What happens to the Republican Party now? (1 Viewer)

[MT15]

This election nonsense by Trump may end up splitting up the Republican Party. I just don’t see how the one third (?) who are principled conservatives can stay in the same party with Trump sycophants who are willing to sign onto the TX Supreme Court case.

We also saw the alt right types chanting “destroy the GOP” in Washington today because they didn’t keep Trump in power. I think the Q types will also hold the same ill will toward the traditional Republican Party. In fact its quite possible that all the voters who are really in a Trump personality cult will also blame the GOP for his loss. It’s only a matter of time IMO before Trump himself gets around to blaming the GOP.

There is some discussion of this on Twitter. What do you all think?

 

[BullSheetBuddha]

I didn't hear about this. Geezus............

 

[brandon]

He assumes that everybody is cheating on their taxes?

Only true patriots.

 

[Optimus Prime]

Good read
==========
In November 1991, I stood in the packed, smoke-filled American Legion hall in the nearly all-White New Orleans suburb of Metairie. A day later in Baton Rouge, I watched a chilling development unfold on election night.


In Metairie, White men and women in their 20s, 30s and 40s, some decked out in campaign T-shirts and hats, whooped up a storm for the demagogic, ex-Klansman Republican David Duke, who was then running for governor.

In Baton Rouge, coiffured senior citizens in suits and ties and cocktail dresses mingled with people clad in jeans and cowboy boots to cheer on the same racist bigot and antisemite. But those things weren’t the shocker.


Thanks to a phenomenal Black voter turnout, Duke lost in a landslide to Democratic Gov. Edwin Edwards. But Duke was able to claim the title of the voice of Louisiana’s White majority.

The searing takeaway was not Duke himself, but nearly 700,000 Louisianans who, knowing what he stood for, voted for him anyway.

On Sept. 30, 2016, after closely watching nearly two years of Donald Trump’s primary and general election campaigns, I wrote about the dangers of his winning.

He had been revealed as an ignorant, undisciplined, ranting bully who exaggerated and lied without shame. His tough-guy masculinity was fakery.

Trump was a coward, I said at the time, who picks on women, demeans people of color and is thoroughly lacking in human decency.


“What does sicken and alarm, and what ought to concentrate African American minds, is the thought of Trump with the powers of the presidency in his hands. Therein lies the danger.”

The upshot?


On Election Day 2016, nearly 63 million Americans voted for Trump, giving him more than 300 electoral votes and the White House. The takeaway? They, too, knew where he stood and voted for him anyway.


Four years later, the impeached, scandal-scarred president went before the American people once again. By then, Trump was known all too well. In his losing bid for reelection, Trump attracted 74.2 million votes.


So, it comes as no surprise — deep disappointment, yes; a jolt, no — that Trump’s foremost Republican critic, Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), would get a thrashing at the polls in 2022, losing renomination by 37 points to Trump devotee Harriet Hageman. Wyoming Republicans knew where Trump stood on Cheney……

This is not a recital of complaints about Donald Trump. It’s about people by the millions who know where Trump stands and slavishly side with him anyway……..

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/trump-voters-kari-lake-liz-cheney-midterms/

 

[Optimus Prime]

 

[Sandman]

A lot of "they" in that speech. "They" do all the bad stuff. Always manufacturing vague enemies "we" can be afraid of and vent our anger toward.

 

[SaulGoodmanEsq]

I'll never stop enjoying the irony of these people using images of the Constitution (his truck in the background) to further their message. The reality is the Founding Fathers were elitists who wanted to make sure nutjob plebs like this guy never had any real power in government.

 

[Optimus Prime]

In his forced (and, he hopes, temporary) retirement, defeated former president Donald Trump has come up with a new undertaking. He’s undertaking.


Technically, his Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., is now acting as a “cemetery company.” (Suggested slogan: “People are dying to get into Bedminster!”)

And he has already landed his first occupant: He just buried his late ex-wife, Ivana Trump, right near the first tee.


Photos published by the New York Post on Sunday show a lone grave at the edge of a field with some yellowed grass around it, a clump of white flowers on the freshly turned earth and a flat stone marker with a less-than-effusive epitaph: “IVANA TRUMP, February 20, 1949 - July 14, 2022.” She died last month of an apparent fall.

The former president has shown little interest in conventional post-presidency pursuits, such as building a presidential library; he’s not much for reading, and he’s trying to hide his presidential papers, not display them.

But why would he bury himself in, of all things, the interment trade?


Simple: He has seemingly turned his late ex-wife (and his oldest kids have turned their late mother) into a tax dodge. Dartmouth professor Brooke Harrington, a specialist in tax optimization, checked the New Jersey tax code and reported that operating a cemetery at the Trump National offers “a trifecta of tax avoidance. Property, income & sales tax, all eliminated.” She tweeted that it “looks like one corpse will suffice to make at least 3 forms of tax vanish.”…….

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/01/ivana-trump-buried-tax-break-grift/

My girlfriend made a very good observation

Who lets their ex spouse who’s since remarried twice decide where they’ll be buried?

It’s certainly an odd arrangement

 

[MT15]

The picture that the top Republican painted was both vivid and terrifying. He warned that additional funding for the Internal Revenue Service would lead to armed auditors banging down front doors to squeeze hard-earned dollars from working Americans.

“Are they going to have a strike force that goes in with AK-15s already loaded, ready to shoot some small-business person in Iowa with these?” Senator Chuck Grassley said on Fox News last week.

The image conjured up by Grassley bears little resemblance to reality. Democrats have indeed directed nearly $80bn to the IRS over the next 10 years as part of their climate and healthcare spending package, the Inflation Reduction Act, which Joe Biden signed into law on Tuesday.

But Republican lawmakers have spread hyperbolic and often false information about how those funds will be used, stoking outrage among their supporters and alarming experts who say the claims could increase the risk of political violence.

Grassley is far from alone in invoking the image of gun-toting auditors. Based on a job posting for the IRS’s criminal investigations unit, which makes up only a small fraction of the agency’s employee base, prominent Republicans and conservative media figures have falsely claimed that the Democrats’ bill will arm tens of thousands of new auditors.

The Fox News host Brian Kilmeade has warnedhis viewers that “Joe Biden’s new army” of armed IRS agents could “hunt down and kill middle-class taxpayers that don’t pay enough”, while the chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, has suggested Democrats may soon “send the IRS ‘SWAT team’ after your kids’ lemonade stand”…….

Armed ... auditors? The IRS becomes the latest target of GOP misinformation

Some Republicans have spread false information about how new funds will be used by IRS, stoking outrage and alarming experts

www.theguardian.com

This is some kind of crazy. Ward already looked up the bill, and IIRC the 87,000 hires are over 10 years. Currently there are about 60,000 IRS employees, but over half of them are expected to retire in the next 5 years. So that accounts for a largest chunk of the new hires. The new hires are also distributed throughout the agency, not all will be enforcement.

Two sitting GOP Senators are pushing this crap publicly. What the hell is wrong with them?

 

[bird]

This is some kind of crazy. Ward already looked up the bill, and IIRC the 87,000 hires are over 10 years. Currently there are about 60,000 IRS employees, but over half of them are expected to retire in the next 5 years. So that accounts for a largest chunk of the new hires. The new hires are also distributed throughout the agency, not all will be enforcement.

Two sitting GOP Senators are pushing this crap publicly. What the hell is wrong with them?

Because they can. Because they know that the IRS is a button that they can push even though the majority of Republican voters aren’t impacted very much by the IRS. Taxes are framed as flat out evil and the IRS as Satan Incarnate.

 

[Optimus Prime]

……Wintemute’s survey showed that one in three people buys into the far right “great replacement” conspiracy theory that white Americans are being supplanted by minorities – cited by the murderers of dozens of people in recent massacres from Texas to New York state. The “great replacement” theory is also regularly aired on Fox News.

Lilliana Mason, the author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, said the election of the US’s first black president, Barack Obama, in 2008 made race “a really salient issue” for many white voters.

“Then Trump said the quiet part out loud. He started using overtly racist and misogynistic language and creating a permission structure for his supporters to become much more aggressive and intentionally offensive in their rhetoric.

That really encouraged not just uncivil behaviour but broke all of these social norms that we had previously considered to be sacred,” she said.

Trump’s embrace of white nationalist groups, such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, also brought armed militias into mainstream politics, helping them to infiltrate local police forces and the military.

In December, three retired US generals said that Trumpism has infected parts of the armed forces and noted the “disturbing number of veterans and active-duty members of the military” who took part in the attack on the Capitol.

They warned of the “potential for lethal chaos inside our military” if the result of 2024 presidential election is disputed.

“The potential for a total breakdown of the chain of command along partisan lines – from the top of the chain to squad level – is significant should another insurrection occur. The idea of rogue units organizing among themselves to support the ‘rightful’ commander in chief cannot be dismissed,” they wrote

“It really does feel a pivotal moment in in American democracy,” says Mason. “We’re probably going to see more violence. I don’t think we’ll see less in the immediate future. But, ultimately, the way Americans respond to that violence will determine whether it can be calmed down or whether it spirals out of control.”

Kleinfeld said she is not optimistic.

“We’re getting to a point where if the Trumpist faction wins, I think we’ll see sustained extremely high levels of violence for the foreseeable future. And if they lose, I think it’ll be worse,” she said……

US political violence is surging, but talk of a civil war is exaggerated – isn’t it?

The FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago unleashed the latest barrage of threats of violence, on top of a wave of threats against election workers and rising weapons sales

www.theguardian.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

Excellent article about Arizona’s Rusty Bowers

Although the rift between Trumpers and traditional conservatives was present well before Covid
====================================

……..He spoke his mind too about the very real danger facing democracy in America today – to his astonishment, at the hands of his own party.

“The constitution is hanging by a thread,” he told me. “The funny thing is, I always thought it would be the other guys. And it’s my side. That just rips at my heart: that we would be the people who would surrender the constitution in order to win an election. That just blows my mind.”…….

He identifies as “pro-life”, sees the US constitution as being inspired by God, and voted for Trump in the 2020 election. “I campaigned for Trump, I went to his rallies, I stood up on the stage with him,” he said.

Somewhere along the line, though, things started to come unstuck. A rift opened up between his old-school Republican values and those of a new cadre of activists who were energized by Trump and his embrace of conspiracy theories and strongman politics.

In hindsight, Bowers now recognizes that the opening shots of the conflict were fired not around the 2020 presidential election but earlier in the year, in the initial days of Covid. Trump-fanatical Republicans in the Arizona house displayed in their anti-mask antics the same disdain for the rules, the same bullying style, that was later to erupt in the stolen election furor.

Then came the first signs of Trump’s refusal to accept defeat in the 2020 election. Bowers himself always expected that the presidential race in Arizona would be close. “We were very much aware that a demographic of women, 18 to 40, college-educated, professional, with small children, were not voting for Donald Trump,” he said.

When the results were confirmed, and Biden had won by 10,457 votes, the slimmest margin of any state, Bowers was unsurprised. But such was the brouhaha as armed Trump supporters protested outside counting centers in Maricopa county demanding “audits” that he decided to take a look for himself.

He gathered a group of trusted lawyers and went to investigate the counting process close up. “I saw incredible amounts of protocols that were followed and signed off by volunteers – Democrats, Republicans, independents. Yes, Republicans for crying out loud! And they did it by the book.”

On 22 November 2020, two weeks after Biden had been declared the next president of the United States, Bowers received a call from the White House. Trump and Giuliani were on the line.

After exchanging niceties, they got down to business. Giuliani said they had found 200,000 illegal immigrants and 6,000 dead people who had voted in Arizona. “We need to fix that,” Giuliani told him, cajoling him to call a special committee of the Arizona legislature to look into the supposed fraud.

Bowers remembers vividly how Trump and Giuliani played good cop and bad cop on that call. “Trump, you know, he wasn’t angry. He wasn’t threatening. He never said to me, ‘I’m going to get you if you don’t do this.’ Giuliani, he was the bulldog.”

In return, Bowers was polite but firm. He told the duo that they had to provide hard evidence. “I said, ‘I’m not doing anything like this until you bring me something. Let’s see it. I’m not going to have circus time at the house of representatives.’”

That’s when Trump and Giuliani unveiled their second, even more incendiary, proposal. They had heard that there was an “arcane Arizona law” that would allow the Republican-controlled legislature under Bowers to throw out Biden’s electors and send Trump alternatives to Congress in their place.

It took a moment for the penny to drop. Bowers was being asked to overturn the election through diktat……..

Ousted Republican reflects on Trump, democracy and America: ‘The place has lost its mind’

Rusty Bowers stood up to the former president’s demand that he overturn Arizona’s election result. He paid the price but has no regrets

www.theguardian.com

 

[MT15]

What an irresponsible loon!

 

[MT15]

Republicans are becoming the anti-science, anti-education party. Their narrative is that college professors are leftist extremists who are recruiting their students into communism or something. The reality isn’t even close to that however. I think this guy has it characterized correctly.

 

[Optimus Prime]

Republicans are becoming the anti-science, anti-education party. Their narrative is that college professors are leftist extremists who are recruiting their students into communism or something. The reality isn’t even close to that however. I think this guy has it characterized correctly.

The son of the guy who ran one of the furthest right sites (stormfront?) and was in very deep had this exact experience when he went to college

He realized how wrong he, his father, friends, family and the website was and wanted nothing more to with that rhetoric or mindset, which went about the way you’d expect when he came back home

 

[Optimus Prime]

Civil rights advocates are ringing alarm bells about officials distributing “In God We Trust” posters in Texas schools after a state law took effect requiring public campuses to display any donated items bearing that phrase.

“These posters demonstrate the more casual ways a state can impose religion on the public,” Sophie Ellman-Golan of Jews For Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ) told the Guardian. “Alone, they’re a basic violation of the separation of church and state. But in the broader context, it’s hard not to see them as part of the larger Christian nationalist project.”

The Southlake Anti-Racism Coalition (SARC) said they were “disturbed” by the precedent the posters’ distribution could set…..

Alarm over Texas law forcing schools to display ‘In God We Trust’ signs

Civil rights advocates say it ‘imposes religion’ as new law requires public campuses to display donated items bearing that phrase

www.theguardian.com

 

[Eeyore]

Dictionaries rejected from school district following DeSantis bill

A Florida district is freezing book donations and purchases in order to comply with new legislation that requires a review of all reading materials.

www.newsweek.com

 

[BullSheetBuddha]

Republicans are becoming the anti-science, anti-education party. Their narrative is that college professors are leftist extremists who are recruiting their students into communism or something. The reality isn’t even close to that however. I think this guy has it characterized correctly.

"Education is UN-indoctrination. That’s why they resent it."

My Buddhist teacher said to me once, "It's not what you learn, it's what you unlearn."

 

[Eeyore]

GOP Candidate Says FBI Agents Would Be Put In 'Body Bag' If His Home Were Searched

Despite the controversy blowing up over the video Saturday, Sarasota businessman Martin Hyde defended his remarks.

www.huffpost.com

FBI needs to raid his house