Should the GOP—at either federal or state levels—play a stronger role in primaries to prevent candidates like Christine O’Donnell Roy Moore Blake Masters Herschel Walker Dr. Oz Mark Robinson from being nominated? The GOP base clearly wants crazy…
[T]he Republican insistence on nominating crazy people … affects us all. If you nominate and elect Tommy Tuberville to the United States Senate, we all have to pay a price. If you allow rancid weeds like Matt Gaetz and Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene to grow at your grassroots, cut them off before I have to put up with them. I remember when it looked like Nevada was going to inflict Sharron (The Chicken Lady) Angle and Maryland was going to hand us the famous non-witch Christine O’Donnell, and I thought that truly was one step beyond. Turns out there is no Beyond. Mark Robinson is proof of that. He should stay on the ballot. He is the perfect GOP candidate for 2024.
[I]t’s a little unclear why Republicans think [Robinson’s Nazi posts] should be a career-ender for a MAGA politician. It all just sounds like a typical dinner conversation at Mar-a-Lago.
… It’s not like Robinson’s comments on [various fascist /pornographic forums] differ in substance from what’s coming from the top of the ticket, even if he sometimes used more blunt language.
… Trump hasn’t publicly engaged in Holocaust denial, but he did make sure to be seen dining with prominent Holocaust denialist Nick Fuentes, along with the notoriously anti-semitic rapper Kanye West. Tucker Carlson, who gave a fascistic speech at the Republican National Convention, also recently championed a Holocaust denier, without losing an ounce of support from Trump. Trump also enjoys genocidal rhetoric, bragging that his proposed mass deportation of millions will be “bloody.”
… In everything Robinson said under his pseudonym, there’s a parallel in mainstream MAGA culture.
Rarely, if ever, has a presidential campaign collapsed from seeming assurance into utter chaos as Trump-Vance has. The campaign seems to have stumbled into a strange unintended message: “Let’s go to war with Taylor Swift to stop Haitians from eating dogs.” The VP candidate wants to raise tariffs on toasters and worries that with Roe v. Wade overturned, George Soros may every day fill a 747 airliner with abortion-seeking pregnant Black women.
The stink of impending defeat fills the air—and so much of the defeat would be self-inflicted.
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David Frum, “This is What a Losing Campaign Looks Like,” Atlantic Magazine.
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UD rarely passes along rumors… But she’s heard that “retorts” are not the only thing Vance is “firing off” in his free time. In line with his crippling anxiety about American birth dearth, and inspired by his colleague Vladimir Putin’s order that birth dearthy Russians have procreative sex during work breaks, Vance has been secreted away in fertility clinics, masturbating to beat the band, in an effort to inject his sperm maximally into childless cat ladies.
Mark Robinson really is a poor person’s Donald Trump. While Trump is paying off porn stars, Mark Robinson is paying to watch porn stars. Both have multiple bankruptcies. Donald Trump lost his casinos. Mark Robinson lost his house. Donald Trump built his profile of outrageousness through shock jocks and tabloids. Robinson built his through social media, both looking for a applause and clicks. Both appeal to evangelicals as defenders against those who belittle them. Both lie as easily as they breathe.
“Trump Says That if He Loses, ‘the Jewish People
Would Have a Lot to Do’ With It“
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Source of post title here.
Hitlerian, religiously self-righteous and into sexual threesomes, homophobic, book-burning, and now headed up by a Jan 6 rioter who’s been lying a hot streak to the authorities about the rioting, Moms for Liberty offers madcap comedy that just – er – keeps coming.
Guardino initially told law enforcement that she was at Trump’s rally but, after its conclusion, returned to her hotel room. She later admitted to law enforcement that she returned to the Capitol grounds — and saw no barriers blocking her path and that there was one broken window. She said she did not see or smell tear gas.
Guardino said she entered the Capitol and found it to be “peaceful,” “akin to a tour,” and “open to the public.” She later admitted that this was not a “public tour,” as there were no security screenings or metal protectors, nor was she asked to show identification.
The federal complaint has several images of Guardino entering the Capitol grounds. They also traced her cell phone inside the building — and further photographs of her filming the scene. They also have pictures of her in the mob of people just outside the building.
Around 3:17 p.m. that day, officers closed the window Guardino had entered through and told her and other rioters to exit the building. Guardino complied and left, but images show her re-entering the building at 3:21 p.m. She started filming again but was redirected by law enforcement to leave. She did so at 3:24 p.m.
Law enforcement officials concluded in the complaint that there was “probable cause” that Guardino impeded and disrupted the orderly conduct of government business. There was also “cause” that she “willfully and knowingly uttered loud, threatening, or abusive language once inside the Capitol.” She also remained in a “restricted building and grounds without the lawful authority to do so.”
Now that she’s been arrested, she can transfer the job of lying to her attorneys.
‘A man … arises from the underbrush … about two hundred yards from the golfers. [It’s] evident he holds a weapon in his right hand, a semiautomatic rifle.’
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Don DeLillo already wrote this latest event, though he was off by two hundred yards:
Mr. Trump was perhaps 400 yards away from the armed man, Sheriff Bradshaw said.
An AK-47-style rifle with a scope was found…
I like the pessimism of this, and in particular the “eagerness for political violence” thing, though it should be amended to eagerness for violence tout court. Watch any interview with a Trumpist; survey the brainless at play on Jan 6 footage; for that matter, listen to their leader try to form a thought. The power of the movement is that it’s now way past impediments like ideology. Take megaMAGA donor Leonard Leo. As Katherine Stewart points out, “Leo and his cronies have never really cared about ideas, because the one idea they keep repeating is that they care about America’s constitutional government. And yet, they have put their weight and money behind a man, Donald Trump, who attempted a coup, and they are filling our courts with judges who seem keen to enable the MAGA project of destroying the Constitution.”
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Trump has always been little more than a sadist, and he has succeeded in molding the movement entirely into his image. It’s basically just sadism now.
Trump himself has no political convictions, and though various fanatics, like Vance, Vermeule, Deneen, and the rest of the Cathophate Party, attach themselves to him, they will always find their cynicism misplaced — as, for instance, when Trump backtracks on abortion (their paramount issue) because he’s never given a shit about it one way or another and only cares about winning an election.
As with his having most recently set the hounds loose on Springfield, Ohio, Trump represents little more than a goad to violence, most famously on display on Jan 6, but abundantly obvious in other venues. Yet while his followers cleave to their sadism, Trump himself lately displays low-energy sadism/inspiration toward crowd-sadism. It is perhaps a bad sign for his current presidential campaign that the bloody shrieks of lock her up from his first campaign are much less evident in this one, and that his sickening on-stage stalking of Hillary Clinton has been reduced, against Kamala Harris, to surly, staring straight ahead, nihilism.
All of which is to say that even world historical sadists get old. To be sure, second generation Trumpian sadism thrives in his sons, and most notably in La Pasionaria Lara Trump, but Trump himself looks more like Humbert Humbert at the conclusion of Lolita: a washed-up roué who has trouble getting it up even for the debauching of a nation.
The legacy for which he will have to settle is the creation of dread, in half the country, that if he loses this election his followers will set the place on fire. Think of all those guns he has helped put in the hands of all those sadists.
Insisting that he was widely respected, Trump invoked the support of Viktor Orbán, the far-right prime minister of Hungary, who has dissented from Nato’s support for Ukraine in its war with Russia and shares much of the former president’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.
“Viktor Orbán is known for destroying Hungarian democracy using techniques Trump has tried to copy,” said David Driesen, a constitutional law professor at Syracuse University, who has written on the capture of democratic institutions by autocratic leaders. “It was surreal to hear Trump cite Orbán’s praise as validation of his own leadership.”