This is a copy paste from a response I made earlier. It certainly tracks with Blacks post and it underscores the increasing frustration and anger starting to build with people who have had enough of Republican bullshit. DONE
“Every day they manufacture a fake crises/issue is another day they don’t have to answer for Project 2025 or Abortion or Election Deniers or how the fuck the toxic minority in this country gets to stir up this much unadulterated fake bullshit lies every fucking day that we have to put our NORMAL lives on hold for and deal with.
There’s 100 Steve Bannons in some room scouring the news every fucking day looking to how best they can concoct a mountainous pile of stinkin BULLSHIT and send it out on their BULLSHIT CONVEYOR directly into the MS Media’s hungry purview so THEY AND US WILL SCREAM “SQUIRREL “ and another day of critical discussion on their dangerous and dystopian plans are left silent.
So so very fucking tired of their twisted lies and their concocted stories and their black hearted souls all done “in the name of Jesus “.
While I appreciate that you try not to vilify all Republican voters, to further clarify some things: the same apparatus used to mainline lies into Trumps head that he then repeats to sell the stories the media on his side wants to push, works to sell air time when Democrats want to position themselves as the only party remaining to keep the empire from crumbling. Trump was already in power 4yrs, during a global crisis, the empire survived just fine. It will continue to because the same people who said Biden wasn’t fit to lead get away with no one asking “so who’s been running the show this past year?”
If the empire is not the million people that died during Covid, then what is it?
I refuse hating people for landing on the wrong side of a media bubble, when rage baiting wonks won’t teach them who their alderman is or why that role has a more direct and immediate impact on their lives than the head of one branch of government, who beyond enacting laws is tasked with crafting global policy to ensure the comfort of already wealthy Americans
I agree with 99% of what you’re saying. The 1% I disagree with is that MAGA folks are not bad people. Some of them are probably reasonably decent, but I’ve been threatened by way too many, in real life, to not know there are some genuinely dangerous lunatics among them. I guess that’s something I have to get used to because I’m never going to stop speaking my mind. And some of them reeeeeeally seem to hate that.
Absolutely, the true mind-boggler here is that the election is still an actual horserace. Every morning I hear about more republicans (like Dick Cheney?!) jumping ship and voting for Harris...and yet the polls still show it's anyone's race. HE WAS A HORRIBLE PRESIDENT, and will be again. Please. Ugh.
On a more cheerful note, caught your show last night, Michael (Have I Got News for You) and it is very funny! We binged a couple of episodes. Great job. Everyone should watch!
There's such cognitive dissonance on the other side. His ilk simply cannot grasp that TFG would do nothing but lie, because in their minds, presidents (at least the ones they like) tell the truth. When presented with the facts in black and white--like explaining how Biden isn't raiding hurricane relief funds to give to migrants--they flat-out reject reality. It doesn't matter that it's easily documentable that FEMA's SSP program doesn't co-mingle with hurricane/disaster funds (or that it was Congress who voted for how to appropriate the money), they refuse to believe it because A) it supports their xenophobic world view, and B) that's not what Trump told them. We knew this on Day One when Trump made Spicer lie about crowd sizes at the inauguration. Reporters said, "But these are the facts," and Spicer replied that he had alternative facts. The MAGA mental gymnastics here are both exhausting and terrifying. HOW IS THIS ELECTION STILL SO CLOSE?
So true and so disturbing that the current election is so close.
How can half the country buy in to Trump's bullshit. Do they actually listen to what he says? I have always been an Independent and the Democrats are not perfect but the Republicans have lost their minds.
Goddamn right Michael! Everyone should share this post. We're sitting here trying to explain to a bunch of undecided voters why they shouldn't be voting based on policy because one side doesn't have any actual policies besides getting elected.
Trump is literally running to stay out of jail, while standing in front of supposedly knowledgeable professionals demonstrating how much he doesn't understand basic economics, and still many of these fuckers are going to vote for him because they expect their taxes to be lower. Trump's economic plan is literally to put tariffs on everything, which he actually believes is going to bring money into the country "at levels you've never seen before" because he thinks foreign exporters pay the tariffs.
The proper response to this should be, "This guy is s complete imbecile, and I'm very concerned about him being put in charge of America!" And yet instead it's still this Flight 93, "We've got to stop Kamala Harris because Joe Biden has been a disaster!" Forget that Joe Biden was handed a country in tatters and guided it back to health again in the midst of a *worldwide* inflation crisis, because eggs haven't come down to 2019 levels yet, and – *psst*, dont tell anyone until after the election – never will, because that's not how inflation works.
Forget that Trump was handed a country in excellent condition, hid his incompetence in the form of mountains of federal debt which Republicans only complain about when Democrats are in office, neglected our pandemic infrastructure which two successive administrations had built up, leading to some of the worst per capita death rates in the developed world, and Trump himself *literally being listed as a comorbidity* by the bipartisan COVID study group because people who voted for him were more likey to die once vaccines became available and they refused to take them.
Oh, and then he tried to overthrow our Constitutional order. Almost forgot.
But Joe Biden has been a disaster! About 55% of Americans think the Trump Administration was a success! The economy was better when Trump was in office! Sonehow he gets credit for the fact that the world was different then, and gets a complete mulligan for COVID even though he massively fumbled the response. But how can you blame him when it affected the whole world?!
Because that's *way* different than the inflation that affected the whole world, and was obviously Joe Biden's and Kamala Harris' fault. But mostly Kamala, now that she's running. Did we say it was Joe Biden? He got coup'ed out by Kamala, poor guy. Nope, it's all been Kamala. Just like the immigrants, all Kamala, even though we impeached Majorkas over it. They're the ones responsible for both inflation *and* our imaginary crime / pet consumption wave!
Once we deport all the immigrants and decimate our workforce, there will be so much economy!! You're gonna be saying, "Dear, what will we do with all this economy?? Stop it already, it's too much!!" Even though the construction industry will be particularly hard hit during a crisis of housing supply, that's ok because it's the immigrants who are buying up all the ridiculously expensive houses, obviously! Duh! Everyone understands this – immigrants bad, tariffs good, right Republican party that just loves tariffs and just tanked a bipartisan (really right-wing wet dream) immigration bill so Trump would have an issue to run on?
The Republican party is shit. Complete shit. They've been lying to their voters for so long, using shiny cultural objects and imaginary ideals of self-sufficiency to push an unappealing economic agenda, that this is the only way they know how to operate. Rationalize. Deflect. Hem and haw.
And if you have to, just fucking lie your ass off, because Fox Newsmax America has your back. Send out the most shameless people with the best poker faces to gaslight the mainstream media. They deserve it for all of those cosmopolitan journalists who see things from a broad perspective and don't represent the viewpoints of backward provincial Christian theocrats.
You're right, Michael. They hate America. They hate us for our freedom, our compassion, our desire to make America a shining example to the world of a secular ideal where people are well informed and not easily manipulated by authoritarian vibes and rich oligarchs who distort our public discourse by buying up every media company they can and turning it into unhinged propaganda.
And I hate myself for my run-on sentences, but I just can't stop myself when criticizing the Republican establishment in this country.
Your run-on sentences on top of Michael's bell-ringing fury nail my own feelings of outrage and disbelief, with a big dose of rising straight-up fear, as I watch this country, my country, teeter on the edge of a cliff.
Racism, misogyny, attacks on bodily autonomy, gender identity and gay marriage, anti-Semitism, guns!!!, "Christian" fundamentalists, Fox news & spin-offs - the 50's and McCarthyism are back in spades, baby, heading us straight for the frigging 19th century.
As a Baby Boomer, I feel as though I got to live through a break of about 20 years (?) - a deep, humble bow to the Civil Rights movement and its leaders - and then watch our downhill slide begin with Reagan, be amplified by Newt Gingrich, and kick into high gear with Rush Limbaugh.
We had some breathers - Carter, Clinton, especially under Obama - but the Holy Trinity of Reaganism, Gingrich's Tea Party and the bullhorn and relentless drumbeat of the Murdochs' Fox News have eaten away at the fabric of this country like moths feasting steadily, relentlessly, on wool. Playing their long game and funded by billionaires, the GOP has decimated U.S. democracy and social/economic progress at every level.
Now I see people who live in the grip of ignorance and fear, perpetrated by old white men clinging to power in the face of a relentlessly changing demographic, reinforced by young men who buy into "America First!" and sickening faux nationalism, because they do not read and get all their "news" - and values - from their social media bubble and the Murdoch/Musk/tech bros empire.
As Butch said to the Kid, forget whether we can swim, the fall's gonna kill us.
There. I see your run-on sentences and raise with mine, adding a dose of similes! ;)
I feel you on this one, Boomer girl. Michael and I are both Gen X, and I think many of us are just shellshocked that things we thought were long since buried in the past have come back to haunt us.
We were an irreverent generation, always reveling in our free speech, yet now we have to keep reminding ourselves why it's important when it constantly seems to be working against us. Will we one day look back and laugh at how hopelessly naive we were with our maximalist ideals on speech?
It's almost hard to see us continuing on like this, without some kind of reckoning. At the very least, we should probably remind ourselves that free speech is meant to protect the people from their government, not to protect government officials from accountability to their people. A law that punishes people like Trump for spreading lies the way he does, given his status as a former and perhaps future public official, seems awfully reasonable right about now.
Dems need to win by a landslide; that’s the only way we take the wind out of their sails. Read today’s Substack by Heather Cox Richardson, whose essay dovetails perfectly with yours, Michael.
Truth is still truth independent of belief systems. We have Americans who will vote for Harris/Walz, and then there are Nazi fantasists who need to be stopped.
ALL TRUE, ALL TRUE,ALL TRUE!!!
Thanks Michael. I almost forgot what a lying bunch of ignorant brainwashed assholes are now the Republicans!
This is a copy paste from a response I made earlier. It certainly tracks with Blacks post and it underscores the increasing frustration and anger starting to build with people who have had enough of Republican bullshit. DONE
“Every day they manufacture a fake crises/issue is another day they don’t have to answer for Project 2025 or Abortion or Election Deniers or how the fuck the toxic minority in this country gets to stir up this much unadulterated fake bullshit lies every fucking day that we have to put our NORMAL lives on hold for and deal with.
There’s 100 Steve Bannons in some room scouring the news every fucking day looking to how best they can concoct a mountainous pile of stinkin BULLSHIT and send it out on their BULLSHIT CONVEYOR directly into the MS Media’s hungry purview so THEY AND US WILL SCREAM “SQUIRREL “ and another day of critical discussion on their dangerous and dystopian plans are left silent.
So so very fucking tired of their twisted lies and their concocted stories and their black hearted souls all done “in the name of Jesus “.
Honest to Betsy, we need to invest in training more good teachers, keeping them in the profession, and improving our schools.
People who READ broadly and deeply are capable of forming independent beliefs. And, for god's sake, protect our libraries!!!
When they take away books, we teeter on the brink.
While I appreciate that you try not to vilify all Republican voters, to further clarify some things: the same apparatus used to mainline lies into Trumps head that he then repeats to sell the stories the media on his side wants to push, works to sell air time when Democrats want to position themselves as the only party remaining to keep the empire from crumbling. Trump was already in power 4yrs, during a global crisis, the empire survived just fine. It will continue to because the same people who said Biden wasn’t fit to lead get away with no one asking “so who’s been running the show this past year?”
If the empire is not the million people that died during Covid, then what is it?
I refuse hating people for landing on the wrong side of a media bubble, when rage baiting wonks won’t teach them who their alderman is or why that role has a more direct and immediate impact on their lives than the head of one branch of government, who beyond enacting laws is tasked with crafting global policy to ensure the comfort of already wealthy Americans
I agree with 99% of what you’re saying. The 1% I disagree with is that MAGA folks are not bad people. Some of them are probably reasonably decent, but I’ve been threatened by way too many, in real life, to not know there are some genuinely dangerous lunatics among them. I guess that’s something I have to get used to because I’m never going to stop speaking my mind. And some of them reeeeeeally seem to hate that.
Absolutely, the true mind-boggler here is that the election is still an actual horserace. Every morning I hear about more republicans (like Dick Cheney?!) jumping ship and voting for Harris...and yet the polls still show it's anyone's race. HE WAS A HORRIBLE PRESIDENT, and will be again. Please. Ugh.
On a more cheerful note, caught your show last night, Michael (Have I Got News for You) and it is very funny! We binged a couple of episodes. Great job. Everyone should watch!
There's such cognitive dissonance on the other side. His ilk simply cannot grasp that TFG would do nothing but lie, because in their minds, presidents (at least the ones they like) tell the truth. When presented with the facts in black and white--like explaining how Biden isn't raiding hurricane relief funds to give to migrants--they flat-out reject reality. It doesn't matter that it's easily documentable that FEMA's SSP program doesn't co-mingle with hurricane/disaster funds (or that it was Congress who voted for how to appropriate the money), they refuse to believe it because A) it supports their xenophobic world view, and B) that's not what Trump told them. We knew this on Day One when Trump made Spicer lie about crowd sizes at the inauguration. Reporters said, "But these are the facts," and Spicer replied that he had alternative facts. The MAGA mental gymnastics here are both exhausting and terrifying. HOW IS THIS ELECTION STILL SO CLOSE?
I second your comment! HOW??!?
So true and so disturbing that the current election is so close.
How can half the country buy in to Trump's bullshit. Do they actually listen to what he says? I have always been an Independent and the Democrats are not perfect but the Republicans have lost their minds.
Goddamn right Michael! Everyone should share this post. We're sitting here trying to explain to a bunch of undecided voters why they shouldn't be voting based on policy because one side doesn't have any actual policies besides getting elected.
Trump is literally running to stay out of jail, while standing in front of supposedly knowledgeable professionals demonstrating how much he doesn't understand basic economics, and still many of these fuckers are going to vote for him because they expect their taxes to be lower. Trump's economic plan is literally to put tariffs on everything, which he actually believes is going to bring money into the country "at levels you've never seen before" because he thinks foreign exporters pay the tariffs.
The proper response to this should be, "This guy is s complete imbecile, and I'm very concerned about him being put in charge of America!" And yet instead it's still this Flight 93, "We've got to stop Kamala Harris because Joe Biden has been a disaster!" Forget that Joe Biden was handed a country in tatters and guided it back to health again in the midst of a *worldwide* inflation crisis, because eggs haven't come down to 2019 levels yet, and – *psst*, dont tell anyone until after the election – never will, because that's not how inflation works.
Forget that Trump was handed a country in excellent condition, hid his incompetence in the form of mountains of federal debt which Republicans only complain about when Democrats are in office, neglected our pandemic infrastructure which two successive administrations had built up, leading to some of the worst per capita death rates in the developed world, and Trump himself *literally being listed as a comorbidity* by the bipartisan COVID study group because people who voted for him were more likey to die once vaccines became available and they refused to take them.
Oh, and then he tried to overthrow our Constitutional order. Almost forgot.
But Joe Biden has been a disaster! About 55% of Americans think the Trump Administration was a success! The economy was better when Trump was in office! Sonehow he gets credit for the fact that the world was different then, and gets a complete mulligan for COVID even though he massively fumbled the response. But how can you blame him when it affected the whole world?!
Because that's *way* different than the inflation that affected the whole world, and was obviously Joe Biden's and Kamala Harris' fault. But mostly Kamala, now that she's running. Did we say it was Joe Biden? He got coup'ed out by Kamala, poor guy. Nope, it's all been Kamala. Just like the immigrants, all Kamala, even though we impeached Majorkas over it. They're the ones responsible for both inflation *and* our imaginary crime / pet consumption wave!
Once we deport all the immigrants and decimate our workforce, there will be so much economy!! You're gonna be saying, "Dear, what will we do with all this economy?? Stop it already, it's too much!!" Even though the construction industry will be particularly hard hit during a crisis of housing supply, that's ok because it's the immigrants who are buying up all the ridiculously expensive houses, obviously! Duh! Everyone understands this – immigrants bad, tariffs good, right Republican party that just loves tariffs and just tanked a bipartisan (really right-wing wet dream) immigration bill so Trump would have an issue to run on?
The Republican party is shit. Complete shit. They've been lying to their voters for so long, using shiny cultural objects and imaginary ideals of self-sufficiency to push an unappealing economic agenda, that this is the only way they know how to operate. Rationalize. Deflect. Hem and haw.
And if you have to, just fucking lie your ass off, because Fox Newsmax America has your back. Send out the most shameless people with the best poker faces to gaslight the mainstream media. They deserve it for all of those cosmopolitan journalists who see things from a broad perspective and don't represent the viewpoints of backward provincial Christian theocrats.
You're right, Michael. They hate America. They hate us for our freedom, our compassion, our desire to make America a shining example to the world of a secular ideal where people are well informed and not easily manipulated by authoritarian vibes and rich oligarchs who distort our public discourse by buying up every media company they can and turning it into unhinged propaganda.
And I hate myself for my run-on sentences, but I just can't stop myself when criticizing the Republican establishment in this country.
Because there is no end to their depravity.
Your run-on sentences on top of Michael's bell-ringing fury nail my own feelings of outrage and disbelief, with a big dose of rising straight-up fear, as I watch this country, my country, teeter on the edge of a cliff.
Racism, misogyny, attacks on bodily autonomy, gender identity and gay marriage, anti-Semitism, guns!!!, "Christian" fundamentalists, Fox news & spin-offs - the 50's and McCarthyism are back in spades, baby, heading us straight for the frigging 19th century.
As a Baby Boomer, I feel as though I got to live through a break of about 20 years (?) - a deep, humble bow to the Civil Rights movement and its leaders - and then watch our downhill slide begin with Reagan, be amplified by Newt Gingrich, and kick into high gear with Rush Limbaugh.
We had some breathers - Carter, Clinton, especially under Obama - but the Holy Trinity of Reaganism, Gingrich's Tea Party and the bullhorn and relentless drumbeat of the Murdochs' Fox News have eaten away at the fabric of this country like moths feasting steadily, relentlessly, on wool. Playing their long game and funded by billionaires, the GOP has decimated U.S. democracy and social/economic progress at every level.
Now I see people who live in the grip of ignorance and fear, perpetrated by old white men clinging to power in the face of a relentlessly changing demographic, reinforced by young men who buy into "America First!" and sickening faux nationalism, because they do not read and get all their "news" - and values - from their social media bubble and the Murdoch/Musk/tech bros empire.
As Butch said to the Kid, forget whether we can swim, the fall's gonna kill us.
There. I see your run-on sentences and raise with mine, adding a dose of similes! ;)
I feel you on this one, Boomer girl. Michael and I are both Gen X, and I think many of us are just shellshocked that things we thought were long since buried in the past have come back to haunt us.
We were an irreverent generation, always reveling in our free speech, yet now we have to keep reminding ourselves why it's important when it constantly seems to be working against us. Will we one day look back and laugh at how hopelessly naive we were with our maximalist ideals on speech?
It's almost hard to see us continuing on like this, without some kind of reckoning. At the very least, we should probably remind ourselves that free speech is meant to protect the people from their government, not to protect government officials from accountability to their people. A law that punishes people like Trump for spreading lies the way he does, given his status as a former and perhaps future public official, seems awfully reasonable right about now.
Well sure, when you put it that way.
Dems need to win by a landslide; that’s the only way we take the wind out of their sails. Read today’s Substack by Heather Cox Richardson, whose essay dovetails perfectly with yours, Michael.
Yeah that's why I'm an expat now. Good luck.
"They’ve destroyed truth. I don’t know how else to say it."
There is no better way to say it.
Truth is still truth independent of belief systems. We have Americans who will vote for Harris/Walz, and then there are Nazi fantasists who need to be stopped.
Yes, truth is still truth. Objectively.
But subjectively we have manipulation by fake news; my truth; alternative fact; flat-out lies; and faith-based blindness.