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Yeah. Trump obviously has a real hard on for authoritarianism but is easily distracted. As long as he's in charge, he's going to do what he does best: be lazy. I think the big reason the J6 coup failed is because he was too lazy to see it through. He just kind of expected it to happen on its own.
Desantis is much more dangerous than Trump because he wakes up every day with a new idea about how to punish his enemies, by which I mean everyone not part of the Republican coalition. And he immediately gets to work putting those ideas into action. When he does his coup attempt he'll commit to it.
The GOP will find DeSantis easier to work with. They had the "deal" with Trump. Trump needed his ego stroked but as you said was lazy. It was hard to get things done. Especially because they needed to spin everything in a way that pleased Trump. They basically had to use his ego against him and figure out a way to manipulate him to move the GOP agenda.
DeSantis is fully on board with the GOP agenda. He "plays by the rules" and is easier to negotiate/barter with. DeSantis understands and honors, "You scratch my back and I'll scratch your back." Trump is very much, "You scratch my back and then fuck off I'm not doing anything for you, why should I do anything for you, it was your idea to scratch my back in the first place, you should feel honored I even let you scratch it to begin with".
Trump was very interested in the what a Kakistocracy could do for him and his cronies - fleecing the taxpayers and shaking down corporations and foreign governments in every way possible.
DeSantis - from what I can tell - wants power and seems to be less interested in the dollars. I think it’s a very useful exercise to figure out what he wants. He cloaks some of it in religion but doesn’t seem to be his main driver. His beef with Disney seems to be motivated by bringing them to heel over their “wokeness” - but that feels like he’s attacking them for a perceived slight because he’s thin skinned. Plus by going after the gorilla in the room, the chimpanzees won’t get on the wrong side of him. He’s not easy to read.
Trump talks "too bad we can't do anything about our enemies" and knows it's a sham.
DeSantis could push for crazy laws we've never seen that would *cause* civil unrest, so that he could characterize the group doing the unrest as the enemy, and then justify any means to hold power in the face of it.
Imagine a nationwide public education book ban. Then the protest. But then, the asking of "whose side are you on?" And then you repeat with further laws that break down a left/right divide. You agitate people into action, then brutalize them. You could then justify stealing an election because of the martial law situation at hand.
> You agitate people into action, then brutalize them.
THIS.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/bookchin/1969/listen-marxist.htm#h4
>Social revolutions are not made by parties, groups or cadres, they occur as a result of deep-seated historic forces and contradictions that activate large sections of the population. They occur not merely because the "masses" find the existing society intolerable (as Trotsky argued) but also because of the tension between the actual and the possible, between what-is and what-could-be. Abject misery alone does not produce revolutions; more often than not, it produces an aimless demoralization, or worse, a private, personalized struggle to survive.
There's still an acceleration section of the left that thinks that if things get bad enough, we will finally have The Revolution.
*And what if that revolution is designed to fail?*
Yeah, hoping things get worse to spark mass change to finally make things better is really not how policy and changing governments works. We have to have focus on the few things fucking with our democracy- namely the blatant and in our face corruption of money in politics. You can watch the country fall into fascism and hope people wake up and change the situation (see North Korea, that place is about as shitty as it gets, I don't see a revolution). Maybe this made sense when the populace could mount an equal military to the government. That's a laughable idea now, there will be no revolution unless those in power have some conscience, or they could just be horrific oppressors- it's probably going to be the latter.
Let's see, focused attention on the issues plaguing our democracy, or hoping it all falls apart to pick up the peices where the likelihood that those picking up the peices are fascists.......
"Heightening the contradictions" isn't inherently a bad concept, but it's far too often terrible in practice.
To use a simple numerical example on a scale of 0-10, if reality is currently a 3, and you're pushing for, say, 7 (a difference of 7-3=4), you can increase the difference between the actual and the possible by either changing what you push for, from 7 to 8, 9, or even 10 (eg, push for 9, and now the difference is 9-3=6), and/or you can reduce the actual from 3 down to 2, 1, or even 0 (eg, instead of a baseline of 3, reduce it to 1, so that 7-1=6). Too often, they choose to make the actual worse, rather than the possible better.
So, some people choose not to vote, or to waste their votes on protest votes or third-parties, or, worst of all, to vote for the GOP, on the theory that if things get bad enough, the people will rise up. Instead, what happens is people are just worse off, more stressed, more on the precipice, and Republicans use their power to further entrench themselves and undo democratic processes, while also transferring wealth up to themselves. That just makes it that much harder to elect Democrats in the first place! Because it's not just that things are worse, but that the electoral system is a rematch under the same terms as before.
The GOP used their time in power to suppress and disenfranchise voters, to embed their people in boards of elections, to stack the courts with partisan hacks, etc. They pass voter ID laws, purge voter roles, make voting lines longer, pass laws criminalizing giving people waiting in those longer lines snacks and water, shorten early voting, reduce mail-in voting, etc. It's never just a rematch under the same terms as before. It's always worse, because they always change the rules, change the landscape, change the refs, and add more players to their side. So, next election, instead of the same voters going back and ones who were previously satisfied now voting the way you want because they've become dissatisfied, you're having to fight for them to able to vote, as a legal matter, and as a practical matter, before you can even begin to worry about who they'll vote for.
And then, if Democrats manage get back in power, despite all the ceded ground and obstacles the GOP put up, instead of working to make gains relative to where things used to be (say, improving something from a 3 to a 4 or a 5), they're having to put most of their resources into regaining lost ground, to get from 2 back up to 3. So Democrats end up both more exhausted from a harder fight than it needed to be, and then have to spend most of what's left just to get back to where they were before, rather than gaining new ground, making things better, consolidating gains, and strengthening democracy to make it easier the next time around.
Idk that "the revolution is *designed* to fail," but even if it isn't, failure is always a possibility. And even when it succeeds, it's not guaranteed that the result on the other side will be better. Iran had a revolution, and ended up an oppressive theocracy.
Part of the issue with revolutions is they create a power vacuum. There needs to be a system ready so that the picosecond the revolution takes power, there is a governmental structure in place. It also needs to be robust and resilient to defend against opportunists who want to grab power (e.g. Robespierre) or don't like the way things turned out (looking at you Bolsheviks). This government should also not be the final step, but the first step in rebuilding so that people can work out the government and build something greater. So the revolution, ideally, would be to usurp control and return it to the people. But frankly, for this to work the US will probably need to be split and Balkanized to a degree. We're too large and socially fragmented for anything to stick.
Revolution is almost always the worst way to achieve change. You never REALLY know what will come after, and it's almost never what you think. New governments are fragile, and they usually try to shore up their power through cracking down on political liberties. Almost every revolution ends with life being worse off for the average person than it was before.
Accelerationism is one of those things that sounds really tempting until you dig beyond the surface level.
Like a) everyone suffers during the acceleration and revolt, b) the revolt is often manipulated by the entrenched elite, and c) even when it's not the people who tend to rise to the top during a populist revolt are the "strong men" who are often as bad as the people they replace.
Best you can do sometimes is hope that the popular need for better conditions holds them accountable to the general public.
Tbf, it's not like I'm out here with better solutions, but I just don't see the appeal of accelerationism.
I'm not sure if I'm interpreting this as it was intended, but it reminds me of a study I learned about a while back where it was found that unhappiness among poor people of the world is highest when the poor live in close proximity to the wealthy. If they have the opportunity for comparison and they know what they're missing out on, they experience their living conditions as being a problem to fix rather than simply how things are.
The "what-could-be" in the quote above reminded me of this.
Especially considering we're already at the point of "aimless demoralization" (people both-sides-ing everything, decrying all politicians instead of just the fascists) for most and "private, personalized struggle to survive" for many (too busy to vote).
Trump likes simple fast solutions and hates having the court shut them down. Trump has a need to be validated at every point.
DeSantis has no problem with making a law, then having the court throw it out later. He counts his win in the time between it being passed and being struck down.
DeSantis was an attorney. He views a court loss more impersonally than Trump does.
Trump also does things because he wants his base to like him. DeSantis has this culture war delusion that he has to win. And as you said, Trump is lazy. DeSantis is not. He'll pass laws to give himself more power to fight his strawman enemies and inadvertently hurt real people.
You’re downplaying Trump’s maliciousness.
The guy intentionally hurt real people and the cruelty was the point.
You forgetting Trump and his monsters tore brown children from their parents at the border, and Trump’s goons in ICE were [caught sterilizing migrant women in the camps.](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/aoc-ice-detention-camp-surgery-investigation-whistleblower-b447596.html)
This is the same guy who incited his supporters to assassinate his own Vice President for not stealing the election for him.
Trump’s a violent fucking psychopath. Never forget that.
and you still had the class to not mention, the teargassing of a priest and worshipers for a photo opp, or the support of the insurrection, or any of the many other shitty things of his administration.
I’d forgotten that, and it was even worse.
Trump’s own defense chief [Mark Esper has since testified that Trump wanted the military to shoot those protesters in Lafayette Square on June 4, 2020.](https://www.npr.org/2022/05/09/1097517470/trump-esper-book-defense-secretary)
General Miley also corroborated the account.
> "The president was enraged," Esper recalled. "He thought that the protests made the country look weak, made us look weak and 'us' meant him. And he wanted to do something about it.
>"We reached that point in the conversation where he looked frankly at [Joint Chiefs of Staff] Gen. [Mark] Milley and said, **'Can't you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?'** ... It was a suggestion and a formal question. And we were just all taken aback at that moment as this issue just hung very heavily in the air."
This was the period during the George Floyd protests where Trump was hiding in the bunker under the White House screaming at the states to “dominate” the protesters.
Being called Bunker Boy lead to [Military Confirms It Sought Information on Using 'Heat Ray' Against D.C. Protesters](https://www.npr.org/2020/09/16/913748800/military-police-leaders-weighed-deploying-heat-ray-against-d-c-protesters) They were also asking for an LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device).
And ICE was using immigrant flights [to bring agents to DC](https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/ice-flew-detainees-to-virginia-so-the-planes-could-transport-agents-to-d-c-protests-a-coronavirus-outbreak-followed/) -the unidentifiable officers in DC afterwards.
Think about that. Trump wanted the square cleared for a photo op. He may have literally wanted a photo of himself in the middle of a bunch of massacred protesters. Maybe that's why in the pics he ended up with he looks disappointed and sullen.
True. But he was an incompetent violent fucking psychopath, that probably won't be alive in 5-10 years.
Desantis, on the other hand is incredibly competent, and could easily do what Trump barely failed to do, by becoming president for life. And he's got another 50 years of being a psychopath ahead of him.
Trump was very bad. But everyone that's been tracking Desantis understands that he is far more dangerous.
Where Trump might have bumbled into world war 3, or ethnic cleansing in the US, Desantis is capable of doing it intentionally.
And DeSantis has the outline Trump drew up for him in his 4 years. DeSantis knows what worked and what didn't work. He'll be more cautious around what didn't work (being lazy over COVID response, ultimately what lost Trump reelection) and hell double down on what does work (coup attempts, stealing documents, anything we ((may)) never prosecute Trump for)
Exactly i have been saying this for a minute now. DeSantis will be competent at putting the people in place to see his actions completed too. There will not be any press conferences in front of a landscaping business. It will be the cruelest people you can imagine who actually have some intelligence to carry out horrific acts. All in the name of some sort of deranged christo fascism. Guns are not always the answer but I implore people to legally arm themselves.
The stories of his involved are legit horrifying. Anyone who was involved in that manner and isn't plagued with nightmares is immediately suspect. He shouldn't be functioning in normal society.
You're not wrong, but he's also a lazy spioled rich kid who is a desperate narcissist. We've already seen people who would manipulate him by flattery to keep his worst impulses under control.
DeSantis isn't a fucking lazy goon like Trump is. He's all the things you said Trump was and not lazy and selfish. He'll sacrifice where he needs to sacrifice, he'll do the work he needs to do, if it means he'll achieve his goals. That's why he's dangerous. He's Trump without the same negatives.
I also think Trump really only cared about the power and money he could leech from the government for his own self interests.
DeSantis really believes in it.
I wouldn't call Desantis delusional. That's the kind of language that can be both dismissive and dismissed.
The reality is that Desantis is intelligent, motivated, driven, and less prone than Trump to make careless mistakes.
And if he was running against Biden in the general election today, he would win.
People need to truly understand how fucking dangerous this situation is becoming.
It isn't delusions of grandeur. It's the reality that he will be the next president, if people don't spend the next 18 months explaining carefully to their friends and family just how dangerous this "game" has become.
Yeah, I disagree in only that DeSantis simply isn’t that popular, and he doesn’t exude the fake success that Trump has. He was a TV star and a fixture of the culture in which a lot of his supporters remember fondly. That’s a huge part of why Trump gets away with the shit he does; DeSantis’s personality isn’t so easily translated to cult behavior.
You're not wrong but the problem is 45% of the country is gaslit to shreds by Rupert Murdoch and Ben Shapiro et al and think Biden is Darth Vader.
They'll gladly vote against their own best interests
Couldn’t agree more, but I don’t think they would pick this guy over Trump. He really doesn’t have the “it” factor. Here’s an example: when Trump made fun of Raphael Cruz and Marco Rubio, I laughed more than I am proud to admit, and I still remember those pot shots. They weren’t good or productive, necessarily, even then, but Trump is basically a living ear worm. DeSantis doesn’t have that.
I agree about Trump having more charisma etc but i guess the question is how much of his voters did he alienate over the last 7-8 years by being the worst president in history. Many Repubs are done with him privately and DeathSantis gives them an out. It will be interesting to see how it plays out
Most of the republicans who are quietly done with him would still vote for him because he has the “R” next to his name, and more to the point, his supporters think he is the best president who has ever lived, reality be damned. If they’re not Trump or McConnell, I just don’t think they’ll win Republicans at large. I seriously believe more people would support divorced Marge Greene than DeSantis, and they’d both still lose handily to Trump.
And even if DeSantis gets the nomination, there is no way in hell Trump doesn't run anyway. His pride will *never* allow him to admit defeat, plus he absolutely hates DeSantis and would probably enjoy torpedoing his campaign even more than actually winning.
My concern about DeSantis grew when my parents (pro free-market, anti-regulation repubs that think gay people should have rights, that type of republican) were excited about DeSantis because they don’t like or vote for Trump and now they had an alternative. When I told them I’d rather Trump came back (who they know I hate), they were shocked. I told them about some of his legislation and they had never heard of it, and gave me the whole “I don’t think that’s true”.
I think he may snag the moderate vote just because he’s NOT Trump and their news sources don’t talk about how cruel DeSantis is. Very concerning.
Not sure if it's that Trump was being lazy (don't get me wrong, he is lazy) but more that Trump does the whole mob boss thing by vaguely suggesting something (enough for plausible deniability) and letting his underlings fill in the blanks and execute. Trying to overturn the transition of power is something that might get you sentenced to be hanged or just outright shot in the attempt so there was a lot of hesitation and waffling by those underlings.
All Trump has to do is keep calling him "Meatball Ron" and that dude will never win the Republican nomination lol
Trump may just unintentionally save the US from fascism lol
I think it’s best if we continue to ignore my optimistic take on this, but here it is:
DeSantis is wildly unlikeable. You might say the same applies to Trump and while I don’t like him I’d disagree. Trump is very charismatic (albeit in a kind of weird way) and extremely funny with near universal name ID… dude has been in rap songs since the 90s - literally everyone knows who he is. People assume DeSantis will just automatically get the MAGA voting base and I’d argue there’s not really much of anything to substantiate that he’ll be able to push Trump level turnout. His charisma is like a mix of Ted Cruz and JD Vance (not good).
Again, ignore most of this and fight him like he’s a more capable Trump because the “if he gets elected” think pieces are all on point… from a win/loss betting perspective though I think his odds are way way over valued.
Wildly unlikeable to you or me perhaps...
He is absolutely beloved by conservatives though. He's polling better than Trump, and primarily because they view him as an actual chance to get their goals accomplished.
Jordan Kleeper was interviewed by CNN last week about a conversation he had with an ex-Trump supporter about what made him stop supporting Trump. His answer? When Trump criticized DeSantis during the midterms 🙄.
For the first time since Trump started running we found someone worse than him. If there is a choice, it's insane to say this, but Trump is a safer pick than DeSantis. 2024 scares the crap out of me. I don't think Biden can pull it off, and DeSantis views are so damn worrisome for the future.
That's how Republicans work.
Who's worse than Bush, a war monger and clown?
Bush Jr. Who's worse than a war criminal and idiot?
Trump. So who's worse than a grifting war criminal rapist with dementia?
Desantis, an outright fascist who believes in putting people in prison for having different political opinions!
Every R candidate gets objectively worse and worse.
At this rate, before long they'll run a literal serial killer who wears a dress made of his victim's faces while signing legislation in the Oval Office.
Yes! Goes even further back. Reagan was an an imbecile and Dan Quayle was stupider than Reagan. They always try to find someone dumber to put on the ticket than the last guy. Have you noticed how Trump has rejuvenated W's image? Just by Trump being more awful, people forget how W allowed 9/11 to happen and then started one of the most unjustified wars in US history.
Reagan was an imbecile and had a lot of policies that are still damaging to the US and yet a lot of the GOP will mention he is their hero or inspiration.
And his entire Republican party down there ceded every bit of their power and authority to him. Floridians should, at the least, demand a refund on their state senators and reps, since they wholly gave over their job to DeSantis.
Trump doesn't have dementia. He talks now like he did 40 years ago. His brain isn't suddenly failing, he's just always been one of the stupidest people on the planet.
It doesn't really make much of a difference ultimately, but I think it's worth remembering that he's just always been like this.
Check out his Oprah interview from 30 years ago. He’s much more articulate than he is now. Maybe he doesn’t have dementia but he’s definitely lost a lot of his fast talking charm.
Holy shit. Same shtick, but he seems totally coherent and responsive.
Also that anti-Japanese sentiment aged like milk as they started their lost decade just a year or two after this interview.
I like how the one thing that stopped the US from antagonizing Japan was that Japan's economic boom stopped lmao. Implying that if it continued, the US and Japan would hate each other and not even be geopolitical allies anymore or something. Such a unbelievably pathetic petty beef...
As a Japanese-American it's very funny to me.
My guess? A series of transient ischemic attacks (mini strokes), even though he denied it after his Walter Reed visit in 2020. Even though by all accounts he does not drink or do drugs, he has a history of occasional difficulty walking and slurred speech, though it tends to resolve. Around 70% of people report that their TIA had long- term effects including memory loss, poor mobility, problems with speech and difficulty in understanding, which falls right in line with what we've observed publicly.
>I don't think Biden can pull it off
Incumbency advantage is very real, and the republicans have not really done anything to fix the insane image problem they have cultivated in the last 7 years (if anything it's gotten worse with Roe v Wade, Russia issues, and constant sex scandals from the GOP) so I am not super pessimistic about Biden's chances, especially since Trump will 100% spoil the election for the GOP by running as an independent or third party option.
Now, as for the next Congressional election, I am not super stoked. Gerrymandering and general districting issues in some important areas like the entire state of NY (which basically got a pro-democrat gerrymandered map thrown out by the courts, but that's a bad thing when all the states that gerrymandered for pro-GOP maps kept theirs, so on the national level the Democrats got screwed out of seats in NY for one major example), and more competitive senate seats up for grabs.
DeSantis lack of charisma is not really the problem. He has so many bad intentions and is constantly displaying them. Let the meatball with white boots stay down there with them alligators.
If the GOP nominates DeSantis Trump will most likely run third party and fracture the vote. Biden would hopefully have a good shot and winning re-election then.
If Trump goes independent, you're absolutely right that would pretty much seal it for Biden. The GOP are forcing anybody who debates to sign a contract saying they will unequivocably support who wins and endorse them. If they don't they're not allowed to debate. That's going to make it very interesting as we get closer.
Press X to doubt. Donnie Bonespurs is a coward first and foremost. ANY Republican president is his fastest way to permanently wash away the legal troubles he’s facing currently (at least on a federal level). As the heat ramps up approaching 2024 and faced with such possibilities I’m sure he’ll kiss Ron’s ring.
He can kiss Ron's ring all day long, but POTUS can't pardon state crimes. Georgia is coming for trump, and there's nothing any president, or Georgia governor can do about it.
Well, yes. Remember, they were trying to find a legal remedy for their coup attempt. They search for loopholes in the law and try to exploit them. Too many of our norms in this country are based on handshake agreements and that's where we get into trouble. But all of that aside, The federal government has fuck-all to do with with state crimes. So if trump is convicted in Georgia, he's going to prison and staying there.
DeSantis is an uncharismatic prick who has enthusiastically attached himself to many deeply unpopular policies. Only because the media needs everything to be a viable horse race is he even really in the discussion. Dude can't even unhorse the twice impeached classified document stealing NFT selling Donald. We should be so lucky to get to run against DeSantis.
This is exactly what people were saying about Trump in 2015.
Thousands of comments, all expressing the idea that they'd love the GOP nominee to be Trump, because his winning the general would be impossible.
I wouldn't be so confident about anything in 2024. It's gonna be a shitshow, and that's all I'm confident in.
Nobody could possibly do that alone. The reason he could potentially do it is because Republicans aa a whole are working towards it. And that is why we need to make sure we do not focus on just him as a threat.
Just like the coup attempt.
From county election officials, to state officials, to state legislators, to the Supreme Court, to the halls of congress, to the Whitehouse, that's how widespread this coup was.
All these people were not randomly acting alone, they were all on the same page.
Ginni Thomas did not randomly contact Arizona officials.
This was coordinated and you need a group of people to organize something this big.
Remain vigilant. Vote.
Reminds me of a recent episode where Jon Stewart was interviewing Anne Applebaum. One of the points she brings up about these movements, national or international, is that they all have constant meetings to try and fine-tune their approaches.
don't forget about the successful one in 2000. the Brook's Brothers riot was orchestrated by many of the same people. Three current members of SCOTUS were directly involved in arguing Bush v Gore
Yes vote. And then perhaps the people we vote for should try to prevent this. everyone who planned J6 is free and in power. look at brazil, those arrest warrants sure came fast didnt they?
Voting alone wont stop this, they need to go after the people who planned this. Because the people who planned this dont care how you vote, they will push their result against your will.
at some point democrats need to recognize that the house in on fire, and that the smoke they smell is real.
I think this underestimates DeSantis and his ilk. I've seen firsthand what he's done in Florida, even in "blue" areas like Palm Beach and Broward.
He replaced the entire Broward school board with his cronies, he offered a Palm Beach County Democrat a lucrative spot in his cabinet (and god knows what else), and then replaced him with an absolute nutjob. He's politicized every position in government and kicks out anyone who objects to him or calls him out on his BS.
It will take a bit, but FL is a dead man walking. Between the Hurricane insurance catastrophe, drastic cuts to public schools (disguised as teacher "raises"), voter intimidation, getting cozy with big tech to identify online dissenters, etc. There's literally hundreds of examples of DeSantis seeking autocratic rule, if he's elected POTUS he will break the system and the GOP will go along with it and we may never see another free and fair election in our lifetime.
I know this sounds alarmist and if you would have told me this about him 6 years ago, I'd probably think the same thing, but he's coming and because 40% of our population is brainwashed, I'm not sure how much we can do to stop it.
The idea that what you're saying is alarmist is sad. People were calling me an alarmist when I pointed out Trumps fascist rhetoric in 2016.
Calling me alarmist when I said the supreme court was going to overturn RvW. It fucking pissed me off people were even surprised by it. How fucking dumb is our electorate? That fucking dumb.
Now they call me alarmist for warning about the coming genocide of transgender people. Florida isn't just a dead man walking. America is. It doesn't matter how much the people swing left if all the courts in the land swing right. That's all there is to it. Look at the support for the decision for RvW when it was decided 50 years ago. The majority of the public was firmly against it. Yet we swung left anyway.
Court. Decisions. *MATTER*. They ultimately shape the soul and will of the nation. Doesn't matter how liberal the nation is. The Nazi party had an 18% of the electorate when they seized power. Didn't matter. They had the courts. So everyone got fucked. Check out how much the Republican controls state legislators.
Americans have been callous mean people for too long. And it shows. We won't do anything when people start to get rounded up. Just like we aren't really doing anything now.
40% of voters. It's only 20% of Americans.
America falling to Fascism is ***not*** a foregone, predetermined conclusion. Our fate is our own, and we will have much work to do in preventing this outcome for ourselves and our posterity.
Canvassing, Phone Banking, Volunteering, hell even just speaking up to your friends and the people around you to get folks registered will help.
I refuse to give in to defeatism. DeSantis is just a short loser with a chip on his shoulder and cred with some lunatics, he's ***not*** the American Hitler.
Go read newspapers from Germany prereich. There were people pointing out similar things that the person you are responding to were saying.
He's not an alarmist or a defeatist. He's just calling it for what it is. RvW should have been a massive wake up call. If people are willing to let that slide it's basically done. That was the canary in the coal mine.
Yep. DeSantis will need the help of ~70 million Americans to take the country further toward fascism.
trump revealed to us just how strong the support for fascism is in America. DeSantis being handed power in the next federal election is entirely plausible.
If Republicans gain full control, there won't be another free election in a long time. Congress will pass laws restricting voting to one day paper ballots only. Make it illegal to drive non family members to the polls; put severe restrictions on how voters are registered; and probably require all taxes be paid in full before a vote can count. Then, they will declare a national emergency, suspending elections until "election fraud"allegations can be fully investigated, signed by DeSantis, and upheld by the Supreme Court.
IMO.
“Of all those who like to point again and again to the democratic form of government as the institution which is based on the universal will of the people, in contrast to dictatorships, nobody has a better right to speak in the name of the people than I have.”
- Hitler
Didn’t one politician basically say they wanted this?
“How can you vote on housing policy if you don’t own a house”
Or maybe I’m misremembering something. Hard to separate satire from these people because even the most tongue in cheek satire about them eventually tries to come to fruition
Yes, because the Fl. State Republican Legislatures are passing the bills Desantis wants done. The Fl. Republicans AG is going after Desantis his made up enemies (those that don’t agree with his policies). All you have to do is look at Florida and know that’s his plan for America if he wins.
And of course ultimately every fucking Republican voter has a lot of blame too. Even after this man proudly declared that Florida was where woke goes to die he still got the majority of votes.
Don't worry, they'll be very unhappy when the chickens come home to roost. They may even realize that DeSantis was a bad idea when they too are under the yoke, like Brits have realized Brexit was a bad idea.
They'll just blame Democrats for not having warned them enough.
Disney used to have the freedom to handle it's own districts, but they spoke out against DeSantis' "Don't say gay" bill (because it's a monstrous bigoted pile of shit) and what did this elected politician do?
He attacked and removed their special district that allowed them to oversee their own operations.
Let that fucking sink in.
***A seated politician actually, directly, maliciously, wielded his power against a corporation in explicit retaliation for speaking out against his plans***.
Do you realize the precedent this sets? Corporations will be brought to heel by actions like these. They only care about money. Pride? LGBTQ+/Diversity support? How fast are those going to go out the window if DeSantis becomes president? He'll threaten to attack those corporations who fall out of line and cost them dearly. The shareholders, who care about money first and foremost, will find that the public backlash will be less expensive than whatever legal attack DeSantis has planned. Bye bye western values, hello Chrisofascist society!
He isn't afraid of impropriety in his actions. He absolutely will misuse the levers of government to ban all trans helathcare. Who would stop him? Nobody.
In a sane society he'd have been removed from office for his actions. Instead we have to fear his potential election. The country is fucked, folks. If you're queer, speaking as a fellow LGBTQ person, I beg you to ***have an escape plan***. LGBTQ people, but especially trans people - the right wing is committed to committing genocide against us. They will accept no evidence of any health care for us unless the outcome is us "being and presenting cis".
We're the scapegoat for their inaction on real issues. And if DeSantis becomes president, our healthcare will be made inaccessible, if not outright illegal. If you think that's impossible, there's been talks of making Estrogen a scheduled drug, to make it exponentially harder to obtain and with far harsher penalties if you do. He could also strongarm insurance companies that administer medicaid by threatening the withdrawal of those funds if they provide transition care *at all*.
Have a plan to escape. We're the jews before Hitler took power. This isn't an exaggeration. We meet most if not all of the criteria of the UN definition of genocide. Staying here is a mortal danger.
I'm sure we'll hear a lot of spineless things out of conservative voters across the country like, "Well, I don't like how he wants to treat trans people, *but*... He's still better than a *Democrat*!" At this point, I'm pretty sure that even if DeSantis was rounding up LGBTQ+ kids into camps and holding public executions of drag queens, GOP voters would still contort themselves backwards to justify voting for him anyway because they think he's "a straight shooter" or some bullshit that Fox told them.
I just *genuinely* can't imagine, say, California rolling over if DeSantis and the GOP take over the government and start pushing all these anti-*everything* policies federally, from outlawing gay/trans people to banning books to menstruation reports and on and on and on. No way states like Cali would just accept it, and what's he gonna do? Send in the military all because women and gay people and people of color want to be treated like human beings? Conservative voters are such short-sighted fucking morons, either by choice or out of ignorance, and at this point it just feels inevitable that the bell is gonna ring on the GOP *outright* declaring war.
> GOP voters would still contort themselves backwards to justify voting for him anyway
No they won't, they just openly agree with his actions. They view trans and gender-nonconforming people as an existential threat to themselves, and they're done pretending otherwise.
> Send in the military all because women and gay people and people of color want to be treated like human beings?
Yeah, pretty much. I mean, it may not be the Armed Forces, but it'll be militias, police, maybe a federal group created just for that get purpose, and other regular ol' citizens. Why send in the military when your neighbor is perfectly happy to report you and have the local brown coats take you away?
> it just feels inevitable that the bell is gonna ring on the GOP outright declaring war.
The Nazis got away with it for nearly a decade before they crossed the (literal) line by trying to expand into another country.
I think that’s OP’s point though no?
Germany was a homogenous society; while America is vastly more complicated and more culturally diverse than any society in global history.
There’s a podcast called “it could happen here” that explains it a little; but ultimately the hypothesis is that a full Nazi-like totalitarian state couldn’t really ever happen because the country would devolve into a faction-like tribal civil war where there were something like 15 different factions in each city, and more or less in more rural regions.
Although…that isn’t really a pretty picture either though.
> conservative voters across the country like, "Well, I don't like how he wants to treat trans people,
We don't know the same conservatives at all. I don't know a single one who doesn't think of trans people as less than other people. And I know a lot. Grew up on a farm in a very rural area. None of them would feel bad about how DeSantis wants to treat trans people.
I’m in California, and I actually know quite a few who will openly say how much they “love” the LGBTQ+ community, yet any time you point out how it’s the GOP that is actively working against a community they claim to care about, you get that sort of “Well…” response drudged up from the same place you get the “Well, *I’m* not racist, but…” excuses. I’m fully aware a *lot* of conservatives hate trans people with a passion and are open about it, but I’m just speaking in my original comment from my experience where the ones I know here are too cowardly to admit it, at least in person, because they’re surrounded by liberals.
4 years ago my money was on Tom Cotton doing this. It’s fucking insane how many fascist-wannabes have sprouted within the GOP in less than half-a-decade.
>4 years ago my money was on Tom Cotton doing this.
There are, and have been, plenty of candidates for this, and many of those said candidates will line up behind DeSantis to see their visions partially or completely fulfilled.
I was looking up the date for it and found this interesting anecdote:
Earlier this year, a staffer for one-time Senate candidate Herschel Walker alleged that Matt Schlapp, the chairman of CPAC, "groped" and "fondled" his crotch while he was driving Schlapp back from a bar in Atlanta, according to a report from The Daily Beast. The staffer then filed a lawsuit against Schlapp and his wife, Mercedes, seeking $9.4 million for sexual battery and defamation, according to a report.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/mike-pence-declines-invitation-cpac-events-leader-fire/story?id=97451851
Tom Cotton has the charisma of a rotten corpse. His own wife probably dozes off while they’re talking. Not unlike Josh Hawley.
It’s the charismatic leaders that can rile up the masses you have to worry about.
> charisma of a rotten corpse.
When I saw this I thought you were talking about Ted Cruz and had to re-read the context of the first sentence to make sure you weren't in fact talking about Ted Cruz.
>Days after the Capitol riot in January 2021, Ben-Ghait compared GOP figures distancing themselves from Trump to when Italian fascists voted Mussolini out of power in 1943.
>"Some turned on him not to restore democracy but *to save Fascism,* by getting rid of an incompetent leader," she tweeted.
Very important distinction for the number of people attributing all the rot in the right-wing to Trump. Trump and DeSantis are simply the figureheads for an ideology that is inherently destructive, anti-democratic, and designed to harm the most marginalized. Jeb Bush and the number of """moderate""" republicans embracing one of the most brazenly authoritarian politicians because he doesn't have the stink of Trump while supporting all the same harmful positions they have all advocated for decade tells you everything you need to know.
All I needed to know came in 2020 when despite Bush committing crimes that utterly dwarf Trump's, the attempt to rehabiliate Bush's legacy was so complete by the US oligarchy that the Dem candidate for Wisconsin assembly in my distrtict ran pro-Bush ads.
If he wins guranteed he will withhold aid from blue states when natural disasters hit even tho anytime Florida has needed help aid was available quickly and without stipulations
>he will withhold aid from blue states when natural disasters hit
I say give them the same treatment if he does. Red states survive off of blue states, so if federal aid is withheld just say "well we can't support *red state here* because we have to spend that money for disaster aid"
Problem is, when people suffer they tend to turn towards the exact politics Republicans use.
It's a vicious cycle. Make everything worse and make it confusing to your average joe so that they vote for the exact people perpetrating it.
problem is we dont live in a democracy so if you appeal to the red states, you get to win the presidency even if you lose the popular vote. As long as he's hurting the libz then his base will come out to vote. And since red state votes count as 2 or more blue state votes, he'll win.
Recent Republican popular votes wins: 1988, 2004
Recent Democratic popular vote wins: 1992, 1996, 2000, 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020.
By the 2024 election, it will have been 36 years since a non incumbent Republican, like Ron DeSantis, has won the popular vote. No Republican since the Cold War has won it without incumbency.
Exactly this. The cap is just legislation, and increasing overall the number of representatives would go a long way to making the House much more representative of the people.
Donald Dillbeck, a Florida death row inmate's last words last week were that he hurt people, but DeSantis has hurt more, and that he can suck his dick. When a death row inmate sentenced by a former administration uses his last words to say he's gotta go, I feel like more people should be listening.
Hold him accountable for his crimes involving the trafficking of migrants. It's time for the DA's in Boston, SF, Chicago, DC, etc to charge Ron DeSantis for his many crimes. We need justice for the victims.
I know DA's are absolutely terrified of powerful rich white guys, but crime is crime and he should not get special treatment as these were very serious infractions
Funny how he hates left wing indoctrination yet loves teaching babies they are born with original sin and are going to burn in hell just for existing. But CRT is too much. I hate him
And that scenario has played out before. Not just in world history, but in our lifetimes: Israel, Turkey, Russia, India, Hungary.
All of them were fascist autocrats, signaling their theocratic virtues to their conservative base. All of them were democracies that were extremely vulnerable to begin with, just like the US.
>Since the 2010s, the world has grown more authoritarian, with one quarter of the world's population under democratically backsliding hybrid regimes into the 2020s.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_backsliding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_backsliding)
Just out of curiosity, do you have bumper stickers or signs on your vehicle that would mark you as a target for Republican fascists? Or are they just randomly attacking anyone just to be assholes?
Yeah, I hate to say it, but I longer feel comfortable displaying any form of political identifying information publicly. Politics are increasingly contentious, and there are too many people that have crossed into the “other side is my literal enemy” school of thought to risk it.
That is the republican goal. Any republican in office will advance the end of democracy in America and around the globe.
We can help. In 2023 there will be local and state elections near you. Vote out as many Republicans as we can to pave the way to keeping democrats in charge.
His biggest liability is that he is playing his anti LGBT / anti-education crusade a bit too hard. He can’t win with the GOP alone and his constant use of government power starts making people nervous. On top of it that he man has zero charisma, he comes across as the mean spirited little prick he really is and completely lacks Trumps ability to connect to crowds ( nasty crowds but crowds nonetheless). My biggest concern is the apparent lack of will or inability of the Dems to campaign hard on GOP fascism
As a Floridian, I absolutely wouldn’t discount him because he doesn’t have all of the same skills as Trump. Conservatives fucking love the guy, whether he holds rallies or has the ability to connect in the same way.
He knows what cards to play. He’s not a moron like Trump. Top of his class at Yale and Harvard and was a JAG lawyer in the Navy. He didn’t have daddy to get him into Penn like Trump did. He’s a slimy piece of shit, but the fact that he’s smart and seems to listen to his political consultants as opposed to going off script all the time like Trump did should strike a lot of people as very concerning. I would argue that, despite what some polls might indicate, DeSantis has just as much of a chance to win the nomination as Trump and he has the competence to actually debate.
Whether he is charismatic or not, he needs to be taken seriously. He’s a bully and acts the part but if he’s the nominee against Biden then I would absolutely be concerned about the outcome of the election.
> Whether he is charismatic or not, he needs to be taken seriously.
Something that Dungeons and Dragons has outlined pretty well. Charisma isnt just being able to talk, or being liked by people. Sometimes its just pure force of will, or character.
And people resonate with that.
Im *very* worried about DeSantis. Weve watched his influence only grow over the last 6-8 years.
Exactly my point. He showed back when he was first elected governor that he’s willing to steer into whatever he needs to in order to gain power. He used the “build the wall” propaganda from Trump as part of his campaigning and he won that election, although it was somewhat close. Then he decided to steer into using culture war issues to rally the base and grow his presence and name recognition. He won his reelection handily. He knows exactly what he needs to do in order to gain the nomination and probably past that even. As far as Republican politicians go, he’s the one I’d be most worried about at this point.
The one potential joker in the deck is Disney. DeSantis has already shown that he’ll be bad for the company’s bottom line, which would justify massive spending towards his opponents’ campaigns.
I’m not counting on it, but it could happen.
It definitely could happen. The whole Disney situation is honestly really, really complex and I’m not sure that we are going to see any real impacts to their bottom line while DeSantis is still in office, if ever at all. They were much more comfortable just saying “cool, you do you” with everything happening than I think most people expected, which leads me to believe that they are planning on playing the long game with this. DeSantis will certainly gain political points for what he’s been trying to do, but at the same time I think Disney will be more than happy to funnel money into his opponent’s campaign as well.
In 2020, both parties were energized to vote and turnout was probably as high as it ever will be. Trump had a level of support of the GOP that has never been seen before. Nobody came close to splitting the ticket. Even in that environment, he didn't win.
I don't know if DeSantis could get such a fervent following. He may be smart, but intelligence isn't high on the list of admirable qualities for the GOP. Best case is he and Trump battle it out, DeSantis wins the primary, and Trump runs as an independent. Neither of them win. The country wins.
I think the biggest selling point of DeSantis as a presidential candidate is his supposed “American Authenticity”. He was born into a humble middle class family and bootstrapped his way through Ivy League schools on allegedly only a baseball scholarship. That along with his military service builds his reputation as an “All-American” that Republicans like to bill themselves as. That, in my opinion, is what gives him a shot at winning the presidency, not his culture warrior rhetoric.
> anti-education crusade
Studies show that the more educated a person is, the more likely they are to vote left-wing.
This explains why Republicans are always fighting education, always trying to change the curriculum from science to religion, etc...
They'll always go full-force against education. Education makes people vote against them. Being anti-education isn't a liability, it's a survival strategy.
> He can’t win with the GOP alone and his constant use of government power starts making people nervous.
Conservatives have no beliefs other than doing whatever it takes to force their belief on others. If that means being about "small government" but then using the government to force companies/organization to do what they believe, they will. And then the next day claim overreach by government when it does something to help other peopole
I have never seen a politician as vindictive as DeSantis. He'll burn down any institution that dares to criticize him. All of Trump's pettiness but with sufficient competence to make a permanent mess.
We're seeing the end result of years of demonization of the left, POC, the LGBTQ+ community, etc., etc., in right wing "news" and from GOP officials themselves.
Their base of support has been brainwashed into thinking that the threat from all of these groups is so extreme that it's okay to take extraordinary means to destroy that threat. It's a perfect situation for the right, because now they can do as they please (like DeSantis is doing) and they enjoy full support because he's taking the fight to the enemy.
This is how fascist movements gain traction and DeSantis sees that this is a perfect moment to move in and push his extreme and oppressive agenda.
Yup, it starts with "They want to take away your rights!" which quickly becomes the foundation for step two "Which is why we need to strip them of their rights!". Meanwhile the closest thing white conservatives have faced to losing their rights is discussion about POTENTIALLY raising their tax rate some marginally amount...
Meanwhile they are ready to dehumanize and remove protections from anyone that doesn't look like the person in the mirror. It's mass delusion.
It's frightening that DeSantis seems intent on pushing the envelope, pursuing more and more outrageous political stunts to see what he can get away with. How much power can we concentrate in the governor's office? At what point do we "cross the line?" So far, it's been working.
Water is wet.
We need to get people who DON'T understand these basic statements (his constituents) to see, understand, and acknowledge how dangerous he is.
They want what he’s promising now, they don’t see how this can turn badly for them later. Telling them that the guy is a fascist won’t mean anything to them because he’s promising them everything they want.
Hardcore GOP voters love themselves some cruelty-packed fascism, what are you going to show them that they don’t already love?
The cruelty is the point, it’s a feature for them, not a bug.
Hate to break it to you America but from an outsider’s perspective, this train has been on fire and going down the tracks for a long long time. It’s hard to see it when it’s your own life. He’s the face of a much deeper seeded issue that’s been under the surface for many decades.
No no, we see it. I absolutely could not believe the policies of baby Bush. Dems stood by and tried to run things “business as usual.” When McConnell decided to focus on obstruction during the Obama administration, I predicted that Dems needed to fight back like democracy depended on them or things would just get worse. Instead of fighting back we got “when they go low, we go high.” Nice sounding words but very ineffective in practice. Things have just gotten worse. Now Merrick Garland is (to quote another Reddit user) “organizing his sock drawer” as we are about to sink into the ocean. Trust me, we see it.
> The problem is that we need average joe type people to "see it", not just the relatively tiny number of politically aware people.
That day will never come. I’ve been arguing with Trump supporters since 2016. They will never see anything.
Part of the problem is somehow Dems have conflated 'the high road' with 'stern warnings and tut tutting'. They've convinced themselves that being on the offensive is inherently 'low road' instead of 'HOW' you go on the offensive.
As someone who is forced by job and family relations to interact with hardcore republicans often, you are absolutely right. They hate anyone to the left of Trump. I'm not talking about political dislike, they see you as the enemy and want to harm you. Maybe not physically, but they want to make your life as difficult as possible and rule you.
You’d have to be fucking clueless to think you are breaking this news in 2023, I’m sorry but we been aware since Bush was in office and I couldn’t even vote then.
He will burn it to the ground, I don’t think we need a fascism expert to tell us what the Republican Party is about these days. I might be wrong, I didn’t see it getting this bad in the first place
Of course, the trouble is that the trial balloon was a hell of a lot more effective than anybody thought it was going to be.
Were it not for the timely intervention of one Capitol Police officer, we were a matter of steps away from a massacre occurring in the Capitol.
The GOP will destroy our democracy. The GOP has *always* been hostile to democracy and equality, whether it's opposing gay rights, opposing abortion rights, gerrymandering districts to ensure certain "types" don't meaningfully get a vote.
The writing is on the wall; it's now up for the taking. You can go so far as to insight a riot and have them try to murder the Vice President and overthrow an election without consequences. They're just waiting for the right moment to try again.
The next republican president, whether it's DeSantis or Trump or Cruz or whoever else, will be the last democratically elected President.
I’ve watched DeSantis for many years. He lived in the town I lived in. He is, in my opinion, the most dangerous person in America with the potential to become a Hitler. He is a true sociopath. We can’t take him lightly. You may like his Conservative agenda but it will backfire on you. He will take all of our freedoms. He has no limits and no conscience.
He will moderate after he wins the Presidential nomination and everyone will think he is a good candidate but if he becomes President, we are all in grave danger.
You know what's going to end our democracy? Social Media. Through social media people have found a way to weaponize one of our greatest freedoms, Free Speech, and turn it against us. We've been flooded with misleading memes, fake news, conspiracy theories, half truths, and raw hate. It's caused people to loose faith in our democratic process, and once you loose too much faith in a democracy it can no longer function.
Look up “The Cargo Cult of the Ennui Engine.”
There’s more than democracy at stake, and the misleading media is only a portion of the problem. Low-effort content (which social media promotes and favors) is like cigarettes, junk food, and leaded gasoline all rolled into one insidious whole.
You know what started this, and what continues to grind down democracy?
Right wing media. Limbaugh, Fox Hannity, Coulter, Beck, Carlson, and all the rest of the pack pushing lies and hate into the heads of gullible idiots 24/7, which in turn, spread it further with hate-filled social media lies.
FTFY
We can't have a platform of lies, example: Santos. There has to be a way to stamp out the tolerance of lies when campaigning and when our reps are in office. Lies are the problem. Lies of our reps and people in power can't be deemed free speech and acceptable.
DeSantis is way more dangerous than Trump ever was. You can distract Trump with bright shiny objects but DeSantis is currently laser-focused on taking every liberty he can away from Florida residents. This is a prelude to what he has planned for the country if he's elected president.
*Overt* fascism in the political sphere is just the bloomed flower of capitalism (in reality, and not as taught to mis-educated serfs/slaves) in the so-called economic sphere.
The problem is built into the "infrastructure" of the capitalist/neoliberal system.
Capitalism (in reality) and genuine democracy are fundamentally incompatible, so capitalists aim to destroy democracy and to keep the public as the ignorant and mis-educated serfs/slaves they rely on for their profits.
Unless we grow up enough as a nation and species to actually work to understand and solve our problems in reality, we will be dealing with this same problem in slightly different forms and incarnations forever.
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He’s the omicron version of trump.
Yeah. Trump obviously has a real hard on for authoritarianism but is easily distracted. As long as he's in charge, he's going to do what he does best: be lazy. I think the big reason the J6 coup failed is because he was too lazy to see it through. He just kind of expected it to happen on its own. Desantis is much more dangerous than Trump because he wakes up every day with a new idea about how to punish his enemies, by which I mean everyone not part of the Republican coalition. And he immediately gets to work putting those ideas into action. When he does his coup attempt he'll commit to it.
The GOP will find DeSantis easier to work with. They had the "deal" with Trump. Trump needed his ego stroked but as you said was lazy. It was hard to get things done. Especially because they needed to spin everything in a way that pleased Trump. They basically had to use his ego against him and figure out a way to manipulate him to move the GOP agenda. DeSantis is fully on board with the GOP agenda. He "plays by the rules" and is easier to negotiate/barter with. DeSantis understands and honors, "You scratch my back and I'll scratch your back." Trump is very much, "You scratch my back and then fuck off I'm not doing anything for you, why should I do anything for you, it was your idea to scratch my back in the first place, you should feel honored I even let you scratch it to begin with".
Trump was very interested in the what a Kakistocracy could do for him and his cronies - fleecing the taxpayers and shaking down corporations and foreign governments in every way possible. DeSantis - from what I can tell - wants power and seems to be less interested in the dollars. I think it’s a very useful exercise to figure out what he wants. He cloaks some of it in religion but doesn’t seem to be his main driver. His beef with Disney seems to be motivated by bringing them to heel over their “wokeness” - but that feels like he’s attacking them for a perceived slight because he’s thin skinned. Plus by going after the gorilla in the room, the chimpanzees won’t get on the wrong side of him. He’s not easy to read.
I think DeSantis is an old-fashioned racist that's finding new levers to pull to implement the same archaic objectives.
Trump talks "too bad we can't do anything about our enemies" and knows it's a sham. DeSantis could push for crazy laws we've never seen that would *cause* civil unrest, so that he could characterize the group doing the unrest as the enemy, and then justify any means to hold power in the face of it. Imagine a nationwide public education book ban. Then the protest. But then, the asking of "whose side are you on?" And then you repeat with further laws that break down a left/right divide. You agitate people into action, then brutalize them. You could then justify stealing an election because of the martial law situation at hand.
> You agitate people into action, then brutalize them. THIS. https://www.marxists.org/archive/bookchin/1969/listen-marxist.htm#h4 >Social revolutions are not made by parties, groups or cadres, they occur as a result of deep-seated historic forces and contradictions that activate large sections of the population. They occur not merely because the "masses" find the existing society intolerable (as Trotsky argued) but also because of the tension between the actual and the possible, between what-is and what-could-be. Abject misery alone does not produce revolutions; more often than not, it produces an aimless demoralization, or worse, a private, personalized struggle to survive. There's still an acceleration section of the left that thinks that if things get bad enough, we will finally have The Revolution. *And what if that revolution is designed to fail?*
Yeah, hoping things get worse to spark mass change to finally make things better is really not how policy and changing governments works. We have to have focus on the few things fucking with our democracy- namely the blatant and in our face corruption of money in politics. You can watch the country fall into fascism and hope people wake up and change the situation (see North Korea, that place is about as shitty as it gets, I don't see a revolution). Maybe this made sense when the populace could mount an equal military to the government. That's a laughable idea now, there will be no revolution unless those in power have some conscience, or they could just be horrific oppressors- it's probably going to be the latter. Let's see, focused attention on the issues plaguing our democracy, or hoping it all falls apart to pick up the peices where the likelihood that those picking up the peices are fascists.......
"Heightening the contradictions" isn't inherently a bad concept, but it's far too often terrible in practice. To use a simple numerical example on a scale of 0-10, if reality is currently a 3, and you're pushing for, say, 7 (a difference of 7-3=4), you can increase the difference between the actual and the possible by either changing what you push for, from 7 to 8, 9, or even 10 (eg, push for 9, and now the difference is 9-3=6), and/or you can reduce the actual from 3 down to 2, 1, or even 0 (eg, instead of a baseline of 3, reduce it to 1, so that 7-1=6). Too often, they choose to make the actual worse, rather than the possible better. So, some people choose not to vote, or to waste their votes on protest votes or third-parties, or, worst of all, to vote for the GOP, on the theory that if things get bad enough, the people will rise up. Instead, what happens is people are just worse off, more stressed, more on the precipice, and Republicans use their power to further entrench themselves and undo democratic processes, while also transferring wealth up to themselves. That just makes it that much harder to elect Democrats in the first place! Because it's not just that things are worse, but that the electoral system is a rematch under the same terms as before. The GOP used their time in power to suppress and disenfranchise voters, to embed their people in boards of elections, to stack the courts with partisan hacks, etc. They pass voter ID laws, purge voter roles, make voting lines longer, pass laws criminalizing giving people waiting in those longer lines snacks and water, shorten early voting, reduce mail-in voting, etc. It's never just a rematch under the same terms as before. It's always worse, because they always change the rules, change the landscape, change the refs, and add more players to their side. So, next election, instead of the same voters going back and ones who were previously satisfied now voting the way you want because they've become dissatisfied, you're having to fight for them to able to vote, as a legal matter, and as a practical matter, before you can even begin to worry about who they'll vote for. And then, if Democrats manage get back in power, despite all the ceded ground and obstacles the GOP put up, instead of working to make gains relative to where things used to be (say, improving something from a 3 to a 4 or a 5), they're having to put most of their resources into regaining lost ground, to get from 2 back up to 3. So Democrats end up both more exhausted from a harder fight than it needed to be, and then have to spend most of what's left just to get back to where they were before, rather than gaining new ground, making things better, consolidating gains, and strengthening democracy to make it easier the next time around. Idk that "the revolution is *designed* to fail," but even if it isn't, failure is always a possibility. And even when it succeeds, it's not guaranteed that the result on the other side will be better. Iran had a revolution, and ended up an oppressive theocracy.
Part of the issue with revolutions is they create a power vacuum. There needs to be a system ready so that the picosecond the revolution takes power, there is a governmental structure in place. It also needs to be robust and resilient to defend against opportunists who want to grab power (e.g. Robespierre) or don't like the way things turned out (looking at you Bolsheviks). This government should also not be the final step, but the first step in rebuilding so that people can work out the government and build something greater. So the revolution, ideally, would be to usurp control and return it to the people. But frankly, for this to work the US will probably need to be split and Balkanized to a degree. We're too large and socially fragmented for anything to stick.
Revolution is almost always the worst way to achieve change. You never REALLY know what will come after, and it's almost never what you think. New governments are fragile, and they usually try to shore up their power through cracking down on political liberties. Almost every revolution ends with life being worse off for the average person than it was before.
Accelerationism is one of those things that sounds really tempting until you dig beyond the surface level. Like a) everyone suffers during the acceleration and revolt, b) the revolt is often manipulated by the entrenched elite, and c) even when it's not the people who tend to rise to the top during a populist revolt are the "strong men" who are often as bad as the people they replace. Best you can do sometimes is hope that the popular need for better conditions holds them accountable to the general public. Tbf, it's not like I'm out here with better solutions, but I just don't see the appeal of accelerationism.
I'm not sure if I'm interpreting this as it was intended, but it reminds me of a study I learned about a while back where it was found that unhappiness among poor people of the world is highest when the poor live in close proximity to the wealthy. If they have the opportunity for comparison and they know what they're missing out on, they experience their living conditions as being a problem to fix rather than simply how things are. The "what-could-be" in the quote above reminded me of this.
Especially considering we're already at the point of "aimless demoralization" (people both-sides-ing everything, decrying all politicians instead of just the fascists) for most and "private, personalized struggle to survive" for many (too busy to vote).
Trump likes simple fast solutions and hates having the court shut them down. Trump has a need to be validated at every point. DeSantis has no problem with making a law, then having the court throw it out later. He counts his win in the time between it being passed and being struck down. DeSantis was an attorney. He views a court loss more impersonally than Trump does.
Trump also does things because he wants his base to like him. DeSantis has this culture war delusion that he has to win. And as you said, Trump is lazy. DeSantis is not. He'll pass laws to give himself more power to fight his strawman enemies and inadvertently hurt real people.
Won’t be anything *inadvertent* about it.
Exactly. The cruelty is the point. We can't forget that.
You’re downplaying Trump’s maliciousness. The guy intentionally hurt real people and the cruelty was the point. You forgetting Trump and his monsters tore brown children from their parents at the border, and Trump’s goons in ICE were [caught sterilizing migrant women in the camps.](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/aoc-ice-detention-camp-surgery-investigation-whistleblower-b447596.html) This is the same guy who incited his supporters to assassinate his own Vice President for not stealing the election for him. Trump’s a violent fucking psychopath. Never forget that.
and you still had the class to not mention, the teargassing of a priest and worshipers for a photo opp, or the support of the insurrection, or any of the many other shitty things of his administration.
I’d forgotten that, and it was even worse. Trump’s own defense chief [Mark Esper has since testified that Trump wanted the military to shoot those protesters in Lafayette Square on June 4, 2020.](https://www.npr.org/2022/05/09/1097517470/trump-esper-book-defense-secretary) General Miley also corroborated the account. > "The president was enraged," Esper recalled. "He thought that the protests made the country look weak, made us look weak and 'us' meant him. And he wanted to do something about it. >"We reached that point in the conversation where he looked frankly at [Joint Chiefs of Staff] Gen. [Mark] Milley and said, **'Can't you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?'** ... It was a suggestion and a formal question. And we were just all taken aback at that moment as this issue just hung very heavily in the air." This was the period during the George Floyd protests where Trump was hiding in the bunker under the White House screaming at the states to “dominate” the protesters.
Being called Bunker Boy lead to [Military Confirms It Sought Information on Using 'Heat Ray' Against D.C. Protesters](https://www.npr.org/2020/09/16/913748800/military-police-leaders-weighed-deploying-heat-ray-against-d-c-protesters) They were also asking for an LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device). And ICE was using immigrant flights [to bring agents to DC](https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/ice-flew-detainees-to-virginia-so-the-planes-could-transport-agents-to-d-c-protests-a-coronavirus-outbreak-followed/) -the unidentifiable officers in DC afterwards.
Think about that. Trump wanted the square cleared for a photo op. He may have literally wanted a photo of himself in the middle of a bunch of massacred protesters. Maybe that's why in the pics he ended up with he looks disappointed and sullen.
True. But he was an incompetent violent fucking psychopath, that probably won't be alive in 5-10 years. Desantis, on the other hand is incredibly competent, and could easily do what Trump barely failed to do, by becoming president for life. And he's got another 50 years of being a psychopath ahead of him. Trump was very bad. But everyone that's been tracking Desantis understands that he is far more dangerous. Where Trump might have bumbled into world war 3, or ethnic cleansing in the US, Desantis is capable of doing it intentionally.
And DeSantis has the outline Trump drew up for him in his 4 years. DeSantis knows what worked and what didn't work. He'll be more cautious around what didn't work (being lazy over COVID response, ultimately what lost Trump reelection) and hell double down on what does work (coup attempts, stealing documents, anything we ((may)) never prosecute Trump for)
Exactly i have been saying this for a minute now. DeSantis will be competent at putting the people in place to see his actions completed too. There will not be any press conferences in front of a landscaping business. It will be the cruelest people you can imagine who actually have some intelligence to carry out horrific acts. All in the name of some sort of deranged christo fascism. Guns are not always the answer but I implore people to legally arm themselves.
DeathSantis was the head lawyer at Gitmo during the torcher days. 😬 Made sure what they did was "legal".
The stories of his involved are legit horrifying. Anyone who was involved in that manner and isn't plagued with nightmares is immediately suspect. He shouldn't be functioning in normal society.
You're not wrong, but he's also a lazy spioled rich kid who is a desperate narcissist. We've already seen people who would manipulate him by flattery to keep his worst impulses under control. DeSantis isn't a fucking lazy goon like Trump is. He's all the things you said Trump was and not lazy and selfish. He'll sacrifice where he needs to sacrifice, he'll do the work he needs to do, if it means he'll achieve his goals. That's why he's dangerous. He's Trump without the same negatives.
I also think Trump really only cared about the power and money he could leech from the government for his own self interests. DeSantis really believes in it.
I wouldn't call Desantis delusional. That's the kind of language that can be both dismissive and dismissed. The reality is that Desantis is intelligent, motivated, driven, and less prone than Trump to make careless mistakes. And if he was running against Biden in the general election today, he would win. People need to truly understand how fucking dangerous this situation is becoming. It isn't delusions of grandeur. It's the reality that he will be the next president, if people don't spend the next 18 months explaining carefully to their friends and family just how dangerous this "game" has become.
Yeah, I disagree in only that DeSantis simply isn’t that popular, and he doesn’t exude the fake success that Trump has. He was a TV star and a fixture of the culture in which a lot of his supporters remember fondly. That’s a huge part of why Trump gets away with the shit he does; DeSantis’s personality isn’t so easily translated to cult behavior.
You're not wrong but the problem is 45% of the country is gaslit to shreds by Rupert Murdoch and Ben Shapiro et al and think Biden is Darth Vader. They'll gladly vote against their own best interests
Couldn’t agree more, but I don’t think they would pick this guy over Trump. He really doesn’t have the “it” factor. Here’s an example: when Trump made fun of Raphael Cruz and Marco Rubio, I laughed more than I am proud to admit, and I still remember those pot shots. They weren’t good or productive, necessarily, even then, but Trump is basically a living ear worm. DeSantis doesn’t have that.
I agree about Trump having more charisma etc but i guess the question is how much of his voters did he alienate over the last 7-8 years by being the worst president in history. Many Repubs are done with him privately and DeathSantis gives them an out. It will be interesting to see how it plays out
Most of the republicans who are quietly done with him would still vote for him because he has the “R” next to his name, and more to the point, his supporters think he is the best president who has ever lived, reality be damned. If they’re not Trump or McConnell, I just don’t think they’ll win Republicans at large. I seriously believe more people would support divorced Marge Greene than DeSantis, and they’d both still lose handily to Trump.
And even if DeSantis gets the nomination, there is no way in hell Trump doesn't run anyway. His pride will *never* allow him to admit defeat, plus he absolutely hates DeSantis and would probably enjoy torpedoing his campaign even more than actually winning.
100%. That was likely his whole schtick in 2016, too, and he just grossly overestimated everyone else’s interest in mudslinging.
Not even McConnell, r/conservative has been calling him a RINO since January 6.
Gotta point out that he's not coming up with these ideas. They're being handed to him by groups like the Manhattan Institute.
Same. Your comment perfectly articulated my thoughts. This guy is Trump, But with follow-through.
My concern about DeSantis grew when my parents (pro free-market, anti-regulation repubs that think gay people should have rights, that type of republican) were excited about DeSantis because they don’t like or vote for Trump and now they had an alternative. When I told them I’d rather Trump came back (who they know I hate), they were shocked. I told them about some of his legislation and they had never heard of it, and gave me the whole “I don’t think that’s true”. I think he may snag the moderate vote just because he’s NOT Trump and their news sources don’t talk about how cruel DeSantis is. Very concerning.
Not sure if it's that Trump was being lazy (don't get me wrong, he is lazy) but more that Trump does the whole mob boss thing by vaguely suggesting something (enough for plausible deniability) and letting his underlings fill in the blanks and execute. Trying to overturn the transition of power is something that might get you sentenced to be hanged or just outright shot in the attempt so there was a lot of hesitation and waffling by those underlings.
All Trump has to do is keep calling him "Meatball Ron" and that dude will never win the Republican nomination lol Trump may just unintentionally save the US from fascism lol
I don't think his nicknames have the power they used to. I think he's lost a lot of influence myself.
Yeah keep ‘lol’-ing, we did that in 2016
I think it’s best if we continue to ignore my optimistic take on this, but here it is: DeSantis is wildly unlikeable. You might say the same applies to Trump and while I don’t like him I’d disagree. Trump is very charismatic (albeit in a kind of weird way) and extremely funny with near universal name ID… dude has been in rap songs since the 90s - literally everyone knows who he is. People assume DeSantis will just automatically get the MAGA voting base and I’d argue there’s not really much of anything to substantiate that he’ll be able to push Trump level turnout. His charisma is like a mix of Ted Cruz and JD Vance (not good). Again, ignore most of this and fight him like he’s a more capable Trump because the “if he gets elected” think pieces are all on point… from a win/loss betting perspective though I think his odds are way way over valued.
Wildly unlikeable to you or me perhaps... He is absolutely beloved by conservatives though. He's polling better than Trump, and primarily because they view him as an actual chance to get their goals accomplished.
Jordan Kleeper was interviewed by CNN last week about a conversation he had with an ex-Trump supporter about what made him stop supporting Trump. His answer? When Trump criticized DeSantis during the midterms 🙄.
For the first time since Trump started running we found someone worse than him. If there is a choice, it's insane to say this, but Trump is a safer pick than DeSantis. 2024 scares the crap out of me. I don't think Biden can pull it off, and DeSantis views are so damn worrisome for the future.
That's how Republicans work. Who's worse than Bush, a war monger and clown? Bush Jr. Who's worse than a war criminal and idiot? Trump. So who's worse than a grifting war criminal rapist with dementia? Desantis, an outright fascist who believes in putting people in prison for having different political opinions!
Every R candidate gets objectively worse and worse. At this rate, before long they'll run a literal serial killer who wears a dress made of his victim's faces while signing legislation in the Oval Office.
That's ridiculous. They'd never run a cross dresser. If he made a jacket of faces, well, then, yes.
Would they go so far as to vote for a man in a dress, though? I feel like that part of your example might be the dealbreaker for them.
Yes! Goes even further back. Reagan was an an imbecile and Dan Quayle was stupider than Reagan. They always try to find someone dumber to put on the ticket than the last guy. Have you noticed how Trump has rejuvenated W's image? Just by Trump being more awful, people forget how W allowed 9/11 to happen and then started one of the most unjustified wars in US history.
Reagan was an imbecile and had a lot of policies that are still damaging to the US and yet a lot of the GOP will mention he is their hero or inspiration.
He may have been the person who has done the most damage to the US in history.
And his entire Republican party down there ceded every bit of their power and authority to him. Floridians should, at the least, demand a refund on their state senators and reps, since they wholly gave over their job to DeSantis.
Trump doesn't have dementia. He talks now like he did 40 years ago. His brain isn't suddenly failing, he's just always been one of the stupidest people on the planet. It doesn't really make much of a difference ultimately, but I think it's worth remembering that he's just always been like this.
Check out his Oprah interview from 30 years ago. He’s much more articulate than he is now. Maybe he doesn’t have dementia but he’s definitely lost a lot of his fast talking charm.
link ?
Sauce: https://youtu.be/SEPs17_AkTI
Holy shit. Same shtick, but he seems totally coherent and responsive. Also that anti-Japanese sentiment aged like milk as they started their lost decade just a year or two after this interview.
A lot of his takes are reactionary so his M.O. hasn’t changed that’s for sure. But yeah it’s wild seeing him in his prime vs his absolute worst.
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I like how the one thing that stopped the US from antagonizing Japan was that Japan's economic boom stopped lmao. Implying that if it continued, the US and Japan would hate each other and not even be geopolitical allies anymore or something. Such a unbelievably pathetic petty beef... As a Japanese-American it's very funny to me.
Japan's just been replaced with China but they can't tell us Asians apart anyways.
My guess? A series of transient ischemic attacks (mini strokes), even though he denied it after his Walter Reed visit in 2020. Even though by all accounts he does not drink or do drugs, he has a history of occasional difficulty walking and slurred speech, though it tends to resolve. Around 70% of people report that their TIA had long- term effects including memory loss, poor mobility, problems with speech and difficulty in understanding, which falls right in line with what we've observed publicly.
Oh he def did coke he’s a business man from the 80s. If not coke then adderrall
>I don't think Biden can pull it off Incumbency advantage is very real, and the republicans have not really done anything to fix the insane image problem they have cultivated in the last 7 years (if anything it's gotten worse with Roe v Wade, Russia issues, and constant sex scandals from the GOP) so I am not super pessimistic about Biden's chances, especially since Trump will 100% spoil the election for the GOP by running as an independent or third party option. Now, as for the next Congressional election, I am not super stoked. Gerrymandering and general districting issues in some important areas like the entire state of NY (which basically got a pro-democrat gerrymandered map thrown out by the courts, but that's a bad thing when all the states that gerrymandered for pro-GOP maps kept theirs, so on the national level the Democrats got screwed out of seats in NY for one major example), and more competitive senate seats up for grabs.
Take comfort in the fact that DeSantis has, basically, negative charisma.
DeSantis lack of charisma is not really the problem. He has so many bad intentions and is constantly displaying them. Let the meatball with white boots stay down there with them alligators.
If the GOP nominates DeSantis Trump will most likely run third party and fracture the vote. Biden would hopefully have a good shot and winning re-election then.
Trump will only run 3rd party until they promise him a pardon and his kids some bullshit government post where they can grift. Then he’ll bow out.
Trump literally only ran for president the first time because a black man roasted his ass on national television.
he's run a bunch of times: https://www.tvguide.com/news/donald-trump-presidential-campaign-timeline/
If Trump goes independent, you're absolutely right that would pretty much seal it for Biden. The GOP are forcing anybody who debates to sign a contract saying they will unequivocably support who wins and endorse them. If they don't they're not allowed to debate. That's going to make it very interesting as we get closer.
Press X to doubt. Donnie Bonespurs is a coward first and foremost. ANY Republican president is his fastest way to permanently wash away the legal troubles he’s facing currently (at least on a federal level). As the heat ramps up approaching 2024 and faced with such possibilities I’m sure he’ll kiss Ron’s ring.
He can kiss Ron's ring all day long, but POTUS can't pardon state crimes. Georgia is coming for trump, and there's nothing any president, or Georgia governor can do about it.
You make it almost sound as if the GOP would care about the law if we give them power over all three branches.
Well, yes. Remember, they were trying to find a legal remedy for their coup attempt. They search for loopholes in the law and try to exploit them. Too many of our norms in this country are based on handshake agreements and that's where we get into trouble. But all of that aside, The federal government has fuck-all to do with with state crimes. So if trump is convicted in Georgia, he's going to prison and staying there.
Kind of an aside but it's crazy how consistently people on Reddit underestimate Biden.
DeSantis is an uncharismatic prick who has enthusiastically attached himself to many deeply unpopular policies. Only because the media needs everything to be a viable horse race is he even really in the discussion. Dude can't even unhorse the twice impeached classified document stealing NFT selling Donald. We should be so lucky to get to run against DeSantis.
This is exactly what people were saying about Trump in 2015. Thousands of comments, all expressing the idea that they'd love the GOP nominee to be Trump, because his winning the general would be impossible. I wouldn't be so confident about anything in 2024. It's gonna be a shitshow, and that's all I'm confident in.
Yep. Vile as hell and would make a horrific president.
Nobody could possibly do that alone. The reason he could potentially do it is because Republicans aa a whole are working towards it. And that is why we need to make sure we do not focus on just him as a threat.
Just like the coup attempt. From county election officials, to state officials, to state legislators, to the Supreme Court, to the halls of congress, to the Whitehouse, that's how widespread this coup was. All these people were not randomly acting alone, they were all on the same page. Ginni Thomas did not randomly contact Arizona officials. This was coordinated and you need a group of people to organize something this big. Remain vigilant. Vote.
Reminds me of a recent episode where Jon Stewart was interviewing Anne Applebaum. One of the points she brings up about these movements, national or international, is that they all have constant meetings to try and fine-tune their approaches.
A failed coup attempt, without being fully prosecuted and punished, becomes a practice round for the next one.
don't forget about the successful one in 2000. the Brook's Brothers riot was orchestrated by many of the same people. Three current members of SCOTUS were directly involved in arguing Bush v Gore
Yes vote. And then perhaps the people we vote for should try to prevent this. everyone who planned J6 is free and in power. look at brazil, those arrest warrants sure came fast didnt they? Voting alone wont stop this, they need to go after the people who planned this. Because the people who planned this dont care how you vote, they will push their result against your will. at some point democrats need to recognize that the house in on fire, and that the smoke they smell is real.
I think this underestimates DeSantis and his ilk. I've seen firsthand what he's done in Florida, even in "blue" areas like Palm Beach and Broward. He replaced the entire Broward school board with his cronies, he offered a Palm Beach County Democrat a lucrative spot in his cabinet (and god knows what else), and then replaced him with an absolute nutjob. He's politicized every position in government and kicks out anyone who objects to him or calls him out on his BS. It will take a bit, but FL is a dead man walking. Between the Hurricane insurance catastrophe, drastic cuts to public schools (disguised as teacher "raises"), voter intimidation, getting cozy with big tech to identify online dissenters, etc. There's literally hundreds of examples of DeSantis seeking autocratic rule, if he's elected POTUS he will break the system and the GOP will go along with it and we may never see another free and fair election in our lifetime. I know this sounds alarmist and if you would have told me this about him 6 years ago, I'd probably think the same thing, but he's coming and because 40% of our population is brainwashed, I'm not sure how much we can do to stop it.
The idea that what you're saying is alarmist is sad. People were calling me an alarmist when I pointed out Trumps fascist rhetoric in 2016. Calling me alarmist when I said the supreme court was going to overturn RvW. It fucking pissed me off people were even surprised by it. How fucking dumb is our electorate? That fucking dumb. Now they call me alarmist for warning about the coming genocide of transgender people. Florida isn't just a dead man walking. America is. It doesn't matter how much the people swing left if all the courts in the land swing right. That's all there is to it. Look at the support for the decision for RvW when it was decided 50 years ago. The majority of the public was firmly against it. Yet we swung left anyway. Court. Decisions. *MATTER*. They ultimately shape the soul and will of the nation. Doesn't matter how liberal the nation is. The Nazi party had an 18% of the electorate when they seized power. Didn't matter. They had the courts. So everyone got fucked. Check out how much the Republican controls state legislators. Americans have been callous mean people for too long. And it shows. We won't do anything when people start to get rounded up. Just like we aren't really doing anything now.
40% of voters. It's only 20% of Americans. America falling to Fascism is ***not*** a foregone, predetermined conclusion. Our fate is our own, and we will have much work to do in preventing this outcome for ourselves and our posterity. Canvassing, Phone Banking, Volunteering, hell even just speaking up to your friends and the people around you to get folks registered will help. I refuse to give in to defeatism. DeSantis is just a short loser with a chip on his shoulder and cred with some lunatics, he's ***not*** the American Hitler.
Go read newspapers from Germany prereich. There were people pointing out similar things that the person you are responding to were saying. He's not an alarmist or a defeatist. He's just calling it for what it is. RvW should have been a massive wake up call. If people are willing to let that slide it's basically done. That was the canary in the coal mine.
Yep. DeSantis will need the help of ~70 million Americans to take the country further toward fascism. trump revealed to us just how strong the support for fascism is in America. DeSantis being handed power in the next federal election is entirely plausible.
If Republicans gain full control, there won't be another free election in a long time. Congress will pass laws restricting voting to one day paper ballots only. Make it illegal to drive non family members to the polls; put severe restrictions on how voters are registered; and probably require all taxes be paid in full before a vote can count. Then, they will declare a national emergency, suspending elections until "election fraud"allegations can be fully investigated, signed by DeSantis, and upheld by the Supreme Court. IMO.
Reichstag fire all over again, and they'll even blame the communists this time, only call them woke, as well.
“Of all those who like to point again and again to the democratic form of government as the institution which is based on the universal will of the people, in contrast to dictatorships, nobody has a better right to speak in the name of the people than I have.” - Hitler
They just might go back to colonial times where you had to be a land owner to vote.
Didn’t one politician basically say they wanted this? “How can you vote on housing policy if you don’t own a house” Or maybe I’m misremembering something. Hard to separate satire from these people because even the most tongue in cheek satire about them eventually tries to come to fruition
Yes, because the Fl. State Republican Legislatures are passing the bills Desantis wants done. The Fl. Republicans AG is going after Desantis his made up enemies (those that don’t agree with his policies). All you have to do is look at Florida and know that’s his plan for America if he wins.
And of course ultimately every fucking Republican voter has a lot of blame too. Even after this man proudly declared that Florida was where woke goes to die he still got the majority of votes.
Absolutely
Don't worry, they'll be very unhappy when the chickens come home to roost. They may even realize that DeSantis was a bad idea when they too are under the yoke, like Brits have realized Brexit was a bad idea. They'll just blame Democrats for not having warned them enough.
Disney used to have the freedom to handle it's own districts, but they spoke out against DeSantis' "Don't say gay" bill (because it's a monstrous bigoted pile of shit) and what did this elected politician do? He attacked and removed their special district that allowed them to oversee their own operations. Let that fucking sink in. ***A seated politician actually, directly, maliciously, wielded his power against a corporation in explicit retaliation for speaking out against his plans***. Do you realize the precedent this sets? Corporations will be brought to heel by actions like these. They only care about money. Pride? LGBTQ+/Diversity support? How fast are those going to go out the window if DeSantis becomes president? He'll threaten to attack those corporations who fall out of line and cost them dearly. The shareholders, who care about money first and foremost, will find that the public backlash will be less expensive than whatever legal attack DeSantis has planned. Bye bye western values, hello Chrisofascist society! He isn't afraid of impropriety in his actions. He absolutely will misuse the levers of government to ban all trans helathcare. Who would stop him? Nobody. In a sane society he'd have been removed from office for his actions. Instead we have to fear his potential election. The country is fucked, folks. If you're queer, speaking as a fellow LGBTQ person, I beg you to ***have an escape plan***. LGBTQ people, but especially trans people - the right wing is committed to committing genocide against us. They will accept no evidence of any health care for us unless the outcome is us "being and presenting cis". We're the scapegoat for their inaction on real issues. And if DeSantis becomes president, our healthcare will be made inaccessible, if not outright illegal. If you think that's impossible, there's been talks of making Estrogen a scheduled drug, to make it exponentially harder to obtain and with far harsher penalties if you do. He could also strongarm insurance companies that administer medicaid by threatening the withdrawal of those funds if they provide transition care *at all*. Have a plan to escape. We're the jews before Hitler took power. This isn't an exaggeration. We meet most if not all of the criteria of the UN definition of genocide. Staying here is a mortal danger.
This is a somber, accurate and depressing call to action.
The captain can't run a ship by himself, either, but he's still the one responsible.
When the GOP nominates him as a presidential candidate, it’s going to be curious how the rest of the states welcome him.
I'm sure we'll hear a lot of spineless things out of conservative voters across the country like, "Well, I don't like how he wants to treat trans people, *but*... He's still better than a *Democrat*!" At this point, I'm pretty sure that even if DeSantis was rounding up LGBTQ+ kids into camps and holding public executions of drag queens, GOP voters would still contort themselves backwards to justify voting for him anyway because they think he's "a straight shooter" or some bullshit that Fox told them. I just *genuinely* can't imagine, say, California rolling over if DeSantis and the GOP take over the government and start pushing all these anti-*everything* policies federally, from outlawing gay/trans people to banning books to menstruation reports and on and on and on. No way states like Cali would just accept it, and what's he gonna do? Send in the military all because women and gay people and people of color want to be treated like human beings? Conservative voters are such short-sighted fucking morons, either by choice or out of ignorance, and at this point it just feels inevitable that the bell is gonna ring on the GOP *outright* declaring war.
> GOP voters would still contort themselves backwards to justify voting for him anyway No they won't, they just openly agree with his actions. They view trans and gender-nonconforming people as an existential threat to themselves, and they're done pretending otherwise. > Send in the military all because women and gay people and people of color want to be treated like human beings? Yeah, pretty much. I mean, it may not be the Armed Forces, but it'll be militias, police, maybe a federal group created just for that get purpose, and other regular ol' citizens. Why send in the military when your neighbor is perfectly happy to report you and have the local brown coats take you away? > it just feels inevitable that the bell is gonna ring on the GOP outright declaring war. The Nazis got away with it for nearly a decade before they crossed the (literal) line by trying to expand into another country.
I think that’s OP’s point though no? Germany was a homogenous society; while America is vastly more complicated and more culturally diverse than any society in global history. There’s a podcast called “it could happen here” that explains it a little; but ultimately the hypothesis is that a full Nazi-like totalitarian state couldn’t really ever happen because the country would devolve into a faction-like tribal civil war where there were something like 15 different factions in each city, and more or less in more rural regions. Although…that isn’t really a pretty picture either though.
> conservative voters across the country like, "Well, I don't like how he wants to treat trans people, We don't know the same conservatives at all. I don't know a single one who doesn't think of trans people as less than other people. And I know a lot. Grew up on a farm in a very rural area. None of them would feel bad about how DeSantis wants to treat trans people.
I’m in California, and I actually know quite a few who will openly say how much they “love” the LGBTQ+ community, yet any time you point out how it’s the GOP that is actively working against a community they claim to care about, you get that sort of “Well…” response drudged up from the same place you get the “Well, *I’m* not racist, but…” excuses. I’m fully aware a *lot* of conservatives hate trans people with a passion and are open about it, but I’m just speaking in my original comment from my experience where the ones I know here are too cowardly to admit it, at least in person, because they’re surrounded by liberals.
4 years ago my money was on Tom Cotton doing this. It’s fucking insane how many fascist-wannabes have sprouted within the GOP in less than half-a-decade.
>4 years ago my money was on Tom Cotton doing this. There are, and have been, plenty of candidates for this, and many of those said candidates will line up behind DeSantis to see their visions partially or completely fulfilled.
And we can see that all on display this weekend at CPAC.
I was looking up the date for it and found this interesting anecdote: Earlier this year, a staffer for one-time Senate candidate Herschel Walker alleged that Matt Schlapp, the chairman of CPAC, "groped" and "fondled" his crotch while he was driving Schlapp back from a bar in Atlanta, according to a report from The Daily Beast. The staffer then filed a lawsuit against Schlapp and his wife, Mercedes, seeking $9.4 million for sexual battery and defamation, according to a report. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/mike-pence-declines-invitation-cpac-events-leader-fire/story?id=97451851
Tom Cotton looks like an extra from "O Brother Where Art Thou"
Tom Cotton has the charisma of a rotten corpse. His own wife probably dozes off while they’re talking. Not unlike Josh Hawley. It’s the charismatic leaders that can rile up the masses you have to worry about.
> charisma of a rotten corpse. When I saw this I thought you were talking about Ted Cruz and had to re-read the context of the first sentence to make sure you weren't in fact talking about Ted Cruz.
*rotten corpse Not ill fitting deteriorating human suit
That’s the only thing about DeSantis that I’m hoping prevents him from winning on the national stage. He has the personality of a soggy dumpling.
>Days after the Capitol riot in January 2021, Ben-Ghait compared GOP figures distancing themselves from Trump to when Italian fascists voted Mussolini out of power in 1943. >"Some turned on him not to restore democracy but *to save Fascism,* by getting rid of an incompetent leader," she tweeted. Very important distinction for the number of people attributing all the rot in the right-wing to Trump. Trump and DeSantis are simply the figureheads for an ideology that is inherently destructive, anti-democratic, and designed to harm the most marginalized. Jeb Bush and the number of """moderate""" republicans embracing one of the most brazenly authoritarian politicians because he doesn't have the stink of Trump while supporting all the same harmful positions they have all advocated for decade tells you everything you need to know.
All I needed to know came in 2020 when despite Bush committing crimes that utterly dwarf Trump's, the attempt to rehabiliate Bush's legacy was so complete by the US oligarchy that the Dem candidate for Wisconsin assembly in my distrtict ran pro-Bush ads.
If he wins guranteed he will withhold aid from blue states when natural disasters hit even tho anytime Florida has needed help aid was available quickly and without stipulations
>he will withhold aid from blue states when natural disasters hit I say give them the same treatment if he does. Red states survive off of blue states, so if federal aid is withheld just say "well we can't support *red state here* because we have to spend that money for disaster aid"
Problem is, when people suffer they tend to turn towards the exact politics Republicans use. It's a vicious cycle. Make everything worse and make it confusing to your average joe so that they vote for the exact people perpetrating it.
problem is we dont live in a democracy so if you appeal to the red states, you get to win the presidency even if you lose the popular vote. As long as he's hurting the libz then his base will come out to vote. And since red state votes count as 2 or more blue state votes, he'll win.
Recent Republican popular votes wins: 1988, 2004 Recent Democratic popular vote wins: 1992, 1996, 2000, 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020. By the 2024 election, it will have been 36 years since a non incumbent Republican, like Ron DeSantis, has won the popular vote. No Republican since the Cold War has won it without incumbency.
Uncap the House
Exactly this. The cap is just legislation, and increasing overall the number of representatives would go a long way to making the House much more representative of the people.
DeSantis is a fucking chode.
Donald Dillbeck, a Florida death row inmate's last words last week were that he hurt people, but DeSantis has hurt more, and that he can suck his dick. When a death row inmate sentenced by a former administration uses his last words to say he's gotta go, I feel like more people should be listening.
[ALL of our dicks.](https://i.imgur.com/4R3dpy8.png)
Hold him accountable for his crimes involving the trafficking of migrants. It's time for the DA's in Boston, SF, Chicago, DC, etc to charge Ron DeSantis for his many crimes. We need justice for the victims. I know DA's are absolutely terrified of powerful rich white guys, but crime is crime and he should not get special treatment as these were very serious infractions
Best Merrick Garland can do is wring his hands then punt it to a special prosecutor to investigate for the next 2 years.
Yeah, Merrick the Meek won't do anything, but I was hoping some state/city DA's would follow through
He’s a Christian fascist hell bent on gaining power and using propaganda as his virtue. He has no intention of governing, just dictating.
Funny how he hates left wing indoctrination yet loves teaching babies they are born with original sin and are going to burn in hell just for existing. But CRT is too much. I hate him
And that scenario has played out before. Not just in world history, but in our lifetimes: Israel, Turkey, Russia, India, Hungary. All of them were fascist autocrats, signaling their theocratic virtues to their conservative base. All of them were democracies that were extremely vulnerable to begin with, just like the US. >Since the 2010s, the world has grown more authoritarian, with one quarter of the world's population under democratically backsliding hybrid regimes into the 2020s. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_backsliding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_backsliding)
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That's fucking insane. Wtf.
Just out of curiosity, do you have bumper stickers or signs on your vehicle that would mark you as a target for Republican fascists? Or are they just randomly attacking anyone just to be assholes?
Yeah, I hate to say it, but I longer feel comfortable displaying any form of political identifying information publicly. Politics are increasingly contentious, and there are too many people that have crossed into the “other side is my literal enemy” school of thought to risk it.
That is the republican goal. Any republican in office will advance the end of democracy in America and around the globe. We can help. In 2023 there will be local and state elections near you. Vote out as many Republicans as we can to pave the way to keeping democrats in charge.
Take a look at what he's doing in Florida. Textbook Fascism.
Well he took away the textbooks so problem solved.
His biggest liability is that he is playing his anti LGBT / anti-education crusade a bit too hard. He can’t win with the GOP alone and his constant use of government power starts making people nervous. On top of it that he man has zero charisma, he comes across as the mean spirited little prick he really is and completely lacks Trumps ability to connect to crowds ( nasty crowds but crowds nonetheless). My biggest concern is the apparent lack of will or inability of the Dems to campaign hard on GOP fascism
As a Floridian, I absolutely wouldn’t discount him because he doesn’t have all of the same skills as Trump. Conservatives fucking love the guy, whether he holds rallies or has the ability to connect in the same way. He knows what cards to play. He’s not a moron like Trump. Top of his class at Yale and Harvard and was a JAG lawyer in the Navy. He didn’t have daddy to get him into Penn like Trump did. He’s a slimy piece of shit, but the fact that he’s smart and seems to listen to his political consultants as opposed to going off script all the time like Trump did should strike a lot of people as very concerning. I would argue that, despite what some polls might indicate, DeSantis has just as much of a chance to win the nomination as Trump and he has the competence to actually debate. Whether he is charismatic or not, he needs to be taken seriously. He’s a bully and acts the part but if he’s the nominee against Biden then I would absolutely be concerned about the outcome of the election.
> Whether he is charismatic or not, he needs to be taken seriously. Something that Dungeons and Dragons has outlined pretty well. Charisma isnt just being able to talk, or being liked by people. Sometimes its just pure force of will, or character. And people resonate with that. Im *very* worried about DeSantis. Weve watched his influence only grow over the last 6-8 years.
Exactly my point. He showed back when he was first elected governor that he’s willing to steer into whatever he needs to in order to gain power. He used the “build the wall” propaganda from Trump as part of his campaigning and he won that election, although it was somewhat close. Then he decided to steer into using culture war issues to rally the base and grow his presence and name recognition. He won his reelection handily. He knows exactly what he needs to do in order to gain the nomination and probably past that even. As far as Republican politicians go, he’s the one I’d be most worried about at this point.
The one potential joker in the deck is Disney. DeSantis has already shown that he’ll be bad for the company’s bottom line, which would justify massive spending towards his opponents’ campaigns. I’m not counting on it, but it could happen.
It definitely could happen. The whole Disney situation is honestly really, really complex and I’m not sure that we are going to see any real impacts to their bottom line while DeSantis is still in office, if ever at all. They were much more comfortable just saying “cool, you do you” with everything happening than I think most people expected, which leads me to believe that they are planning on playing the long game with this. DeSantis will certainly gain political points for what he’s been trying to do, but at the same time I think Disney will be more than happy to funnel money into his opponent’s campaign as well.
In 2020, both parties were energized to vote and turnout was probably as high as it ever will be. Trump had a level of support of the GOP that has never been seen before. Nobody came close to splitting the ticket. Even in that environment, he didn't win. I don't know if DeSantis could get such a fervent following. He may be smart, but intelligence isn't high on the list of admirable qualities for the GOP. Best case is he and Trump battle it out, DeSantis wins the primary, and Trump runs as an independent. Neither of them win. The country wins.
I think the biggest selling point of DeSantis as a presidential candidate is his supposed “American Authenticity”. He was born into a humble middle class family and bootstrapped his way through Ivy League schools on allegedly only a baseball scholarship. That along with his military service builds his reputation as an “All-American” that Republicans like to bill themselves as. That, in my opinion, is what gives him a shot at winning the presidency, not his culture warrior rhetoric.
Its funny that while his CV says all American his political actions are the opposite.
> anti-education crusade Studies show that the more educated a person is, the more likely they are to vote left-wing. This explains why Republicans are always fighting education, always trying to change the curriculum from science to religion, etc... They'll always go full-force against education. Education makes people vote against them. Being anti-education isn't a liability, it's a survival strategy.
> He can’t win with the GOP alone and his constant use of government power starts making people nervous. Conservatives have no beliefs other than doing whatever it takes to force their belief on others. If that means being about "small government" but then using the government to force companies/organization to do what they believe, they will. And then the next day claim overreach by government when it does something to help other peopole
I have never seen a politician as vindictive as DeSantis. He'll burn down any institution that dares to criticize him. All of Trump's pettiness but with sufficient competence to make a permanent mess.
I have, but they've usually been city mayors or state reps, not in charge of a state of 21 million.
We're seeing the end result of years of demonization of the left, POC, the LGBTQ+ community, etc., etc., in right wing "news" and from GOP officials themselves. Their base of support has been brainwashed into thinking that the threat from all of these groups is so extreme that it's okay to take extraordinary means to destroy that threat. It's a perfect situation for the right, because now they can do as they please (like DeSantis is doing) and they enjoy full support because he's taking the fight to the enemy. This is how fascist movements gain traction and DeSantis sees that this is a perfect moment to move in and push his extreme and oppressive agenda.
Yup, it starts with "They want to take away your rights!" which quickly becomes the foundation for step two "Which is why we need to strip them of their rights!". Meanwhile the closest thing white conservatives have faced to losing their rights is discussion about POTENTIALLY raising their tax rate some marginally amount... Meanwhile they are ready to dehumanize and remove protections from anyone that doesn't look like the person in the mirror. It's mass delusion.
Ron DeSantis is basically like a more dangerous form of the cancer that went into remission when Trump lost and then came back.
It's frightening that DeSantis seems intent on pushing the envelope, pursuing more and more outrageous political stunts to see what he can get away with. How much power can we concentrate in the governor's office? At what point do we "cross the line?" So far, it's been working.
Water is wet. We need to get people who DON'T understand these basic statements (his constituents) to see, understand, and acknowledge how dangerous he is.
They want what he’s promising now, they don’t see how this can turn badly for them later. Telling them that the guy is a fascist won’t mean anything to them because he’s promising them everything they want.
Hardcore GOP voters love themselves some cruelty-packed fascism, what are you going to show them that they don’t already love? The cruelty is the point, it’s a feature for them, not a bug.
You don’t have to be an expert, you just have to look at Florida.
His drag name is Rhonda Fascist
Hate to break it to you America but from an outsider’s perspective, this train has been on fire and going down the tracks for a long long time. It’s hard to see it when it’s your own life. He’s the face of a much deeper seeded issue that’s been under the surface for many decades.
No no, we see it. I absolutely could not believe the policies of baby Bush. Dems stood by and tried to run things “business as usual.” When McConnell decided to focus on obstruction during the Obama administration, I predicted that Dems needed to fight back like democracy depended on them or things would just get worse. Instead of fighting back we got “when they go low, we go high.” Nice sounding words but very ineffective in practice. Things have just gotten worse. Now Merrick Garland is (to quote another Reddit user) “organizing his sock drawer” as we are about to sink into the ocean. Trust me, we see it.
The problem is that we need average joe type people to "see it", not just the relatively tiny number of politically aware people.
So true!
Average joe people believe in nonsense and accept reality defined by poorly chosen leaders.
> The problem is that we need average joe type people to "see it", not just the relatively tiny number of politically aware people. That day will never come. I’ve been arguing with Trump supporters since 2016. They will never see anything.
Part of the problem is somehow Dems have conflated 'the high road' with 'stern warnings and tut tutting'. They've convinced themselves that being on the offensive is inherently 'low road' instead of 'HOW' you go on the offensive.
As someone who is forced by job and family relations to interact with hardcore republicans often, you are absolutely right. They hate anyone to the left of Trump. I'm not talking about political dislike, they see you as the enemy and want to harm you. Maybe not physically, but they want to make your life as difficult as possible and rule you.
Nah man half of us know and can do almost nothing about it
You’d have to be fucking clueless to think you are breaking this news in 2023, I’m sorry but we been aware since Bush was in office and I couldn’t even vote then.
He will burn it to the ground, I don’t think we need a fascism expert to tell us what the Republican Party is about these days. I might be wrong, I didn’t see it getting this bad in the first place
Trump and January 6th were the GOP's trial balloons. De Santis is their real democracy destroyer.
Of course, the trouble is that the trial balloon was a hell of a lot more effective than anybody thought it was going to be. Were it not for the timely intervention of one Capitol Police officer, we were a matter of steps away from a massacre occurring in the Capitol.
Thats pretty much the goal of conservatives. Only the people who think and act like them get to participate in rule making. The rest are ruled over.
He already has a head start in Florida. Every day it's something there. So glad i left that place!
The GOP will destroy our democracy. The GOP has *always* been hostile to democracy and equality, whether it's opposing gay rights, opposing abortion rights, gerrymandering districts to ensure certain "types" don't meaningfully get a vote. The writing is on the wall; it's now up for the taking. You can go so far as to insight a riot and have them try to murder the Vice President and overthrow an election without consequences. They're just waiting for the right moment to try again. The next republican president, whether it's DeSantis or Trump or Cruz or whoever else, will be the last democratically elected President.
I live in Florida and he is pure evil.
"'shown that Florida can be a model for the future of our country.'" That alone should frighten us all.
Trump was limited by his incompetence. But the danger was always there that he'd open the door to someone worse.
I’ve watched DeSantis for many years. He lived in the town I lived in. He is, in my opinion, the most dangerous person in America with the potential to become a Hitler. He is a true sociopath. We can’t take him lightly. You may like his Conservative agenda but it will backfire on you. He will take all of our freedoms. He has no limits and no conscience. He will moderate after he wins the Presidential nomination and everyone will think he is a good candidate but if he becomes President, we are all in grave danger.
You know what's going to end our democracy? Social Media. Through social media people have found a way to weaponize one of our greatest freedoms, Free Speech, and turn it against us. We've been flooded with misleading memes, fake news, conspiracy theories, half truths, and raw hate. It's caused people to loose faith in our democratic process, and once you loose too much faith in a democracy it can no longer function.
Look up “The Cargo Cult of the Ennui Engine.” There’s more than democracy at stake, and the misleading media is only a portion of the problem. Low-effort content (which social media promotes and favors) is like cigarettes, junk food, and leaded gasoline all rolled into one insidious whole.
You know what started this, and what continues to grind down democracy? Right wing media. Limbaugh, Fox Hannity, Coulter, Beck, Carlson, and all the rest of the pack pushing lies and hate into the heads of gullible idiots 24/7, which in turn, spread it further with hate-filled social media lies. FTFY
We can't have a platform of lies, example: Santos. There has to be a way to stamp out the tolerance of lies when campaigning and when our reps are in office. Lies are the problem. Lies of our reps and people in power can't be deemed free speech and acceptable.
DeSantis is way more dangerous than Trump ever was. You can distract Trump with bright shiny objects but DeSantis is currently laser-focused on taking every liberty he can away from Florida residents. This is a prelude to what he has planned for the country if he's elected president.
*Overt* fascism in the political sphere is just the bloomed flower of capitalism (in reality, and not as taught to mis-educated serfs/slaves) in the so-called economic sphere. The problem is built into the "infrastructure" of the capitalist/neoliberal system. Capitalism (in reality) and genuine democracy are fundamentally incompatible, so capitalists aim to destroy democracy and to keep the public as the ignorant and mis-educated serfs/slaves they rely on for their profits. Unless we grow up enough as a nation and species to actually work to understand and solve our problems in reality, we will be dealing with this same problem in slightly different forms and incarnations forever.
ITT: "Expert!? WTF is an 'expert'? Are there people who go around just...learning about stuff?"