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It feels more like a concert than a political convention lmao
The only thing I like about him is how he humiliates Evangelical Christians regularly. He doesn’t believe any of the shit they do, but he makes them feel like they are gaining cultural power, so they are devoted to him.
This instance is particularly funny. One of the few things he knows about their religion is that they are motivated by a fear of going to hell, so he’s just like “I’ll use that!” If you don’t vote, you go to Hell. So get out and vote, you dumb rubes.
https://youtu.be/JHBRMyx_xHs?is=hItSVYU6rL2a_DSy
I can't even. How anyone could be this demented and still be a leader of even a youth sports team would be beyond me, let alone the President of the US.
Go to any backwards town and get 4 people to stand behind you smiling in an extremely tight shot and pretend you're loved by everyone.
He's shitting his pants. Also, he's fucking terrified of the midterms.
Midterms? Too old for him.
That's as close to a Nazi salute as he can get without even the American media catching on.
I think that headline missed the plot.
“That I will go out with my family, my friends, I’ll do it anyway, I don’t care if I’m registered or not. I’m going to try and cheat like hell like they do,
So there are going to be a lot of unregistered Republican voters casting ballots?
He also almost said exactly how to cheat and either realized he needed to shut up or the brain fog kicked in to save him
So he just authorized conservatives to openly cheat.
The projection is just...
I can't with these people.
Not authorised. INSTRUCTED.
Let me repeat that: the current sitting president of the US gave an instruction to his followers to ignore the rule of the law and cheat at the election.
Even more brazenly than on 6 Jan 2021, he's literally instructing his followers to dismantle the entire legal basis of the federal state.
Watch it, his next attempt will be to then discredit the midterms' results and claim they don't count so the already sitting representatives stay.
They're getting desperate to keep control, because they KNOW people are going to vote blue. Mamdani's example of successful leadership contrasts the disaster of the cabinet too sharply. People are starting to see through the constant communist scaremongering.
Not authorised. INSTRUCTED.
It's far worse than that. He's trying to get them to take a vow, to make a personal promise -- literally "so help me god" -- so that those who promise will then believe they will be held accountable before "god" to fulfill.
He's literally trying to make this promise have religious consequences for failing to live up to it in the minds of those who took it.
People who think this is all imaginary have no idea how real it is for those heavily propagandized in this way, who have had their real faith hijacked by Christian nationalist propaganda. It's no joke. It's all VERY legal, tick the box, "You said this and now you're bound by it" with actual threat of hellfire attached at the end. Just like Trump did here. Most of us would laugh; MAGAs do not.
This exact dynamic is why Republicans are so terrified of James Talarico down in Texas: he's offering the MAGAs who have equated Christianity with MAGA Christian nationalism a real off ramp from Trump that allows them to keep their church, faith, and local community.
If you're in a rural area where all you know are the 500 people that live in your mostly MAGA town, and you can't afford to be ostracized or you'll literally have no community left, it's a big fucking deal.
This faux "Christianization" of politics is very real, and that's what he's trying to capitalize on by making the rubes take a "repeat after me, so help me god" kind of vow.
Fortunately, he fucked it up, so they all have plausible deniability if they want it. But that's why he was struggling so hard to get them back on track and to repeat the whole thing: he knew exactly what he was doing, and to what end.
Some right wing nutjob is going to end Talarico too. There is no way they're going to let him win.
So, a direct pledge to him as god-king-emperor in which he claims moral authority over their previous god, and that he has the old god's power of final judgement.
Sigh, I wish with all my heart this were actually binding. I can think of nothing better than these creatures getting an eternity in a pocket universe of trump's creation with him as the supreme power.
What a fuccen time to be alive. Could really use a grassy knoll right about now.
Weve had one, yes, but what about 2nd grassy knoll?
Personally I'm not hyped about a President Vance, but it would certainly be cathartic to see him suffer and die. I really want to see him die in prison, we almost had that until they voted him back in while his trials were ongoing.
As I've pointed out before, Trump dying probably spares us the worst of the MAGA heads, but where Trump wants to lead with charisma and a charged base, I feel like Vance is actually content with keeping power via use of arms. The guy is craven at the thought of having power.
I guess we better pledge to cheat like hell or something
I trust him on this.
The 33% who are too stupid and too racist to care what he says. They just love pulling off his diaper and giving him a sloppy rim job.
Not sure if serious... (I've seen how you comment and post, lol)
I was totally unprepared for this imagery. Viceral.
Oh my fucking god I’d say this can’t be real but it defiantly is
I'm grateful I accepted myself as a godless atheist long before this shit came up. If I was a Christian, a real Christian anyway, I'd be so fucking pissed off by this guy.
I mean, I'm pissed off by this guy anyway, but not in a divine way at least.
a real Christian
I wish this myth would die. There are no real christians. There is no real christ. The concept of christ is, "an abusive god sacrificed himself to save us from the violence he'll inflict on us if we don't submit completely to his vague and contradictory commands, which include owning slaves and selling women to their rapists."
Accountability is impossible when we tolerate magical thinking. Innocent people are dying for it.
I almost hope I'm wrong and there is a god so this guy does suffer eternal damnation
I actually kind of envy those people because at least they believe that he will receive eternal punishment.
Instead he'll just rot in a fucking grave
I'm in the same boat, sort of. I was a true believer, but the words-in-red kind, not like this lot. Got all the way out just in time, and I could not be more relieved. I literally do not know how I'd still be functioning if I were still a believing Christian and this was somehow my own twisted circus-mirror faith being reflected back to me.
Knowing it's all a lie is a VAST relief.
Feels like an easy way for him to lose people is to try and get them to "repeat after me", like there is no way helps people think he's snart
I would 100% go to hell if it meant I no longer had to listen to this orange Russian cum rag.
You make this deal with a demon. You immediately die and arrive in Hell. It's not so bad, you have to walk over flaming coals to get anywhere and the demons inserting fiery brands into every orifice are pretty unpleasant, but you've had worse. You begin to settle into your new life.
A few years pass in this fashion, until one day the demon knocks on the door of your abyssal torture cottage. You ask him why he has come. He says it's time for your eternal punishment to start, and he'd like to introduce you to your new roommate.
fin
So now the question becomes if we KNOW by their own words they’re going to cheat, why allow them the chance? Why not just eliminate the possibility by eliminating their right to vote? If not, I guess we have to cheat then - we’ve seen what happens when we try to play fair and they don’t, and we can’t afford even a single step more in that direction as it would be the last.
Eliminate the right to vote? So you are saying beat them to the punch in establishing an autocracy? It may come to that, we are no where near that yet.
I support restoring the republic and safeguarding fair elections.
I agree with everything you said except:
I support restoring the republic and safeguarding fair elections.
Because I support the Balkanization of U.S. Nothing good comes from the continued existence of the this country. Trump's rise to power isn't a fluke, it is merely the natural consequence of courting authoritarianism for the better part of a century.
Such an outcome would lead to a strong man consolidating power, but first would lead to warlords, oligarchs with their own bastions of power, security services left derelict after the collapse of government would turn to highway robbery, aforementioned warlordism, and organized crime.
Then you have what is left over of the military, and whomever consolidates that, is the new supreme leader.
We could talk all day about how it would play out under different scenarios, but the collapse of governments in the US would be a very very bad thing if we weren't organized to institute a better system. That system could even be broken up into several, countries.
Otherwise the new boss is at best the same as the old, and in all probability much worse, with a lot of pain and suffering before that happens. And when that strongman takes power as an autocrat, future autocrats only get worse.
Plato noticed every single republic follows the same formula from representative government through stages of oligarchic repression to "democracy," as defined by the ancient greeks up until like the 19th century when it became a positive buzzword rather than a strong man rallying the population to seize absolute power. Then the autocracy degrades in time through successive leaders and is overthrown and a republic re-instituted.
No republics have since broken with the formula even if they haven't run through the stages yet.
Yeah, an uncontrolled collapse could be catastrophic. That's an argument for building decentralized institutions capable of surviving a federal crisis, not necessarily an argument for preserving the existing federal state indefinitely.
Because I support the Balkanization of U.S. Nothing good comes from the continued existence of the his country.
I recomend you look up the setting for the Shadowrun TTRPG. The federal government fracturing would result in megacorps taking control of various regions of the country very similar to the game, minus all the magic stuff
Well, what I really support is the Balkanization of the U.S. PLUS the complete and utter collapse of capitalism as a system. But that gets into a lot more of a nuanced discussion than I was prepared for.
But that game sounds sick, though.