Examples of GOP Leadership

HGCC said:

I saw his tigers! He should fight a tiger for his freedom, good with whatever outcome.

The evolution and understanding of the term Karen is interesting. Started as bitchy lady wanting to talk to the manager all the time, then the haircut became part of it, then it became racist white ladies OR racist white ladies referring to ladies that they thought were bitchy with their wokeness or uprightness, and I have also seen it used just in reference to just the haircut like a mullet.

Edit: doh, poked I here to mock Lindsay Graham saying he would go to war for chic filet. Man I hate that guy, what a schmuck.

Lindsey Graham said he'd 'go to war' to defend Chick-fil-A in Notre Dame culture war clash

Sen. Lindsey Graham this week injected himself into a dispute at the University of Notre Dame, where some students briefly opposed an effort to open a Chick-fil-A over its owners' religious positions, in the Republican senator's latest effort to seize upon a culture war issue to score points...

www.cnn.com

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I think of it a step further as just anyone acting like a fool in public because they are overstimulated/crazy/racist/etc.

Guess Trump / Bill Oreilly are planning a 4 stop tour …
The Loser Tour . Note the amount of Available ( unsold lol ) in blue … grey area mostly “ not part “ of available seating. $100 per pop average with a ridiculous $8500 meet and greet with the tards for photo op. Stop giving this imbecile money.

Budzbuddha said:

Guess Trump / Bill Oreilly are planning a 4 stop tour …
The Loser Tour . Note the amount of Available ( unsold lol ) in blue … grey area mostly “ not part “ of available seating. $100 per pop average with a ridiculous $8500 meet and greet with the tards for photo op. Stop giving this imbecile money.

View attachment 4945225

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(just incase people don't get this meme)

hanimmal said:

View attachment 4945229


(just incase people don't get this meme)

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'what would it hurt humoring him for this brief period of time?'

too late freak..Q4 is coming.


you know..if they give out smokes..

‘A madman with millions of followers’: what the new Trump books tell us | Books | The Guardian

A madman with millions of followers’: what the new Trump books tell us

Books show how close the US came to disaster, and document an unprecedented moment in US history that is not yet over

• I Alone Can Fix It: Trump as wannabe Führer

This week, the Guardian reported that what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents describe Donald Trump as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual”. Vladimir Putin, the documents say, therefore decided to assist Trump’s rise to power in 2016 as a way to weaken America.

Five years on, as America digests a string of bombshell revelations about the last days of Trump’s presidency pulled from a string of new books, Russia’s judgment seems born out.

Taken together, these Trump books show just how close the US came to disaster amid stark warnings from military leaders and almost unprecedented fears of an attempted coup. They also revealed new and shocking claims about Trump and his inner circle, including praise for Hitler and an apparent desire to have protesters shot.

In Nightmare Scenario, Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta of the Washington Post show how Trump failed to cope with the coronavirus pandemic. Trump, they report, wanted to send infected Americans to Guantánamo Bay and seemed to hope Covid would take out his national security adviser.

In Landslide, Michael Wolff’s second sequel to Fire and Fury, the book that birthed the genre, Trump is shown isolated and unhinged in the White House, pushed to extremes by Rudy Giuliani before, during and after his supporters’ deadly attack on the Capitol. He also reports – and Fox News denies – that Rupert Murdoch personally approved the early call of Arizona which signaled Trump’s defeat with a pithy “Fuck him”.

In Frankly, We Did Win This Election, Michael Bender reports the 2020 campaign in exhaustive detail. He also tells us Trump believed Adolf Hitler “did a lot of good things”, wanted to “execute” whichever aide leaked news of his retreat to a White House bunker as anti-racism protests raged last summer, and told his top general to “just shoot” those demonstrating in Lafayette Square outside.

In I Alone Can Fix It, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker show that general, Mark Milley, resisting Trump but fearing a “Reichstag moment”, a coup by supporters of a president preaching “the gospel of the Führer”. Four days later, on 6 January this year, Trump supporters did storm the US Capitol, seeking to overturn the election, looking for lawmakers to capture and kill.

The two Pulitzer-winning Washington Post reporters also report that Vice-President Mike Pence defied his own Secret Service agents and refused to leave the Capitol as it came under attack. They even show Milley reassuring the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, that Trump will not be allowed to use nuclear weapons. So, on Friday, did Susan Glasser of the New Yorker, whose Trump book will come out next year. For good measure, Glasser also reported Milley’s efforts to stop Trump attacking Iran.

To the reader, America really did come to the brink of disaster.

Asked for Trump’s thoughts, a spokesperson directed the Guardian to a statement issued on 9 July, before some of the most alarming revelations were public. The interviews he sat for were “a total waste of time”, Trump said, as the authors were “bad people” who “write whatever they want to write”.

But Trump did respond to Leonnig and Rucker – also authors of a bestseller on the start of his presidency, A Very Stable Genius. Denying their reporting, he said Gen Milley should be “impeached, or court-martialed and tried” and called Pelosi “a known nut job”.

Tara Setmayer, a former Republican strategist now a senior adviser with the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, told the Guardian such statements were “the rantings of a raving madman”.

“But he’s a madman with millions of followers, including powerful elected members of the United States government.”

Therein lies the rub. Many Trump books report important news. Many trade in salacious gossip. But all in some way document a moment in US history that is unprecedented – and which has not ended.

Trump retains control of a party committed to advancing his lie that his defeat was the result of electoral fraud and to attacking the voting rights of opponents. It is therefore important, Setmayer said, for the media to continue to cover both Trump and the avalanche of books about him.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/12/landslide-review-michael-wolff-donald-trump-book-
“It is unconscionable given his behavior that the Republicans would give him the time of day,” she said. “He should be a political pariah. But it’s important to frame it all in the proper context, to point out when he’s not telling the truth. And as long as that’s done, then I think you have to continue to show what he’s doing.”

The chase
Trump is not a reader but he knows what is written about him. According to Politico, earlier this month he woke to news – broken by the Guardian – of the passage in Bender’s book in which he is reported to have praised Hitler.

Trump again denied the remark, Politico said, but also told an adviser: “That doesn’t mean [former chief of staff] John Kelly didn’t tell Mike Bender that. That doesn’t mean other people didn’t say it.”

Former aides jockey to tell their sides of the story. Pence and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law-cum-adviser, have signed deals for memoirs. Trump has even claimed to be writing his own book, news that prompted leading agents and publishers to reach for their very longest bargepoles, with which not to publicly touch it.

Most influential Trump world figures have spoken on or off the record. As one former aide told Politico: “It’s fraught right now as to who is telling the truth. They’re all trying to go back in time and curate their own images.” All have reason to be cautious. Trump remains powerful – and angry.

“Nobody had ever heard of some of these people that worked for me in DC,” he said in yet another statement this week, adding: “For the first time in their lives they feel like ‘something special’, not the losers that they are – and they talk, talk, talk!”
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continued...
Portrayals of key meetings and moments fuel the new Trump books, all written in a style made famous by Bob Woodward, the Post veteran whose own third Trump book is due out in September. Drawn from anonymous sources, scenes are reproduced as if the reporter is in the room, quotes reported verbatim. It all adds up to a tempting prize for other journalists, jockeying to scoop the hot new read.

Keith Urbahn is a former speechwriter and Pentagon chief of staff who co-founded Javelin, a leading Washington literary agency. He told the Guardian: “Over the last year, various editors have told us they’re skeptical, that the demand that we saw in the last few years of the Trump presidency for political books was necessarily going to decline as soon as he was out of office.

“And our thesis was that it wouldn’t. Maybe it would diminish a little bit. But that the desire to understand this critical period of history was going to continue. And I do think that’s been proven.”

A glance at the Amazon bestseller list suggested Urbahn was right. Leonnig and Rucker led the way, days before publication, with Wolff third and Bender fourth after a few days on sale. Pro-Trump books by Mark Levin and Jesse Waters filled out the top five.

The presence of the two Fox News hosts echoed a note of caution from Setmayer. Deep reportage of the excesses of Trump, she said, “further confirms to the 80-plus million who voted for Joe Biden that they made the right choice. Clearly.”

“But you had over 74 million people who still voted for Donald Trump. Does it make a difference to them? I fear that for the large majority of those people, it does not. If anything, it further entrenches them in this idea that Donald Trump was somehow the victim, that the ‘deep state’ was indeed after him. And I’m not quite sure how you ever break through to those people.”

Most likely, the publishing world never will. But as Urbahn said, plenty of other readers “look back on the Trump era with a mixture of anger, surprise and shock. I think the books are a great way to make sense of that history in ways the daily drumbeat of news stories and tweets does not. It’s not possible. Only books are really a way of doing that.”

The record
Journalism, so the cliche goes, is the first draft of history. Books based on journalism are therefore seen as the second.

Setmayer said: “I think that the books by the more credible journalists are doing that, versus the more salacious ones. We can let history be the judge.”

Asked to judge, the historian Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton aide turned Lincoln biographer, warned that the history the books are trying to write is not yet over.

“It would be complacent to regard this as something comfortably in the past,” he said. “The insurrection Trump organised and coordinated and had paid for revealed weaknesses in the system that the entire Republican party now is devoted to exploiting, through not only voter suppression but future election suppression.

“All this demonstrates how dangerous Trump remains.”

And why books about him sell.

If anyone hasn’t heard it today ….. Fuck Trump and his Troop of Tards

Looks like this crop is just as loony as their parents and about as committed to democracy, behold the young fascists trying to do democracy.
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College Republicans in disarray after 'stolen' election — and the Texas chapter might secede - Raw Story - Celebrating 17 Years of Independent Journalism

College Republicans in disarray after 'stolen' election — and the Texas chapter might secede

College Republicans are facing disharmony in their ranks after Courtney Britt was elected chair of the College Republican National Committee, the National Review reports.

The election's legitimacy has been challenged after "only about 60 percent of CRNC affiliates were allowed to cast ballots.

Britt reportedly "spent much of the day, however, voting not to allow numerous states — which had been sidelined over disputed credentialing issues — representation in the chairman's race. It is widely believed that [Judah] Waxelbaum would have had a sizable majority had all 52 eligible federations cast ballots. Just over 30 were actually allowed to."

Allegations of voter fraud were rampant.

"At one point, a debate broke out over Arkansas being stripped of its votes last Sunday under allegations of voter fraud in its state chairman election; the state's actual party chairman has weighed in on the matter, assuring the CRNC that everything was on the up and up. Nevertheless, Britt — a graduate of Richmond Law School — argued that the state should remain disenfranchised since it hadn't presented evidence that fraud had not occurred," the National Review explained.

The feud is expect to continue.

"Now, the theater of battle shifts. Britt will take over in 72 hours, but her organization may be significantly smaller by then. Within minutes of her election, both the New York and Texas federations announced that they would be meeting to discuss secession," the publication reported.

The National Review quoted Brandon Kiser, chairman of the Texas federation, who argued the election had been stolen.

"I don't want to get into the details of this stolen election. My focus now is on TXFCR, our chapters, our members, and our future. Texas doesn't tolerate corruption and fraud. We are going to vote on leaving the CRNC to ensure moral leadership of our organization, and a focus on winning in 2022," Kiser said.

The backlash against the national organization may continue to grow.

"Students from multiple other federations have also told National Review that they are considering leaving. One person connected with the Waxelbaum campaign implied that Florida and California are likely to withdraw from the CRNC. That would mean the organization would lack representation in the four largest states," the National Review reported.

College Republicans Poised for Splinter after ‘Stolen’ Election My latest @NRO https://t.co/v6PSZKv96h
— Isaac Schorr (@Isaac Schorr) 1626570535.0

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Gaetz destroyed ….. PEDOPHILE , PEDOPHILE , PEDOPHILE ( * crowd chants )

Orange Skidmark is moaning and groaning once again …..

Pence isn't enough of a "killer" for the the base, he's a conventional establishment republican, they want someone far more radical than him! They need someone as POTUS who will break the law, constitution and democracy and desperate Donald, a sociopath with nothing to lose who was sensitive to their deep desires fit the bill perfectly. Considering he's a morally corrupt, elitist city slicker from NY city who was a democrat made no difference at all, Donald blew the dog whistle through a bullhorn.

These extremist might make up 30% of the party, but they vote in primaries and almost half the party are somewhat sympathetic and willing to believe any bullshit at all. The republicans are now auto selecting sociopaths as candidates, they are the only ones who can give the extreme elements what they want. We see them arise in the racist and gerrymandered districts and states, with the likes of MTG, Gaetz, Jordan, Gomhert, Cruz and a host of others, in a veritable rogues gallery of corrupt, treasonous and vile GOP congress people. Corruption arises with racism and bigotry as conmen seek to take advantage of stupidity in a race to the bottom, just blow the dog whistle and they will come running.
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Pence flatlines as 2024 field takes shape - POLITICO

Pence flatlines as 2024 field takes shape
“There are some Trump supporters who think he’s the anti-Christ,” said one Iowa GOP official.

DES MOINES, Iowa — Mike Pence was met by a respectful, even warm, crowd in his first trip back to Iowa since the election. Republicans at a picnic in the northwestern corner of the state stood and clapped for him on Friday. In Des Moines later that afternoon, a ballroom full of Christian conservatives did the same.

He was “honorable,” a “man of faith,” attendees at the annual Family Leadership Summit said. Evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats called him “a very consistent conservative voice in Congress and then as governor, and then as vice president.”

What few people said they saw in Pence, however, was the Republican nominee for president in 2024.

Many Iowa Republicans had seen the results of the most recent Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll, released just days earlier, in which Pence flatlined, drawing no more than 1 percent support. Before that, they’d watched the video of Pence getting heckled and called a “traitor” at a major gathering of conservatives in Florida last month.
“I don’t imagine he’d have a whole lot of support,” said Raymond Harre, vice chair of the GOP in eastern Iowa’s Scott County. “There are some Trump supporters who think he’s the anti-Christ.”

Harre said Pence “did a good job as vice president,” and he called the vitriol directed at him “kind of nutty.” Still, he said, “I don’t see him overcoming the negatives.”

Six months after he left the vice presidency, that is the prevailing view at the grassroots and among the GOP political class. By most accounts, both here and nationally, Pence is dead in the early waters of 2024.

“Who?” Doug Gross, a Republican operative who was a chief of staff to former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, replied flatly when asked about Pence. “It’s just, where would you place him? … With Trumpsters, he didn’t perform when they really wanted him to perform, so he’s DQ’d there. Then you go to the evangelicals, they have plenty of other choices.”

At the moment, Pence occupies a political no-man’s land. Vocal elements of Trump’s base remain furious at him for his refusal to reject the results of the November election, despite him having no authority to do so. Moderates, meanwhile, see too little distance between Pence and the president he catered to for four years. They’re wary the association may turn off the independents and suburban women Trump hemorrhaged in 2018 and again in 2020.

At 62 — and with several contenders in their 40s — Pence is too old to represent a new generation of Republican leadership. His deep well of support among Christian conservatives, which served as a critical validator for Trump, will matter less in a field where the religious right has other candidates to pick from.

“He’s got to justify to the Trumpistas why he isn’t Judas Iscariot, and then he’s got to demonstrate to a bunch of other Republicans why he hung out with someone they perceive to be a nutjob,” said Sean Walsh, a Republican strategist who worked in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush White Houses and on several presidential campaigns.

Describing Pence as “caught in between” those competing factions, Walsh said, “I just think it is an awfully tough, tough hill for him to climb.”

After hecklers greeted Pence at the Faith and Freedom Coalition event in Florida last month, organizers of a speaker series in one early nominating state decided to hold off on inviting him. They were sympathetic to Pence, but fearful he’d be embarrassed by a similar reception there, according to a source involved in the decision.

Three years before an election — and especially for someone with Pence’s name recognition and expansive donor and political network — no campaign is irredeemable. But not since another former vice president from Indiana, Dan Quayle, ran for president in 2000, has such a prominent Republican politician’s pre-presidential campaign seemed more forlorn.

“I really like him,” said Carmine Boal, a former Iowa state representative who chairs the Northside Conservatives group in Ankeny. But Pence, she said, just doesn’t have “the wow factor.”

“You have to have something that just reaches out and grabs people where they’re at,” she said. “Pence just seems a little cool and removed.”

Even if that demeanor might not fit the moment, Pence, a former Indiana governor, still possesses the traits of a formidable candidate. If Trump doesn’t run again in 2024 — the only scenario in which most credible contenders would likely enter the race — Pence would have the benefit of familiarity to Republican voters, a reliably conservative record and relationships forged during time in Congress, in the Trump administration and while sharing a ticket with Trump on two presidential campaigns.

A national survey of GOP voters by Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio last week placed Pence at 15 percent, far behind Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, but second in a presidential primary field without Trump competing. After returning to the speaking circuit in recent months, Pence drew appreciative crowds in the early nominating states of New Hampshire and South Carolina. In Sioux County, Iowa, on Friday — where Trump pulled nearly 83 percent of the vote last year — freshman GOP Rep. Randy Feenstra had Pence headline his inaugural family picnic.
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‘It’s chilling what is happening’: a rightwing backlash to Biden takes root in Republican states | US politics | The Guardian

‘It’s chilling what is happening’: a rightwing backlash to Biden takes root in Republican states

Biden may be president but Republican-controlled states are busy introducing reams of legislation that is anything but progressive

In his inaugural address in January, Joe Biden promised to use his presidency to “restore the soul of America”. He would unite the nation, defuse “anger, resentment and hatred”, and lead Americans back to a world where they treated “each other with dignity and respect”.

Six months later, Biden is still preaching the unity gospel, and regularly assures his fellow Americans that “there’s not a single thing we aren’t able to do when we do it together”.

Drive 1,400 miles west from the White House, to Dallas in Texas where Brianna Brown lives, and there’s little evidence of politicians working together that she can see. As an African American fourth-generation Texan, Brown has been assailed since Biden came into office by a whirlwind of regressive laws emanating from the Republican-controlled state legislature.

The explosion of extreme rightwing legislation rammed through by Texas Republicans this session – culminating on Monday with the dramatic flight of Democratic lawmakers from the state in an attempt to prevent the passage of the latest voter suppression law – has left Brown feeling apprehensive and insecure.

She thinks about her own family’s long struggle for voting rights now threatened once again, is fearful about being accosted in the street by armed men legally bearing arms without a permit, bothered about what might happen to her when she next joins a peaceful protest, and worried about the fallout of a renewed push to build a wall along the Mexican border.

Top of her list of concerns is the Republican bill to make it even more difficult to vote – in a state that already makes it harder to vote than any other in the nation. Brown recalls how she once heard her grandmother having to remind herself that her vote was no longer conditional on the poll tax – a ruse once commonly used in the south to disenfranchise Black people.

“That was my grandmother!” Brown said. “To say that people fought and died for our right to vote – that’s personal for me.”

Brown is spooked about another new law set to come into effect in September that effectively tries to turn ordinary citizens into anti-abortion bounty hunters. It offers a $10,000 reward to anyone who successfully sues a fellow Texan for helping a woman seek an abortion beyond six weeks of pregnancy.

“It is chilling that this is happening,” she said.

As co-executive director of the Texas Organizing Project that seeks to empower Black and Latino neighborhoods, she is concerned too for the transgender men, women and children who are bearing the brunt of Republican intolerance in a state in which more anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been promoted by Republicans this session than in any other. “This is an assault on people who are on the margins,” she said.

And there’s more. Much more. There’s the order by the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, to all state agencies to block Biden’s efforts to combat climate change; the new law that punishes any Texas city that has the audacity to cut police budgets; the $1,000 fines that will be imposed on anyone requiring Covid masks to be worn in public schools; the gun law that allows Texans to carry handguns with no training and without a permit.

Walking around as a Black person, the feeling is that this can easily escalate

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Brianna Brown
Brianna Brown is not feeling Biden’s vision of Americans doing things together. She is feeling the wrath of a Texan Republican party that since Donald Trump’s defeat in the presidential election last November has taken its animus to a whole other level.

“When I leave the house with my two-year-old daughter, I now carry with me two phones: a work phone, and a personal phone,” she told the Guardian. “I make sure I always carry both because I never know when I might need to call for help. The Republicans have incited their base. There are a lot of white people out there who feel very emboldened. Walking around as a Black person, the feeling is that this can easily escalate.”

Nor is Brianna Brown alone.

Across a vast swath of the American heartlands, the anti-Biden backlash is being replicated in Republican-controlled statehouses in what Ronald Brownstein has described in the Atlantic as a “collective cry of defiance”.

In some instances, the challenge to Biden is explicit. At least nine Republican-controlled states, Texas included, have passed laws banning the enforcement of federal firearms statutes in a blatant attempt to frustrate the president’s ambition to tackle the nationwide scourge of gun violence.

Twenty-six states have put a stop to the extra $300 a week in unemployment support that the federal government has extended through the pandemic, suggesting that they care more about resisting Biden’s economic agenda than about giving a helping hand to their own. The latest to do so, Louisiana, has the worst poverty rate in the US bar Mississippi – with one in five of its citizens below the poverty line.

In other cases, Republican-dominated legislatures have invested in hot-button social issues, aggressively targeting minority communities and other groups for attack. At least 15 states have between them enacted 90 measures to restrict access to abortions – a record number. Thirty-three states have pumped out 250 anti-LGBTQ+ bills, and five have allowed firearms to be carried without a license in a major loosening of gun laws.

The backlash so far this year has also involved virulent rightwing efforts to suppress the vote of Democratic-leaning demographics, especially people of color. In the first six months of the year, about 17 states have enacted 28 new laws that will restrict access to the ballot box, according to the Brennan Center, and more are certain to follow.

The welter of voter suppression measures is not only striking in its own right, it is indicative of one of the great driving forces of this year’s seismic eruption of toxic rightwing legislation. American politics is no stranger to Republicans responding fiercely to Democrats gaining control of Congress and the presidency – Newt Gingrich turned partisan obstructionism into an art form when Bill Clinton was in the White House, while Barack Obama’s victory as the first Black president gave rise to the Tea Party.

But the accent in 2021 on tampering with and tamping down the vote is a sharp departure from past form, both in its ferocity and in its extremism. The new trend is evident not just in attempts by states like Texas to erect additional hurdles to voting that especially affect African American and Latino communities.

Most sinisterly, bills have been introduced that would grant state lawmakers the power to overturn the legitimate will of the people in a contested presidential election. They would empower themselves to supplant their own winner – the electoral equivalent of a coup.
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continued

For Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, the attack on elections and the very machinery of democracy sets the current Republican fury apart. “This is different. Republicans at state level have moved from pursuing conservative economic policies to pushing measures designed to cripple the opposition and undermine democracy.”

Hacker added: “The Republican party used to be anti-Democratic, now it’s anti-democratic.”

The rocket fuel propelling the emergence of a fundamentally anti-democratic strain in Republican politics is Trump and his big lie that the election was stolen from him. The defeated president continues to peddle the falsehood, inciting his supporters with the potent belief that the current occupant of the White House is an impostor.

Either you believe, or pretend to believe, that Trump won the election, or you will be destroyed

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Jacob Hacker
“Trump has broken a fundamental norm that politicians don’t refuse to accept the legitimacy of a free and fair election, and that has been hugely empowering,” Hacker said. “He has turned it into a loyalty test – are you with or against us? Either you believe, or pretend to believe, that Trump won the election, or you will be destroyed.”

In his new book with Paul Pierson, Let Them Eat Tweets, Hacker describes what he calls the “doom-loop” of rising outrage that now has the Republican party in its grip. Politicians stoke anger by assaulting a plethora of targets – Black people, immigrants, transgender youth, women seeking abortions, BLM protesters, critical race theory – to fire up the base.

Voters in turn get riled up, baying for the blood of anyone who crosses Trump or steps out of line. Party leaders duly respond by stoking up more outrage – and so the “doom-loop” turns and intensifies.

This tendency is quite consciously embraced by the party leadership. The New York Times unearthed a memo from Jim Banks, a Congress member from Indiana and chairman of the Republican Study Committee, in which he regurgitated frenzied exaggerations about critical race theory and concluded: “We are in a culture war. My encouragement to you is lean into it. Lean into the culture war.”

Such clear signs of a coordinated national resistance should not obscure the fact that today’s torrent of Republican anger has been a long while in the baking. Vote View, an academic research project, has tracked party ideology over time and found that while the Democratic party has moved gradually to a more overtly liberal stance, the shift by Republicans has been much more dramatic.

Since the 1970s the party has moved sharply to the right, increasingly aligning itself with white voters resentful of the civil rights movement, evangelical Christians and the cultural issues now so beloved of the leadership. Long before Trump burst on the scene, Vote View was recording that the Republican party was projecting its most conservative ideology in a century.

You can’t understand such a rush to the right without considering demographic changes that have radically altered the face of American society over the same modern period. Ryan Enos, a social scientist at Harvard, has carried out groundbreaking research that shows that voters are now more segregated according to their partisan loyalties than they are by racial group.

“We think of America as a very racially segregated society. But we were surprised to find that Democrats are even more likely to live around Democrats, and Republicans with Republicans – and that drills down even to the level of neighborhoods.”

Partisanship has become a social identity, meaning that our sense of ourselves is linked to our party

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Lilliana Mason
The physical segregation of voters has been matched by hardening political identities. Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, has studied the self-identity of the American voter, discovering that over the past four decades it has become ever more tied to party allegiance.

“Partisanship has become a social identity, meaning that our sense of ourselves, who we are in the world, and even our sense of status is linked to our party. That’s who I am, and my emotional state is connected to whether my party is winning or losing,” she told the Guardian.

Mason’s research has found that between 1972 and 2016, not only have the two main parties moved sharply apart in conservative and liberal directions, but their supporters have also separated out in terms of race.

“Whites are moving very far towards the Republican party, and Blacks are moving very far towards the Democratic party. That divide increased by about three times over those years,” she said.

Throw partisan ideology and racial resentment into a pot, and the result is a fevered political climate in which elections are increasingly seen as existentially important. “We are clearly having a battle over social hierarchy and white patriarchy,” Mason said.

In her upcoming book with Nathan Kalmoe, Radical American Partisanship, Mason reaches some alarming conclusions based on a series of surveys conducted over several years. Since 2017, the proportion of voters who think that physical violence against the opposite party could be at least a “little bit” justified has increased markedly.

The trend is especially stark for Republicans. When asked whether violence was justified were the Democrats to win the presidential races in 2020 or 2024, the proportion of those who assented leapt from 20% shortly before last November’s election to almost 30% in February.

Throw the big lie into the pot, and the bubbling stew of anger and hatred begins to boil over. Just after Biden became president-elect, Mason held another survey of voters and was chastened by what she learned.

Republicans who subscribed to the calumny that the election was stolen were far more likely to endorse violence to advance their political goals. If that’s the view of a significant chunk of the American people, Biden has a job on his hands.

This correlates to those with morals and brains who left the republican party and the simpleminded racists and ignoramuses who joined it these past few years.
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Republican Confidence in Science Falls 27 Percentage Points Since 1975, Poll Says (yahoo.com)

Republican Confidence in Science Falls 27 Percentage Points Since 1975, Poll Says

Republicans had more confidence in science four decades ago than they do today, according to a new poll.

In 1975, Gallup polled U.S. adults about their confidence in science, and 72 percent of Republicans said they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the field. But that number has plummeted by almost 30 percentage points to only 45 percent since the last time the polling firm asked the question.

Confidence in science overall among Americans has seen a six percentage point decline since 1975, from 70 percent to 64 percent, according to the new survey conducted from July 1 to July 5 of this year. Independents dropped by eight points, from 73 percent to 65 percent. However, Democrats’ confidence has increased by 12 points from 67 percent in 1975 to 79 percent today.

The 34 point differential between Republicans and Democrats is a stark reflection of the partisan divide that is dangerously affecting the way Americans view the pandemic, vaccines and health measures recommended by scientists and federal officials.

According to Gallup, the wide partisan polling gap between Republicans and Democrats is only topped by a “49-point party divide in ratings of the presidency and 45 points in ratings of the police.”

The poll results seem to show that decades of anti-science policies and rhetoric, including lies about climate change and more recently covid and vaccines, from right-wing politicians and media have poisoned the minds of a significant portion of the U.S. population.

This week all 50 states saw a rise in Covid cases while vaccination rates have lagged. Because of a steady stream of bullshit about the virus and vaccines from right-wing politicians, certain cable networks, and social media platforms, the U.S. Surgeon General released an advisory calling the spread of health misinformation an “urgent threat” to public health and asked Americans and tech companies to up their efforts to combat the problem.
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The rantings of a madman. Good luck getting through this.

Greene gets 12-hour Twitter suspension over COVID-19 misinformation
According to a Twitter spokesperson, Greene was suspended for two tweets she sent out on Monday in which she baselessly claimed COVID-19 is "not dangerous" for people who are not obese or under the age of 65.

In another tweet, the freshman congresswoman, who has a history of embracing conspiracy theories, claimed that "defeating obesity" would protect people against coronavirus complications and death.

Obese individuals have been found to be at a higher risk of developing COVID-19 complications and being hospitalized.

She also argued against requiring military members to receive vaccines, as well as against mask mandates.

Both tweets have been flagged by Twitter as being misleading and have been barred from being shared, liked or commented on.

“Twitter, Facebook and the rest of the Silicon Valley Cartel are working hand in hand with the White House to censor Americans," Greene said when reached for comment by The Hill. "This is a Communist-style assault on free speech. I will not back down and I will continue [to] tell the truth to the American people.”