The Trump Post-Presidency and Insurrection

Nice copy pasta. Still no original thoughts?

I wrote everything I said in Message 239. You wrote almost none of the words in the response you posted. From the Forum Guidelines:

6. Avoid lengthy cut-n-pastes. Introduce the point in your own words and provide a link to your source as a reference. If your source is not on-line you may contact the Site Administrator to have it made available on-line.

Use your words. No one's interested in arguing with cut-n-pastes and videos. The Internet is a big place and anyone's ability to cut-n-paste dwarfs what could be verified or responded to by single individuals.Fox News is not a news organization but a propaganda machine who serves up what their viewers want to hear and will say whatever it takes to keep them. The Dominion case makes this eminently clear.--Percy

Yes, I noticed. Most all bare assertions with no supporting evidence. Here we go again. Message 236 is a bare link with none of your words. I could easily load this message up with examples of Forum Rule #10 being shattered by your helpers.When you play the forum rule card while breaking those rules yourself, it tells me that I probably need to vacate for awhile like I've wisely done a few times in the past. I could be close to a banning, and this terrifies me greatly.

I provided a link to the news article about Fox News' lies about Dominion, and the rest is just common knowledge. If you'd like to dispute some of it then you have to tell me what it is you're disputing. Boy are you ever out to lunch. Look at the date, Marc. It was an April Fool's joke, and *all* the words were mine. The link is self-referencing, i.e., to the message containing it. If you think Fox News didn't lie about some of the items in my list you're more than welcome to ask me to support my assertions, but I don't know why you'd do that. The Dominion case all by itself is enough to illustrate how Fox News's priorities lie with ratings and audience levels, not truth and accuracy. They throw a lot of stuff against the wall, and whatever sticks (i.e., the audience responds well) they give them more of. Truth is not part of their equation. In fact, as we've seen, telling the truth can get you fired at Fox News.--Percy

Here are a few I have read.
Trump is, in my opinion, a Nationalist but clearly not a Socialist.
I Know Fascists; Donald Trump Is No Fascist <---From Atlantic

The Atlantic Magazine:

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s Donald Trump a fascist? Several commentators in America, my adoptive country, on both the left and right, have essentially compared “The Donald” to Mussolini, the fascist strongman who destroyed my old country Italy for a time, leaving behind half a million dead and the lingering poison of civil war.

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“The brand of fascism was invented and exported by Italians,” Vittorio Foa, a Resistance hero and the father of Italy’s Republican Constitution, used to quip. He was right and, having grown up in the birthplace of fascism and lived through its aftereffects, I am dead sure: Trump is not a fascist. Using the label not only belittles past tragedies and obscures future dangers, but also indicts his supporters, who have real grievances that mainstream politicians ignore at their peril. America should tackle the demons Trump unleashes in 2016, not tar him by association with ideas and tactics he doesn’t even know about.(...)Western democracies learned how to prevent fascists from taking power again. The danger I see in Trump is that nobody yet knows how to oppose his particular brand of populism, in America or Europe.(...)Trump’s fans are too few to march on Washington, but way too many to ignore or mock. They want jobs, schools, safe communities. If you keep your eyes on their needs, and not on Trump’s distorted hall of mirrors, you will not see “fascists” but instead people forgotten by both Democrats and Republicans.

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That was an old article from 2016, before the January 6th fiasco. There are more sources, however.
Are Trump Republicans Fascists?

Boston University:

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There’s a libertarian strand of American politics, going back to 1776, that is used to interpret January 6 as a moment of positive anti-authoritarianism. If you think about Rosa Parks defying bad law, there’s nothing violent about that. Almost all January 6 insurrectionists—I wouldn’t call [them] fascists, because fascists are people who were involved in the interwar period. But there’s no question that they’re violent anti-democrats who are also violently racist. And the Republican Party is in danger of becoming the party of violence, anti-democracy, and racism. If there is any kind of similarity with the interwar period, it’s that you have conservatives willing to collaborate for political reasons with people who are often violent and racist and antidemocratic.

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Personally, I think that a lot of the anger from Republican Populists stems from the fact that the economy is imploding and that they are being marginalized in order to address minority groups that used to be the marginalized ones. So there is some legitimate social unrest in the MAGA group. I do think that the Democrats need to address the concerns of marginalized populists regardless of the fact that many of them are white.
Is Trump a fascist? 8 experts weigh in.

Vox:

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So I reached out to the experts I talked to back then. Four of the five replied, and I also got in touch with a few more scholars who have researched fascism to get a broader view.

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The responses were, again, unanimous, albeit tinged with much greater concern about Trump’s authoritarian and violent tendencies. No one thinks Trump is a fascist leader, full stop. Jason Stanley, a Yale philosopher and author of How Fascism Works, came closest to that conclusion, saying that “you could call legitimately call Trumpism a fascist social and political movement” and that Trump is “using fascist political tactics,” but that Trump isn’t necessarily leading a fascist government.

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|If Trump manages to get out of the trouble he is in now, he will again carry a broad base of disenfranchised populists, but I doubt whether it will be enough of a majority to win.First, he has to refute the charges brought against him. I think that dredging up Stormy Daniels was a low blow, personally.

Stormy Daniel's was not " dredged up".

Phat writes in his own words: 1. the economy is NOT imploding. you are spreading a lie of fear.2. the minority groups are STILL being marginalized today. new groups are being added (especially the 'T' in LGBTQ+).3. the marginalized whites are not directing their anger against the Republicans who cause their woes, but against the Democrats, who have been successfully demonized in the USA by the corporate rich Republicans for portraying them as being "communists" or "socialists", despite FDR's liberalism being the only successful agents in their favor.Unfortunately it takes work, work that they are unwilling to do because it feels too much like going back to school again.

how is it a low blow? are Christians now A-Ok with adultery?

And lying, and tax evasion, and illegally manipulating business records.

First, we want to know why *you* think Trump is not a fascist, not the article's author, Gianni Riotta. Second, don't you think Ms. Riotta's opinion might have changed by January 7th, 2021?In essence all you've said is, "Seven years ago this person didn't believe Trump was a fascist." His increasingly authoritarian behavior all through his presidency and his efforts after the 2020 vote to overturn a free and fair election have pretty much cemented his fascist bonafides Yeah, exactly! Why is it always the Republicans that have to deal with those uppity blacks? Why don't Democrats ever do anything about them? Right on, brother. White populist concerns about uppity blacks should be taken seriously by the Democrats. Black Live Matters my ass. A couple of comments here. Am I to understand that you think it was a worse thing to have made the Stormy Daniels payoff public than to have cheated on your wife, paid Daniels to keep quiet so that the public wouldn't factor that into their voting decisions, then maintained the secrecy by cooking the books of your organization to hide payoffs under the category of legal fees?My other comment is that it was the highly conservative Wall Street Journal that broke the Stormy Daniels story: Trump Lawyer Arranged $130,000 Payment for Adult-Film Star’s Silence--Percy

I did not mention blacks at all. All I am defending is the notion that populist concerns should not be ignored. If you want to make it a black/white thing, I would only say that populists(many of them white) should NOT have to go to the back of the bus in the name of affirmative action. But I was NOT trying to make populism a black/white issue. The Populists(a 2015 article)

quote:

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That’s the volatile nature of populism: it can ignite reform or reaction, idealism or scapegoating. It flourishes in periods like Watson’s, and like our own, when large numbers of citizens who see themselves as the backbone of America (“producers” then, “the middle class” now) feel that the game is rigged against them. They aren’t the wretched of the earth—Sanders attracts educated urbanites, Trump small-town businessmen. They’re people with a sense of violated ownership, holding a vision of an earlier, better America that has come under threat.

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Sometimes I feel this way, though I think I see both sides of the argument.

quote:

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Trump takes it to a demagogic extreme. There’s no dirtier word in the lexicon of his stump speech than “politician.” He incites his audiences’ contempt for the very notion of solving problems through political means. China, the Islamic State, immigrants, unemployment, Wall Street: just let him handle it—he’ll build the wall, deport the eleven million, rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment, create the jobs, kill the terrorists. He offers no idea beyond himself, the leader who can reverse the country’s decline by sheer force of personality.

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I think that if by some legal means Trump delays his judgement, he could prove to be a force in politics one last time. If our economy does collapse before then, he may be the only one that can pull us out of it,,,,albeit at the cost of damaging nearly every political alliance in existence. Is that Fascist? The question is the same as the one leveled at the German people in the twenties: Would you rather be broke?

You didn't have to. These "marginalized populists" complain about the same things you do, Black Lives Matter and reparation discussions and so forth. Your racism is no secret. You're using the term "populist" incorrectly. Trump is the populist. His followers can be called many things (rubes, suckers, white nationalists, white supremacists, mob rule advocates), but not populists. You already made it a "black/white thing" when you started classifying white groups as marginalized. Are there actually conservatives making the absurd claim that they're being asked to go to the back of bus? Or is this a metaphor for their feelings of grievance that they're being turned into second class citizens at the same time that they're victimizing blacks and other minorities at a horrifying rate, even being so daring as to oust a pair of black lawmakers from the Tennessee legislature. Trump is as racist as they come, and he's out there convincing the people already at the top of the heap that they're actually marginalized victims. It's his antagonism toward our democratic institutions, free and fair elections for example, that make him fascist. The German people were never presented a choice between destitution and fascism. That Hitler was intent on becoming a fascist dictator wasn't something he made public. You appear to be suggesting that fascism is an alternative worth considering if it improves the economy.--Percy

No, I wouldnt go that far, though I suspect that the Conservatives seem to understand some of my pet peeves while the Liberals act as if I'm making stuff up. I know how much you all loathe Tucker Carlson, and I also understand your argument that Fox News caters to what its audience wants to hear, but my friend sent me this clip of Carlson describing the upcoming collapse (or demise) of the US Dollar which just so happens to corroborate with what Ive been researching. Meanhile, the Democrats (many of you) act as if though its all made up. I think that "your side" wants to believe that the whole demise of the dollar thing is a Right Wing Conspiracy, and I believe that you are all WRONG. Prove me otherwise.
Short Clip

It's less that we think you're making stuff up then that your knowledge and comprehension is so poor that oftentimes you're not even wrong, or even comprehensible. Translation: Fox News tells lies that it knows are lies to its audience. Translation: "This reinforces my fantasies, so I'm going to believe it." That's because it is. You're a fantasist who is particularly vulnerable to YouTube videos delivered in an urgent and intense tone. More a fairy tale than a conspiracy. Every day that your fantasies don't come true is proof that you're wrong. Omigod, another YouTube video. Give it up, already.--Percy