American Politics

[Sirioja]

Surely you do realize, that it is the very legacy car manufacturers of the world, like Audi, Mercedes, Porsche, VW, Ford and Toyota, that are the very idiots paying Tesla (unfortunately for years now), by buying hundreds of millions in Telsa carbon credits to avoid even larger fines in the billions, by the EU for all those V8 powered ICE vehicles, you love to drive so much.

I mean talk about dumb business practices, handing over money to help your competitor's business! (...kkkk!)

Automakers to pool CO2 emissions with Tesla, to comply with EU 2025 rules., Jan 07, 2025
https://www.reuters.com/business/aut...la-2025-01-07/

With regards to the Korean and Chinese EVs being shit, you couldn't be more wrong.

Korean/Chinese EVs are in many instances, currently better than the European made EVs, if not just as good. Many models are winning awards and have been named Car/EV of the Year, in some cases. Chinese BYD (EV/Hybrid auto and bus manufacturer) just become the worlds top EV seller.

Many in Europe feel shame now from jumping monkey Musk behavior. I think Tesla should fall in Europe. Do you compare Hyundai or Kia with Porsche or Audi? When I needed to improve my Audi V8 and engineerd powered with french gas from agriculture, getting more powerful and 0% pollution on technical control, to save our planet, when Tesla batteries and chineses make pollution. When he doesn t bullshit like always, but maybe he will find who killed JFK? Senile old Trump cry like a baby about USA 350 billions debt with Europe: Europe is bad with us, when for sure not buying shit USA foods to get sick and obese, when Coca and McDo make our children obese, nor USA cars which can t compete with European cars. Americans dream about Porsche, Audi, MB or BM, or french hands made Bugatti, or Ferrari or Maserati, when only very few Europeans dream about American cars. Rather than crying like a senile baby, he should work to improve USA products quality, when quality is not important in USA, but just money, so, don t ask others to buy your shit, when far below European standards for quality, and he has big work with Boeing.

[Sirioja]

So please keep your pro baby butchering propaganda to yourself.

In modern countries, women are free to decide, when men and Trump just know nothing about making a baby in belly. In middle age USA, women will have a baby after a rape, great life for both.

[MarquisdeSade1]

And thank you for rendering your legal / moral opinion The Reverend Dr. Justice MarquisdeSade LMFAO!

Malum in se. Malum in se is a concept in criminal law referring to an inherently immoral act, regardless of whether the action is criminalized.

Abortion is the murder of a baby.

Tread lightly, Karma isn't so kind to baby butchers.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2...-brain-cancer/

Its a shame it took her so quickly she should of suffered much much longer!!

Brain cancer is the perfect death for this monster.

[MarquisdeSade1]

Trump doesn't own anything. He's a parasite and always has been. His "executive orders" look like a flurry of activities, but all of them are cheap ideological shots to emotionally satisfy his poor, narrow-minded, uneducated supporters to evoke intense and vehement sensation of "owning the dems. "

Kill, baby, kill, that's what this "president" is all about.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/23/o...-populism.html

Opinion.

David Brooks.

How Trump Will Fail.

Jan. 23,2025.

A photograph of the president's desk with no one sitting in the chair.

Credit. Damon Winter / The New York Times.

Listen to this article · 9:59 min Learn more.

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881.

David Brooks.

By David Brooks.

Opinion Columnist.

After a four-year hiatus, we are once again compelled to go spelunking into the deeper caverns of Donald Trump's brain. We climb under his ego, which interestingly makes up 87 percent of his neural tissue; we burrow beneath the nucleus accumbens, the region of the brain responsible for cheating at golf; and then, deep down at the core of the limbic system, we find something strange — my 11th grade history textbook.

Over the past few months, and especially in his second Inaugural Address, Trump has gone all 19th century on us. He seems to find in this period everything he likes: tariffs, Manifest Destiny, seizing land from weaker nations, mercantilism, railroads, manufacturing and populism. Many presidents mention George Washington or Abraham Lincoln in their inaugurals. Who was the immortal Trump cited? William McKinley.

You can tell what kind of conservative a person is by discovering what year he wants to go back to. For Trump, it seems to be sometime between 1830 and 1899. "The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts," he declared in his address.

It's easy to see the appeal. We were a boisterous, arriviste nation back then, bursting with energy, bombast and new money. In 1840, there were 3,000 miles of railroad track in America. By 1900, there were roughly 259,000 miles of track. Americans were known for being materialistic, mechanical and voracious for growth. In his book "The American Mind," the historian Henry Steele Commager wrote of our 19th-century forebears: "Whatever promised to increase wealth was automatically regarded as good, and the American was tolerant, therefore, of speculation, advertising, deforestation and the exploitation of natural resources. " So Trumpian.

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It was a time when the national character was being forged not among the establishment circles in Boston, Philadelphia and Virginia but out on the frontier, by the wild ones, the uncouth ones. It was the rugged experience of westward expansion, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared in 1893, that had given America its vitality, its egalitarianism, its disinterest in high culture and polite manners. The West was settled by a rising tide of hucksterism — the spirit of the circus master P. T. Barnum more than that of the aristocratic novelist Henry James.

It was a golden age of braggadocio, of Paul Bunyan-style tall tales. It was also an age when to be American was to be wreathed in glory. Many Americans believed that God had assigned a sacred errand to his new chosen people, to complete history and to bring a new heaven down to earth. (Kind of like the way God saved Trump in that Pennsylvania field so that he could complete the sacred mission of deporting more immigrants.).

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Herman Melville captured, without endorsing, the nationalist fervor in his novel "White Jacket": "We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people — the Israel of our time. God has predestinated, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls. " Walt Whitman joined the chorus: "Have the elder races halted? / Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas? / We take up the task eternal. " There's no confidence like adolescent confidence, for a person or a country.

I can see why this image of a wild, raw, aspiring America appeals to Trump. It is sometimes said that Trump appeals to those left behind, the losers of the information age. And this is a nationalism filled with aspiration, daring, hope and future-mindedness. (It helps if, like Trump, you whitewash a few minor details about 19th-century America from your portrait — like, you know, slavery and Reconstruction.).

Maybe the century's key appeal for Trump is that in those days America was firmly anti-establishment. Across the Atlantic were the old states — Europe. Periodically, Europeans like Fanny Trollope (herself a novelist and the mother of a rather more famous one) would visit America and turn up their noses at the vulgar money-loving people they found here. The English writer Morris Birkbeck summarized his view of the American spirit this way: "Gain! Gain! Gain!" Americans were proud to defy the snobs with their refined manners, class-ridden societies and inherited luxuries.

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You can draw a straight line from this (semi-mythical) image of America to the movement Trump leads today. He too leads a band of arrivistes, establishment-haters, money-seekers and unreconstructed nationalists. Many Democrats accuse Trump of ushering in an oligarchy, but new-money moguls like Elon Musk have often sided with the populists against the bien pensants. This is not oligarchy; this is what populism looks like.

Trump is drawing on themes that have been deep in the American psyche at least since Andrew Jackson became president in 1829. Populist movements, like most movements that represent the dispossessed, tend to be led by men who radiate power, masculinity and wealth. They harness American's natural distaste for rules, regulations and bureaucratic moralists.

The quintessential thing Trump did this week was to announce an artificial intelligence development project of up to $500 billion while also revoking a Biden executive order for A. I. Safety. Even Musk says the whole project is mythical hype because some of the companies involved don't have the money. Meanwhile, weakening the safety control on the technology? What could go wrong?

Today's populist ire is directed not at the European establishments living across an ocean but at the American ones on the east and west coasts. Democrats are mistaken if they think they can rebuff Trump by howling the words "fascism" or "authoritarianism," or by clutching their pearls every time he does something vulgar or immoral. If they decide to continue the culture war between the snooty elitists and the masses, I think we know how that's going to turn out.

The problem with populism and the whole 19th-century governmental framework is that it didn't work. Between 1825 and 1901 we had 20 presidencies. We had a bunch of one-term presidents; voters kept throwing the incumbents out because they were not happy with the way government was performing. The last three decades of that century saw a string of brutalizing recessions and depressions that profoundly shook the country. The light-footprint government was unable to cope with the process of industrialization.

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Many populists were ill equipped to even understand what was happening. In his classic book "The Age of Reform," Richard Hofstadter writes, "Populist thought showed an unusually strong tendency to account for relatively impersonal events in highly personal terms. " In other words, they thought they could solve the disruptions of industrialization if only they could find the evil conspirators who were responsible for every ill. Their diagnoses were simple-minded, their rhetoric over the top; their proposals, Hofstadter noted, wandered "over the border between reality and impossibility. " Sound familiar?

Here's how America recovered: Populist indignation finally got professionalized. In the 20th century, members of the progressive movement took the problems the populists were rightly angry about and built the institutions that were required to address them effectively — like the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve. Populists had trouble thinking institutionally; the progressives, who were well trained, morally upright, self-disciplined, disgusted by corruption, intellectually rigorous (and sometimes priggish and arrogant) did not have that problem.

There's a reason the 20th century happened. The United States had to build a stronger central government and a leadership class if it was going to take responsibility — responsibility for the people who were marginalized and oppressed in our own country and, as the century wore on, responsibility to establish a peaceful and secure world order. Americans have a perpetual problem with authority, but for a time — from say 1901 to 1965 — Americans built authority structures that voters trusted.

Now we live amid another crisis of authority. Our system has not managed to keep up with the savage inequalities produced by the information age — especially between the college educated and the less educated. Populists are again indignant and on the March. But, as before, they have no compelling theory of change.

The colorful menagerie of people who make up the proposed Trump cabinet all have one thing in common: They are self-identified disrupters. They aim to burn the systems down. Disruption is fine in the private sector. If Musk wants to start a car company and it flops, then all that's been lost is investor money and some jobs. But suppose you disrupt and dismantle the Defense Department or the judicial system or the schools? Where are citizens supposed to go?

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The history of the world since at least the French Revolution is that rapid disruption makes governments cataclysmically worse. Trump, the anti-institutionalist, is creating an electoral monarchy, a system in which all power is personalized and held in his hands. That's a recipe for distorted information flows, corruption, instability and administrative impotence. As we've seen over and over again down the centuries, there's a big difference between people who operate in the spirit of disruption and those who operate in the spirit of reform.

If I were running the Democratic Party (God help them), I would tell the American people that Donald Trump is right about a lot of things. He's accurately identified problems on issues like inflation, the border and the fallout from cultural condescension that members of the educated class have been too insular to anticipate.

[EihTooms]

A baby's life begins the moment it is conceived
So please keep your pro baby butchering propaganda to yourself.

Mississippi politician files Contraception Begins at Erection Act

https://www.wlbt.com/2025/01/22/miss...-erection-act/

JACKSON, Miss. (WLBT) - A state senator in Mississippi has filed a bill entitled the Contraception Begins at Erection Act.

As written by Sen. Bradford Blackmon, the bill would make it unlawful for a person to discharge genetic material without the intent to fertilize an embryo.

There are also fines involved, the third strike resulting in the loss of $10,000 from the perpetrator.

In a statement to WLBT News, Blackmon wrote, All across the country, especially here in Mississippi, the vast majority of bills relating to contraception and/or abortion focus on the womans role when men are fifty percent of the equation.

This bill highlights that fact and brings the mans role into the conversation. People can get up in arms and call it absurd but I cant say that bothers me."

In fact, if you really cared about babies you would agree that a baby begin breathing life with the first horny thought in the mind of either the man or the woman and anything you do to inhibit or thwart the inevitable from that moment forward is butchering a baby. Or maybe twins. Or maybe triplets. Or maybe quads.

Please be consistent in your MAGA principles.

[EihTooms]

Then:

Trump says he can end the Russia-Ukraine war in one day. Russia's UN ambassador says he cant.
July 2, 2024

https://apnews.com/article/trump-rus...a1d52d137ca893

NOW:

Trump said he'd quickly end Russia's war on Ukraine. But it's proving tough.
Jan. 23, 2025

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...r/77557215007/

No. Really. Nobody knew ending Putin's War was hard.

Really.

Nobody.

Swear to god.

Nobody knew it.

Really.

[The Cane]

So please keep your pro baby butchering propaganda to yourself.

And thank you for rendering your legal / moral opinion The Reverend Dr. Justice MarquisdeSade LMFAO!

[Xpartan]

LOL. Remember all those "Trump" buildings that Trump never designed, never built, never owned, never had anything to do with other than selling his name to put on a sign to simply rebrand something someone else did all the work to create?

Trump doesn't own anything. He's a parasite and always has been. His "executive orders" look like a flurry of activities, but all of them are cheap ideological shots to emotionally satisfy his poor, narrow-minded, uneducated supporters to evoke intense and vehement sensation of "owning the dems. "

Kill, baby, kill, that's what this "president" is all about.

[MarquisdeSade1]

You might be right. I just don't remember people selling out so quickly before my own eyes. Trump to TikTok. Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos and the rest of them to Trump. Maybe because I am old, this lightning speed of all-consuming corruption is a bit overwhelming to my old and slow self.

But I'm glad to see that you and your brothers are OK with this intense upcoming oligarchization of our society. I don't get for the life of me what's in it for you, but at least you don't expect the man you worship to do anything for anyone but himself.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/21/o...rts-minds.html

Opinion.

Guest Essay.

The Right Is Winning the Battle for Hearts and Minds.

Jan. 21,2025.

A woman wearing red looks up at President Trump, who is speaking to a large crowd at the Capital One Arena in Washington.

Credit. Damon Winter / The New York Times.

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221.

Thomas be. Edsall.

By Thomas be. Edsall.

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, the. See. , on politics, demographics and inequality.

The full-scale assault by the conservative movement on liberal domination of the nation's culture has begun to deliver key victories.

The right has gnashed its teeth for decades over the leftward tilt of academia, the literary world, the press, television and streaming video.

Thirteen years ago, Rod Dreher published "Yes, Liberals Do Control Culture" in The American Conservative: "The hegemony of cultural leftism in American popular culture, and the resulting epistemic closure among American culture producers, is a critical challenge to conservatives. ".

In a 2012 essay, "'Sexual Careers' in Late Roman America," Dreher added, "I am tempted to believe — more than tempted; in fact, I do believe — that there is very little to be saved in our decadent culture, only things to be suffered, and endured, and preserved through this present darkness for a more sane age to come. ".

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The world Dreher described has radically changed, if not flipped on its head, according to Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts. In a Jan. 2 essay, Drezner posed the question: "Has the Right Won the Culture War?

"Over the last five years, the cultural ground has shifted dramatically to the right," Drezner wrote. While this does not mean that "the right is now culturally ascendant," he added, "it does mean that neither progressive nor 'nonpartisan' elites possess the cultural cachet they did even a half-decade ago. ".

What has changed, Drezner wrote, "is the erosion of the left's cultural dominance. ".

Drezner argued that "if it turns out the right controls both the ascendant political and cultural institutions in the United States, that presages a very different next decade than what many were expecting even a year ago. ".

How did this shift occur?

First, an aggressive and opportunistic conservative movement recognized the crucial importance of new technologies in shaping politics and culture, in the dissemination of ideas and in providing credible, albeit partisan, analyses of the ills of society.

Most prominently, Elon Musk, an ally of President Trump, bought Twitter in 2022 and turned it into X, a major social media platform now tilted to the right. On a lesser scale, Trump created Truth Social, and right-wingers have founded such social media sites as Gab and Parler.

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Gab offers new members the opportunity to join community groups that include "Victims of Affirmative Action," "Liberal Bashing 101," "White Man Wednesday" and "Bible Prophecy and Truth. ".

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Similarly, as Luke Winkie pointed out in an article in Slate in November, "How the Right Won Podcasting," conservatives dominate the list of the most popular podcasters. He wrote, "Scroll through Spotify's top podcasts chart these days, and at any given moment, at least half of the most popular shows are hosted by figures friendly to the MAGA cause. ".

"Tucker Carlson's show," Winkie wrote.

Is the fourth-most-listened-to show on the platform, while anti-woke entrepreneur Patrick Bet-David lingers a few rungs below him, and Candace Owens sits comfortably between them both. Further down you can find firebrands like Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino cranking out new shows every day. Similarly, Joe Rogan, with his eternally inscrutable, are. F. K. Jr. –adjacent brand of populism, continues to dominate the top spot.

Tellingly, Winkie continued, "members of the reliably liberal podcasting commentariat are few and far between on the charts alongside their opposition. ".

Trump's threats to use the government's regulatory apparatus to punish dissident corporations have, in turn, brought to heel major technology players that perform an important role in shaping what constitutes contemporary American culture. Google, Meta, Amazon and Apple's Tim Cook each contributed $1 million to Trump's inauguration celebration.

During a Dec. 16 news conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump commented on the high-tech moguls now seeking him out: "One of the big differences between the first term — the first term, everybody was fighting me. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend. ".

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The tech see. E. O. S are not alone in seeking Trump's favor.

Paramount Global, which owns CBS, is reportedly exploring ways to settle a $10 billion lawsuit filed by Trump over the way CBS handled an interview with Kamala Harris, according to The Wall Street Journal.

In December, ABC News, which is owned by Disney, settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Trump as the network contributed $15 million to his future presidential foundation and museum, along with $1 million to cover legal fees.

Both cases reflect Trump's determination to force the media to constrain hostile coverage. The strategy appears to be working.

Anna Diakun, a lawyer at Columbia University's Knight First Amendment Institute, told The Guardian:

These suits will have a significant chilling effect on news outlets. Even the threat of legal action may lead some to self-censor, rather than risk retribution. This is no accident — it appears to be Trump's goal. The bottom line is that Trump's lawsuits against media organizations — and his threats to file more — are a danger to press freedom.

The Trump-Republican November sweep had an immediate effect on the partisan balance of power regarding cable news networks, which have long been crucial players in the dissemination of ideas, values and beliefs from the left as well as from the right.

Despite the closeness of the November election, the two more liberal cable channels, MSNBC and CNN, experienced a severe decline in viewership after Nov. 5, while Fox News ratings rose.

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I asked Anya Schiffrin, the director of the technology, media and communications program at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, about the differences between conservative and liberal communication systems. Schiffrin wrote back by email:

It is remarkable how right-wing talking points now dominate discourse in many parts of the world. They've managed to galvanize voters by focusing on anxiety about crime, migration and inflation. Over the last couple of years, we've heard the story of migrant crime in Santiago, Stockholm, Melbourne, as well as New York.

Over decades, Schiffrin continued.

Republicans have done a superb job of messaging through the right-wing radio network as well as the tabloids and Fox television and now through social media. Many on the left have agonized about this and wondered whether they should create alternative media infrastructures.

However, part of why the Republicans are so successful is the message rather than the medium. Republicans keep their message extremely simple and focus on topics that have salience. Explaining the nuances of crime statistics and telling people not to worry about crime is not persuasive when people go daily to CVS and see all the toothpaste and aspirin are under lock and key or feel threatened on the street or subway.

An essential part of the conservative agenda, Schiffrin wrote, is what she calls "platform capture":

The tech titans want to avoid regulation and taxation, and many have a libertarian bent, so it's natural for them to collaborate with Donald Trump. The platforms and A. I. Companies are counting on the United States to stop global regulation. Indeed, when Zuckerberg said recently that he would dismantle fact-checking efforts he also mentioned the need to beat back European regulation. A Trump and Zuckerberg-Musk alliance makes sense for all of them right now.

While a major element of the conservative drive to set the cultural agenda is to control the medium — the websites, podcasts, messaging systems — another goal is to discredit and push back against liberal initiatives and claims.

On this score, Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of "America's Cultural Revolution," has almost single-handedly forced liberals to retreat on a host of issues.

Rufo can claim credit (or blame) for the corporate and academic retreat on critical race theory; diversity, equity and inclusion (better known as the. E. I.); and the environmental, social and governance (E. S. G.) movement in corporate investing.

Two days ago, Rufo boasted on X of the rising status of the right in the nation's culture:

For the past four years, the Left has tried to condemn us as fringe, radical, extreme, and worse. But the truth is that we are mainstream, reasonable, popular, and ascendant. We're no longer going to let Cluster be leftism ruin our institutions. If that's your thing, try therapy.

In a more subtle but no less significant development, two Wall Street Journal reporters, Aaron Zitner and Meridith McGraw, described in an article on Jan. 19 how "in sports, entertainment and marketing, displays of conservatism are crowding out progressive postures. ".

"Instead of taking a knee to call for social justice," Zitner and McGraw wrote.

And. F. L. Players are doing the "Trump dance" in the end zone at football games. Mainstream entertainers, among them the country singer Carrie Underwood and the rapper Snoop Dogg, agreed to perform at events celebrating Donald Trump's inauguration, something music stars largely shunned eight years ago.

A new generation of Trump-friendly comedians and wellness influencers is populating YouTube and other social media, while a snippet of audio featuring Barron and Melania Trump has become one of the hottest online memes, with celebrities such as Paris Hilton and brands, including Frontier Airlines, using it in their TikTok and Instagram posts.

"Every time I walk on campus, I see a few MAGA hats. That's definitely new," said Carson Carpenter, 19, a senior at Arizona State University. Conservatism, he said, 'has really become intertwined in our pop culture. . It's really showing that conservatism is cool now. ".

On a separate front, Zitner and McGraw wrote.

Businesses are rolling back diversity efforts that gained urgency after the murder of George Floyd by police in 2020 led to a focus on racial inequities. Universities are adapting to the Supreme Court's ban on considering race in admissions, and programs designed to help minority students are under legal attack, facing claims that they discriminate based on race. In some Republican-led states, officials feel newly empowered to press for Christian-theme curricula in the classroom.

Conservatives have long complained that free speech was censored on social media. This month Meta Platforms announced the end of fact-checking and restrictions on certain types of speech across Facebook and Instagram.

While the right has been and continues to be on the attack, the left has been on the defensive.

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Musa al Gharbi, a professor of sociology at Stony Brook and the author of "We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of the New Elite," wrote by email in response to my inquiries:

The big story from 2010 on is not Republicans growing more effective at messaging but Democrats growing increasingly out of step with the median voter as they catered ever more around the preferences of knowledge economy professionals.

Knowledge economy professionals, according to al Gharbi, are those employed in higher education, the media, high tech, the law, health care, entertainment, advertising, human resources, information technology and other fields requiring be. A. s or advanced degrees.

"They tend to have systematically different political and moral preferences and priorities than most other Americans," al Gharbi said, a theme he expanded on in a Nov. 6 Substack post, "Contextualizing the 2024 Election: It's the (Knowledge) Economy, Stupid":

Rather than viewing the gender divide, the ethnic shifts, the education divide, etc. As separate phenomena, it's more insightful to understand them as facets of a more fundamental schism in American society. Namely: a divide between "symbolic capitalists" and those who feel unrepresented in our social order.

Two decades ago, al Gharbi wrote, the.

Sociologists Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks observed, "Professionals have moved from being the most Republican class in the 1950's to the second-most-Democratic class by the late 1980's and the most Democratic class in 1996. " The consolidation they noted at the turn of the century is even more pronounced today. And as these professionals have been consolidated into the Democratic Party, they've grown increasingly progressive, particularly on "cultural" issues (sexuality, race, gender, environmentalism) and especially relative to blue-collar workers.

Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and the author of "The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time," has a different but related take. In an email, he wrote: "Each time Democrats lose, they blame the nature of modern communication. " he added:

Since Trump was re-elected last November, they have lamented that left-of-center donors haven't invested into creating progressives podcasts that could rival the influence of Joe Rogan (ignoring the fact that Rogan's podcast never had such donors).

These arguments miss the forest for the trees. The reason Republicans have been more successful in spreading their message isn't that they have bigger budgets or smarter staffers; it's that they have been more adept at telling an aspirational story about the nature of the country — one that, as it turns out, a lot of citizens from all kinds of demographic backgrounds found to be convincing.

The truth is that Democrats are now in the midst of a deep epistemological crisis. They look at the country through simplistic categories, for example by assuming that it can be split into two rival blocks of whites and people of color. They talk about it in a linguistic register that most Americans find deeply alienating. Most of all, they continue to express themselves with extreme care, lest they inadvertently end up saying the "wrong" thing.

Among the most damaging developments for the left include the failure of elite universities, bastions of liberalism, to deal with antisemitic protests during Israel's attacks on Gaza; the current exodus of reporters, editors and subscribers at The Washington Post, a mainstay of liberal journalism; the discrediting of academia's commitment to free speech as a result of the disclosure of their cancellation of controversial speakers; the relative absence of conservative professors in most fields; and the requirement that faculty members file annual mandatory diversity statements.

There are other factors at work. Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State, replied by email to my inquiries, writing: "The main distinction is that liberals dominate traditional media and cultural industries but conservatives more successfully build alternative institutions that are self-consciously ideological and anti-establishment. ".

Within this distinction, Grossmann wrote, he and his colleagues have found "there is a bigger audience for self-consciously conservative than liberal media due to perceptions that mainstream media is liberal. ".

In the battle to win the attention of voters, Democrats face two hurdles because of their increased dependence on voters with college and advanced degrees.

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As Andrew Van Dam explained in his Nov. 15 data analytics column in The Washington Post, "Can Our Spending Habits Help Explain the Culture Wars? Reading newspapers, a key vehicle for the transmission of political and cultural information, has both declined and become politicized:

NORC's General Social Survey has been asking how often folks read newspapers since the mid-1970's, when about two-thirds of Americans did so daily. As of 2022, a majority of USA Adults (roughly 55 percent) never open a paper or perhaps even a news app or news website.

Over the past four-plus decades, Van Dam continued.

Democrats made up a narrow majority in the 1990's and early 2000's, but their lead has turned into a rout. Now, among people who read the paper multiple times a week (roughly 15 percent of adults), Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than two to one.

While both Democrats and Republicans have abandoned newspapers in growing numbers, Van Dam noted, the drop among Republicans accelerated much faster than it did for Democrats in 2016, the year Trump first ran for president.

Bottom line: Newspapers are a key source of information for Democrats but not Republicans.

Nate Silver, the polling expert, took a more apocalyptic view of the problems facing liberals struggling to maintain cultural influence.

In a December Substack essay, "The Expert Class Is Failing, and So Is Biden's Presidency," Silver argued that the emergence of the Democrats as "the party of the educated" has resulted in what he called "the Indigo Blob," which he described as.

The merger between formerly nonpartisan institutions like the media, academia and public health on the one hand — institutions that draw almost exclusively from the ranks of college graduates — and expressly partisan and political instruments of the Democratic Party and progressive advocacy groups on the other hand.

This evolved liberalism, in Silver's view, has undergone.

A double failure. Its institutions serve the public increasingly poorly — but it's also increasingly losing politically. If Trump's victory against a Harris campaign that literally ran out of ideas wasn't proof enough of that, people are also voting with their feet, fleeing blue states and cities. Corporations that embraced wokeness have now done a 180-degree turn.

The result, Silver wrote, is that the left "is losing the battle of ideas, the one thing that it's supposed to win. ".

The enemies of liberalism are having a cumulative effect.

Rising authoritarianism, economic inequality, political polarization and challenges to democratic norms echo certain historical patterns, inviting comparisons to the rise during the Great Depression of Huey Long in Louisiana, to give an American example, and of fascism in Europe.

Contemporary political jousting between left and right includes ethnic and racial scapegoating, but there are also key differences: the presence of robust global institutions, no matter how much Trump hates them or wants to withdraw from them, widespread access to information and hard lessons learned from bitter experience.

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Trump's corporate allies are now lodged throughout the American business community. History has shown that turning points like the one we face can be very dangerous. Once leaders with autocratic aspirations, like Trump, as well as his enabler and sidekick Musk, have risen to power, an inflamed, ascendant right follows them, wherever they go.

Where, the question then becomes, might this end?

[EihTooms]

Trump's Pandemic Part 2, dot #2:

Health Agency Reports from CDC, FDA, and NIH Halted by Trump Officials.
Jan. 23, 2025

https://www.healthline.com/health-ne...agency-reports

During President Trumps first term in office, one of his appointed officials tried to assume control of the MMWR journal, which published information about the COVID-19 pandemic that did not align with White House messaging.

Not a day goes by when CDC isnt tracking a potential threat to our health, Richard Besser, MD, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and former acting director of the CDC, said in a statement shared with CNN.

[MarquisdeSade1]

Stages of Fetal Development

https://www.msdmanuals.com/home/wome...al-development

You might want to review that to bone up on what is and isn't a "baby."

So please keep your pro baby butchering propaganda to yourself.

[EihTooms]

Ready for Trump's Pandemic Part 2?

Mass Murdering more than a million Americans, millions more around the World, crashing world-wide economies, Wiping Out Millions Upon Millions of Jobs, collapsing global supply-chains and triggering all of the hyper-inflation and opportunistic price-gouging, skyrocketing prices for food, GROCERIES, rent and gas that followed the first time around just wasn't satisfying enough for Trump and his MAGA Cult followers.

So now he is winding up to do whatever it takes to do it all over again, perhaps with an even more virulent disease this time:

Public health experts worry about implications of Trump withdrawing US from WHO: 'An enormous mistake'.
Jan. 22, 2025

https://abcnews.go.com/US/public-hea...y?id=117933153

Trump's executive order is an attempt to finish a process he began during the last months of his first term. The president temporarily slashed funding and signed an executive order in July 2020 removing the U.S. from the WHO but, because withdrawal requires a one-year notice, former President Joe Biden reversed the decision upon taking office in January 2021.

This is what might happen if the US withdraws from the WHO.
Pulling out will harm the US, as well as global public health.
Jan. 23, 2025

https://www.technologyreview.com/202...-from-the-who/

On January 20, his first day in office, US president Donald Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the US from the World Health Organization. Ooh, thats a big one," he said as he was handed the document.

The US is the biggest donor to the WHO, and the loss of this income is likely to have a significant impact on the organization, which develops international health guidelines, investigates disease outbreaks, and acts as an information-sharing hub for member states.

But the US will also lose out. Its a very tragic and sad event that could only hurt the United States in the long run, says William Moss, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.
..........
WHO funds are spent on a range of global health projectsprograms to eradicate polio, rapidly respond to health emergencies, improve access to vaccines and medicines, develop pandemic prevention strategies, and more. The loss of US funding is likely to have a significant impact on at least some of these programs.

A gentle reminder that MAGAs and their typically pro Repub confederates in Mainstream Media worked very hard to ignore Trump's incomparable and in many ways singular contribution to laying the groundwork for, creating and exacerbating Trump's Pandemic Part 1. The gigantic dots, really only 2-3 of them, were right there from the very beginning to show, illustrate, support and prove the reality of that conclusion. But their blind allegiance to Trump and the Cult just wouldn't allow them to see and accept it.

Well, now let's see how hard they work to ignore Trump's mission to drag the world through another round of it while the reports and substantiation of him doing it are revealed and warned against step by step, dot by dot, in real time and right before their eyes.

[Spidy]

As a Western European fed with quality standards, I don t buy chinese nor korean shit cars, nor chinese shit other products. I drive V8 Audi I powered with french E85 to save our planet, when batteries for Teslas and others make big pollution, Musk fucking our world. Just have to have a brain, when USA seem no brained, according to who they elected. I will ban USA products, under Trump and Musk who are bullshiting our world. I may buy a Dodge charger V8 , for the legend, but only after these 2 crazy. Our world have to resist to Trump, Musk and Putin, kind of 3 brothers.

Surely you do realize, that it is the very legacy car manufacturers of the world, like Audi, Mercedes, Porsche, VW, Ford and Toyota, that are the very idiots paying Tesla (unfortunately for years now), by buying hundreds of millions in Telsa carbon credits to avoid even larger fines in the billions, by the EU for all those V8 powered ICE vehicles, you love to drive so much.

I mean talk about dumb business practices, handing over money to help your competitor's business! (...kkkk!)

Automakers to pool CO2 emissions with Tesla, to comply with EU 2025 rules., Jan 07, 2025
https://www.reuters.com/business/aut...la-2025-01-07/

With regards to the Korean and Chinese EVs being shit, you couldn't be more wrong.

Korean/Chinese EVs are in many instances, currently better than the European made EVs, if not just as good. Many models are winning awards and have been named Car/EV of the Year, in some cases. Chinese BYD (EV/Hybrid auto and bus manufacturer) just become the worlds top EV seller.

[EihTooms]

Using mostly whole numbers for simplicity, here are some key date USA Stock Market closing numbers for the S&P 500 Index:

-Election Day 2016 = 2163.

-Inauguration Day 2017 = 2263.

-Election Day 2020 = 3369.

-Inauguration Day 2021 = 3852.

-Election Day 2024 = 5783.

-Inauguration Day 2025 = 5996.

Therefore, based on those closing date numbers we can calculate that:

Trump's 2016 post-election win relief rally gain was 9%.

Biden's 2020 post-election win relief rally gain was 14%.

Trump's 2024 post-election win relief rally gain was just under 4%. And to be more precise it was 3. 7%.

Trump's 2017 Inauguration Day-to-Last Day in Office gain was 70%, but a sizable percentage of that was Biden's 14% 2020 post-election win relief rally gain.

Biden's 2020 Inauguration Day-to-Last Day in Office gain was 55%, and that result was obviously unfairly restricted by that tepid-to-insignificant piddling 3. 7% 2024 Trump post-election win relief rally "gain. ".

Interestingly, if you calculate the entire possible Trump-influenced time period from his Election Day 2016 to his Last Day in Office in 2021 vs the entire possible Biden-influenced time period from his Election Day 2020 to his Last Day in Office in 2025, they both come in at 78%!

However, we should remember that Trump got there after inheriting a terrific set of positive economic trajectories from Obama-Biden and along the way shook out and likely bankrupted many stock market investors at the dreadful bottom of each of his TWO Bear Market Declines in the broad USA Stock Market during his 4 year term, one in 2018 and another even deeper one in 2020, along with a Recession and him Wiping Out Millions Upon Millions of Jobs.

Meanwhile, Biden got there after inheriting the usual horrific economic conditions handed to incoming Dems by outgoing Repubs over the past 100 years, averted even the slightest recession, presided over NO Bear Market Crashes in his 4 years in office and produced more jobs than all three previous Repub presidents combined, Trump included, and a sizable percentage of the fourth previous Repub so-called president.

Big difference.

[EihTooms]

Good god. The Globalist panel at the WEF tried to come across as an easier roll-over for Trump than the White House Press Corp. And that is saying a lot.

I say they tried to come across that way because they knew that was the best approach to getting him to relax and reveal his true totally uninformed, incomperent, ignorant and unfit self. LOL.

He CLEARLY did not have the slightest clue how to respond to their questions, probably not even a clue what the TOPIC of the questions were, simply blathered on and on with his usual nonsensical "weave" into one incoherent, non responsive word salad after another.

Seriously. Those guys were obviously goofing on him, goading him along, humoring him, just to demonstrate to themselves and every other Global Industry Leader and World Leader what a ridiculous chump they will all be lucky to crush in any and every negotiation for the next four years.