Oh boy. I have to accept that there is a greater-than-zero chance that the Trump Justice Department may come after even anonymous nobodies like me. I’m prepared for that to happen, even if it would s u c k.
The issue is, what’s the point of having principles if you aren’t willing to suffer for them? So, yes, it would be scary and frightening if I had to deal with the Justice Department then, that would be the consequences of my actions one way or another.
Maybe I’m overthinking things. Maybe I’m really am such an anonymous nobody that I really am such a nobody that they won’t come after me.
I don’t know. I just don’t know. But I have to be brave, no matter what.
As I understand it, the only way that Viktor Orban was defeated in Hungary was that his opponent was a break away conservative. So, as such, it seems like if Democrats are ever going to win again maybe they need to find someone who is conservative yet opposes Trump.
So, in a sense, maybe The Lincoln Project is going to be the source of any Democratic candidate that might actually have a chance of winning. America is a conservative nation with liberal ideals and we continue to drift towards a more and more conservative future.
As such, maybe someone like George Conway might be just the person to at least make sure the United States ensures a traditional liberal democracy for…a little bit longer?
I have no illusions that this might actually happen. In fact, I think we’re stuck with MAGA candidates and policies for the foreseeable future. We’re all kind of doomed.
Baring something really unexpected, I think America will continue to drift into being a more and more craven, idiotic place.
I think we have to come to grips with the fact that Trump’s second term is something of a revolution. There’s no going back. The whole tenor of the country is changing — not to mention the creation of a MAGA “Deep State” — in such a way that simply can not, will not be fixed no matter what.
America is in an extended period of decline.
The only question is, what happens next? Where do we end up after Trump FINALLY ends his reign of dumb terror.
I think, ultimately, the moment we get a young MAGA leader that that will be that. We will never have another free and fair election — or we will have about 20 years of MAGA leaders.
Now, there is one cavate.
The issue of the Singularity. I could see the Singularity so totally fucking with our political system that the traditional Left-Right divide is totally switched around. How, exactly, I don’t know.
But it’s very possible.
But it’s also possible that we’re just fucked. That at least for my lifetime we’ll have a series of MAGA leaders that make us sicker, dumber and poorer (except for plutocrats.)
When asked recently by Seth Myers on his TV show, Stephen Colbert said he would need to “talk to his faith leader and his wife” about running for office. He definitely did not say *no.*
Now, the hilarious element to any talk about Colbert running for any sort of office is, of course, that he would be definition be a Blue Donald Trump. They say if you live long enough, you turn into the thing you hate and so, lulz. That’s exactly what would happen if Colbert if he ran for POTUS.
Not that Colbert would not do a good-to-great job as POTUS. He would be great and I definitely would vote for him. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that Colbert might even be an American Volodymyr Zelenskyy if he ran and became POTUS.
And….yet…Trump has such damage to the American political system and government and the rot, the innate structural problems that caused Trump in the first place aren’t going anywhere so….Colbert would only be able to do so much good under the best of times.
As it stands, we probably have a good 20 to 40 more years of MAGA dominance to suffer through, unless something — the Singularity? — happens that really puts a new spin on things in ways that no one, least of all me, can expect.
Anyway, I hope does Colbert does run for POTUS. That would be pretty cool.
A number of macro events have happened in the last few decades that made the political clusterfuck we are experiencing in the United States now inevitable. NAFTA is a big one. But the real issue, the issue that is the source of all it, is the decline in white babies being born.
That’s the ur issue that has led to MAGA. I can remember reading a bit of The Birth Dearth in the 1980s (90s?) that talked about the impact of such things. The whole concern about white babies being born is fucking racist, but it’s because of whites feeling insecure about their social status that we get fucking Trump and his ilk.
That particular issue isn’t going anywhere.
In fact, if anything, it’s going to get worse as Baby Boomers start to drop dead and there just aren’t enough of those sweet, sweet little white babies to make up the difference. I, for one, welcome our “brown” future — as long as I get to live in a traditional liberal democracy — but, lulz, the fucking fascists of MAGA are so freaking the fuck out that we’re kind of doomed.
The thing about Trump is he is probably the most important political figure of the last 50 or more years because he has a unique talent for accelerating trends that were inevitable. What might have, under the best of possibilities, taken a gradual 20 years if, say, Hillary had won in 2016 or Biden won in 2016….is now happening in a few years.
We’re fucked. We’re totally, completely fucked. There’s no going back. America is in decline and I don’t have any ready answer for you as to what happens next. The only unknown at the moment is the Singularity.
The Singularity — which, for me, means the rise of ASI — could throw everything for a loop. We might find ourselves thinking not about the decline and fall of the American Empire but rather how we’re going to deal with “aliens” of our own creation that make demands of us in ways none of us can in any way expect.
As I often say, the saying goes you go bankrupt gradually then all at once and that’s exactly what’s going on with the USA right now politically. Either we find oursleves in a situation where Congress is forever in control of MAGA and we drift into a more “hard” autocracy than we would otherwise imagine….or we have a civil war.
Now, I have written a great deal about my musings about civil war or revolution over the years and I look like a fool now because none of them have come anywhere near coming true. But, in my defense, the issue is that Republicans have generally won so they, being the people who seemingly want a civil war so bad, have be placated and so nothing has happened.
Meanwhile, pressure is ever-so-slowly building on Blues.
There is going to come a point where Blues may be forced to fish or cut bait when it comes to the USA as we currently imagine it. If it becomes clear that Republicans are going to impose MAGA values on the entirety of the USA, Blues, not Reds, may revolt.
I don’t want that, but it’s….possible. It’s something to think about. Because it the horrible tribalism that has infected the MAGA side of things may also begin to pop up within Blues if we are controlled by MAGA for the next few decades with no end in sight.
There was an event that happened recently that I generally had fun participating in. Amusingly, I ran into a few MAGA people in the wild as part of it and it was…interesting.
But I kept my mouth shut.
I was not really in a position to say anything. And they were nice enough so I did everything in my power to avoid trouble.
There was, of course, a part of me that felt like blurting out, “You, personally, are everything wrong with America today.”
Trump’s recent posting of a picture of himself as…Jesus?…seems to have struck a nerve in the zeitgeist that his posting an AI generated photo of himself as the Pope did not.
“Doctor” Trump
I don’t know what to tell you. Trump seems to be testing the waters of how far he can go before anyone notices. I think there continues to be a whole lot of slack in the system.
Trump has a knack for posting or doing or saying things that are bonkers and alarming, but he can spin ex post facto away out of existence. It just makes you wonder what he could possibly do that would be so bad that that usual dynamic would not happen.
I honestly, at the moment, can’t think of anything. It seems as though Trump will always be on the edge of crashing out and ultimately the issue will be if we can prevent him from running for a third term.
The usual anti-MAGA people are atwitter about the looming Amanda Ungaro interview about what she may know about Melania Trump’s involvement in the Epstein stuff.
They seem to think Ungaro will somehow say something or prove something that might actually be some sort of fatal blow to MAGA. But I have my doubts that ANYTHING could do anything to harm MAGA at this point.
MAGA is here to stay, and really the only issue we have to address in the immediate future is what happens once Trump shuffles off this mortal coil. But otherwise, MAGA is going to be a serious political movement for decades to come and there’s just nothing we can do about it.
You know Republicans are desperate to make sure the April 21st vote allowing Democrats to do what Republicans have been doing — gerrymander the state in the extreme — fails because their propaganda against it is pretty bonkers.
The ads show all these angry old white people looking stone faced at the camera, ranting about how evil brown people are going to get their hard earned taxpaper money that they earned from their jarbs as South Park might say.
I have no idea if the Constitutional amendment will pass, but I sure will be glad when I don’t have to sit through racist propaganda to watch YouTube videos.
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