the American people to make that transformation, and go back out and stump in every single state in every single election in the United States to earn the people’s support.
But to do that they needed an ambitious plan - a Green New Deal - that would genuinely help Americans. And they needed to admit the economy was failing and people were hurting.
Biden didn’t have an ambitious plan. Biden didn’t have any plan. Biden sat on his hands and pretended the biggest wealth transfer in history was actually good for American consumers and the economy was going great, and then Harris ran on that record in 2024 and refused to suggest anything she would have done different than Biden.
And of course she lost, because Trump did have an ambitious plan to transform America, and he convinced Americans his plan would leave them better off, and Americans looked at how they were better off under Trump’s first term than they were under Biden and made the obvious choice.
We still live in a democracy. And blaming voters for making the wrong choice is a great way to permanent minority status. It was Biden’s job - it was the job of the Democratic Party as a whole - to recognize the problems facing the American people, offer genuine solutions, and convince the American people to support their plan.
Don’t blame the American people for Biden’s failure to lead.
It’s a horrible thing Trump won.
But it was pretty much inevitable.
The Biden administration was weak, cowardly, and incompetent. It didn’t understand - or refused to admit - how bad the US economy really was and how many people were struggling and suffering.
The student loan debacle exemplified the Biden administration’s “strategy” on the economy, the environment, everything - make a half-ass attempt to slightly improve things, give up at the first challenge, and pat yourself on the back for trying.
The economic failures of the Weimar Republic pushed Germany into the arms of a fascist who promised security and prosperity.
The economic failures of the Biden administration did the same for America.
This administration sent out millions of emails giving immigrants from certain black and brown countries seven days to leave the U.S. voluntarily before being deported.
Seven days. A fucking eviction notice comes with thirty days. Seven days to pack up their entire lives, quit their jobs, buy plane tickets, find somewhere to live and work in a whole different country - fuck, if you had to buy plane tickets for your family at $250 per, could you even afford it? Most American families would have to go into debt for that, never mind immigrants from desperately poor countries who sold everything they had to get here in the first place…
The cruelty is the point, is my point.
Just like immigrants, college educated Americans from lower castes - people smart enough to go to college but too poor to pay for it out of pocket - are enemies of the Trump Administration.
And they want to make their enemies suffer.
They don’t want it to “work”. They want it to hurt people.
It is kind of funny how much of the Trump administration’s agenda makes sense if you’re a “climate realist” preparing America to rule the new three degree world.
Annex Canada and Greenland? Sure, as the world gets warmer and Arctic resources open up we’re going to want those.
Tariffs to help American manufacturing? Famines and natural disasters are going to wreck world economies and scramble supply chains, so we need to be able to make it on our own.
Brutal immigration enforcement and performative cruelty towards migrants? The climate crisis is going to drive climate refugees north from Latin America at levels never seen before. We want migrants to be afraid to come to the United States. And we want Americans to hate migrants so they’ll be on board with turning them away.
(Same with cutting Social Security and Medicare and public benefits - we won’t be able to afford those luxuries in the coming crisis, so let’s get America used to the idea of not having them.)
More oil and gas and fossil fuel production? Why not? We’re preparing for the climate crisis, and other countries are not - the faster the climate changes, the more of an advantage we’ll have.
Even the fucking lumber emergency is understandable - if you think most of America’s forests are going to burn down in the next few decades anyway, the rational thing to do is salvage as much usable wood as you can before the forest fires get really bad and you lose that resource entirely.
I don’t think Trump would come up with this on his own, but “the world as we know it is ending and strong men must now make hard choices to save civilization” is exactly the narrative techbros like Musk would cream their jeans over. I wonder if Peter Thiel got into ecofacism in the last few years.
Wouldn’t a law that exempts a law enforcement agency from constitutional limits be an unconstitutional law - and therefore an illegal law - and therefore not lawful?