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The GQP Thread: Cause the other one is broken.
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Handyman
Hug someone you care about...
Yeah it was making me subscribe with no way to click out of it. I'm not a huge fan of theirs anyways.
I saw the headline but none of the body...
SonofSouthie
Misanthrope
I originally started reading it on MSN so I copied the title, added Raw Story, and searched just to make sure they had the whole story.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is warning America that God is vengeful, evil will be punished, and the [international Jewish] “Globalists” are out to destroy America. Like most of today’s Republicans — particularly the Trump-humpers in the Congressional Sedition Caucus — she portrays an America under attack from within and in a state of decay and collapse.
Most Democratic political messaging and ads are upbeat and talk about what politicians and the party have done and hope to do for working class and poor Americans. Most Republican ads, on the other hand, are dark, ominous, and point to danger, death, and destruction.
Every wonder why this has been the case for at least 40 years?
Our most primal emotion is fear. For millions of years it helped us and our primate ancestors survive: fear kept us wary of predators and other dangers. Walk up to a wild squirrel or bird and you’ll see fear kick in as they run or fly away from you: every animal on Earth maintains its life on a substrate of fear.
This is why fear is so powerful: it’s at the core of our survival instincts, right alongside thirst, hunger, breathing, and the need to excrete waste. It’s wired into our brains and begins to function at the moment of our birth: the younger and more helpless we are — all the way back to our first moments outside mom — the more easily we slip into fear.
Because fear was primary at our birth, when we experience it as adults it tends to throw us back to our infancy. It’s why torture victims usually sob uncontrollably; why George Floyd and Tyree Nichols both called out for their mothers as police officers brutally murdered them: Floyd’s mother had been dead two years when he called her name as he died.
Fear, in other words, infantilizes us. It takes us back to a time before knowledge, before logic, before we felt power and agency as an adult. Fear sweeps aside a lifetime of learning and maturing and reduces us, emotionally, to infancy.
Which is precisely why Republicans and GOP-aligned media like Fox “News” and rightwing hate radio use fear as their primary tool to capture and motivate voters. Turn on rightwing media at any random time and you’ll get a fiery blast of rhetoric and imagery specifically designed to induce fear, thus producing infantilization.
Because infants don’t question things. They don’t make comparisons. They don’t put things in context or look for alternative explanations. They don’t think critically.
They just cry out for mom or dad, and when Republicans can throw them into that state of fear, part two of the classic authoritarian playbook kicks in: offer a powerful-seeming parental figure (almost always male) who can reassure frightened Republicans that he’ll take care of them, he’ll hold the threats at bay, he’ll keep them safe if they just surrender their agency and power to him.
Donald Trump has been playing this game ever since he came down the escalator in 2015 ranting about dark-skinned “rapists and murderers pouring across our border” from Mexico. His first inaugural address, his infamous “American Carnage” speech, referred to our “inner cities,” “crime and the gangs” and “radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the Earth.”
But fear as a GOP political weapon goes back much farther than Trump. Nixon did it when he declared his racist “war on drugs.” Reagan did it when he referred to Black people as “monkeys” and “cannibals” who are “uncomfortable wearing shoes.” George HW Bush did it with his Willie Horton ads. George W. Bush did it to justify two illegal wars while torturing and extrajudicially murdering Afghan and Iraqi civilians.
If you can scare people badly enough, you can get them to go along with almost anything sold to them as providing safety and security.
It’s why every fascist movement in history starts out by dehumanizing its victims, then characterizing them as an existential threat. Whether it was Hitler’s characterization of Jews, or DeSantis’ portrayal of trans people and drag queens as “groomers and predators,” the script is always the same.
Scare people, point to an “other” as the threat, and then promise to “deal with” that threat in the most brutal and thus instantly effective way possible. Double bonus points for convincing people that their beloved children are the ones primarily under threat.
As the brilliant Amanda Marcotte noted for Salon: “The last thing MAGA stands for, in fact, is making America great, much less ‘great again.’ These are people caught up in a dark fantasy that they live in a zombie movie.”
She goes so far as to speculate that Republicans refuse to do anything about gun violence because mass- and school-shootings increase the fear of Americans, and Republicans live on fear the way vampires live on blood (my metaphor, not hers).
Ignoring the very real “sexualizing” effect of pornography instantly available on the internet — it’s a multibillion-dollar industry that could be cordoned off with an “.xxx” domain that requires age verification to access — the GOP has blocked all efforts to keep explicit porn away from our children. Republicans instead want you to believe that drag queens, public school teachers, and trans people are “groomers” and “molesters.”
You won’t hear a peep out of them about the steady stream of fundamentalist and Catholic pastors and priests (and Republican politicians) arrested for grooming and molesting: this is about creating fear and then redirecting that fear against people who are the least likely to be able to fight back.
While Republican politicians will blithely tell you there’s “nothing that can be done” about high-velocity bullets from assault weapons tearing our schoolchildren’s bodies into mangled and sometimes unidentifiable masses of bloody meat, they’ll go to the mat for fetuses.
Why? Because defending innocence and purity is the other face of attacking sinfulness and danger. As Pastor Dave Barnhart wrote on his Facebook page back in 2018:‘The unborn’ are a convenient group of people to advocate for.
“They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don't resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don't ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don't need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don't bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn.”
The GOP’s relentless focus on criminalizing abortion is part and parcel of their larger efforts to infantilize Republican voters. To protect them from scary Black men, uppity women, terrified asylum seekers, poor people, union “bosses,” and “Marxist” progressives who want to give them free healthcare and college.
Once white voters are reduced to that child-like state, with every fear assuaged by performative anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-Black history, anti-drag, and anti-abortion laws, it’s an easy step to telling them, as Trump did repeatedly.
This strategy, employed by dictators and autocrats, is as ancient as history. Caligula did it, as did Nero. Mussolini, Hitler, Putin, and Orban achieved and exercised power using fear.
And now the GOP has adopted fear as their first and foremost electoral strategy, knowing it’s so powerful that both optimism and fact-checking almost always fail against it.
Ironically, in their overreach, Republican policies are now inspiring so much reactive fear in Democratic voters — particularly among women, students, the queer community, and people of color — that it may end up propelling millions of new progressive voters to the polls.
Turnabout, apparently, is fair play.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is warning America that God is vengeful, evil will be punished, and the [international Jewish] “Globalists” are out to destroy America. Like most of today’s Republicans — particularly the Trump-humpers in the Congressional Sedition Caucus — she portrays an America under attack from within and in a state of decay and collapse.
Most Democratic political messaging and ads are upbeat and talk about what politicians and the party have done and hope to do for working class and poor Americans. Most Republican ads, on the other hand, are dark, ominous, and point to danger, death, and destruction.
Every wonder why this has been the case for at least 40 years?
Our most primal emotion is fear. For millions of years it helped us and our primate ancestors survive: fear kept us wary of predators and other dangers. Walk up to a wild squirrel or bird and you’ll see fear kick in as they run or fly away from you: every animal on Earth maintains its life on a substrate of fear.
This is why fear is so powerful: it’s at the core of our survival instincts, right alongside thirst, hunger, breathing, and the need to excrete waste. It’s wired into our brains and begins to function at the moment of our birth: the younger and more helpless we are — all the way back to our first moments outside mom — the more easily we slip into fear.
Because fear was primary at our birth, when we experience it as adults it tends to throw us back to our infancy. It’s why torture victims usually sob uncontrollably; why George Floyd and Tyree Nichols both called out for their mothers as police officers brutally murdered them: Floyd’s mother had been dead two years when he called her name as he died.
Fear, in other words, infantilizes us. It takes us back to a time before knowledge, before logic, before we felt power and agency as an adult. Fear sweeps aside a lifetime of learning and maturing and reduces us, emotionally, to infancy.
Which is precisely why Republicans and GOP-aligned media like Fox “News” and rightwing hate radio use fear as their primary tool to capture and motivate voters. Turn on rightwing media at any random time and you’ll get a fiery blast of rhetoric and imagery specifically designed to induce fear, thus producing infantilization.
Because infants don’t question things. They don’t make comparisons. They don’t put things in context or look for alternative explanations. They don’t think critically.
They just cry out for mom or dad, and when Republicans can throw them into that state of fear, part two of the classic authoritarian playbook kicks in: offer a powerful-seeming parental figure (almost always male) who can reassure frightened Republicans that he’ll take care of them, he’ll hold the threats at bay, he’ll keep them safe if they just surrender their agency and power to him.
Donald Trump has been playing this game ever since he came down the escalator in 2015 ranting about dark-skinned “rapists and murderers pouring across our border” from Mexico. His first inaugural address, his infamous “American Carnage” speech, referred to our “inner cities,” “crime and the gangs” and “radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the Earth.”
But fear as a GOP political weapon goes back much farther than Trump. Nixon did it when he declared his racist “war on drugs.” Reagan did it when he referred to Black people as “monkeys” and “cannibals” who are “uncomfortable wearing shoes.” George HW Bush did it with his Willie Horton ads. George W. Bush did it to justify two illegal wars while torturing and extrajudicially murdering Afghan and Iraqi civilians.
If you can scare people badly enough, you can get them to go along with almost anything sold to them as providing safety and security.
It’s why every fascist movement in history starts out by dehumanizing its victims, then characterizing them as an existential threat. Whether it was Hitler’s characterization of Jews, or DeSantis’ portrayal of trans people and drag queens as “groomers and predators,” the script is always the same.
Scare people, point to an “other” as the threat, and then promise to “deal with” that threat in the most brutal and thus instantly effective way possible. Double bonus points for convincing people that their beloved children are the ones primarily under threat.
As the brilliant Amanda Marcotte noted for Salon: “The last thing MAGA stands for, in fact, is making America great, much less ‘great again.’ These are people caught up in a dark fantasy that they live in a zombie movie.”
She goes so far as to speculate that Republicans refuse to do anything about gun violence because mass- and school-shootings increase the fear of Americans, and Republicans live on fear the way vampires live on blood (my metaphor, not hers).
Ignoring the very real “sexualizing” effect of pornography instantly available on the internet — it’s a multibillion-dollar industry that could be cordoned off with an “.xxx” domain that requires age verification to access — the GOP has blocked all efforts to keep explicit porn away from our children. Republicans instead want you to believe that drag queens, public school teachers, and trans people are “groomers” and “molesters.”
You won’t hear a peep out of them about the steady stream of fundamentalist and Catholic pastors and priests (and Republican politicians) arrested for grooming and molesting: this is about creating fear and then redirecting that fear against people who are the least likely to be able to fight back.
While Republican politicians will blithely tell you there’s “nothing that can be done” about high-velocity bullets from assault weapons tearing our schoolchildren’s bodies into mangled and sometimes unidentifiable masses of bloody meat, they’ll go to the mat for fetuses.
Why? Because defending innocence and purity is the other face of attacking sinfulness and danger. As Pastor Dave Barnhart wrote on his Facebook page back in 2018:‘The unborn’ are a convenient group of people to advocate for.
“They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don't resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don't ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don't need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don't bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn.”
The GOP’s relentless focus on criminalizing abortion is part and parcel of their larger efforts to infantilize Republican voters. To protect them from scary Black men, uppity women, terrified asylum seekers, poor people, union “bosses,” and “Marxist” progressives who want to give them free healthcare and college.
Once white voters are reduced to that child-like state, with every fear assuaged by performative anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-Black history, anti-drag, and anti-abortion laws, it’s an easy step to telling them, as Trump did repeatedly.
This strategy, employed by dictators and autocrats, is as ancient as history. Caligula did it, as did Nero. Mussolini, Hitler, Putin, and Orban achieved and exercised power using fear.
And now the GOP has adopted fear as their first and foremost electoral strategy, knowing it’s so powerful that both optimism and fact-checking almost always fail against it.
Ironically, in their overreach, Republican policies are now inspiring so much reactive fear in Democratic voters — particularly among women, students, the queer community, and people of color — that it may end up propelling millions of new progressive voters to the polls.
Turnabout, apparently, is fair play.
Handyman
Hug someone you care about...
Trump and MTG (and others) are now calling for the defunding of the DOJ and FBI.
https://twitter.com/jasonselvig/status/1643820294165938176?t=aa2kXeyo2oNVAX2RO0Uu8g&s=19
Even leaving out the million absurd things about this they realize the defund platform is a failure even Dems didn't make it work. Have fun with it 2024 is gonna be hilarious!
https://twitter.com/jasonselvig/status/1643820294165938176?t=aa2kXeyo2oNVAX2RO0Uu8g&s=19
Even leaving out the million absurd things about this they realize the defund platform is a failure even Dems didn't make it work. Have fun with it 2024 is gonna be hilarious!
And if it continues to trigger you, they'll continue to use it.
Kepler
Cornell Big Red
I was talking to a lawyer friend today and his friend's brother is representing Don Jr. in a case. I said "tell him to get paid up front," and he responded, "nah, I hope he gets ripped off."
And my friend is actually a Republican who voted for Dump in '16. Maybe the spell is breaking finally. Or maybe the smarter ones are just sick to death of TFG.
And my friend is actually a Republican who voted for Dump in '16. Maybe the spell is breaking finally. Or maybe the smarter ones are just sick to death of TFG.
Kepler
Cornell Big Red
SJW. Feminazi. Statist. They've been doing this for 60 years. They have no capacity to think critically, they just hurl their poop and screech to each other.
Handyman
Hug someone you care about...
As long as it continues to trigger losses I am fine with it. Not one of their Boogeymen has offset the Dodds Effect in any meaningful way and they are so oversaturating the use of whatever their Adjective Du Jour is so that it loses all power within a couple of weeks.
2/3 of the country can smell how full of it they are and are just tuning them out. It doesn't help that they make sure to broadcast their stupidity and fascism for the world to see. This stuff is better left in the dark that way you can claim it is political hyperbole. When you literally do all the worst case scenarios the Dems warn about (after denying it) it is a bad look. It is why FatSantis had no chance to really win even if he beat Trump (no Purple State was voting for a guy who authorized book bans, is destroying public and college education and started a special police for friggin Drag Shows) and why it would appear that even in deep Red areas enthusiasm is dropping.
I mean Jesus the leader of the party was just indicted and there was less people protesting it than there were counter protestors to laugh at him and them.
Kepler
Cornell Big Red
We can use their need to express their bile against them, because they can't help themselves. They love to share their offensive stupidity "to trigger the libs," and they don't give a thought to the fact that they are alienating everybody else except their buddies. They live in a culture so insulated they think their adolescence is "winning," because it appeals to them. They have no idea the entire rest of the world thinks they are disgusting. They are really just like their god king Dump.
So. Play up to it. Keep being appalled by their stupidity, and they'll keep doing it, and they'll hang themselves with the gen pop. They are the class clown everybody is sick of, but who thinks the attention he's getting is positive.
I will say this is what the Right used to do to us. There were plenty of insulated Lefties who thought screaming their fringe accusations at the top of their lungs was "winning" because they also congratulated themselves for it, and punished anyone who objected to it as insufficiently pure. This is how the Right started out criticizing wokeness, and it worked. But they overplayed it so much now even flyover housewives are realizing that for the Right not wanting to register your period with the government is "woke," and they are reacting against them.
We can use the Dodd Effect to bait the Right into jerking itself off to death.
So. Play up to it. Keep being appalled by their stupidity, and they'll keep doing it, and they'll hang themselves with the gen pop. They are the class clown everybody is sick of, but who thinks the attention he's getting is positive.
I will say this is what the Right used to do to us. There were plenty of insulated Lefties who thought screaming their fringe accusations at the top of their lungs was "winning" because they also congratulated themselves for it, and punished anyone who objected to it as insufficiently pure. This is how the Right started out criticizing wokeness, and it worked. But they overplayed it so much now even flyover housewives are realizing that for the Right not wanting to register your period with the government is "woke," and they are reacting against them.
We can use the Dodd Effect to bait the Right into jerking itself off to death.
FadeToBlack&Gold
Kettle Medallion
It's this. Recall the small group of Germans who initially supported Hitler, but eventually helped organize Operation Valkyrie once it was clear Hitler had become a completely unhinged, drug-addled mess whose decisions were going to cost them the war.
You give them too much credit, they’ll never be able to keep up with a word-of-the-day calendar. Give them a few months between terms.
rufus
rock and roller
Had a guy in one of my accounts last week, probably the Friday morning after the indictment was announced late Thursday night, saying, "hah hah, he said he'd get arrested on Tuesday, and he had all those Democrats just sitting there waiting for it to happen, and then it never did, and..........."
Like they'd actually won something
And I'm just over in the corner, not really replying to him, but saying it loud enough so he could hear, "yep, you sure showed them libt#rds that time, heh, heh, heh, yep, sure showed them, yessir....."
Like they'd actually won something
And I'm just over in the corner, not really replying to him, but saying it loud enough so he could hear, "yep, you sure showed them libt#rds that time, heh, heh, heh, yep, sure showed them, yessir....."
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Handyman
Hug someone you care about...
This is 100% correct. They think because we are upset at their stupidity they are winning, what they don't realize is that the Dems they think they are fighting no longer are in control. The Dems of my youth (the ones that couldn't fight out of a wet paper bag) are completely outnumbered by the fighters and organizers. The party is not controlled by people like Debbie Wasserman-Shultz who are weak willed, they are controlled by people like Stacey Abrams who take the fight right to the GOP and know that the best way to win is to get more people to vote. (not spit in the face of half the voters in your own party) The Dems play chess, and it might not be the speed games you see in the park but it is the winning game in the end. Look at how many people are voting in off year/Midterm elections...that is a long term death knell for the GOP.
The GOP inadvertently flipped the script. The GOP has gone from the Party of "Just STFU" to the party of Snowflakes. They went from a Party that fought tooth and nail for every inch to the one that can't even elect a Speaker. They went from a unified coalition to a full on civil war. They went from the Party that mocked safe spaces and Whiny White Liberals Virtue Signaling with fake cancel culture to being the party that is trying to make every Red State a safe space with true cancel culture. They went from accusing the Dems of hating cops in secret to openly being hostile with cops on a daily basis. They are imploding their base because they sold out to a moron and have no way to stop it.
I mean seriously...these are the types of things they see as making a statement: https://twitter.com/Travistritt/status/1643765186736553984
Country Star No One Knew Still Performed said:
Their crime...a trans inclusive campaign. And the best part is I guarantee the Streisand Effect will make AB more money than they will lose because Ho Chunk Casino in Somerset, Wisconsin didn't have a 12 pack back stage for he and his "band". (btw Miller/Coors has a similar campaign so...I guess he better just find some microbrews from Red States to drink)
This type of stuff is a long term loser. The Dems tried it for decades and it lost them more elections than it won. The Center doesn't care and the Center is the key to winning. As long as the GOP is a grievance party they will lose more elections than they win and as long as we let them do it the country will survive. Let them have their worthless committees (that have done nothing to help their numbers or hurt the Dems) hell I hope they do call Bragg to the Hill to "answer" for his indictment. I am sure a bunch of Angry White Men yelling and spitting on the career of a Black DA from New York (States Rights...amirite!) will go over great...in SEC Country. It won't win them back Pennsylvania or Wisconsin or Michigan so...cool!
Proud2baLaker
Master of Science
Multiple things make me laugh about the knuckle draggers boycotting AB because of the trans inclusive campaign:
1 - the hypocrisy when they whine about democrats and liberals calling for boycotts of companies whose policies actually do harm (anti-abortion, ant-LGBTQ, etc)
2 - the fact that if they do actually switch (which lets be honest will be for a very short time before they forget or decide that the 30-pack for $18 is too good of a deal to pass up) they will just end up switching to some other company that is owned by InBev or some other huge conglomorate, that as Handy noted, will also likely have a Trans inclusive campaign, or if it doesn't certainly wouldn't make an anti-trans campaign.
1 - the hypocrisy when they whine about democrats and liberals calling for boycotts of companies whose policies actually do harm (anti-abortion, ant-LGBTQ, etc)
2 - the fact that if they do actually switch (which lets be honest will be for a very short time before they forget or decide that the 30-pack for $18 is too good of a deal to pass up) they will just end up switching to some other company that is owned by InBev or some other huge conglomorate, that as Handy noted, will also likely have a Trans inclusive campaign, or if it doesn't certainly wouldn't make an anti-trans campaign.
MissThundercat
Are the cis okay?
These are the same knuckle draggers who burned their own Nike shoes and wanted an NFL boycott because "WHY BLACK GUY KNEEL FOR SPECIAL SONG?"
Jimjamesak
Already insane, UAA making it worse
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