Trump is drifting back to a happier time…when being President just meant occasionally nominating somebody that someone told him to nominate for the Supreme Court. He longs for the good ole days.
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This guy is to far gone for that. But good news is they don’t vote.
Lol, I’ve been contemplating texting “Trump knew” to a Trumper but have so far refrained.
Maybe some Trumpers take this more seriously?
Just seems wildly irresponsible to sit on this info.
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Grunching, so not sure if ponied. I’m going totally off of memory right now, so while I might have scope and scale and some details slightly off all of what I’m saying here is materially what happened. In the late-1970s someone realized something major. The least reliable voting bloc was religious voters. They almost never voted. This person realized if these types could be mobilized into voting reliably that they would be able to shape agenda for generations because there were so many of them. The people who came up with this were from the religious right, and eventually the voters they changed from being the least reliable to most reliable voters are now referred to as Evangelical Christians. This group of people that became the influence of this giant bloc are known for perverting the Bible, teaching the ‘prosperity gospel’, and grifting from the susceptible population for the max amount possible.
The name of the group that started it was the Moral Majority, founded by Jerry Falwell, Sr. You might have noticed his son recently made the news as a torch bearer of the ‘movement’. They then teamed with a super secret organization called the Council for National Policy founded by Tim LaHaye (known for the Left Behind books and movies) that would be the equivalent of a Conservative think tank today. These groups blended together around 1979 or 1980 and there’s no clear line of when Council for National Policy was founded though it’s no earlier than 1979 and no later than the primary run up to the 1980 presidential election.
The idea these grifters had was this:
We need to craft a TV network of our ideas to compete against CBS, NBC, and ABC aka liberal Hollywood in their eyes. If we could just get eyes on our ideas they would take over and dominate this nation.
They recruited a number of what would basically be billionaires today in the hopes of buying one of the networks. They had no clue this was impossible, because duh. Lucky for them cable TV was right around the corner so it didn’t fizzle out into nothing overnight. My theory of the movement was that these people went to billionaires and promised them they could be saved if they would just get on board this cause. That their money could go to a worthy cause and they could feel better about how awful they were as people.
The founders were grifters, and they grifted billionaires. They, in turn, used the billionaires’ money to create an organization that would be able to grift susceptible marks with a message of how much power they could bring their movement if only they voted. Then grifters came in and grifted the group promising that they could get them what they wanted. It’s an absolute circle of grift from start to finish. The first candidate this group got behind was Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election.
As the Council for National Policy gained more influence, future Republican presidential primary candidates could not ignore them and were basically forced to speak at their secret conference. A notable exception of someone who refused to appear in his primary was none other than Rudy Giuliani.
For nearly 40 years, this group pushed, prodded, and shaped Republican policy ideals through the lens of the religious right and their insanely powerful and reliable voting bloc. If you shut them out, you didn’t have a chance to win on a national scale. Because of who the people were who founded the group, how they went about growing the organization, and how stupid they were about getting there by pretty much any means necessary, it’s zero shock they finally got their big win with the election of Trump. He’s the culmination of that nearly 40 years of work. They had huge influence over Dubya getting the nomination in 2000 after he spoke in front of it in 1999 but I think their influence over him was less strong than anyone else who got the Republican nomination after him.
Look up Council for National Policy on wikipedia. It just scratches the surface and appears to have been scrubbed a bit somewhat recently, but you’ll be able to connect the lines from then to today very easily. When anyone says voting doesn’t matter, point to this organization and what it did. They took a bloc that never voted and made them the most reliable voters in this country’s history. What people refer to as bad Boomers are just the religious right, old now, continuing to vote like they were told to to shape this country when they never dreamed of doing so previously to when they first started voting.
Apply this to the young generation of today, provided we fade 2020, and you would be amazed at what policy we’ll be able to get in a very short period of time. Council for National Policy started at zero in 1979 with the backing of a couple of ‘billionaires’. By the mid-90s, they had profound influence in American politics. By 2016, they had finally gotten a president they thought they had in their pocket (it’s arguable Dubya was their first and they certainly pushed Reagan over the finish line in 1980). The progressive movement is starting 90 meters deep in a 100 meter race and if it does something like what the Council for National Policy did by activating eligible voters who didn’t, this country could be progressive in probably fewer than 8 years accomplishing all the goals of the CNP from the opposite side in a fraction of the time.
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Abortion isn’t their sole issue. It’s their moral escape hatch when confronted about their horrible political views. Their true motivation is racism, bigotry, and other deplorable views. It’s why the anti-abortion crowd keeps finding the worst racist pieces of shit in society to put into office despite having the numbers to determine the outcome of any republican primary. But when they’re confronted about voting for a horrible person, rather than giving an honest answer they can fallback on abortion. It also allows them to believe they have the moral high ground, because without the abortion issue they’d have to confront the reality that the rest of their views are awful.
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Yeah that’s the fox army talking point
This is a trolley problem with some perverse economic incentives thrown in.
Getting Trump out of office is worth millions of lives, potentially much more, so even if holding back adds 1% to the chance Trump is ousted from office its worth tens of thousands of lives.
On the other hand, if he goes public in March maybe some people take COVID more seriously but honestly probably not, are you people paying attention? Basically nobody is like “after a review of the scientific literature I’ve decided to go to a bar / travel / whatever.” The idiots would have still been idiots and everyone would have forgotten this story in two weeks.
Obviously you also have Woodward and his publisher wanting to cash in at a time of peak interest, but even if that drove the decision it doesn’t change the analysis above.
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Dems would have to be crazy to not impeach Trump over this, so I assume they won’t do it.
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this is also correct, they can’t be on the wrong side cuz the other side SUPPORTS KILLING BABIES
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I feel like the senate would not confirm any of them.
Seems like his finger should be permanently mashed without sweating on the Sell books in September button. Woodward’s been pretty consistently awful about stuff like this (being in the know and doing nothing about it) since, oh, I don’t know at least 2000.
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Ted Cruz.
Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Best joke ever.
The Senate always confirms their own. Better question is why would any of them want it. They all want to be President, not on SCOTUS.
Ted Cruz is the most disliked member of the Senate, everyone supposedly hates him
Which is possibly why he’s considering putting them onto the SC. He sees himself as a Caesar now and he’s worried about plotters; if he wins it will be closer to Caligula.
“If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you,” Sen. Lindsay Graham said in February.
RE: Trump downplaying the virus
His followers think we’re overreacting to the virus now. They will applaud his efforts to keep us from overreacting then.
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