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beloch 13 hours ago [-]
The U.S. government shutdown has halted pay to the TSA, but not ICE, so ICE is taking over from the TSA in airports[1]. If you fly to the U.S., starting Monday apparently, the first think you're likely to see is masked gunmen giving you the eye.
Would anyone argue that the TSA, Theatre Security Agency, shouldn’t be defunded?
Macha 13 hours ago [-]
Replacing it with nothing in an orderly fashion? Probably a good move.
Replacing them with ICE as a political gesture? Not so much
derf_ 13 hours ago [-]
The TSA is responsible for more than just airports. As someone with family who works (worked) on port security in the maritime division, I would argue that Chesterton's Fence [0] applies here just as much as anywhere else.
Many of us were alive when the TSA was created. It's not a mystery why it's there. (Mostly so politicians could say they did something to improve air travel security.)
rendaw 7 hours ago [-]
Ports had no security before 2001? What does TSA do there?
The Coast Guard has long been responsible for port security. TSA does administer TWIC, the Transportation Worker Identification Credential program, which is a biometric identification system go access to secure port facilities.
tombert 13 hours ago [-]
There's an argument for that, though I think replacing it with Trump's basically-unregulated private military is pretty concerning.
hmmokidk 13 hours ago [-]
This isn’t that.
mlrtime 4 hours ago [-]
Depends on what defunded means... if it means pay/control shifting from a Federal agency to local, then yes.
Maning, airports / municipalities should be funding this. If airports were in control the the user experience, I bet you would see a lot better outcomes.
13 hours ago [-]
diego_moita 13 hours ago [-]
It will be so much fun to watch the World Cup from outside the US...
SSLy 3 hours ago [-]
Remember to use a pirate stream.
diego_moita 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah! That will be even better!
taneq 13 hours ago [-]
I feel like "form your own private paramilitary organisation with minimal oversight, then expand their reach by having them take over the operations of other government departments" has been done before somewhere, as part of a larger plan.
nclin_ 13 hours ago [-]
This is a historical pattern: Bringing border forces to bear against your own population, because those border forces are trained to deal with people who don't have the rights of the state.
gotwaz 13 hours ago [-]
They dont have all the skills to do anything super complex in a sustainable way. Already proved in the first term. What their existence demonstrates is winning election is not super complex if you can find enough groups to precisely target and pander/capture attention. Social media has been a force multiplier for such behavior and the people that have emerged dont have any other skill other than attention capture. But thats short term win like full focus on marketing while product and operations have no hope of catching up. Every "large plan" will fail. Large plans in complex ever changing environments always need massive cooperation of very different skills. Never happens sustainably with just one skill dominating all.
mattoxic 12 hours ago [-]
They dont have all the skills to do anything super complex in a sustainable way.
And that's stopped them?
gotwaz 12 hours ago [-]
We know the answer. Whats stopping ebola or a hurricane from over running everything?
encrypted_bird 13 hours ago [-]
It has. (Unless you're being sarcastic, in which case I'm not surprised it went over my head. Lol.)
ajkjk 13 hours ago [-]
of course they were
encrypted_bird 13 hours ago [-]
Hey, tone doesn't translate well over text, they did not use anu tone tags, and I'm already terrible at reading tone in the best of times. Lol, can you really blame me for at least asking? Haha.
taneq 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I was aiming for irony but I should probably have added /s at the end there. It's definitely in the mid-late chapters in any "how to install a fascist regime" handbook.
AceJohnny2 13 hours ago [-]
> So ICE is taking over from the TSA in airports
It's even more disgusting than that:
"Tom Homan: ICE officers will not assist with airport security scanning amid TSA staffing shortage"
I can't tell what's supposed to be disgusting about this unless you stopped reading past the inflammatory headline.
fundad 13 hours ago [-]
Enter the country and you interact with CBP and that hasn't changed. CBP agents are the ones who murdered the legal observers in Minneapolis so there's that.
TSA checks bags for commercial airlines which is a service that should never have been nationalized.
jordanb 13 hours ago [-]
It would really be amazing if the end result of all of this is the post-9/11 DHS finally gets reverted back to what we had before.
fundad 1 hours ago [-]
An amazing start.
bdangubic 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ohyoutravel 13 hours ago [-]
TSA is mostly people who want a job and act pretty professionally in the hundreds or thousand times I’ve encountered them. ICE encourages people with anger issues who hate brown people to apply. These are not the same.
bdangubic 13 hours ago [-]
it isn’t about people and which group is mostly this or that. Americans have long accepted to have their Constitutional Rights violated at the airports so it really doesn’t matter if it is TSA or ICE or whatever three-letter gang runs it
andrewflnr 13 hours ago [-]
This is binary thinking that has no place in predicting the real world. In practice, the specific person violating your constitutional rights makes a big difference in how badly your rights are violated.
bdangubic 8 hours ago [-]
oh I love this… so good! like OK to violate me a little but don’t but know where to draw the line. this is like an excuse of a chronic domestic abuser, “I slapped her/him around a little but did not slam/her against a wall”
cdrnsf 13 hours ago [-]
Funny, everyone outside of the US should exercise increased caution when dealing with or visiting the US.
Arubis 13 hours ago [-]
Also, everyone within the US already should exercise increased caution.
pier25 13 hours ago [-]
I travelled to the US some weeks ago and was anxious but everything turned out ok. I'm happy I don't have to go back any time soon.
JPKab 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
pier25 12 hours ago [-]
I won't share personal details but you couldn't be more wrong.
12 hours ago [-]
surgical_fire 13 hours ago [-]
Or maybe he just got lucky.
Impossible to prove otherwise. No reason to try his luck.
dotancohen 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
JPKab 12 hours ago [-]
I worked in the Pentagon for 10 years, and got my beak wet with neural nets there very early, back when we were using Playstation 3s for their GPUs.
I was staunchly against the Iraq war, but even when Bush was president I didn't let it compromise my patriotism.
The amount of people on here who ignore the fact that Iran was the primary enabler of Hamas' attack on 10/7/23, and therefore sowed the seeds of the destruction of Gaza, is insane. Basically, if Trump does a thing, they are against it, independent of the thing. There is no principle, just reactionary hatred. If Biden had launched this war, none of these people would have had a problem with it. I am 100% positive on that assumption.
galangalalgol 12 hours ago [-]
It seems like about 20% of people judge the actions of a us administration independent of their partisan positions. I am recently joined and cannot claim it is from any virtue on my part. A backlash against an attempted autocratic takeover is a common starting point for successful ones by an opposing party. Leftist autocratic coups are only slightly rarer than rightist ones. We are in the middle of an attempted rightist one, but that doesn't mean we are safe if we remove them.
nozzlegear 12 hours ago [-]
>If Biden had launched this war, none of these people would have had a problem with it. I am 100% positive on that assumption.
I think you're wrong here. As a Biden stan who's gone to the mat debating Biden's policies here on HN many times in the past, he lost pretty much all of the remaining good will he had by defending and supporting Israel for so long after it became clear what they were doing in Gaza. Biden wouldn't be getting a free pass in the Middle East if it were helping Israel's goals (ignoring the fact that Biden is much more of a dove than Trump).
mcphage 12 hours ago [-]
> Basically, if Trump does a thing, they are against it, independent of the thing.
Because on top of doing terrible things, the non-terrible things he does, he does incredibly badly.
> There is no principle, just reactionary hatred.
No, we’re all good little Bayesians around here.
> If Biden had launched this war, none of these people would have had a problem with it.
You’re really missing what’s going on here. The reason that people liked Biden is that he would not have launched this war.
what 11 hours ago [-]
> The reason that people liked Biden is that he would not have launched this war.
No, they liked him because he wasn’t Trump. And then they liked Trump more after having him.
mcphage 3 hours ago [-]
> And then they liked Trump more after having him.
And it only cost them their country. Not bad!
anon7000 12 hours ago [-]
I highly disagree, one clear thing conservatives and liberals largely agree on is no more wars in the Middle East. It’s astonishing to me that Trump supporters who voted for an isolationist policy are happy with him intervening in the Middle East (not to mention South America) again.
Yes, I am “reactively” hating our president for starting wars without congressional approval and with very handwavy explanations. Besides, he has a track record for saying whatever the fuck he wants if he thinks people will like it, so you can’t trust the words from his mouth anyways. It’s pretty infuriating, actually.
I would be much happier if there was a clear justification and rational explanation for the president starting more wars in the Middle East. And yes, because Biden has a slightly better baseline of not telling bold-faced lies, I could see more people giving the benefit of the doubt at first. But overall, liberals did not like Biden very much. Trump, on the other hand, has a pretty hardcore base of people who don’t seem to care what he says or that he does/says the opposite of what he used to say. Pretty weird.
By the way, this opinion is not formed by reading or listening to any kind of mainstream media. It’s formed from listening to the words coming out of Trump’s mouth for the past fucking decade.
dotancohen 11 hours ago [-]
If "no more wars in the middle east" means that America can not protect herself from a nation that regularly chants Death To America, then it really means "I'd rather see America as a society fail than stand up and defend myself".
donkeybeer 33 minutes ago [-]
Words are violence!!!
Chanting for death to any country or religion is not violence dude. Until and actually Iran launches an attack on the USA.
Iran didn't start this war, America and Israel did, while right in the middle of a pretend negotiation with them.
I believe this is a strong sign that any time Israel or America are asking to negotiate with any country, they should prepare a full scale military action ready for the real "negotiation".
edit: Are you a dual citizen? Everyone has a right to free speech of course and to support or not support any country or cause. But if you feel so strongly about a foreign country, why don't you be honest with yourself and pick a lane. I say this to everyone, not just Israeli, but Chinese, Dutch, any other dual citizens.
surgical_fire 12 hours ago [-]
Oh yes, Iran enabled Hamas in a vacuum.
Nothing happened prior to 10/07/23, no sir. Just an evil country doing evil things. Of course the US and Israel are victims on all this.
dotancohen 11 hours ago [-]
Yes, Hamas had been shooting rockets at Israel for almost two decades by that point.
surgical_fire 6 hours ago [-]
Probably for no reason whatsoever.
dotancohen 29 minutes ago [-]
Probably because the destruction of the state of Israel is clearly stated in the Hamas charter. As is massacre of Jews.
If you don't know this, then you probably shouldn't have such strong opinions on the topic.
nandomrumber 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
archagon 12 hours ago [-]
What is “white culture”?
I re-flagged OP.
JPKab 42 minutes ago [-]
There was absolutely no reason to flag my comment, other than the fact that you disagree with it because it penetrates your Bay Area bubble of distorted reality.
I don't know what the comment you are replying to was talking about, and I agree that "white culture" is an absurd false construct, because "white" is a false construct. I understand flagging stuff like that, but nothing in my comment warranted it. I expressed a logical opinion. The percentage of people in the United States present on legal visas getting caught up by ICE is near-zero. It's an entirely propagandistic narrative to suggest otherwise, based entirely on motivated reasoning.
And before you label me a bigot or whatever to feed your sense of moral superiority, be aware that I'm the only "white" person in my household, and I'm also, by far, the most "liberal". Outside of the Bay Area, a lot of people of color like my wife and her family absolutely despise your politics, viewing them as luxury beliefs.
My politics are basically identical to Garry Tan's, but you've lost the plot so much that you felt a need to flag my comment.
TheSpiceIsLife 11 hours ago [-]
White European culture, and including the USA, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, South Africa and Zimbabwe before they turned to shit.
Freedom of expression, not executing gays or hunting them for sport; the end of slavery, universal suffrage, space exploration, being able to criticise the government.
Am I allowed to have an opinion?
If it differs from yours?
Diversity. So long as I conform?
archagon 11 hours ago [-]
What do you mean by European? Because as someone with Slavic heritage, I'd rather you excluded my culture from your offensively aggregated "Western European" culture. You don't get to claim Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, and Solzhenitsyn just because the color of our skin has a similar shade. In terms of religion, the Orthodox Church only has surface-level overlap with Evangelical Protestantism. And much like the Irish, Polish, and other "less desirable" European ethnicities, we weren't even considered fully white until sometime in the 20th century.
Europe is a massive melting pot, not some single, monolithic "culture." In fact, I have much more in common with my Latino neighbors than the WASPs having conniptions over the purported decline of "white culture."
> the end of slavery
Lol, lmao. Well, it's pretty obvious what fetid corners of the web you lurk in.
TheSpiceIsLife 8 hours ago [-]
Funnily enough, the part of Australia I grew up in had and has a very successful set of communities of Croatian, Yugoslavians, Ukrainian, Polish, Italian, and Greeks.
In other nearby regions Slovenians, Lebanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, Taiwanese, Filipino, Indians, Pakistani, Nepalese…
Have all managed to end up co-existing, build businesses, even to the extent that we’ve got along well enough to build a nation together.
And yeah, I actually don’t know anyone who owns slaves around here. I’ve met people from all over Europe and the USA and none of them own slaves or are involved in the slave trade.
Australian doesn’t have forced labour prisons, it’s optional and the inmates gain additional benefits for their labour and the potential to have their custodial sentence reduced.
But anyway, the whole point isn’t to say that I don’t like brown people.
The point is to goad people like you to claim I live in some fetid corner.
Simply for saying I’m white, and I’m proud of what my ancestors have accomplished.
My Dutch and Italian ancestors left their home lands and have become know throughout the word as very successful farmers pretty much everywhere they’ve settled.
But thats not an okay thing to say.
It’s okay to be black a proud, LGBTQI+ and proud, it’s okay to sterilise children, mutilate their genitals, give them cross-sex hormones, it’s okay to be a proud Australian Aboriginal.
It’s okay to tax the working class, it’s okay to artificially restrict the supply of housing.
But if you’re white, you are guilty of things you didn’t do, and owe reparations to people who didn’t have it happen to them.
If your white and proud, your a Nazi. You drink Elon’s cum for breakfast, and enjoy eating babies with your Jewish handlers in Sundays.
defrost 8 hours ago [-]
On the one hand, I do know where you're coming from, on the other ...
White European culture [..] including [..] Australia, Canada, South Africa and Zimbabwe before they turned to shit.
Freedom of expression, not executing gays or hunting them for sport; the end of slavery,
Congrats, you've named places that in my lifetime have had effective slavery (stolen generations, imposed domestic servitude) and the freedom to hunt and execute gays (illegal, but common and commonly overlooked).
Indeed, particularly given that ICE agents are going to be deployed to airports. Their penchant for killing civilians and otherwise violating civil rights only to lie about their actions hardly seems like a good fit for airport security duties they haven’t been trained to perform.
encrypted_bird 13 hours ago [-]
> duties they haven't been trained to perform
Which implies they've been trained?
cdrnsf 12 hours ago [-]
Fair, they haven’t. I wonder how long it will take them to use tear gas when the line at a Starbucks kiosk gets a little too long.
encrypted_bird 11 hours ago [-]
I fear the day when that happens.
nandomrumber 13 hours ago [-]
[dead]
throwawaytea 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
honeycrispy 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jazzpush2 13 hours ago [-]
Has there been any official WH note on the need for this war, yet? Or objectives?
daheza 10 hours ago [-]
They rebranded to the department of war but its not a war. We definitely don't want war, but we want all soldiers to be warriors. Still not warmongering.
mememememememo 13 hours ago [-]
This war is not a war. Not a.war war. Just a "war". No war has been declared.
refulgentis 12 hours ago [-]
It's a special operation
briantakita 13 hours ago [-]
We already won. Are you tired of winning yet?
briansm 7 hours ago [-]
I keep reading this, is it meant to be a joke? What is being won?
Moomoomoo309 2 hours ago [-]
They're referencing Trump's constant insistence that we won or are currently winning. He never, ever admits defeat or concedes any ground, everything is a victory, nothing is a loss. Trump also famously said (paraphrasing) "We're gonna win so much, we'll be tired of winning".
znpy 7 hours ago [-]
It identifies as a special operation and people should just respect that.
13 hours ago [-]
bdangubic 13 hours ago [-]
20 or so far, there is a new one each day
nclin_ 13 hours ago [-]
Yes, they are flooding the zone with many alternative explanations so that they're both all deniable, and all accessible to anyone who finds just one of them convincing. This is a strategy.
giwook 13 hours ago [-]
And all of them different from the last and/or contradicting each other at times.
It's like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.
nandomrumber 13 hours ago [-]
Probably spaghetti.
cogman10 13 hours ago [-]
All I know is we are accomplishing them and we'll be done in 3 weeks to 3 years. Also, this isn't a woke war, which I was worried about.
dotancohen 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
JKCalhoun 3 hours ago [-]
"What is North Korea, Alex?"
"Ooooh, I'm sorry…"
engcoach 12 hours ago [-]
Why do they chant that? Is it due to acting against US interests in favor of another state, maybe one in the Levant?
nozzlegear 12 hours ago [-]
What are you saying? Speak plainly so we don't have to guess.
engcoach 2 hours ago [-]
Israel
dotancohen 11 hours ago [-]
No, they chant Death To America because the United States is a successful, secular society based on Christian values. That is perceived as a direct threat to an Islamic Republic which funds the spread of Shia Islam. The US was also an ally of the Shah.
Khomeini regularly said that the United States was the cause of all Muslims' problems - and his hatred of Israel was due to her being the only regional US ally. You've got the cause and effect backwards.
You need to learn about the history of this conflict if you're going to express an idealogical viewpoint on the subject.
dwb 6 hours ago [-]
It’s bold to get presumptuously snooty about people’s understanding of history, and even mention the closeness of the Shah with the US, without acknowledging how the Shah came to power…! To say nothing of the US’s more recent interventions in other Muslim-majority countries. Do you not think that might go further to explain the discontent, especially considering Khomeini’s comments that you refer to, than some nebulous idea of “values”?
kashunstva 8 hours ago [-]
> secular society based on Christian values
Oddly the Christian deity is mentioned exactly zero times in the Constitution.
dotancohen 16 minutes ago [-]
I stated that the United States is based on Christian values. Not that the United States is a Christian state.
Do you value separation of state and religious authority? Women's rights? Minority rights? Human dignity? Equality before the law? Sanctity of life? Individual moral responsibility? Monogamous marriage? The objective study of history? Fair trial? Witnesses at trial? Tolerance of alternative viewpoints?
Those are all Christian values. For what it's worth, I'm not Christian.
chneu 7 hours ago [-]
They were trying to gain energy independence, not develop nuclear weapons. This has been confirmed by plenty of independent auditors. Drunk Hegseth is a literal white nationalist Christian with a crusades tattoo.
You really want to be on the side of a white nationalist who openly says all Muslims are the enemy and openly advocates for christian prophecies that require the US to submit to Israel? These aren't conspiracies. Hegseth openly believes all this stuff.
MSM 12 hours ago [-]
"Bombings will continue until you stop hating us"
ggm 13 hours ago [-]
Would the current state of affairs qualify for cancelling the mid-terms? Is that overly cynical?
Not in the US, not a US citizen or voter. My suspicion is the answer is "no, but it is not a given that a competent supreme court which looks likely to overturn the WH exists, if they say they want to do this"
atq2119 12 hours ago [-]
AFAIUI, elections in the US are not run by the federal government but by the states.
Trying to cancel elections seems like it'd be a lot harder than in other countries.
ggm 8 hours ago [-]
Hopefully that is reassuring. Worryingly I would like some sense of confirmation but in any case I expect a declaration it's not a valid real result because that's what happened before, counts not withstanding.
Tadpole9181 1 hours ago [-]
The US does not have a legal avenue for cancelling elections regardless of circumstances without a constitutional amendment. It cannot happen under any conditions or circumstances.
To do so would basically be an open announcement of dictatorship and - more than we have already - the end of rule of law and a likely civil war.
12 hours ago [-]
JPKab 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
incze 12 hours ago [-]
seems from outside, that many things happen, that's never happened in the entire history of this country, as your prez says many times a day, that "you've never seen before".
otoh, i saw ice agents to murder a super aggresive protester, who was actually trying to help a super aggressive woman dumped to the earth by ice agents, from many angle. also, and i followed minnesotans aggressively filming everywhere what happens to them. and i saw, how aggressive they were to bovino and co.
so, i really understand your rant.
throwawaytea 10 hours ago [-]
If you can't follow basic police orders, you probably shouldn't visit the US, that's for sure.
zzrrt 12 hours ago [-]
> Texas or Arizona or North Carolina or Florida
All Red states. So if you roll over and let the federal government trample your state's sovereignty, they won't murder people in your state? Somehow I don't think that's what federalism was supposed to mean.
Trump nearly passed out with glee when he was talking to the Ukrainian president and found out elections are canceled, by their law, due to martial law because of the war. I would not so casually assume he won't try it here.
anon7000 12 hours ago [-]
Seriously, it’s totally fair to think that there’s no way they’ll be cancelled. There are some checks and balances left. But if you voted for Trump, you should be DEEPLY concerned about how much he loves toying with the idea. It’s frankly more impeachable than nearly anything I’ve heard of, since it’d be fucking treasonous to cancel elections. Demand better from your representatives and officials, and stop voting MAGA so we can get out of this mess.
cogman10 13 hours ago [-]
Is this an orange, purple, or magenta threat level?
SlightlyLeftPad 13 hours ago [-]
Approaching ultraviolet, invisible to the naked eye but still very much a threat. “there is no war, only excursions.”
softwaredoug 13 hours ago [-]
This is so non-specific to be meaningless.
Like actually tell us what you know so we can make useful decisions about our safety.
alephnerd 13 hours ago [-]
> Like actually tell us what you know so we can make useful decisions about our safety
"Americans abroad should follow the guidance in security alerts issued by the nearest U.S. embassy or consulate."
chneu 7 hours ago [-]
This is just more victim fear being pushed so (mostly Christian) conservatives can claim to be the victims, once again, as they colonize another people/land.
cmdrmac 13 hours ago [-]
My first thought: You don't say?
agnishom 13 hours ago [-]
Right? What kind of person does not follow the news but subscribes to the State Department notifications?
nandomrumber 13 hours ago [-]
All the people who decided to stay in the Middle East even when the second carrier group was en route, and then thought they were news worth enough to get on camera and comment about there being no commercial flights out of there.
13 hours ago [-]
nisiddharth 6 hours ago [-]
"Americans", do they own the entire American continent?
mrbombastic 13 hours ago [-]
Crazy how effective at making everything worse this admin has been.
arvid-lind 13 hours ago [-]
That's the strategy of Project 2025, make all the nice things we have much worse and broken so there's no choice but to scrap and start over. While they're in charge, of course.
MengerSponge 13 hours ago [-]
Showing that government doesn't work by making sure government doesn't work.
fundad 13 hours ago [-]
Project 2025 and the Trump administration is the most success ant-growth movements have ever had.
xnx 11 hours ago [-]
Horseshoe theory
stackghost 13 hours ago [-]
Trump is but a symptom of an underlying sickness. Things won't magically go back to normal after he dies.
malfist 13 hours ago [-]
Did someone say they would?
lyu07282 13 hours ago [-]
Many liberal people think he is an abberation, they would gladly return back to "normal". The point is, he is a symptom of a larger unaddressed sickness, there is no return to business as usual, it will only return far worse.
To prompt with something more specific: there is a possibility of a Gavin Newsom vs. Tucker Carlson in 2028, it's crucial to understand why Tucker might win and why he would be ten times worse than Trump.
greenavocado 13 hours ago [-]
Most people think Trump is the lynchpin, when in fact, its his masters that decide what happens next.
andrewflnr 13 hours ago [-]
Even if he was, a lot of things have been destroyed that will take a lot longer to rebuild. Notably, trust.
stuaxo 13 hours ago [-]
It would delay things, he has a "charisma" that his followers look like.
But it's true he is a symptom.
greenavocado 11 hours ago [-]
He is not a symptom he is an actor that is playing a part in a script. He is manipulated, bullied, and blackmailed into submission.
JeremyNT 12 hours ago [-]
Having somebody less incompetent, senile, and corrupt at the helm may not make things "magically go back to normal," but it's a step in the right direction. Necessary but not sufficient.
Perhaps you'll be explicit though, what is the "sickness" you perceive?
stackghost 12 hours ago [-]
>Perhaps you'll be explicit though, what is the "sickness" you perceive?
It's that a significant number of Americans are mean, selfish, racist, arrogant, and delight in the victimization of those they perceive as belonging to an outgroup.
2/3 of your electorate either voted for him (meaning they liked what they saw) or were sufficiently unbothered by him to not vote (meaning they were more or less okay with Trump).
These crocodile tears about how "we were bamboozled" are just that. It was plainly obvious to the rest of us looking in from outside, even before his first term but certainly after, that he was exactly the person he is now, and fully two thirds of American voters accepted this.
morkalork 38 minutes ago [-]
Today is MAGA, yesterday it was the "Tea Party" faction, before that it was something else, and tomorrow there will be another.
Every time there's a cycle of fringe-right blowing up in popularity, pushing an agenda and flaming out, it's still the same people they're appealing to who are voting for them.
>The left won’t accept this awful truth about the American soul, a beast that they believe they can fix “if only the people knew the Truth.”
>But what if the Truth is that Americans don’t want to know the Truth? What if Americans consciously choose lies over truth when given the chance–and not even very interesting lies, but rather the blandest, dumbest and meanest lies? What if Americans are not a likeable people? The left’s wires short-circuit when confronted with this terrible possibility; the right, on the other hand, warmly embraces Middle America’s rank soul and exploits it to their full advantage. The Republicans know Americans better than the left. They know that it’s not so much Goering’s famous “bigger lie” that works here, but the dumber and meaner the lie, the more the public wants to hear it repeated.
throwawaytea 10 hours ago [-]
The main problem with your thinking is that you fail to realiZe that a lot of conservatives criticism of Trump is that he is too weak on the things he promised to be hard on.
They want MORE ICE, more cuts to government programs, more police.
majormajor 13 hours ago [-]
Very few other people have Trump's ability to channel frustration in a nonspecific-but-charismatic way that connects the various extreme factions of the American right.
None of those factions will be gone, but their battles will weaken their cause more than they have since 2016.
Some of this can be seen by how even his own popularity falls any time he actually has power, since there are no effective ideas there, only misplaced blame, and that doesn't sustain support for four years. Without him there at all in an out-of-power period, the "blame the Jews"/"blame the brown people"/"blame the women"/"blame the baby-killers"/"blame the anti-Semites"/"blame the sexual deviants" factions will likely fail to find another person they all rally around.
goosejuice 12 hours ago [-]
The extreme factions of the right are a very small portion of the electorate. They generally don't decide elections beyond the primaries and generally turn out in favor of the right regardless.
Dems lean more on moderates/independents. Trump won because he persuaded that group, particularly the young men.
25-33% of the electorate is no small fraction. There's a group of people who have been consistently supportive of this government's policies since 2016. Take any policy survey, and the fraction that supports the right-wing side of action always amounts to a consistent 25-33% of the votes.
goosejuice 10 hours ago [-]
You're going to have to define extreme right with those percentages. You think 25-33% of the electorate is extreme right?
intended 9 hours ago [-]
While being largely correct, looking at his popularity misses the forest for the tree.
Trump is very much a symptom, not a cause. He is simply the kind of personality most fit for the media environment.
The media environment on the right has essentially eschewed journalistic standards for political and economic velocity.
Fringe theories get introduced during podcasts, which then get brought up by guests on Fox. Members of the government point out that the news media is talking about fringe theory X, which then gets repeated by the news media. Eventually the government opens up an investigation or creates a task force to address the issue.
It is not that people don’t come up with objections or counter narratives on the right, it’s just that they don’t get platformed.
Verification is the expensive part of journalism. If you eschew verification. You can be more efficient. Today the right is simply the more “efficient” political consensus manufacturing machine.
This is foundation upon which the rest of the events occur. This is why there will always be space for another character to appear.
fakedang 12 hours ago [-]
> Trump's ability to channel frustration in a nonspecific-but-charismatic way
If Trump is the most charismatic political personality America has to offer...
michaelhoney 13 hours ago [-]
It will be a lot harder to convince voters when he's gone... if the US still has elections
nozzlegear 12 hours ago [-]
Why wouldn't it?
CamperBob2 11 hours ago [-]
Trump has assured us there will be no need for them. I believe him. He lies a lot, but not about his own ambitions.
nozzlegear 12 hours ago [-]
Could you enlighten the class as to what you believe the underlying sickness is?
jb827 13 hours ago [-]
America has neglected working class people for decades. The economy has shifted from supporting earning income to make a decent living, to protecting assets (bail outs etc.) Trump tapped into this and tricked these people into electing him, bringing along right wing or whatever they are.. and they got hold of power. Don't think numbers are there for this culture war crowd to stay in power unless they hitch a ride with someone.
(edited: typo)
JPKab 13 hours ago [-]
You know what else would make everything worse? A totalitarian theocratic regime with long range ballistic missiles and nukes.
But hey, it's not like they funded and backed a bunch of theocratic fanatics who committed a mass atrocity in Israel and provoked a war that destroyed Gaza or anything, right? Or that they were exporting massive quantities of drones to Putin for him to use to murder Ukrainian civilians, right? They were nice guys, and the 35K protesters they murdered deserved it, right?
We should have just let things keep rolling the way they were. It was all going so well, and at no point would the regime that was actively inciting terrorism all over the world for the last 47 years be a threat if they got nukes on the ICBMs we now know they had been a problem. I mean, heck, those missiles they shot at Diego Garcia were just fireworks, purely for decorative purposes, right?
The HN bubble is truly grand. My college girlfriend was the daughter of parents who fled the Ayatollah in 79. You people on here think everyone shares your values and worldview, and that the mullahs in Iran are rational actors. They are not. They are part of a specific sect of Shiite Islam that truly believes that bringing about an apocalypse is a desirable thing. It's such a foreign concept to you that you dismiss it as fantasy and misinformation. But it's real. And you simply lack the life experience to know it. You've never seen entire masses of people infected with the radical religious mind viruses that those of us with firsthand experience with religious fundamentalists have seen.
Imagine the Branch Davidians in Waco with nukes, and you start to scratch the surface of what this would look like if you let it play out.
solid_fuel 13 hours ago [-]
> A totalitarian theocratic regime with long range ballistic missiles and nukes.
Man, imagine that, how scary. I bet in theocratic regimes there's a bunch of stupid stuff going on, like a ~Secretary~ Minister of ~War~ Defense that justifies an attack on a foreign nation by calling it a holy war and prays every time he gives a speech to the troops.
Those theocrats probably do things like de-funding every science project they can when they get power. Or worse, maybe they think vaccines are against god's will and get a bunch of kids sick by opposing vaccines for preventable diseases. Hell they probably don't even teach their kids about evolution or gay people.
Can you imagine if a nation like that had nuclear weapons and long range missiles? Why, they might start a war for no reason.
archagon 12 hours ago [-]
47 years? What a convenient sounding number. Wonder where you got it from.
jghn 13 hours ago [-]
I honestly thought you were talking about the US in your first paragraph.
JPKab 13 hours ago [-]
The narcissism of small differences on full display here.
There isn't a single "red state" in the US that requires women to cover their heads and bodies in public or executes people for speaking out against the "regime".
But you pretend like that's the case, while acting like Iran was just minding their own business when they have exported terror for decades, along with drones being used to murder Ukrainian civilians. I mean, I guess supporting Ukraine was soooo 2022-23, and now we're on to the new fashion trend of supporting the people helping to murder them because "orange man bad."
awnird 12 hours ago [-]
Israel has killed more civilians than Russia and Iran combined.
I don’t think your concern for civilian casualties is genuine.
bdangubic 10 hours ago [-]
was this copy/pasted from a post from 30 years ago or was it typed up from scratch?
mrbombastic 13 hours ago [-]
You certainly built a large strawman out of one sentence.
awnird 13 hours ago [-]
Hey, you forgot “they hate us for our freedoms” in your propaganda spiel.
cogman10 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah it's a good thing we dismantled that regime and totally didn't empower the most extreme and radical portion of it while removing the politicians who'd tempered that and turned the population against the US and Israel.
But hey, at least we've lifted sanctions and we are now sending them even more money because the oil market was completely destroyed so that's great right?
Obviously this is the best strategy because we can see how the Taliban was completely dismantled in Afghanistan after 20 years of occupation right?
Unless you are proposing genocide of Iran or an eternal occupation, what we've done is kicked a hornets nest.
TacticalCoder 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
rixed 8 hours ago [-]
I wish we could throw in a giant arena every person believing in "inherent evil", be it "of islamism" or "of zionism" or "of America", give them knives and books, and let them fight until they figure t out.
lyu07282 12 hours ago [-]
I agree THAT ethno nationalist country in the middle east, with long-range ballistic missiles, secret nukes and a secret nuclear doctrine that hasn't signed any Non-Proliferation treaty should make everybody worried. But that country isn't Iran.
It's the only country in the world with nuclear weapons that at this moment gets bombarded by missiles right now, if that doesn't make you worried you aren't paying attention.
elromulous 13 hours ago [-]
Agreed. But also why are you speaking like Yoda?
encrypted_bird 13 hours ago [-]
They're not; they're speaking colloquially: this is the word "It's" omitted from the beginning.
---
*EDIT*: Corrected word. Lol.
rdiddly 12 hours ago [-]
That's not what made it sound like Yoda. It was sticking "has been" at the end, and I agree there was a better choice stylistically: "Crazy how effective this admin has been at making everything worse."
mrbombastic 12 hours ago [-]
Didn’t even strike me as weird phrasing. Or rather: strike me as weird phrasing it did not.
daemonologist 13 hours ago [-]
"It's," perhaps?
encrypted_bird 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah, nope, you're right. Not sure why my brain thought "The". Haha. I blame on the roughlu 2½ hours of sleep I got last night. Yay insomnia!
metalman 5 hours ago [-]
There is a worldwide consensus that the American State should exercise increased caution.
ceejayoz 13 hours ago [-]
I am tired of winning.
fouc 13 hours ago [-]
winning what?
toomuchtodo 13 hours ago [-]
One of President Donald Trump’s lines during the 2016 presidential campaign was his promise that, “We’re gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning. And you’ll say, ‘Please, please. It’s too much winning. We can’t take it anymore, Mr. President, it’s too much.’ And I’ll say, ‘No it isn’t. We have to keep winning. We have to win more!’”
Hence the joke, "I am tired of winning." as the situation continues to rapidly degrade through policy choices. So much winning, it's too much.
calvinmorrison 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jazzpush2 13 hours ago [-]
Would you qualify complaining about starting an unnecessary war as "whining"? Why? What about ICE agents killing American citizens? Adding unprecedented numbers to the federal deficit, etc.?
How nice it must be to be able to just dismiss these things.
SanjayMehta 13 hours ago [-]
> How nice it must be to be able to just dismiss these things.
I don't know anyone in the US in real life who is happy with the current situation, including people who voted for Trump. The cheer leaders are only visible online.
The people who voted for Harris are saying "we told you so," and the others are saying "he conned us."
encrypted_bird 13 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure where you live, but try going to some of the super-small towns in the Midwest. I unfortunately still see people openly wearing MAGA hats and have MAGA flags on the flag poles in their yards.
Trust me, as sad as it is, those people still exist.
cogman10 13 hours ago [-]
For the people I know, it's mostly just been quiet silence, they don't really want to talk about it (and I don't force it). I know this is uncomfortable for them.
Outside that, what I've noticed in my area is a whole lot less trucks driving around with cartoonishly large American flags and pro-trump bumper stickers. Even homes that proudly flew the "Trump 2024" flags and flew the 2020 flags for a long time have taken those down.
Republicans here (Idaho) have been gleefully touching every 3rd rail (Medicaid, public school funding, public lands). I don't really have hope that the electorate will do anything about it, but who knows. I've never really seen such bold actions against the citizenry.
13 hours ago [-]
calvinmorrison 13 hours ago [-]
There are petty peevish folks too, to quote myself lately
October 2025
"I believe Trumps gutting of institutions of learning, culture, democracy, law is punishment for the Branch Covidians. I believe this punishment must continue for some time until the lesson is learned about abuse of power"
Should we reconcile this great nation, not balkanize, not be in an antebellum period, not be a Weimar republic, and walk back the rubicon and cross into more quiet waters, we must turn our attention to what made this country great.
What has made it unique? That our constitution is explicit about what freedoms and rights are reserved for the people and are not to be trampled, touched, or looked at by the government. State, Local, or Federal.
Our founding fathers and great men who preceded us recognized government as a necessary evil, one that must be kept at bay, not used as a violent tool to achieve outcomes.
All of these institutions must walk back their power, give the rights back to the people, to be truly afraid of the populace. Each tax collector must shiver when he goes to work, and each police officer be fully aware that a single parking ticket is an act of violence.
All said, I am afraid, we have lost that. And now we must face the future hoping that someday, another group of smart men can realize something so unique, so right, so innately just and moral was achieved by the signing of the constitution that it must be tried again.
Calvin - 2022
stavros 13 hours ago [-]
I don't understand the "he conned us" stance. He was literally saying all these things before getting elected. He wasn't being coy about it, we all knew it would be terrible, and here we are. What was the con exactly?
If there's one thing you can't accuse Trump of, it's ever masking how utterly nonsensical he is.
beedeebeedee 13 hours ago [-]
Saying “he conned us” is easier for people to accept than being introspective, taking responsibility and experiencing ego dissolution.
pasquinelli 13 hours ago [-]
i thought he was more anti-war
flowerthoughts 8 hours ago [-]
On the flip side, I _think_ there's actually less and less about Epstein visible, so I think WH is winning that war. Or at least successfully postponing battles.
marysminefnuf 11 hours ago [-]
So the presidents personal law enforcement that is tasked with racially profiling people who overwhelmingly do not pose a threat are going to now be conducting security directly from the source where millions of foreign travelers come through…hmmm…ridiculous
bdangubic 13 hours ago [-]
I got jumped in Italy couple of weeks ago. I was wearing a "volleyball dad" hoodie my kid bought for me but did not realize that the "volleyball dad" is etched in the middle of a large American flag covering my entire back. Luckily (for him, not me :) ) three police officers were 10 meters away walking the area dealing with apre ski drunks and restrained him. fun times
razodactyl 13 hours ago [-]
Crazy does and crazy do. Be vigilant and try not to set these people off. There's no rhyme or reason, some people are just faulty in the head.
terminalshort 12 hours ago [-]
Didn't happen
mlrtime 3 hours ago [-]
Sorry that happened to you, Italy has not been a safe place for tourists long before this administration.
What did the attackers say to you that told their intention was to harm you for having an American flag?
lyu07282 13 hours ago [-]
r/thathappened
kylehotchkiss 13 hours ago [-]
oof I would not wear an American flag outside the country. We've hurt too many feelings. Like any good American though, a Canadian flag works.
stackghost 13 hours ago [-]
>Like any good American though, a Canadian flag works.
Please don't do this.
bdangubic 8 hours ago [-]
didn’t even know I was wearing it (honestly never even noticed anything other that “volleyball dad”) but rest assured I wore it every day for the rest of the trip
nclin_ 13 hours ago [-]
people*
tombert 13 hours ago [-]
What the fuck was even the intended purpose of starting this war in Iran? Like in their mind, what was the best case scenario?
chneu 7 hours ago [-]
Hegseth is a white christian nationalist with a crusades tattoo. Whatcha think the intended purpose is here? People said this was going to happen when he was nominated.
There's a christian prophecy involving israel occupying certain lands, a cow, and some other nonsense. A weirdly high number of Americans, mostly christians, believe it. There are a ton of them in the Trump admin.
dotancohen 13 hours ago [-]
Best case scenario was probably keeping nuclear weapons and basaltic missiles out of the hands of those who chant Death to America.
macintux 12 hours ago [-]
Maybe ripping up the international plan to keep Iran from gaining nuclear weapons during his first term wasn’t the best idea.
dotancohen 11 hours ago [-]
That plan would have expired ten years after January 2016. In other words, already excited two months ago.
It was a ten year plan, not a permanent plan.
zzrrt 12 hours ago [-]
But Trump already obliterated their nuclear capacity last year! Were they lying then or now?
engcoach 12 hours ago [-]
That’s going to age as well as weapons of mass destruction in Iraq did. The reality is that only Israel was threatened by Iran and the US is caught up in it simply because we act as their vassal.
terminalshort 12 hours ago [-]
The fact that Iran has now launched missiles at civilian areas in a dozen or so countries unrelated to the war shows that this is clearly false.
dotancohen 11 hours ago [-]
Then how do you explain the rockets taking on Saudi Arabia? Baharain? UAE? Even Diego Garcia - which is further from Iran than Israel is. Just as far as Europe is. So they were only developing weapons that could target Israel?
5 hours ago [-]
intended 9 hours ago [-]
Remove Epstein from the news cycle?
drgo 13 hours ago [-]
A small price for demonstrating that our El-Douche is always right and a stable genius.
dzonga 13 hours ago [-]
why are common people paying for the incompetence of a gvt.
to not be political this lies at the heart of principles, morals, meritocracy
values that the current gvt lacks & things that drove america forward.
tremon 13 hours ago [-]
That's because the common people voted for the incompetent. Not being political either, of course.
dotancohen 13 hours ago [-]
In what part of the world does the populace not suffer for the incompetence of their leaders? St. Petersburg? Ramallah? Port Au Prince?
tremon 28 minutes ago [-]
The obvious and flippant answer to that would be "the parts of the world that do not have incompetent leaders". But that will only lead to the incredulous claiming that all governments are equally incompetent (yet some are more incompetent than others) and that's not a discussion I'm inclined to entertain.
terminalshort 12 hours ago [-]
Because it's the government they voted in. Typical American take. Wanting no responsibility for the adverse effects of your decision.
tombert 11 hours ago [-]
I'm American, I didn't vote for Trump, so I don't feel like it's me dealing with adverse effects of my decisions.
I did vote for Eric Adams in NYC, and while Eric Adams didn't advertise blatant corruption as part of his campaign, insofar that I can be blamed for his idiocy and bribes I will accept responsibility. I didn't vote for him the second time around and I feel foolish for voting for him the first time.
intended 9 hours ago [-]
Democracy is a collective thing. Americans may strongly believe in individualism, but democracy is a collective responsibility. Its kind of a key design feature.
hsbauauvhabzb 13 hours ago [-]
People vote for the current government. I’m not sure why you would expect others’ to pay for americas internal messes, we’re already busy dealing with the external ones.
refurb 12 hours ago [-]
The federal government hasn't passed a budget because the Democrats are blocking it. They feel it's worth the political gamble to cause Americans pain and that it'll turn on Trump.
There you go - mystery solved.
UltraSane 13 hours ago [-]
Trump wrecks everything he touches.
bradleyankrom 13 hours ago [-]
Bankrupting a casino is a literal thing he did and also a pretty decent metaphor for what he's doing now.
cindyllm 13 hours ago [-]
[dead]
refulgentis 13 hours ago [-]
lol.
The current situation has been giving me so many flashbacks. Here, my GWB-era teens had the terror threat level, and now we're lazily reimagining State Department traveling warnings as a dark slapstick version (be afraid everywhere, American!)
Makes you wonder who really did launch those missiles?
throwaway290 12 hours ago [-]
Iran's source is the one who said they did it in the first place :facepalm: and it was confirmed by UK
As soon as they felt like denying it would be better for them they did and took down https://en.mehrnews.com/ where it was published. Unless you say mehr was defaced and the news were planted by Mossad
No thankyou.
[1]https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cede0qyvqz3o
Replacing them with ICE as a political gesture? Not so much
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
Maning, airports / municipalities should be funding this. If airports were in control the the user experience, I bet you would see a lot better outcomes.
And that's stopped them?
It's even more disgusting than that:
"Tom Homan: ICE officers will not assist with airport security scanning amid TSA staffing shortage"
https://thehill.com/policy/transportation/5795316-homan-ice-...
TSA checks bags for commercial airlines which is a service that should never have been nationalized.
Impossible to prove otherwise. No reason to try his luck.
I was staunchly against the Iraq war, but even when Bush was president I didn't let it compromise my patriotism.
The amount of people on here who ignore the fact that Iran was the primary enabler of Hamas' attack on 10/7/23, and therefore sowed the seeds of the destruction of Gaza, is insane. Basically, if Trump does a thing, they are against it, independent of the thing. There is no principle, just reactionary hatred. If Biden had launched this war, none of these people would have had a problem with it. I am 100% positive on that assumption.
I think you're wrong here. As a Biden stan who's gone to the mat debating Biden's policies here on HN many times in the past, he lost pretty much all of the remaining good will he had by defending and supporting Israel for so long after it became clear what they were doing in Gaza. Biden wouldn't be getting a free pass in the Middle East if it were helping Israel's goals (ignoring the fact that Biden is much more of a dove than Trump).
Because on top of doing terrible things, the non-terrible things he does, he does incredibly badly.
> There is no principle, just reactionary hatred.
No, we’re all good little Bayesians around here.
> If Biden had launched this war, none of these people would have had a problem with it.
You’re really missing what’s going on here. The reason that people liked Biden is that he would not have launched this war.
No, they liked him because he wasn’t Trump. And then they liked Trump more after having him.
And it only cost them their country. Not bad!
Yes, I am “reactively” hating our president for starting wars without congressional approval and with very handwavy explanations. Besides, he has a track record for saying whatever the fuck he wants if he thinks people will like it, so you can’t trust the words from his mouth anyways. It’s pretty infuriating, actually.
I would be much happier if there was a clear justification and rational explanation for the president starting more wars in the Middle East. And yes, because Biden has a slightly better baseline of not telling bold-faced lies, I could see more people giving the benefit of the doubt at first. But overall, liberals did not like Biden very much. Trump, on the other hand, has a pretty hardcore base of people who don’t seem to care what he says or that he does/says the opposite of what he used to say. Pretty weird.
By the way, this opinion is not formed by reading or listening to any kind of mainstream media. It’s formed from listening to the words coming out of Trump’s mouth for the past fucking decade.
Chanting for death to any country or religion is not violence dude. Until and actually Iran launches an attack on the USA.
Iran didn't start this war, America and Israel did, while right in the middle of a pretend negotiation with them.
I believe this is a strong sign that any time Israel or America are asking to negotiate with any country, they should prepare a full scale military action ready for the real "negotiation".
edit: Are you a dual citizen? Everyone has a right to free speech of course and to support or not support any country or cause. But if you feel so strongly about a foreign country, why don't you be honest with yourself and pick a lane. I say this to everyone, not just Israeli, but Chinese, Dutch, any other dual citizens.
Nothing happened prior to 10/07/23, no sir. Just an evil country doing evil things. Of course the US and Israel are victims on all this.
If you don't know this, then you probably shouldn't have such strong opinions on the topic.
I re-flagged OP.
I don't know what the comment you are replying to was talking about, and I agree that "white culture" is an absurd false construct, because "white" is a false construct. I understand flagging stuff like that, but nothing in my comment warranted it. I expressed a logical opinion. The percentage of people in the United States present on legal visas getting caught up by ICE is near-zero. It's an entirely propagandistic narrative to suggest otherwise, based entirely on motivated reasoning.
And before you label me a bigot or whatever to feed your sense of moral superiority, be aware that I'm the only "white" person in my household, and I'm also, by far, the most "liberal". Outside of the Bay Area, a lot of people of color like my wife and her family absolutely despise your politics, viewing them as luxury beliefs.
My politics are basically identical to Garry Tan's, but you've lost the plot so much that you felt a need to flag my comment.
Freedom of expression, not executing gays or hunting them for sport; the end of slavery, universal suffrage, space exploration, being able to criticise the government.
Am I allowed to have an opinion?
If it differs from yours?
Diversity. So long as I conform?
Europe is a massive melting pot, not some single, monolithic "culture." In fact, I have much more in common with my Latino neighbors than the WASPs having conniptions over the purported decline of "white culture."
> the end of slavery
Lol, lmao. Well, it's pretty obvious what fetid corners of the web you lurk in.
In other nearby regions Slovenians, Lebanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, Taiwanese, Filipino, Indians, Pakistani, Nepalese…
Have all managed to end up co-existing, build businesses, even to the extent that we’ve got along well enough to build a nation together.
And yeah, I actually don’t know anyone who owns slaves around here. I’ve met people from all over Europe and the USA and none of them own slaves or are involved in the slave trade.
Australian doesn’t have forced labour prisons, it’s optional and the inmates gain additional benefits for their labour and the potential to have their custodial sentence reduced.
But anyway, the whole point isn’t to say that I don’t like brown people.
The point is to goad people like you to claim I live in some fetid corner.
Simply for saying I’m white, and I’m proud of what my ancestors have accomplished.
My Dutch and Italian ancestors left their home lands and have become know throughout the word as very successful farmers pretty much everywhere they’ve settled.
But thats not an okay thing to say.
It’s okay to be black a proud, LGBTQI+ and proud, it’s okay to sterilise children, mutilate their genitals, give them cross-sex hormones, it’s okay to be a proud Australian Aboriginal.
It’s okay to tax the working class, it’s okay to artificially restrict the supply of housing.
But if you’re white, you are guilty of things you didn’t do, and owe reparations to people who didn’t have it happen to them.
If your white and proud, your a Nazi. You drink Elon’s cum for breakfast, and enjoy eating babies with your Jewish handlers in Sundays.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_gang_murders (in an about Sydney since the 1970s)
Which implies they've been trained?
It's like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.
"Ooooh, I'm sorry…"
Khomeini regularly said that the United States was the cause of all Muslims' problems - and his hatred of Israel was due to her being the only regional US ally. You've got the cause and effect backwards.
You need to learn about the history of this conflict if you're going to express an idealogical viewpoint on the subject.
Oddly the Christian deity is mentioned exactly zero times in the Constitution.
Do you value separation of state and religious authority? Women's rights? Minority rights? Human dignity? Equality before the law? Sanctity of life? Individual moral responsibility? Monogamous marriage? The objective study of history? Fair trial? Witnesses at trial? Tolerance of alternative viewpoints?
Those are all Christian values. For what it's worth, I'm not Christian.
You really want to be on the side of a white nationalist who openly says all Muslims are the enemy and openly advocates for christian prophecies that require the US to submit to Israel? These aren't conspiracies. Hegseth openly believes all this stuff.
Not in the US, not a US citizen or voter. My suspicion is the answer is "no, but it is not a given that a competent supreme court which looks likely to overturn the WH exists, if they say they want to do this"
Trying to cancel elections seems like it'd be a lot harder than in other countries.
To do so would basically be an open announcement of dictatorship and - more than we have already - the end of rule of law and a likely civil war.
otoh, i saw ice agents to murder a super aggresive protester, who was actually trying to help a super aggressive woman dumped to the earth by ice agents, from many angle. also, and i followed minnesotans aggressively filming everywhere what happens to them. and i saw, how aggressive they were to bovino and co.
so, i really understand your rant.
All Red states. So if you roll over and let the federal government trample your state's sovereignty, they won't murder people in your state? Somehow I don't think that's what federalism was supposed to mean.
Trump nearly passed out with glee when he was talking to the Ukrainian president and found out elections are canceled, by their law, due to martial law because of the war. I would not so casually assume he won't try it here.
Like actually tell us what you know so we can make useful decisions about our safety.
"Americans abroad should follow the guidance in security alerts issued by the nearest U.S. embassy or consulate."
To prompt with something more specific: there is a possibility of a Gavin Newsom vs. Tucker Carlson in 2028, it's crucial to understand why Tucker might win and why he would be ten times worse than Trump.
But it's true he is a symptom.
Perhaps you'll be explicit though, what is the "sickness" you perceive?
It's that a significant number of Americans are mean, selfish, racist, arrogant, and delight in the victimization of those they perceive as belonging to an outgroup.
2/3 of your electorate either voted for him (meaning they liked what they saw) or were sufficiently unbothered by him to not vote (meaning they were more or less okay with Trump).
These crocodile tears about how "we were bamboozled" are just that. It was plainly obvious to the rest of us looking in from outside, even before his first term but certainly after, that he was exactly the person he is now, and fully two thirds of American voters accepted this.
Every time there's a cycle of fringe-right blowing up in popularity, pushing an agenda and flaming out, it's still the same people they're appealing to who are voting for them.
http://exiledonline.com/we-the-spiteful/
>The left won’t accept this awful truth about the American soul, a beast that they believe they can fix “if only the people knew the Truth.”
>But what if the Truth is that Americans don’t want to know the Truth? What if Americans consciously choose lies over truth when given the chance–and not even very interesting lies, but rather the blandest, dumbest and meanest lies? What if Americans are not a likeable people? The left’s wires short-circuit when confronted with this terrible possibility; the right, on the other hand, warmly embraces Middle America’s rank soul and exploits it to their full advantage. The Republicans know Americans better than the left. They know that it’s not so much Goering’s famous “bigger lie” that works here, but the dumber and meaner the lie, the more the public wants to hear it repeated.
None of those factions will be gone, but their battles will weaken their cause more than they have since 2016.
Some of this can be seen by how even his own popularity falls any time he actually has power, since there are no effective ideas there, only misplaced blame, and that doesn't sustain support for four years. Without him there at all in an out-of-power period, the "blame the Jews"/"blame the brown people"/"blame the women"/"blame the baby-killers"/"blame the anti-Semites"/"blame the sexual deviants" factions will likely fail to find another person they all rally around.
Dems lean more on moderates/independents. Trump won because he persuaded that group, particularly the young men.
https://www.thirdway.org/memo/why-republicans-can-win-with-t...
Trump is very much a symptom, not a cause. He is simply the kind of personality most fit for the media environment.
The media environment on the right has essentially eschewed journalistic standards for political and economic velocity.
Fringe theories get introduced during podcasts, which then get brought up by guests on Fox. Members of the government point out that the news media is talking about fringe theory X, which then gets repeated by the news media. Eventually the government opens up an investigation or creates a task force to address the issue.
It is not that people don’t come up with objections or counter narratives on the right, it’s just that they don’t get platformed.
Verification is the expensive part of journalism. If you eschew verification. You can be more efficient. Today the right is simply the more “efficient” political consensus manufacturing machine.
This is foundation upon which the rest of the events occur. This is why there will always be space for another character to appear.
If Trump is the most charismatic political personality America has to offer...
But hey, it's not like they funded and backed a bunch of theocratic fanatics who committed a mass atrocity in Israel and provoked a war that destroyed Gaza or anything, right? Or that they were exporting massive quantities of drones to Putin for him to use to murder Ukrainian civilians, right? They were nice guys, and the 35K protesters they murdered deserved it, right?
We should have just let things keep rolling the way they were. It was all going so well, and at no point would the regime that was actively inciting terrorism all over the world for the last 47 years be a threat if they got nukes on the ICBMs we now know they had been a problem. I mean, heck, those missiles they shot at Diego Garcia were just fireworks, purely for decorative purposes, right?
The HN bubble is truly grand. My college girlfriend was the daughter of parents who fled the Ayatollah in 79. You people on here think everyone shares your values and worldview, and that the mullahs in Iran are rational actors. They are not. They are part of a specific sect of Shiite Islam that truly believes that bringing about an apocalypse is a desirable thing. It's such a foreign concept to you that you dismiss it as fantasy and misinformation. But it's real. And you simply lack the life experience to know it. You've never seen entire masses of people infected with the radical religious mind viruses that those of us with firsthand experience with religious fundamentalists have seen.
Imagine the Branch Davidians in Waco with nukes, and you start to scratch the surface of what this would look like if you let it play out.
Man, imagine that, how scary. I bet in theocratic regimes there's a bunch of stupid stuff going on, like a ~Secretary~ Minister of ~War~ Defense that justifies an attack on a foreign nation by calling it a holy war and prays every time he gives a speech to the troops.
Those theocrats probably do things like de-funding every science project they can when they get power. Or worse, maybe they think vaccines are against god's will and get a bunch of kids sick by opposing vaccines for preventable diseases. Hell they probably don't even teach their kids about evolution or gay people.
Can you imagine if a nation like that had nuclear weapons and long range missiles? Why, they might start a war for no reason.
There isn't a single "red state" in the US that requires women to cover their heads and bodies in public or executes people for speaking out against the "regime".
But you pretend like that's the case, while acting like Iran was just minding their own business when they have exported terror for decades, along with drones being used to murder Ukrainian civilians. I mean, I guess supporting Ukraine was soooo 2022-23, and now we're on to the new fashion trend of supporting the people helping to murder them because "orange man bad."
I don’t think your concern for civilian casualties is genuine.
But hey, at least we've lifted sanctions and we are now sending them even more money because the oil market was completely destroyed so that's great right?
Obviously this is the best strategy because we can see how the Taliban was completely dismantled in Afghanistan after 20 years of occupation right?
Unless you are proposing genocide of Iran or an eternal occupation, what we've done is kicked a hornets nest.
It's the only country in the world with nuclear weapons that at this moment gets bombarded by missiles right now, if that doesn't make you worried you aren't paying attention.
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*EDIT*: Corrected word. Lol.
https://www.c-span.org/clip/campaign-2016/user-clip-too-much...
Trump says US is 'winning so much' in longest ever State of the Union - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhQUGjRtq-M - February 25th, 2026
Hence the joke, "I am tired of winning." as the situation continues to rapidly degrade through policy choices. So much winning, it's too much.
How nice it must be to be able to just dismiss these things.
I don't know anyone in the US in real life who is happy with the current situation, including people who voted for Trump. The cheer leaders are only visible online.
The people who voted for Harris are saying "we told you so," and the others are saying "he conned us."
Trust me, as sad as it is, those people still exist.
Outside that, what I've noticed in my area is a whole lot less trucks driving around with cartoonishly large American flags and pro-trump bumper stickers. Even homes that proudly flew the "Trump 2024" flags and flew the 2020 flags for a long time have taken those down.
Republicans here (Idaho) have been gleefully touching every 3rd rail (Medicaid, public school funding, public lands). I don't really have hope that the electorate will do anything about it, but who knows. I've never really seen such bold actions against the citizenry.
October 2025
"I believe Trumps gutting of institutions of learning, culture, democracy, law is punishment for the Branch Covidians. I believe this punishment must continue for some time until the lesson is learned about abuse of power"
Should we reconcile this great nation, not balkanize, not be in an antebellum period, not be a Weimar republic, and walk back the rubicon and cross into more quiet waters, we must turn our attention to what made this country great. What has made it unique? That our constitution is explicit about what freedoms and rights are reserved for the people and are not to be trampled, touched, or looked at by the government. State, Local, or Federal. Our founding fathers and great men who preceded us recognized government as a necessary evil, one that must be kept at bay, not used as a violent tool to achieve outcomes. All of these institutions must walk back their power, give the rights back to the people, to be truly afraid of the populace. Each tax collector must shiver when he goes to work, and each police officer be fully aware that a single parking ticket is an act of violence.
All said, I am afraid, we have lost that. And now we must face the future hoping that someday, another group of smart men can realize something so unique, so right, so innately just and moral was achieved by the signing of the constitution that it must be tried again.
Calvin - 2022
If there's one thing you can't accuse Trump of, it's ever masking how utterly nonsensical he is.
What did the attackers say to you that told their intention was to harm you for having an American flag?
Please don't do this.
There's a christian prophecy involving israel occupying certain lands, a cow, and some other nonsense. A weirdly high number of Americans, mostly christians, believe it. There are a ton of them in the Trump admin.
It was a ten year plan, not a permanent plan.
to not be political this lies at the heart of principles, morals, meritocracy
values that the current gvt lacks & things that drove america forward.
I did vote for Eric Adams in NYC, and while Eric Adams didn't advertise blatant corruption as part of his campaign, insofar that I can be blamed for his idiocy and bribes I will accept responsibility. I didn't vote for him the second time around and I feel foolish for voting for him the first time.
There you go - mystery solved.
The current situation has been giving me so many flashbacks. Here, my GWB-era teens had the terror threat level, and now we're lazily reimagining State Department traveling warnings as a dark slapstick version (be afraid everywhere, American!)
https://theonion.com/no-blood-for-oil-vs-exactly-how-much-oi...
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/iran-fires-missiles-remot...
And Iran denies it as well: https://x.com/DropSiteNews/status/2035477318055985648
Makes you wonder who really did launch those missiles?
As soon as they felt like denying it would be better for them they did and took down https://en.mehrnews.com/ where it was published. Unless you say mehr was defaced and the news were planted by Mossad