2028
- Thread starter Krgrecw
- Start date
acesfull86
Well-known member
It’s just Heather Richardson Cox nailing the moment once again. See her musings on (R) using “cheap fakes” to make Biden look infirm in the days prior to the Trump-Biden debate, or her insistence that the Charlie Kirk killer was right wing, and you’ll know what you’re dealing with.
Tapate50
Well-known member
Jaw
It's OVER 5,000!
But she’s a respected university professor!
acesfull86
Well-known member
Tapate50
Well-known member
Speaks volumes.
From what 57 posts here she’s not real self aware. But her word counts are over a thousand !
57Brave
Well-known member
Yesterday, here in Chicago, where I am today, America caught a glimpse of its possible future, and it was terrifying. Federal agents, dressed like soldiers and armed with the weapons of war, rammed a civilian vehicle on 105th Street, using a maneuver outlawed by Chicago police, and then fired tear gas into a crowd of bystanders and local officers.
The air filled with smoke and screams as parents fled with babies in their arms, teenagers were slammed to the pavement, and a young girl was struck in the head by a gas canister. One boy was detained for hours, denied his rights, his family left in the dark.
This was not a foreign regime or some distant “law-and-order” fantasy. It was an American city, in broad daylight, and it looked more like a militarized crackdown in a third-world dictatorship than traditional American law enforcement.
The question we have to ask is simple and chilling: Is this America that we are becoming, one where democracy dies behind clouds of tear gas?
Trump’s secret police are trying to provoke riots in the streets to justify a harsh crackdown on dissent and the Democratic Party. They’re kicking in doors and dragging screaming American citizen children into the cold night. They’re shooting priests in the head with pepperballs.
And they say it’s all to “make America great again.” Again?!? Like in 1861?
-Thom Hartman
The air filled with smoke and screams as parents fled with babies in their arms, teenagers were slammed to the pavement, and a young girl was struck in the head by a gas canister. One boy was detained for hours, denied his rights, his family left in the dark.
This was not a foreign regime or some distant “law-and-order” fantasy. It was an American city, in broad daylight, and it looked more like a militarized crackdown in a third-world dictatorship than traditional American law enforcement.
The question we have to ask is simple and chilling: Is this America that we are becoming, one where democracy dies behind clouds of tear gas?
Trump’s secret police are trying to provoke riots in the streets to justify a harsh crackdown on dissent and the Democratic Party. They’re kicking in doors and dragging screaming American citizen children into the cold night. They’re shooting priests in the head with pepperballs.
And they say it’s all to “make America great again.” Again?!? Like in 1861?
-Thom Hartman
acesfull86
Well-known member
It can’t be great for the state of the leftist movement in 2025 that one of the apparent thought leaders in the movement is someone I had to Google. I feel like I must be missing out on so many important updates about how fine I am.
I take it she does not think things are fine currently.
Jaw
It's OVER 5,000!
I know a history prof of a very prominent school who quotes her and sends her posts out constantly. No amount of countering her with documented facts is ever enough, the response is always something along the lines of “check your sources.” She definitely has some kind of hold among those with too much appreciation of her credentials.
57Brave
Well-known member
Trump and today’s Republican Party aren’t offering something new. They’re simply resurrecting the old Confederacy, dressing it up in the trappings of modern politics and media. Strip away the slogans and the tweets and you can see the same architecture: oligarchy instead of democracy, hierarchy instead of pluralism, the rule of the white wealthy few over the many.
This isn’t nostalgia for Dixie so much as a deliberate effort to bring back the very systems that tore our nation apart the last time the morbidly rich tried to end our democratic republic and replace it with an early fascist form of neo-feudalism.
57Brave
Well-known member
At the heart of the old Confederacy was oligarchy, as I laid out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. A tiny elite of plantation owners controlled politics, law, and the economy across the entire region; by the mid-1850s democracy in the Old South was entirely dead.
That same racist, fascist goal appears to animate today’s GOP, which fights tooth and nail to defend the interests of white people, billionaires, and giant corporations while undermining any effort to preserve genuine democracy.
Taxes on the morbidly rich are cut to the bone, while working people and the professional middle class carry the burden. Government subsidies flow to “friends of the administration,” while towns, industries, and communities that cross political leaders are punished with the withdrawal of federal support and attacks by ICE.
Racism, too, is baked into the GOP’s contemporary model. The Confederacy was built on human enslavement and white supremacy. Today’s Republican project echoes that same spirit by targeting immigrants, demonizing Black people (even in the military, per “Whiskey Pete” Hegseth), restricting voting rights in communities of color, and maintaining a system of informal but organized apartheid. Housing segregation, school funding disparities, and the over-policing of Black and Hispanic neighborhoods today accomplish the same results as the old Jim Crow laws, just through different mechanisms.
Male supremacy is also apparently central to the new GOP Confederate order. Back in the day, women were property under the law, and patriarchy was woven into both religion and politics. The modern right’s war on reproductive freedom and equal rights for women is an almost perfect parallel. A woman’s autonomy and economic power, in their worldview, must always be subordinate to the demands of men and to a rigid religious orthodoxy.
The old Confederacy depended on cheap labor, and when it couldn’t enslave outright it invented systems like debt peonage and sharecropping. Today’s Republicans defend the use of prison slave labor, which is still constitutionally permitted under the 13th Amendment and most heavily deployed in Red states. They attack unions, push gig work without benefits, and refuse to raise minimum wages, ensuring that working people remain trapped in low-wage jobs without bargaining power.
The plantation economy itself was a form of monopoly: vast estates swallowed up smaller farms and drove independent competitors under to the point where a few hundred families controlled most of the region’s economy by the 1860s. Today the GOP defends monopolistic corporate power in much the same way, blocking antitrust efforts and encouraging consolidation across agriculture, media, energy, retail, insurance, medicine, and technology. Small business is starved out by giants, just as yeoman farmers in the South were once pushed off their land by the spread of the slave plantations.
- Thom Hartman
That same racist, fascist goal appears to animate today’s GOP, which fights tooth and nail to defend the interests of white people, billionaires, and giant corporations while undermining any effort to preserve genuine democracy.
Taxes on the morbidly rich are cut to the bone, while working people and the professional middle class carry the burden. Government subsidies flow to “friends of the administration,” while towns, industries, and communities that cross political leaders are punished with the withdrawal of federal support and attacks by ICE.
Racism, too, is baked into the GOP’s contemporary model. The Confederacy was built on human enslavement and white supremacy. Today’s Republican project echoes that same spirit by targeting immigrants, demonizing Black people (even in the military, per “Whiskey Pete” Hegseth), restricting voting rights in communities of color, and maintaining a system of informal but organized apartheid. Housing segregation, school funding disparities, and the over-policing of Black and Hispanic neighborhoods today accomplish the same results as the old Jim Crow laws, just through different mechanisms.
Male supremacy is also apparently central to the new GOP Confederate order. Back in the day, women were property under the law, and patriarchy was woven into both religion and politics. The modern right’s war on reproductive freedom and equal rights for women is an almost perfect parallel. A woman’s autonomy and economic power, in their worldview, must always be subordinate to the demands of men and to a rigid religious orthodoxy.
The old Confederacy depended on cheap labor, and when it couldn’t enslave outright it invented systems like debt peonage and sharecropping. Today’s Republicans defend the use of prison slave labor, which is still constitutionally permitted under the 13th Amendment and most heavily deployed in Red states. They attack unions, push gig work without benefits, and refuse to raise minimum wages, ensuring that working people remain trapped in low-wage jobs without bargaining power.
The plantation economy itself was a form of monopoly: vast estates swallowed up smaller farms and drove independent competitors under to the point where a few hundred families controlled most of the region’s economy by the 1860s. Today the GOP defends monopolistic corporate power in much the same way, blocking antitrust efforts and encouraging consolidation across agriculture, media, energy, retail, insurance, medicine, and technology. Small business is starved out by giants, just as yeoman farmers in the South were once pushed off their land by the spread of the slave plantations.
- Thom Hartman
acesfull86
Well-known member
Yes, but if you actually vote against the duopoly, you’re a monster who wants *insert ridiculous hysterics*
You were fine with the previous administration restricting the right to free speech. You were fine with the previous administration forcing people to take vaccinations or be fired, you were fine with the previous admin installing vaccine cards in order to board planes or eat out in town. You were also fine with the Dems subverting the peoples vote entirely by forcing Biden out when he wasn't doing well and pushing someone to the top of the ticket that not a single person voted for.
But sure...... No Kings.
What you really want is a king. You just want a king that does things that you agree with. You couldn't give one single iota of concern if Dems took control and stripped the rights away from every American as long as they pushed the agenda you wanted.
acesfull86
Well-known member
What we’ve learned more than anything over the past several years is that principles are in short supply