tingilinde

comments from those who have worked with trump

Not a pretty picture

 

ranking the states for quality of life

As part of a competitiveness index for attracting skilled employees

There seems to be a common thread in the ten worst...

 

 

blood and soil

A good piece by historian Carl Zimmer

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Crucially, the Right’s desire to purge is not confined to the national story. They also dream of cleansing the nation from anyone they believe does not belong.

The central promise of Trump’s election campaign is to conduct an unprecedented mass deportation. To do this, Trump and white nationalist purge-planner-in-chief Stephen Miller envision the creation of a deportation force larger than the U.S. military, sweeping the country, rounding up anyone they can get their hands on. This isn’t empty campaign rhetoric either: Russell Vought, the guy who is chiefly responsible for Project 2025’s “180-day Playbook,” has proudly admitted that he has been preparing the executive orders to turn those mass deportation fantasies into reality as quickly as possible.

A few months ago, Trump said he wanted to deport 15 million people, then 20 million … the number keeps escalating. The exact number is not important, but the magnitude is: The estimated number of undocumented people in the country is far lower, and the rightwingers know it. What they are planning is a purge of the nation that will not be confined to undocumented people. Miller has been talking about “denaturalization” for a long time. And rightwing thinkers openly fabulate about the need to go much further. In an infamous essay titled “Conservatism is no longer enough,” published in Claremont’s online magazine in the spring of 2021, Glen Ellmers outlined a vision of redrawing the boundaries of citizenship and excluding over half the population: Anyone who is not an “authentic American,” as he put it – literally every single Democratic voter. In his view, people who voted for Joe Biden and his “progressive project of narcotizing the American people and turning us into a nation of slaves” were simply not worthy of inclusion in the body politic.

Such extreme ideas are fully in line with the type of blood-and-soil nationalism that has taken over the Right: The allegiance to the “real American” homeland overrides all else, and those who undermine it must not be tolerated. Legal status is irrelevant, citizenship is always conditional. There is an enemy within – the globalist elites, the “woke” ruling class, the radical Left – that is responsible for the assault on the homeland. This enemy is aiding America’s foes abroad, in cahoots with China, and undermining the strength of the nation by “flood(ing) this country with millions of illegal aliens,” as J.D. Vance claimed in his Convention speech. Propagating Great Replacement, all the way down. For the homeland to be made safe for “real Americans,” the enemy within must be purged too 

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the real consequences of christo-fascism

A large leap in the deaths of pregnant woman in Texas post abortion ban.

for context the white death rate is over 40 times that observed in the Scandinavian counties.

 

 

timothy snyder on freedom

It's not what many think it is

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But freedom is not just an absence of evil. Freedom is a presence of good. It is the value of values, the condition in which we choose and combine the good things, bringing them into the world, leaving our own unique trace. It is positive.

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And the home of the brave? It is cowardly to believe that freedom is just negative, just an absence. When we think of freedom that way, we leave all the hard questions open: Who are we? What do we care about? For what will we take a risk? What we are really saying is that someone or something else will fill the void and do the work for us. A leader will tell us what to think. Or a market or a machine will do the thinking for us. Or it will be the founders who somehow did all the thinking long ago.

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srpingfield

 

 

 

collective amnesia

Why so many don't remember the hate and chaos of Trump's administration.

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Historians have long observed how quickly the so-called Spanish flu of 1918, which killed 50 million worldwide and nearly 700,000 in the United States, vanished from public conversation. As George Dehner, an environmental historian at Wichita State University, observed in his book Influenza: A Century of Science and Public Health Response, “the most notable historical aspect of Spanish flu is how little it was discussed,” resulting in “a curious, public silence.”

“Humans are really good at compartmentalizing things in the past, and Americans appear to be especially good at that. That’s a nicer way of saying we don’t keep track of history very well,” Dehner tells me, explaining Trump is “counting on, and his supporters are cultivating, this tendency to compartmentalize unpleasant associations from the past.”

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a tip of the hat to Dan

 

 

more sarah cooper

She knows how to do Trump

 

 

the way major newspapers and media coverup for the rightwing..

Perhaps they'd talk about a certain killer this way:

 

Jeffery Dahmer, who gained a reputation as an edgy gourmand not bound by social convention

 

the two truths problem

How Harris dealt with Trump and the 'two truths' problem

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One reason fact checking doesn’t work with Donald Trump is that he has trained his followers to so distrust the press that even if Daniel Dale lays out 33 lies in one debate, Trump’s followers will simply write that off to press bias. Donald Trump has created a system in which there are two truths in the United States: one, the reality that sane people live in, and another, an all-encompassing system of false claims that Trump has spun with the help of Fox News.

So every time you try to fact check Trump, you simply reinforce the polarization in the US. You simply reinforce the belief of Trump’s supporters that the other half of society simply hates Trump’s truth. And so, counterintuitively, fact checking has the opposite effect you might want it to have: it reinforces the loyalty of Trump’s rubes, rather than leads them to doubt him.

Kamala Harris appears to understand that. One of the most fascinating aspects of last week’s debate is how, with one major and two lesser exceptions, rather than directly disputing Trump’s truth, Harris instead rebutted his false claims by making Trump look weak.

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