They do kill babies. Many will,die this year because of cut backs so rich have more money. Republicans have abortions when it suits them. Files from the Epstein saga are coming out that girls who got pregnant from Epstein and company were forced to have abortions. girls were raped,and the republican congress voted against releasing the Epstein files. Many will will die from hunger and lack of medical care with the administration. A well known person who left the Republican Party, thought the that republicans were more honest and Christian like. He found out they were not. You cannot be MAGA and a Christian. I am a cradle Catholic and there is no way on this God’s earth that Vance and etc are Catholic. If God voted in this last election he would NOT voted Trump. My mother always said show me what you do Not What you Say. He have seen and are seeing what Trump and company are doing. That Fox guy who says d yesterday homeless people should be KILLED. A lot of homeless pare veterans who fought in our wars. He was forced go on Fox and denounce what he said. He did mean ,it because there is No One in my family who would even have the thought to say it.
I was brought up in loving Catholic home, so I know what God wants.
You know what RB means by “morally and spiritually bankrupt” but feign obtuseness to troll and disrupt discussion. Most people have better things to do with their time.
Prob bc he is sweeping the Epstein files under the rug and denying survivors to receive the justice they so desperately deserve even though it was promised by this administration …that’s just one reason out of many
Democrats had 4 years to release the Epstein files. They did nothing except ignore the issue. Do you really think there was something in there about Trump they wouldn't have leaked?
One group's failure to do the right thing does not excuse another group's failure to do that thing.
It's really very simple why neither administration has released them, and it's because the people in charge are partisans who value loyalty to faction above basic morality.
When the Democratic Party controlled the executive, they weren't about to release the Epstein files because a name that everyone knows is in there is Bill Clinton.
Now that the Republican Party controls the executive, they aren't about to release the Epstein files because another name that everyone knows is in there is Donald Trump.
("Everyone" here means everyone who is actually paying attention to what is known about Epstein and his associates, and not those who have bought conspiracy theories like Pizzagate.)
Any release of the files that doesn't implicate both men would immediately be met with a torrent of skepticism (to put it mildly), and since neither party wants to officially implicate their guy in something so heinous, neither party is willing to release the files.
Trump’s out here doing Cirque du Soleil with reality. “They’re only radical because they don’t like crime.” Right. And arsonists are just passionate about fire safety. Kirk spent years mainlining hate into the bloodstream, now his death is being used as proof that honesty is violence. That’s not law and order, that’s authoritarian improv with a laugh track.
Project 2025 is based on the premise that the left has completely ruined democracy so much so that it’s not worth saving and should be destroyed. “We had to destroy the village to save it”. Russell Vought: “The stark reality is that we’re in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country, in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of government apparatus, and they have aimed it at us.” Trump is channeling this premise and expanding its range, applying it to pretty much everything, not just to “government apparatus”.
Maga is a movement of gaslighting, first and foremost. Trump's hypocrisy and moral failures as a human being have infected the entire party. You either reject Trump or reject sanity, sadly many people chose Trump over logic or reason, so they are governing based solely on lies and delusions nowadays.
I think what we are seeing is an extension of a pattern I've noticed among various groups of varying ideological stripes: that government itself is illegitimate unless certain policy questions are answered in the way that group would prefer.
A historical example of this is slavery in the United States. Among those who opposed slavery, its legality, or even the option of its legality, rendered government illegitimate. Among those who supported it, on the other hand, slavery was so central to the society in which they wished to live that banning it would render government illegitimate. (Indeed the Confederate constitution contained a clause preventing any state from banning slavery.) These conflicting views of what was required for a legitimate government ultimately resulted in a war after escalating violence such as Bleeding Kansas and the assault of Charles Sumner.
Arguably a similar dynamic played out later with Jim Crow laws. The New Deal was quite racist; Social Security excluded professions in which blacks worked disproportionately in order to secure Dixiecrat support, and Dixiecrats insisted that the GI Bill be administered by state governments so that black veterans from those states would be effectively unable to access its benefits. Dixiecrats ultimately left the coalition after the civil rights reforms of Kennedy and Johnson and the forced end to Jim Crow. Even in 1964, before the Voting Rights Act had passed, five Deep South states selected electors pledged to Goldwater, and by a greater margin than his own state of Arizona did. To this day white voters have always favoured the Republican candidate in every US Presidential election since 1968.
In the United Kingdom, between 1912 and 1914, certain elements of the women's suffrage movement conducted a terrorist campaign aimed at securing women the right to vote, seeing a democracy in which women could not participate on an equal basis with men as illegitimate.
Today consider abortion. Many people who oppose it do so because they view abortion as murder, full stop. A government that does not ban abortion, therefore, is a government which tolerates murder in certain circumstances (among those who favour bans on abortion but support the death penalty, this is specifically the murder of an innocent, defenceless person who has been convicted of no crime), and a government which permits legal murder, in this view, is inherently illegitimate.
On the other side, many of those who push for legal abortion consider bans on it to be tantamount to slavery, or forced labour, and calling back to the legacy of 19th century abolitionists like William Wilberforce and William Seward, therefore oppose attempts to restrict it and seek to entrench its legality because to restrict it is to render government illegitimate.
Consider also many gender-diverse people, who are in numerous jurisdictions seeing restrictions placed on them and their public behaviour and presentation. Such restrictions often feel like an attempt to render their very existence illegal, and someone whose existence is made illegal by government will, naturally, come to consider that government as lacking any legitimacy.
Someone opposed to trans rights, by contrast, might see a government which allows a "crack in the door" for someone assigned male at birth to legally access women's-only spaces as illegitimate.
These are all policy questions which under the rubric of liberalism would be debated and settled peacefully, but they are of such import to certain groups that those groups consider the entire structure of government and public discourse to be inherently illegitimate unless the outcome is their preferred one; they are questions that simply cannot be up for debate. Once government is illegitimate, once public discourse is illegitimate, many, many other things become legitimate, such as using violence to force your opponent to accede to your position; in the case of the four-year skirmish that ran concurrently with the final years of the Taiping Rebellion, this ultimately became an attempt by the Union to force the Confederate states to remain in the United States without legal slavery, and an attempt by the Confederacy to force the Union to recognise them as an independent country where slavery would be forever legal.
Trump, Vought, Patel, Kennedy, Vance et al. have gone completely berserk. They inhabit a world of hatred, bigotry and ignorance and haven’t the slightest clue about real world issues of concern to most American, jobs, housing, schools, health insurance, etc. MAGA constantly fuels resentment at “those people destroying America” (insert favorite punching bag) or getting ahead in a rigged system. MAGA is also fear-based. In a volatile economy family situations could fare poorly while others surge ahead. These attitudes align with Trump’s claim that sinister forces persecute him “so unfairly” (while he grifts billions on crypto). After all he’s trying to save America from the radical left. It’s all nonsense of course but it works to keep his base angry and engaged. He’s milking CK’s brazen murder in Utah for all it’s worth to stoke the MAGA fires of hatred and resentment. Absolutely absurd so many Americans buy into this insanity but there you are.
You go, Mike! As we say, everything out of their mouths is a projection, a confession. It gets more transparent by the day. The scum out-caricature themselves, looking silly in suits and dresses, completely unaware that we see right through them. We know where they work, and who to call when the time comes for a reiving to the funny farm. Stay "woke"!
The only person I've heard wistfully talk about shooting someone in the street is Trump himself - and there's been no reports of setting shopping centers on fire. I have, however, heard of plenty of malls dying of neglect because they are obsolete marketing models.
Living the last 55 years in the East Valley of Maricopa County AZ I have interacted with Mormons (they prefer LDS) all that time. Once a jack-Mormon heard someone sort of compiment the church on its 1978 change (due to a revelation inspired by Fed threats on church tax exemption) in its abhorrent racist doctrine. 'No,' she said, 'having lived in Utah and AZ since then, I can tell you many members rejected the change.' My point is that religion really does not direct people's thinking.
Trump is responsible for this violence. He is now condemning liberals for this shooting. He is not the President for all. He generates hate at every mouthful of rancid rhetoric.
I would have thought — mistakenly, I'm afraid — that after the presumptive shooter's ID was confirmed, his background thoroughly aired across the MSM and social media, all the far-right hullabaloo would collapse like a punctured balloon. Yet, here they are, blatantly and purposefully going the eyes-wide-shut route, continuing their left-bashing, calls for "revenge" — like what? Murdering his family? — and the like. Simply cannot understand why the far right persists in flogging the SOS adopted literally minutes after Kirk was shot, all this in the face of patently objective evidence to the contrary.
I wrote this piece a while back, but it feels especially relevant to what is happening in the U.S. today. I also wrote The Language of MAGA, both explore how we arrived here.
I am not a subject expert, but growing up in rural Texas and spending 20 years living & working on cruise ships in a senior HR position has given me a unique lens.
Thanks for highlighting Spencer Cox. We're in LDS territory now, but I'll add Cox to Mitt Romney into the category of Mormons Who Can Think. At least he'll apply some cultural pressure towards sanity. In this case I suppose it's possible that the LDS Church could theoretically bring LDS MAGA back to more adult positions.
I'm already thinking about capital punishment in the wake of the Kirk killing. We're looking at important questions about video games and age of maturity with Tyler Robinson. It seems strange to me to call him a "man" when he's clearly still a boy. These days we've got all these diagnoses. It seems like "everyone" Tyler's age has a "diagnosis." (I hope calling him by his first name doesn't make me guilty of some kind of radical leftist offense.) I want to look into the possibility that video games can cause some kind of cognitive dysfunction that leads to irrational adolescent behavior in the immature mind.*
Everyone deserves the opportunity to repent (or should be sentenced to the possibility of repentance.) I always wondered whether Timothy McVeigh would eventually have felt a kind of horrified remorse for the OK City bombings. Maybe that would be "cruel punishment," but it would have to be accompanied by a cultural belief in universal redemption. I don't know where LDS doctrine stands on repentance and redemption, but I'll be looking into this.
*This would be related to the fact that we've evolved ourselves, especially our males, to be a violent, warring species. Boot camp, for example, is designed to elicit this kind of cognitive dysfunction.
I've told MAGA in my family that they are morally and spiritually bankrupt.
Because they don't kill babies and mutilate kids? Or is it something else?
They do kill babies. Many will,die this year because of cut backs so rich have more money. Republicans have abortions when it suits them. Files from the Epstein saga are coming out that girls who got pregnant from Epstein and company were forced to have abortions. girls were raped,and the republican congress voted against releasing the Epstein files. Many will will die from hunger and lack of medical care with the administration. A well known person who left the Republican Party, thought the that republicans were more honest and Christian like. He found out they were not. You cannot be MAGA and a Christian. I am a cradle Catholic and there is no way on this God’s earth that Vance and etc are Catholic. If God voted in this last election he would NOT voted Trump. My mother always said show me what you do Not What you Say. He have seen and are seeing what Trump and company are doing. That Fox guy who says d yesterday homeless people should be KILLED. A lot of homeless pare veterans who fought in our wars. He was forced go on Fox and denounce what he said. He did mean ,it because there is No One in my family who would even have the thought to say it.
I was brought up in loving Catholic home, so I know what God wants.
You know what RB means by “morally and spiritually bankrupt” but feign obtuseness to troll and disrupt discussion. Most people have better things to do with their time.
Well I don't actually, which is why I asked.
Prob bc he is sweeping the Epstein files under the rug and denying survivors to receive the justice they so desperately deserve even though it was promised by this administration …that’s just one reason out of many
Democrats had 4 years to release the Epstein files. They did nothing except ignore the issue. Do you really think there was something in there about Trump they wouldn't have leaked?
One group's failure to do the right thing does not excuse another group's failure to do that thing.
It's really very simple why neither administration has released them, and it's because the people in charge are partisans who value loyalty to faction above basic morality.
When the Democratic Party controlled the executive, they weren't about to release the Epstein files because a name that everyone knows is in there is Bill Clinton.
Now that the Republican Party controls the executive, they aren't about to release the Epstein files because another name that everyone knows is in there is Donald Trump.
("Everyone" here means everyone who is actually paying attention to what is known about Epstein and his associates, and not those who have bought conspiracy theories like Pizzagate.)
Any release of the files that doesn't implicate both men would immediately be met with a torrent of skepticism (to put it mildly), and since neither party wants to officially implicate their guy in something so heinous, neither party is willing to release the files.
Let the man work.
Well stated 🎯
Doesn’t matter, he has an opportunity now . Why is he dragging his feet and pretending it doesn’t exist
You haven't noticed DOJ activity? You haven't noticed the courts refused to release the grand jury charges?
When has trump been known to back down on a court ruling he didn’t like, especially from an Obama appointed judge?
Trump’s out here doing Cirque du Soleil with reality. “They’re only radical because they don’t like crime.” Right. And arsonists are just passionate about fire safety. Kirk spent years mainlining hate into the bloodstream, now his death is being used as proof that honesty is violence. That’s not law and order, that’s authoritarian improv with a laugh track.
Spot on. “Arsonists for fire safety.” Is the perfect analogy.
Project 2025 is based on the premise that the left has completely ruined democracy so much so that it’s not worth saving and should be destroyed. “We had to destroy the village to save it”. Russell Vought: “The stark reality is that we’re in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country, in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of government apparatus, and they have aimed it at us.” Trump is channeling this premise and expanding its range, applying it to pretty much everything, not just to “government apparatus”.
Maga is a movement of gaslighting, first and foremost. Trump's hypocrisy and moral failures as a human being have infected the entire party. You either reject Trump or reject sanity, sadly many people chose Trump over logic or reason, so they are governing based solely on lies and delusions nowadays.
I think what we are seeing is an extension of a pattern I've noticed among various groups of varying ideological stripes: that government itself is illegitimate unless certain policy questions are answered in the way that group would prefer.
A historical example of this is slavery in the United States. Among those who opposed slavery, its legality, or even the option of its legality, rendered government illegitimate. Among those who supported it, on the other hand, slavery was so central to the society in which they wished to live that banning it would render government illegitimate. (Indeed the Confederate constitution contained a clause preventing any state from banning slavery.) These conflicting views of what was required for a legitimate government ultimately resulted in a war after escalating violence such as Bleeding Kansas and the assault of Charles Sumner.
Arguably a similar dynamic played out later with Jim Crow laws. The New Deal was quite racist; Social Security excluded professions in which blacks worked disproportionately in order to secure Dixiecrat support, and Dixiecrats insisted that the GI Bill be administered by state governments so that black veterans from those states would be effectively unable to access its benefits. Dixiecrats ultimately left the coalition after the civil rights reforms of Kennedy and Johnson and the forced end to Jim Crow. Even in 1964, before the Voting Rights Act had passed, five Deep South states selected electors pledged to Goldwater, and by a greater margin than his own state of Arizona did. To this day white voters have always favoured the Republican candidate in every US Presidential election since 1968.
In the United Kingdom, between 1912 and 1914, certain elements of the women's suffrage movement conducted a terrorist campaign aimed at securing women the right to vote, seeing a democracy in which women could not participate on an equal basis with men as illegitimate.
Today consider abortion. Many people who oppose it do so because they view abortion as murder, full stop. A government that does not ban abortion, therefore, is a government which tolerates murder in certain circumstances (among those who favour bans on abortion but support the death penalty, this is specifically the murder of an innocent, defenceless person who has been convicted of no crime), and a government which permits legal murder, in this view, is inherently illegitimate.
On the other side, many of those who push for legal abortion consider bans on it to be tantamount to slavery, or forced labour, and calling back to the legacy of 19th century abolitionists like William Wilberforce and William Seward, therefore oppose attempts to restrict it and seek to entrench its legality because to restrict it is to render government illegitimate.
Consider also many gender-diverse people, who are in numerous jurisdictions seeing restrictions placed on them and their public behaviour and presentation. Such restrictions often feel like an attempt to render their very existence illegal, and someone whose existence is made illegal by government will, naturally, come to consider that government as lacking any legitimacy.
Someone opposed to trans rights, by contrast, might see a government which allows a "crack in the door" for someone assigned male at birth to legally access women's-only spaces as illegitimate.
These are all policy questions which under the rubric of liberalism would be debated and settled peacefully, but they are of such import to certain groups that those groups consider the entire structure of government and public discourse to be inherently illegitimate unless the outcome is their preferred one; they are questions that simply cannot be up for debate. Once government is illegitimate, once public discourse is illegitimate, many, many other things become legitimate, such as using violence to force your opponent to accede to your position; in the case of the four-year skirmish that ran concurrently with the final years of the Taiping Rebellion, this ultimately became an attempt by the Union to force the Confederate states to remain in the United States without legal slavery, and an attempt by the Confederacy to force the Union to recognise them as an independent country where slavery would be forever legal.
Trump, Vought, Patel, Kennedy, Vance et al. have gone completely berserk. They inhabit a world of hatred, bigotry and ignorance and haven’t the slightest clue about real world issues of concern to most American, jobs, housing, schools, health insurance, etc. MAGA constantly fuels resentment at “those people destroying America” (insert favorite punching bag) or getting ahead in a rigged system. MAGA is also fear-based. In a volatile economy family situations could fare poorly while others surge ahead. These attitudes align with Trump’s claim that sinister forces persecute him “so unfairly” (while he grifts billions on crypto). After all he’s trying to save America from the radical left. It’s all nonsense of course but it works to keep his base angry and engaged. He’s milking CK’s brazen murder in Utah for all it’s worth to stoke the MAGA fires of hatred and resentment. Absolutely absurd so many Americans buy into this insanity but there you are.
You go, Mike! As we say, everything out of their mouths is a projection, a confession. It gets more transparent by the day. The scum out-caricature themselves, looking silly in suits and dresses, completely unaware that we see right through them. We know where they work, and who to call when the time comes for a reiving to the funny farm. Stay "woke"!
The only person I've heard wistfully talk about shooting someone in the street is Trump himself - and there's been no reports of setting shopping centers on fire. I have, however, heard of plenty of malls dying of neglect because they are obsolete marketing models.
I'll leave you to sort it out.
Blessings.
Living the last 55 years in the East Valley of Maricopa County AZ I have interacted with Mormons (they prefer LDS) all that time. Once a jack-Mormon heard someone sort of compiment the church on its 1978 change (due to a revelation inspired by Fed threats on church tax exemption) in its abhorrent racist doctrine. 'No,' she said, 'having lived in Utah and AZ since then, I can tell you many members rejected the change.' My point is that religion really does not direct people's thinking.
MAGA will never take responsibility for its own de-humanizing insults and inflammatory rhetoric.
https://ericbutterfield.substack.com/p/selective-outrage-wont-save-the-republic
Trump is responsible for this violence. He is now condemning liberals for this shooting. He is not the President for all. He generates hate at every mouthful of rancid rhetoric.
I would have thought — mistakenly, I'm afraid — that after the presumptive shooter's ID was confirmed, his background thoroughly aired across the MSM and social media, all the far-right hullabaloo would collapse like a punctured balloon. Yet, here they are, blatantly and purposefully going the eyes-wide-shut route, continuing their left-bashing, calls for "revenge" — like what? Murdering his family? — and the like. Simply cannot understand why the far right persists in flogging the SOS adopted literally minutes after Kirk was shot, all this in the face of patently objective evidence to the contrary.
SMFH.
I wrote this piece a while back, but it feels especially relevant to what is happening in the U.S. today. I also wrote The Language of MAGA, both explore how we arrived here.
I am not a subject expert, but growing up in rural Texas and spending 20 years living & working on cruise ships in a senior HR position has given me a unique lens.
https://substack.com/@thevagabondmermaid/note/c-155544508?r=3mnaw2
Yup.
Thanks for highlighting Spencer Cox. We're in LDS territory now, but I'll add Cox to Mitt Romney into the category of Mormons Who Can Think. At least he'll apply some cultural pressure towards sanity. In this case I suppose it's possible that the LDS Church could theoretically bring LDS MAGA back to more adult positions.
I'm already thinking about capital punishment in the wake of the Kirk killing. We're looking at important questions about video games and age of maturity with Tyler Robinson. It seems strange to me to call him a "man" when he's clearly still a boy. These days we've got all these diagnoses. It seems like "everyone" Tyler's age has a "diagnosis." (I hope calling him by his first name doesn't make me guilty of some kind of radical leftist offense.) I want to look into the possibility that video games can cause some kind of cognitive dysfunction that leads to irrational adolescent behavior in the immature mind.*
Everyone deserves the opportunity to repent (or should be sentenced to the possibility of repentance.) I always wondered whether Timothy McVeigh would eventually have felt a kind of horrified remorse for the OK City bombings. Maybe that would be "cruel punishment," but it would have to be accompanied by a cultural belief in universal redemption. I don't know where LDS doctrine stands on repentance and redemption, but I'll be looking into this.
*This would be related to the fact that we've evolved ourselves, especially our males, to be a violent, warring species. Boot camp, for example, is designed to elicit this kind of cognitive dysfunction.