"The Trumpian revolution … seems to be the product of decadent boredom commingled with casual nihilism.
Circumstances for our revolutionaries have never been better. They are so flush that they parade on their boats. And fly upside-down flags outside of their million-dollar suburban homes."
"And put stickers depicting a hogtied president on their $75,000 pickup trucks. All while posting angry memes to Facebook on their $1,000 iPhones.
We are not talking about les misérables Américains.
Unlike normal revolutionaries, the Trumpist revolutionaries risk nothing. If their gambit succeeds, then they overturn the Constitutional order. And if it fails? They go back to their boats, and trucks, and good-paying jobs, and iPhones."
"[Philosopher Bettina Stangneth is] not convinced that Germans have faced the worst fact about the Nazi period: not the ignorant masses, but the educated elites were the driving forces behind the regime.”
~ Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019), p. 55.
“People voted for Hitler as they voted for Putin and Trump, because they didn’t want to give up their own privileges. This isn’t a matter of ignorance. They understand exactly the price of enlightenment: that the equality of humankind means the equality of humankind, and not only after I’ve secured my own comfort."
“What had come out on top in Germany might occur in darkest Russia or the Balkans, but surely not in their law-abiding country. What had happened? That was the question raised on all sides, but no one had an answer.”
~ Joachim Fest, Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood, trans. Martin Chalmers (NY: Other Press, 2012), p. 100
Rep. Matt Gaetz may have "engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, accepted improper gifts, dispensed special privileges and favors to individuals with whom he had a personal relationship, and sought to obstruct government investigations of his conduct." - House Ethics Committee https://ethics.house.gov/press-releases/statement-regarding-matter-representative-matt-gaetz
@w7voa We need no more data points to prove that #MAGA/ #Republican is a criminal organization. Anyone who vote for or or otherwise supports these people are criminals.
“What [the Hunter Biden] story shows is that they’re getting better at this. MAGA has learned from their fumbles. They’re emboldened by the shamelessness and the corporate media’s urge to minimize fascism. This is also why Project 2025 matters; every failure has become a vendetta with policy prescriptions designed to overcome the checks on power that come from democracy.”
#DonaldTrumpJr tried to deny his father's connexion to #JeffreyEpstein, despite all the photos of them together. But thanks to the Maxwell prosecution, we can see Trump's name in the flight logs for Epstein's 'plane. All the #MAGA pricks are projecting their own love of grooming.
Closing asset loophole could add billions to tax collections, IRS says
The Biden administration plans to stop businesses and wealthy individuals from manipulating the value of assets in arcane ways such as using the same assets over and over to lower their taxes.
High-end business partnerships like hedge funds and wealthy individuals such as real estate investors have inappropriately used labyrinthine structures to shield tens of billions of dollars from taxation, Treasury Department officials said Monday
as they vowed to crack down on the practice.
They announced several steps to address a tax planning strategy known as basis shifting,
in which complex business partnerships can move assets from one entity to another on paper for no reason other than to avoid taxes.
“These transactions don’t create any economic activity for the U.S. “Their sole purpose is to reduce tax bills,” said Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo,
adding that shutting down inappropriate basis shifting could increase tax collections from partnerships by at least $5 billion a year over the next decade. https://stocks.apple.com/Ac5vnY8JDQqW7R7Tx0K27HA
>> Then a look at the ridiculous "religious" tax exemptions allowed for spurious "religious" institutions
Better hurry up before #FelonGang supplants #Christianity as the dominant religion in USA, just like #MAGA took over the #GOP of a bygone era and turned it into a mere husk
💥“Motivated ignorance,” 💥refers to willfully blinding oneself to facts.
It’s choosing not to know.
In many cases, for many people, knowing the truth is simply too costly, too psychologically painful, too threatening to their core identity.
Nescience is therefore incentivized; people actively decide to remain in a state of ignorance.
If they are presented with strong arguments against a position they hold, or compelling evidence that disproves the narrative they embrace, they will reject them.
Doing so fends off the psychological distress of the realization that they’ve been lying to themselves and to others.
This is why, as cognitive scientist George #Lakoff suggests, the truth (facts) will not set them free.
Or as his former student, Anat Shenker-Osorio, quips,
truth for some people is more an “I’ll see it when I believe it” proposition
and not the other way around.
Motivated cognition, she told Lawrence O’Donnell, “is a helluva drug.”
Motivated ignorance is a widespread phenomenon; most people, to one degree or another, employ it.
What matters is the degree to which one embraces it, and the consequences of doing so.
In the case of #MAGA world, the lies that Trump supporters believe, or say they believe, are obviously untrue and obviously destructive.
Since 2016 there’s been a ratchet effect, each conspiracy theory getting more preposterous and more malicious.
Things that Trump supporters wouldn’t believe or accept in the past have since become loyalty tests.
Election denialism is one example.
The claim that Trump is the target of “lawfare,” victim to the weaponization of the justice system, is another.
In an Atlantic article Wehner struggles, as do I, with how to assess the moral character of people who may otherwise present as decent people yet celebrate Trump’s lies and “defend his lawlessness and undisguised cruelty.”
Political opinions are but one area of people’s intellectual lives. It’s one thing to embrace a conspiracy theory about faked moon landings that has little real-world impact.
But it’s another “if the falsehood you’re embracing and promoting is venomous, harming others, and eroding cherished principles, promoting violence and subverting American democracy.” And getting people terrorized and killed.
Wehner cites the cases of two pro-segregation Baptist ministers from the 1950s and 60s.
Now ask yourself this:
Did the fierce advocacy on behalf of segregation, and the dehumanization of Black Americans, reflect in any meaningful way on the character of those who advanced such views,
even if, say, they volunteered once a month at a homeless shelter and wrote a popular commentary on the Book of Romans?
Readers can decide whether MAGA supporters are better or worse than Albert Garner and Carey Daniel.
My point is that all of us believe there’s some place on the continuum in which the political choices we make reflect on our character.
Some movements are overt and malignant enough that to willingly be a part of them becomes ethically problematic.
If not “grievously wrong,” perhaps as in joining Trump’s MAGA movement.
Many, Wehner adds, “are self-proclaimed evangelicals and fundamentalists,
and they are also doing inestimable damage to the Christian faith they claim is central to their lives.
That collaboration needs to be named.
A generation from now, and probably sooner, it will be obvious to everyone that Trump supporters can’t claim they didn’t know.”
They will have ash in their feather dusters:
The villagers, he said, knew about the camp, and watched daily as thousands of prisoners would arrive by rail car,
herded like cattle into the camp.
Even though the camp never could have held the vast numbers of prisoners who were brought in,
the villagers knew that no one ever left.
They also knew that the smokestack of the camp’s crematorium belched a near-steady stream of smoke and ash.
Yet the villagers chose to remain ignorant about what went on inside the camp.
No one inquired, because no one wanted to know.
“But every day,” he said, “these people, in their neat Germanic way, would get out their feather dusters and go outside.
And, never thinking about what it meant, they would sweep off the layer of ash that would settle on their windowsills overnight.
Then they would return to their neat, clean lives and pretend not to notice what was happening next door.”
“When the camps were liberated and their contents were revealed, they all expressed surprise and horror at what had gone on inside,” he said.
“But they all had ash in their feather dusters.”
MAGA cult members will too,
let’s hope only figuratively.
"Something has changed for me in the Trump era. I struggle more than I once did to wall off a person’s character from their politics when their politics is binding them to an unusually—and I would say undeniably—destructive person. The lies that MAGA world parrots are so manifestly untrue, and the Trump ethic is so manifestly cruel, that they are difficult to set aside."
"If a person insists, despite the overwhelming evidence, that Trump was the target of an assassination plot hatched by Biden and carried out by the FBI, this is more than an intellectual failure; it is a moral failure, and a serious one at that."
"It’s only reasonable to conclude that such Trump supporters have not made a good-faith effort to understand what is really and truly happening. They are choosing to live within the lie, to invoke the words of the former Czech dissident and playwright Vaclav Havel."
@Strandjunker Minorities need to know that #Trump will pardon any #MAGA who kills or injures a minority. It will be part of the campaign of terror planned now and echoes the Nazi terror of the 1930’s.
Former President Trump calls Ukrainian President #Zelensky "the greatest salesman of any politician that's ever lived," remarking on the $60 billion Ukraine recently received to fight against #Russia's invasion. The 2024 presumptive #Republican nominee goes on to say, “It never ends. I will have that settled prior to taking the White House as president-elect. ... Gotta stop it."
US surgeon general calls for cigarette-style warnings on social media platforms ( www.theguardian.com )
Sen. Tim Scott says he stands by vote to certify 2020 election - ABC News ( abcnews.go.com )
Can you imagine Jan 6-redux with vp Scott...?