They can make it illegal to acknowledge it, even. Label any recognition a form of antisemitism. Accuse any reporter or activist of siding with The Terrorists.

Easy to forget that Tlaib has already been censured for saying exactly this a year ago.

H.Res.845 - Censuring Representative Rashida Tlaib for promoting false narratives regarding the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and for calling for the destruction of the state of Israel.

The age gap is steep. Lots of Republican women are post-menopausal.

It’s all ideology. They scream about not having enough white babies and then do one more thing to make the birthrate drop. But all that proves is the insidiousness of the other side. Gotta keep doubling down.

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Lol ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING???

Sadly, he’s not. And you can absolutely believe there’s going to be some kind of legal or legislative action intended to force them out so Trump can replace them. Given the success rate of conservative judicial maneuvers, I wouldn’t even be surprised if it worked.

Americans can all learn something from South Korea’s vibrant democracy?

The way all those ajusshimis stormed the capital and pushed past the military to usher the Parliament back in and end the coup was - IMHO - a sign of a vibrant democracy that Americans could learn a lot from.

From what I’ve seen under Eric Adams in New York, you never actually lay any of these people off. You just bring in a robot that bumbles around a subway terminal until it breaks down, while a squad of officers guard it with lethal force.

Americans will not destroy the military or the police state. We need those to do harm against our enemies and to punish the undeserving.

Again, under a Liberal government.

The Republicans controlled every branch of government in 2003, as well as a majority of state legislatures and governorships.

What broke for gay marriage in 2003 was a libertarian strain of conservatism defecting from the mainstream. Liberals accepted the change with the same passivity as they accepted the status quo.

It had a 60% approval by the public in 2015 when it was fully legalized.

Again by a majority conservative court. The Obama legislature dragged its heels.

Liberal governments can be forced to do these things by popular will.

They can be forced to do things by powerful socio-economic interests. In this case, a big chunk of the legal community broke for gay marriage and Obama didn’t try to get in the way.

But they didn’t do anything. They just let the change happen.

Think ‘gay people can marry and have kids to give us more economic slaves’ vs. ‘gay people can’t marry, can’t have kids, and we’re going to use them as a scapegoat for our issues.’

Gay marriage was legalized under a majority conservative court system way back in 2003. When it went to a poplar vote in the bright blue State of California in 2008, Prop 8’s plan to kill it passed by a healthy margin

This was the same year Obama was tiptoeing around full legalization of gay marriage for fear of pissing off too many swing voters in the Midwest.

Gay marriage wasn’t fully legalized into 2015, again by the conservative courts. Efforts to legislate civil rights for LGBT people have largely failed even when the Pres and Leg were fully in Dem control.

And the smaller press were bought out or folded, because apparently people don’t read their news on paper anymore

Bought out or folded because they lost ad support from major business groups whenever they failed to kowtow to the company line.

The remaining US media institutions are all either utterly subservient to or entirely owned by corporate boards and billionaires.

It’s probably not as cartoonishly ridiculous as things might be under Putin

It’s the same guys in both brackets. Steven Bannon made repeated trips to Eastern Europe to assist in shaping the media of Russia and its allies during Trump’s first term. And he was hardly the only one. American aid to “friendly” Russian officials goes back to Yeltsin in the early 90s and the flood of Western press behind the Iron Curtain following its collapse.

“Russia would have done it worse” is just Western Whataboutism. It’s literally the same slop coming from the same cartel of white nationalists collaborating across Continental Europe and the US. From Elon’s Twitter to Murdoch’s NewsCorp to RT guest hosting Tucker Carlson. The exact same guys.

It all goes back to Chomsky - set up an extremely narrow range of permitted opinions, and “allow” vigorous debate, only in that range and marginalize anything outside that range. Rinse, repeat.

I miss Young Chomsky. The man was clear eyed and sharp as a knife.

Clinton fucking balanced the budget.

For what? A few months? And largely by balancing off the SS Trust, a trick you can only do once (as Bush Jr discovered when he was too far in debt to privatize it).

The real problem is Republican spend 4-8 years screwing everything up.

Half the Democratic Party was along for the ride on the Bush agenda. Kennedy embraced NCLB, Clinton and Kerry fully endorsed the AUMF, Joe Biden authored much of the Patriot Act Hell, Graham-Leech-Biley was signed under Clinton, queuing up the financial crash of 2008.

This isn’t just Republicans. The problem is broadly bipartisan.

it usually takes 4-6 years or so for democrats to fix most of whatever republciants screw up.

Liberals never actually fix what conservatives screw up. We never closed Gitmo and we still have troops based in Iraq. We never actually ended the War on Drugs (which has left Republicans a loophole to ban contraceptives by listing them as controlled substances). We never truly repealed Jim Crow and much of the country still relies on forced labor even in liberal bastions like California or New York.

Trump’s just pulling back the curtain on how much has rotted.

Americans literally have every respectable news source available to them, and they still get brainwashed by these buffoons

The “respectable news sources” have been fully co-opted by buffoons for decades.

The NYT lied us into Iraq while fearmomgering against Mexico. The WSJ gulled us into the Housing Crisis and Crypto scams. The WaPo praised Victor Orban and Ahmed Chalabi and Bong Bong Marcos long past their obvious expiration dates. The Economist cheered on everyone from Francisco Franco to Javier Milei.

And now that Trump is once again in the driver’s seat, the mass media response is to simultaneously downplay the coming horror and denounce LGBT and Latinos for his win.

Imagine if every news channel in the US was just Fox News

Compare FOX News in 1996 to MSNBC in in 2024. Rachael Maddow of yesteryear would be fucking horrified at what she’s saying today.

I agree with the sentiment. But I think one of the perils of Democratic erosion has been “Us” having less and less say in how government functions, particularly at the local level.

The mayor is as alien and removed from me as any CEO or celebrity. City council is dominated by real estate agents and business cronies. Even the school board is inaccessible, as they pay far more attention to their friends in state government than anyone with kids in grade school.

Fearmomgering against the other is a tool leveraged to win high office. But it’s hard to see who isn’t just running a racket when the profession seems to repel activists and draw in shills like a magnet.

The only question I have is whether the oligarchy wants him to do that.

Quite a few have explicitly said they do. That’s a big reason why Trump won with Silicon Valley conservatives this year.

Dan Osborne ran competitively in a neglected Nebraska Senate race. It’s very common for Dems to entirely neglect seats, even whole states, and let winnable races languish.

Sanders candidates can (and did) win races like this in 2018 and 2020. The problem is that once a seat is “winnable”, lobbyists state money bombing primaries. Then you get shitty corporate Dems pushing leftists out and promptly losing those seats again.

Reminds me of the time FOX News kept labeling John McCain a Democrat

lol ok Manchin and Sinema, two big democrats!

When Republicans hold office with a slim majority, they’ve got the power to end democracy

When Democrats hold office with a slim majority, the majority doesn’t count and nobody can do anything.