Trump Had A Rally: Why We Shouldn’t Care or Talk About It.
It’s time to move on from his rallies and focus on the real actual dangers..and it’s not Trump. Never really has been.
I am sure you’ve seen all the coverage of “Oh no!! Trump supporters all raised their hands together with the “We’re #1” hand gesture and it looks just like Nazi Germany THE HORROR!!!” Followed by hundreds of comments that all have this sort of tone “How could this happen here? It’s the end of the world!!! We’re on the way to WW2 fascism and Trump is Hitler 2.0!! OH NO!!”
Trump in 2016 was Hitler 2.0, sort of. But now he’s fading and the issue isn’t him, it’s the machinations the GOP is and has been doing while everyone is focused on him. Really, the issue has never been Trump, he’s the figurehead that ended up being positioned into power so that the GOP party could try to undo the massive demographic shifts that are happening and threatening their supremacy. But are most of you paying attention to that? Nope. Why?
Because Trump is the shit-covered distraction that you’re focusing on.
My mom told me years ago that she never listens to political speeches, she reads them, and the reason is simple. She grew up in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power and survived WW2, she remembers hearing some of his speeches and seeing how they swayed the people around her. She told me that when you listen to the speeches you get caught up in the emotion, but when you read them, then you can really see what it is they’re truly saying.
I rarely listen to speeches, I read them and I’ve found that often when you read political speeches it’s much easier to pick out all the empty emotional appeals, ignore them and see what is actually being said. Our country needs to listen less and read more.
We need to stop putting politicians on pedestals and reacting emotionally and start looking at them as interviewees for a job. Do they have the experience? Do they have a good work history? Do they act in ethical ways? What have they accomplished? What are they proposing? Have they shown they can work well with others?
If we did that, we get much better results and a whole lot less corrupt, mindless egomaniacs in office. Which would be a good start towards solving most of our problems.
Meanwhile, we’re all over in panic attack corner discussing the hand waving of Trump’s groupies the GOP is focused on things like utterly destroying the voting process.
And they’re doing it through lawsuits changing how voting works which have skyrocketed in the last year or so.
It’s only mid-September, but GOP groups have already filed 41 election and voting lawsuits in 2022.
As of Sept. 16, Democracy Docket has tracked 76 lawsuits filed so far in 2022 that relate to voting and elections. Of these 76 cases, over half of them (41) were filed by the Republican Party and its allies — a 486% increase in new lawsuits by GOP-affiliated groups from 2021 to 2022.
Notably, 22 of these 41 lawsuits seek to limit mail-in voting access. This category includes cases that challenge absentee ballot deadlines, the use of drop boxes, signature matching rules, cure procedures and more. An AP survey recently confirmed that even in 2020, an election year with a significant increase in drop box use due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there were no widespread problems with drop boxes.
Twelve Republican-filed lawsuits in 2022 were focused on the logistical aspects of running an election, including conspiracy-led challenges against voting machines.
Among the other lawsuits filed this year, one successfully blocked a pro-voting ballot initiative from appearing on Arizona’s ballot this fall, two dealt with post-election results and four seek to limit voter registration opportunities.
The most recent lawsuits involving the Republican National Committee (RNC) reveal the party’s priorities as we approach the midterm elections — legal challenges over how to count election results and which ballots to include in those counts. On Sept. 1, the RNC challenged the authority of Pennsylvania county officials to notify voters of technical mistakes with their mail-in ballots and allow voters to fix simple errors to ensure their ballots are counted, a routine process known as ballot curing. On Sept. 8, the RNC challenged North Carolina’s absentee ballot return deadline, which the state board of elections extended by three days to account for Veterans Day. These recent lawsuits are included in the count of 22 cases dealing with aspects of mail-in voting.
As far as I know, there is only one law firm that is consistently working on fighting against this, and that is Marc Elias’ firm.
So while everyone is worried about the Trump groupies showing up over and over at his pathetic rallies, the RNC is working through the legal system, the legal system that Trump had four years to appoint judges to; in an effort to control the entire process of voting.
Not to mention all the laws they’ve tried to pass to restrict voting. From 2021
This year, 19 states, most of them controlled by Republicans, enacted 34 laws that made voting harder, while many blue states expanded access, particularly to mail voting, according to the Brennan Center’s latest tally. The changes touched off bitter legislative battles and brought major corporations off the sidelines under pressure to declare public support for the right to vote.
“What we’ve seen passed this year is more than a third of all the voting restrictions that have passed in the last decade happened this year,” said Wendy Weiser, the vice president of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center, adding that the count doesn’t fully capture the sheer scale of the changes because of multiple provisions stuffed into large omnibus bills.
And what I tend to see over and over again is that these stories fly under the radar while everyone freaks out about the Trump Rallies. Why are we continuing to talk about his rallies? He has been deplatformed on all social media, so how about we stop sharing videos of how his last pathetic rally went?
Let’s be real here. His last rally in Ohio was held in a volleyball stadium that had a max occupancy of 7000, there were plenty of empty seats. For those of you who have ever visited San Diego Comic-Con, Hall H (the main panel hall) holds around 6000 people. So Trump barely got the same attendance for one event that Comic-Con gets for one panel of stars. Now, Comic-Con goes all weekend, and Hall H is always full, and of different people from different fandoms, not just the MAGA version of Deadheads who follow him around from rally to rally. His last rally in GA barely got 5k people.
Now rally size is overall meaningless anyway, as I have said often, Bernie had massive rallies but never won a primary. But in Trump's world, it matters because he’s a vain narcissist and feeds off the adulation.
Trump’s fame will fade, but not the agenda of the GOP and that’s what people are ignoring when focusing on Trump. People think all of this happened overnight, like suddenly in 2016 the GOP decided to go completely off the rails.
Yeah no, while Trump wasn’t the choice of the party powerbrokers as he is erratic, to say the least, their goals of subverting the process and turning back all progress on social justice, and civil rights and ignoring the reality of climate change, etc have been their platform for decades. Maybe not in the public eye but certainly in the backrooms where the real power resides. The only difference now is that they’re saying all the quiet parts out loud for the first time since the 60s.
Here’s the GOP Platform from 1996…Read it. Everything that they’re pushing now was all there in 1996, just in less aggressive language.
Restoring Justice to the Courts
“When I am president, only conservative judges need apply.” Bob Dole, May 28, 1996, in Aurora, Colorado
The American people have lost faith in their courts, and for good reason. Some members of the federal judiciary threaten the safety, the values, and the freedom of law-abiding citizens. They make up laws and invent new rights as they go along, arrogating to themselves powers King George III never dared to exercise. They free vicious criminals, pamper felons in prison, frivolously overturn State laws enacted by citizen referenda, and abdicate the responsibility of providing meaningful review of administrative decisions.
“The alternative to cold bureaucracy is not indifference. It is the warmth of families and neighborhoods, charities, churches, synagogues and communities. These value-shaping institutions have the tools to reclaim lives — individual responsibility, tough love, and spiritual renewal. They do more than care for the body; they restore the spirit.” Bob Dole, May 23, 1996, in Philadelphia
Stronger Families
We are the party of the American family, educating children, caring for the sick, learning from the elderly, and helping the less fortunate. We believe that strengthening family life is the best way to improve the quality of life for everyone.
Families foster the virtues that make a free society strong. We rely on the home and its supportive institutions to instill honesty, self-discipline, mutual respect and the other virtues that sustain democracy. Our goal is to promote those values by respecting the rights of families and by assisting, where appropriate, the institutions which mediate between government and the home. While recognizing a role for government in dealing with social ills, we look to mediating institutions — religious and community groups, private associations of all kinds — to take the lead in tackling the social ills that some government programs have only worsened.
We know what works in education, and it isn’t the liberal fads of the last thirty years. It’s discipline, parental involvement, emphasis on basics including computer technology, phonics instead of look-say reading, and dedicated teaching.
Abstinence education in the home will lead to less need for birth control services and fewer abortions. We support educational initiatives to promote chastity until marriage as the expected standard of behavior. This education initiative is the best preventive measure to avoid the emotional trauma of sexually-transmitted diseases and teen pregnancies that are serious problems among our young people. While recognizing that something must be done to help children when parental consent or supervision is not possible, we oppose school-based clinics, which provide referrals, counseling, and related services for contraception and abortion.
And if you really want to have fun, look at the things they are supposedly espousing like “no pre-existing conditions should affect insurance” and then see how they fought against all of that when Obama proposed it and then tried to get rid of it after the ACA was passed.
So to act like somehow all of this is on Trump or a weird psychotic break that the GOP is going through is self-delusion at its finest, and liberals are the ones who are deluding themselves here.
The answer to “How did this happen?” is simple, people refused to pay attention to politics.
The answer to “How can these people be like this? Where did they come from? Why is this happening now?” is also simple. These people have always been like this, they came from the same place they always come from, that percentage of the population that is at its core selfish and cruel.
“Why is this happening now?” I answer that question with a question. When did it ever stop happening?
Racism never went away, it was just buried under integration, but the same people were still racist. Nationalism never went away, it just hops from country to country in a fairly consistent pattern as the political pendulum swings to and fro. The concept that the President should be all-powerful? Well, humans that seek power eventually seek all the power. As they say, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
But the key that most liberals who are freaking out are overlooking is the small power plays, the school boards that get co-opted, the bureaucracies that define the rules, the poll workers all the little cogs in the wheels that the conservatives have controlled for years. Those are the areas we need to focus on, not just the head of the snake. Because the GOP isn’t a snake, it’s a hydra, and cutting off one head does nothing, it just makes another one.
And all of this comes down to one thing and one thing alone….people staying informed.
We don’t, we never do until it’s too late and we refuse to take the time to go to source documents and cut through all the pandering to get to the core truths.
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