A scene from the inauguration:
Some elections are important, some are not. But this one, this one really mattered and I just want to say thank you for making it happen…
then a bold unmistakeable Nazi salute.
Don’t try to tell me that was a slip of the entire goddamn right arm. That was a massive call out to the American fascist community. He knew what he was doing.
“Our sovereignty will be reclaimed. Our safety will be restored. The scales of justice will be rebalanced. Our top priority will be to create a nation that is proud, prosperous, and free.”
— Trump inaugural address
Is this a plagiarized quote from Hitler circa 1930?
And that’s it. The US of A, such as it was, is done. It’s over. Congratulations, you no-vote fucks. May you all rot under the bridge along with the rest of your destitute, lice-ridden, moral peers.
Dennis K, that sounds awfully like despair.
Me, I reckon the USA is stronger than that.
The pendulum will swing again.
Dr. Strangelove did it better.
Thankyou Vicar, beholder, Jill Stein, West and rest of the Putriuty Disunity mob and thsoe who couldn;’t be borhered voting to save the USoA from actiual fuckiung nazis. .You evil guillible tools might deserve this Trumopuan Fascist era world you’ve inflicted on us but ratuional, humane good people unlike you do NOT.
YOU put Trump iand hiscrew of unspeakably evil fascist billionairesd theives and crooks in charge. To think you probly even feel smug about it..
There’s an awful lot of people who by now have waaay too much to lose unless the swinging pendulum is shoved good and hard permanently off its pivot before four years are up.
They can’t take the risk; they have less than four years to make sure they are never voted out again, and that they have a suitable puppet to pardon, stay, and obstruct on their behalfs.
Yes, that’s despair.
UNCLE SAM, b. 1776, aged 249, passed today of complications from a wound inflicted in 1980 by R. Reagan. Sam is survived by mother Britain, brother Australia, and sisters Canada and New Zealand. May he rest in peace, after his zombified corpse is dismembered, hopefully before it can bite any future victims.
Last time it took 70-85 million lives to swing that pendulum back, with 83% on the Allied side.
The ADL has made fools of themselves by publicly stating that it was just “an awkward gesture during a moment of enthusiasm.” An “awkward gesture” he did twice.
Oops, that should have been “in a moment of enthusiasm.”
A person could (quite feebly) claim the first was a kind of “And away to the stars we go!” gesture – in reference to his space plans, but the second? No, that makes it clear, unambiguously, he was sieg heiling.
But calling it Nazi… well… fun fact; before the 1930’s every kid in the U.S was encouraged to perform this salute while reciting a pledge of allegiance (before the Nazi’s sent it into disrepute) ‘cos it was sorta Roman and the U.S fancied itself successor to the Roman Empire.
By the way, sieg heil literally translates to “Hail the victor!” I wouldn’t be surprised to see people shortly claiming that’s all it “innocently” meant!
@ 9
If the last year has shown us anything, it’s that the ADL thinks they are the arbiters of what is and isn’t antisemitism. Since Trump is going to let the Israeli’s run their own Holocaust, they are cool with whatever he or his cronies do.
“Actually it’s a Roman salute” is the same as saying “Actually it’s a Sanskrit svastika.”
@11: “fun fact; before the 1930’s…”
Fun fact: The 1930’s happened, so did the 1940’s, and they are both now are long gone.
@ ^ Ed Seedhouse : are you sure about that? History may not repeat but sure seems like its rhyming lately..
@ 11. fentex : ” I wouldn’t be surprised to see people shortly claiming that’s all it “innocently” meant!
They can make that claim but it won’t make it true. It will be the obvs gaslighting it is.
Given the context and Musk’s support for fascism in Europe , Amercia on TwitX ad nauseam.. no one will or should buy that.
Talking of gaslighting, for fuck’s sake ABC news!
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-21/president-trump-inauguration-key-takeaways-musk-melania/104841074
Yeah, extended in an obvious nazi fucking salute. Really expected better from them.
Ibid :
the politics is what it is and those true believers in the fascist ideals mean it. For Trump while he is full of hate, spite and cruelty he is primarily about the money if it makes him money and fame he will strive for it. He reminds me of no one so much as Spiro Agnew, he can be bought as well . He does not display much of a political agenda nor ideology as much as unalloyed avarice. His ignorance and incompetence are on display in everything he does and says.
Musk thinks he has won because he thinks he has bought Trump and Musk’s fever dream of civilization in his image is at hand. He has tied his plans to someone who can not deliver loyalty in any form and will cheat and steal from everyone sooner or later. It is a train wreck we are all part of, how bad it will get no one can tell yet.
Steve Shives debunks the excuses made for Musk here – 17 mins long.
@StevoR, #5:
Yes, yes. You think it was vitally important to make sure that the people committing a genocide stay in office. We know. You’re now desperately angry that you’re going to suffer just as much as the people elsewhere in the world have been suffering thanks to the US, but instead of accepting that your side fucked up royally and the blame lies with you for pampering them into believing they could win, you’re desperately trying to convince yourself that it’s everybody else’s fault. You’re actually dumber than the Republicans, you know that? They keep getting scammed by Trump — including his crypto thing; apparently a bunch of them lost a bunch of money on it within about a day — but at least Trump is giving them what they want. You keep letting the center-right botch things up for you over and over and over again, and you don’t even claim to want what they’re selling anyway. What sort of idiot are you?
As stated before: I voted third party, and if every single third-party voter had instead voted for Harris, she still would have lost — in fact, there’s not a single state where third-party voters changed the outcome. In my state, if I had ten thousand votes and voted Harris, it would not have made the slightest difference to the outcome; if you want to yell at anybody, yell at the people who voted for Biden in 2020 and then voted for Trump this time, those are the people who decided the election, the votes Harris could have gotten but didn’t. (Unlike the Republican votes she spent the entire campaign trying to get and failed so completely that she actually got fewer of them than Biden did.) And according to a post-election poll, the single issue which those voters said changed their mind was not “the economy” as the Democrats have been lying about, it was the Gaza genocide that you kept dismissing and Biden and Harris refused to budge about. As I’ve said: the Democrats chose to lose by refusing to do the right thing. They became so evil that people couldn’t see any point in continuing to support them. I was warning about this all along. They — and you, their mindless supporter — should be doubly ashamed.
PZ, I think one of the first things you should do to resist the Trump regime is to permaban his enablers like Vicar above, beholder and others. They have nothing to offer but lies and gaslighting to support fascism and nobody will miss reading their self-righteous screeds.
You know, I think we should not judge someone for a gesture that might or might not have been the Hitlergruß, ah, I mean the Roman Salute.
It’s all about the context you know. I mean, it’s not as if the guy had supported fascist politicians in the US and abroad, bought a well known communications platform and changed it into a Nazi hangout or changed his screen name in this platform to Nazi Kekfrog. /s
Uh okay, The Vicar argues that it’s better to have an outright fascist in power who cheers on a certain genocide and plans to start some ethnic cleansing at home than some centrist who tacitly approves that genocide.
Also the fascist is better than the centrist because he god damn will deliver the promised ethnic cleansing, persecution of minorities and war while the centrist will not act according to The Vicar’s wishes.
And also while he did his part in bringing the fascist to power his personal action might not have been the deciding factor, he is totally blameless for getting the murderous fascist he wanted as president into power.
And then he calls others idiots.
@mordred, #22:
When Biden was doing the genocide, you guys were de facto supporting it, alongside the Republicans. Now you’re against it, and — according to the Israelis themselves — Trump won’t be giving them weapons, so although they will continue violating the ceasefire and killing Palestinians as they’ve done all along this is actually a major step up for them.
Don’t try to claim that you’re now powerless to act because Trump is President, but had the ability before — if that’s the case, it actually makes you worse, because it means you had the power to act but did not use it, since nothing changed, so you actively supported the genocide.
You guys really don’t understand even the most basic of basic ethics. Fascism is bad not because there is inherent evil in putting capitalists in charge of the government (which is what fascism means, by the definition of the man who created it) but because of the outcomes of doing so. Fascism is bad because it leads to genocide. If centrism leads to genocide, too, then no matter how much more anodyne its rhetoric may sometimes be, it is as bad as fascism, full stop. If we get mass murder from both the center-right and the far right, then the center-right is the enemy of all decent people just like the far right is. When Bill Clinton went to Michigan to give a speech saying that killing the Palestinians was necessary for US foreign policy, he was saying that anybody with an ethical code that prohibits genocide cannot support him and his ilk.
AugustusVerger’s suggestion to ban dissent rather than dispute anything Vicar has written only serves to strengthern Vicar’s points about the ethical failures of some.
It’s quite a strong point they made that Fascism’s dangerous outcomes aren’t noticeably worse than genocide, and I notice no real dispute with their argument. Now I personally think their argument about voting third party making no difference is bollocks (that couldn’t be known when voting, the outcome is no justfication for the decision). And even their fairly strong argument about Harris/Democrats being no better actually fails on the simple logic that fascism in the U.S IS worse for U.S voters than any other nations genocidal behaviour would be.
I think the Democrat party in the U.S has real problems if they can’t be seen as a better alternativre than the Republicans and I suspect the accounts I’ve seen about feelings of betrayal over Biden’s concealed frailties may have quite some truth to them.
But Vicar writes considerable truth I think when writing Democrats would do better if only they could manage to do more (morally) right.
The Vicar, lying again:
No, what was important was to prevent the establishment of outright fascism in power. An outcome that you, very clearly, wanted, and are pleased with, whatever your mouthings.
Who, here, has been dismissing the Gaza genocide? Come on, name names and provide quotes, if you can.
And while you’re about it, give us the source for your claim that: The Israelis themselves say that the reason they negotiated a ceasefire is that Trump has said he will not keep funding them, in keeping with the whole right-wing “foreign aide is what causes the deficit” thing.
I’ve looked, and I cannot find anywhere that “The Israelis” – or even a single Israeli – has said anything resembling that.
“AugustusVerger’s suggestion to ban dissent rather than dispute anything Vicar has written only serves to strengthern Vicar’s points about the ethical failures of some.”
No, it’s an ethical failure to not shun habitual liars and spreaders of misinformation. Lying is easy. Debunking lies takes effort. Especially when the likes of Vicar don’t even bother debating their lies and just keep straight repeating them at the next opportunity anyway.
They need to be banned.
Trump-supporting Tankie Vicar keeps repeating lies & ignoring truths.
Vicar had – like all voting Americans a choice between Trump’s Fascism & Kamala Harrisés NOT-Fascism.
Vicar has spent their time here arguing against the Democratic party and thus de facto for Trump in a shitty political system which has only two parties that can actually ever win thus ONLY two actual choices.
Does anyone ever recall Vicar criticising Trump or the Repugs at all? I don’t.
Vicar is a Repug Trumpist stooge & troll as well as a tankie who supports multiple genocides and the genocidaire Vladimir Putin.
Vicar hypocrtitically pretends to give a shit about Palestinians whilst empowering the party that will hurt and genocide them worst. Losing NOT just Gaza but also the West Bank.
Now thanks to Vicar the world will see more and worse genocide, suffering, lives lost, lives ruined, Global Overheating, bigotry, outright fascism and has generally made the world a vastly worse place. Vicar has to live with this. I do NOT think that we should be forced to put up with them.
@#25, KG:
Every. Single. One. Of. You.
If you really believed that it was important, you would have refused to vote for Biden or Harris.
The fact that you voted for them means that, to you, it is not important. It’s something to be negotiated about, like a budget, where a few dollars more or less can be shifted or added or omitted. Biden really, really wanted all the Palestinians dead and you wanted Biden (and later Harris, who refused to split from Biden — or even to say she would split from Biden* — on even the smallest detail of policy) so you decided that it was okay for the genocide to go ahead. The Democrats can have a little genocide, as a treat. You didn’t even hide it; even now, you would certainly kill every Palestinians — and probably strike every arab in the entire SWANA region dead — if it would put Harris into office instead of Trump.
You did the same thing with immigration: in Trump’s first term, at least, he deported fewer people than Biden did in his 4 years, and fewer than Obama did in any four years of his two terms. But you don’t really care about immigrants — that’s why Biden and Harris thought it was okay to chase Republican voters by jumping on the right-wing anti-immigration bandwagon. And they knew you’d do the same thing with LGBT people, too, that’s why when Harris was asked what should be done if Republicans made it illegal to be trans, she said they should obey the law. She knew you’d have her back when she was pushing trans people under the bus, and history shows that where the T gets betrayed, the LGB are the next on the chopping block.
By the same faulty “harm reduction” rhetoric you guys have been using about voting, as soon as you decided that the only way for the US to exist was genocide, you made “harm reduction” mean that the US has to cease to exist. Only somebody who thinks the US can exist without genocide can be trusted to run the country.
*Incidentally: it’s really revealing that Harris was unwilling even to lie and say she disagreed with Biden. Democrats aren’t above lying; among other things, Obama lied about his intentions over the Iraq war and about wanting a public option in the ACA, Hillary Clinton lied about Libya and about the coup she backed in Ukraine (which the Biden administration eventually admitted was run by Nazis), Biden lied about his intended policies pretty much across the board, but Harris was so far to the right she couldn’t even say she was willing to cut funding to Israel if they wouldn’t accept a ceasefire, let alone admit that they were committing genocide as pretty much every legal and academic authority of any standing in the entire world has agreed, not even to win the election. That’s how important genocide is to the center-right, and I suggest you remember it.
As for the Israelis claim, my original source was a third-party translation, confirmed by machine translation, of a news story from Israel in Hebrew, which quoted Israel’s own negotiators. (It is standard policy in Israel to discourage stories which might lead westerners to doubt Israel’s position from being published in English, so if you don’t at least machine translate things from Hebrew you will never get a good picture of what’s going on.) I can’t find that item now, but here’s the Jerusalem Post saying that the cause was “significant diplomatic pressure” from Trump pushed it through. I admit that that is not as satisfactory as saying outright that he wasn’t going to keep funding them, although on the other hand I wonder what other pressure you could possibly imagine Trump giving them, given his history of being rabidly pro-Israel. He’s not going to bomb them or invade or even permit the UN to send in peacekeeping troops.
That could be because their “argument” – not really worth dignifying with that term – has been refuted here so many times before, and The Vicar simply ignores the refutations.
1) To take the most obvious point first: Biden and the Democrats, whatever their other crimes, respect the outcome of elections they lose. We’ve just seen that happen, and can contrast it with what happened four years ago – the difference couldn’t really be any more fucking obvious. There may very well be no further opportunity to elect an alternative – and if there is, it won’t be because Trump and his oligarchs voluntarily permit it.
2) You concede that “And even their fairly strong argument about Harris/Democrats being no better actually fails on the simple logic that fascism in the U.S IS worse for U.S voters”. IOW, their “fairly strong argument” is obviously false, and particularly so as far as women, LGBTQ+ people, migrants, ethnic minorities and the poor are concerned. If we can judge by his actions and rhetoric, the Vicar doesn’t give a shit about any of these people.
3) Trump has, among his first actions, withdrawn from the Paris Accord on climate. He has also promised to “drill, baby, drill” for oil and gas, has an irrational hatred of wind power, and is a climate change denialist. Now it’s absolutely true that the Paris Accord is too weak, that both the USA and other countries are falling short in actions to implement it, that without drastic change we are headed for catastrophe. But the difference between Trump’s policies, and those Biden followed and Harris would have followed, remains vast – and affects everyone in the world.
4) Trump has also withdrawn from the World Health Organization, threatened the International Criminal Court, and explicitly threatened to invade sovereign states and seize their territory, in blatant violation of the UN Charter. In other words, he demonstrates complete contempt for and hostility towards what there is of international governance.
5) Trump’s victory has encouraged and enthused fascism everywhere – as can be seen in the gathering of fascist and far right “populist” leaders at his inauguration. Musk – he of the Hitlergruß – is explicitly interfering in support of fascism in Germany and the UK. Conversely, a defeat for Trump would have been a setback for fascism everywhere.
6) We haven’t yet seen how Trump will handle the two most prominent and dangerous (in terms of likely escalation and spread) current international conflicts: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s genocide in Gaza and accompanying expansionism in the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria. But his record, and his frank admiration for tyrants, are far from reassuring. Certainly, both Putin and Netanyahu have clearly welcomed his return to power.
Now watch: if The Vicar deigns to respond at all to these points, it will simply be by repeating the charge that anyone who wanted Harris to defeat Trump is an apologist for genocide, and similar obfuscations.
Incidentally, your repeated use of “Democrat Party” would be taken by many as a “tell” that you are in fact pro-Trump. For some reason, misnaming the Democratic Party in this way has been adopted by Trumpists as a sign of their contempt and hostility.
I wrote #29 before seeing TheVicar’s #28, but everyone can see that he has fulfilled the prediction I made in my penultimate paragraph. He has also failed either to name names or provide quotes for anyone here “dismissing the Gaza genocide”, his only justification for that lie being the pretence that preferring the lesser evil means dismissing the fact that it is indeed evil, and has finally admitted he can provide no source for the claim that:
with a bunch of obfuscation about how he can’t now find it (although it was a key point of his argument), and here’s something completely different instead that he’ll pretend is really the same, because reasons.
Is there a benefit to giving habitual liars and fascism enablers a soapbox? Did society benefit from allowing misinformation factories like Xhitter and Fraudbook flourish undaunted?
Nope. Not a single one. Liars need to be shunned.
US President Donald Trump has reversed the Biden administration’s sanctions on violent Israeli settlers in a concession to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu amid the precarious ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas.
So as predicted, Trump is not going to be any better than “Genocide Joe”, but in fact very likely to be worse. Not that the liar Vicar will care because he creates his own facts.
BAN HIM NOW!
Re #32, this may well be the first installment of what Trump offered Netanyahu in return for agreeing to a ceasefire he could boast about at his inauguration – a ceasefire which, while welcome, is not by any means necessarily the end of the genocide. Indeed, Trump has already disclaimed responsibility for maintaining and extending it.
That’s been a widespread thing on the American right since at least the days of Bush II in my recollection, and likely much longer. Wikipedia states it was well-known by the mid-80s, and has much earlier roots: Democrat Party (epithet).
@fentex, The Vicar has been repeating the same shit ad nauseam for over eight years by now if my memory serves correctly. I admit I did not read everything they wrote, but most of what I did read consisted of drive-by screeds about how Hillary was terrible and then ignoring every single refutation to said screed. This topic is somewhat unique in the sense that they wrote more than one comment.
I admit I was pretty dismayed about Trump’s win and I always thought that Elon Musk is an idiot and a sociopath but I was not expecting him to do an outright nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration. Twice. The USA descent into fascism might accelerate now even more than I thought.
Today it is “That wasn’t a Nazi salute!”
Tomorrow it will be “OK, it was a Nazi salute, but it doesn’t mean we are Nazis!”
The day after, it will be “Yes, it was a Nazi salute. We’re Nazis. What are you going to do about it?”
Charly@36,
I’m waiting to see if there’s any response to Musk’s Nazi salute from various UK politicians who have praised him (Farage, Badenoch) or welcomed him as a prospective investor (Starmer). The Guardian, pusillanimously, says “Musk appears to make back-to-back fascist salutes at inauguration rally”. Well yes, he did “appear” to make facist salutes – because he did, in plain fact and in plain sight, make fascist salutes.
dunc@35,
Thanks for that info.
Hmm.. a meme on thisshared by a friend just reminded me of this Blues Brothers – I hate .. South African .. nazis scene.
A true Nazi would say that the form of the salute was very different from a Sieg Heil (cf. the cerulean sweater scene in The Devil Wears Prada).
As for the rest of us…
@#20, AugustusVerger:
Yes, the commenter who predicted both what was going to happen and how it was going to happen in advance should be run out of town on a rail because it makes you angry when people point out that this was entirely predictable, and that your unquestioning fealty enabled it. Congratulations on being the most Democratic Democrat ever to Democrat. You couldn’t be more like the character in this video if you tried.
Funny how the Democratic Party is unbending just enough to admit that Biden letting Israel violate every red line he claimed he was drawing was a bad thing, but not noticing the obvious parallel, that letting Democratic politicians violate every supposed policy red line their base has.
@#29, KG:
To your point #1: so, you’re not going to resist Trump because he is the elected President and respecting the results of the election is more important than doing what is right. That’s certainly the implication of what you’re saying here, at least. Glad to know where you stand, champ, if only because I want to make sure I don’t end up nearby. You can — quite rightly — say a lot of negative things about the intelligence of Republicans, but at least they would rather rebel against the government than do what they see as evil. For all your denunciations of Trump, you’re going to back him instead of rebelling, apparently because you view morality as gauche.
To your point #2: I’m actually in a couple of those groups, and spend a fair chunk of time with friends in others. Biden and Harris and the Democratic Party generally very blatantly do not give a shit about us. Harris just threw trans people under the bus, and as soon as she did a bunch of Democrats in Congress came out and said “well, I think that trans people have been controlling the party for far too long and we should kick them out [and presumably legislate against them]”, Biden just signed the first anti-LGBT bill in decades into law, and I haven’t seen any of you making any counterdemands while there was still time.
To #3: just before the election, it was announced that the US is now the world’s largest producer of oil. This was, in fact, something that Democrats were actively crowing about, as a triumph, specifically because it was the result of Biden policy — his administration approved more oil drilling licenses than any previous one, including Reagan, either Bush, or Trump’s first term, and that includes a project which is projected to be within the 1% most polluting ever. We are also the largest producer of LNG (which is increasingly being revealed to be startlingly bad for climate change) and remain the fourth-largest producer of coal. He put tariffs on solar panels and turbines from China, which manufactures the overwhelming majority of both items in the world, thus putting major roadblocks in the way of green power in the US. The claim that Trump is going to be worse than Biden rests largely the willingness of people like you to pretend his spoken rhetoric is his actual policy — we have not, in fact, been meeting the Paris agreement, and we never ratified the Kyoto Protocol in the first place; if we violate them without being signatories, does the excess carbon dioxide become twice as powerful or something?
To #4: tell me again how compliant we’ve been with the ICC’s declaration that Israel is committing genocide. Then go look up what Biden’s vote was on the — never repealed — Hague Invasion Act back in 2002. Your complaints about Trump not wanting to be part of groups which might hold the US accountable are laughable when Biden has treated international cooperation as something to ignore as soon as becomes inconvenient.
#5: which really raises the question of “if this is all so terrible, and could be seen coming for so long, why has Biden done nothing to stop it?” (Heck, why did Obama do nothing to stop it?) Go watch that video I linked to earlier in this comment — I promise it’s quick, although the subtitles are awful so you kind of need the audio. Why are the Democrats always making promises but then deliberately turning themselves into lowercase p presidents?
#6: As far as Putin goes, Biden is one of the people who gave Putin an excuse to invade, by first backing expansion of NATO (which the founders of NATO opposed for exactly that reason) through the Clinton and GWB years and then being part of the administration which backed what his own administration has admitted, in 2021, to be an Nazi-backed coup in Ukraine. Is it really being helpful to rush over with insecticide when you’re the one who threw rocks at the hornets’ nest in the first place? The US military empire isn’t going to last forever — nothing does — and it’s dramatically irresponsible to deliberately make other peoples’ safety contingent on its continuation when not actually necessary. And on the other head, why did Biden bow and scrape to Netanyahu for 15 months, then? (Well, okay, we know the answer to that, even though we don’t say it out loud very often — Israeli lobbyists gave Biden $5.5 million, and Biden is the kind of old-fashioned politician who believes in staying bought. It’s ironic to see all the news stories about how well all Trump’s donors are doing out of his corruption after all this; even if Biden took ten times as much from Israel as is known to be the case, Israel would still have gotten hundreds of times their investment back in genocide assistance through his administration.) The best you can say for Biden on this head, giving him every benefit of the doubt, is that he’s been extraordinarily foolish, to a degree where if you object to Trump on the grounds of stupidity you should definitely also object to Biden; if you assume he isn’t a fool, then he has to be malignant. There’s really no third option. (The same goes for Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, incidentally. The Democrats just keep picking the worst people to run for President.)
Incidentally, although you haven’t mentioned it in your follow-up and probably don’t care: Biden and Blinken said over and over again that Israel had agreed to ceasefires and Hamas had refused them, and the article starts, flat-out, with the Israelis saying they have repeatedly refused the deals. So: regardless of whether or not you think Biden was actually telling the Israelis they had to stop, or whether (as I think, and is only reasonable) he was privately telling them to go ahead, the Biden administration was openly lying to the American public all along. That’s not a surprise; long after the Israelis had admitted that their claims about the October 7 attack were almost entirely lies, Biden was repeating those same claims as facts in his press conferences. But it’s yet another thing he lied about, which you were okay with all along, and remain okay with.
I’d like you to answer a question: Trump famously bragged that he could go out and shoot somebody and it wouldn’t lose him any followers. Is there anything Biden or Harris could have done which would have lost them your vote? You already explicitly were okay with genocide, with lying to the public on a whole host of fronts, with being bribed (by Israel)… on what basis can you claim to be superior to the MAGA crowd if the only difference is to which corrupt liar you’ve attached your unwavering, unthinking loyalty?
KG@38: Hmm, now that you mentioned it, I have yet to hear anything from Lindner the head of Germany’s pro-business/libertarian party who recently declared the Kekfrog to be great role model for Germany’s next government.
The Kekfrog though did not return Lindner’s affection, instead supported the fascists from the AfD, who definitely will not have a problem with him doing a Heil-Hitler. Except for envy, because around here they would get into legal trouble for being so obviously Nazi.
And Vicar Gish-Gallops into the horizon…
Musk did it twice. Not an accident.
Add this to his curiosity about WWII expressed on social media. And the sort-of-eugenic ideas he has expressed. Nope, he does not get the benefit of doubt.
So I, a person who publicly stated my dislike of Biden, said that the Democratic party was being cowardly, and have been far more scathing of Trump, am now accused of voting Trump into office because I voted for a party that opposed him. I have to wonder if those people who voted for a third party also put him into power, and if not, why? Did the third party in question favor or oppose all of Trump’s policies? Was the third party politically pure, with not a single position that required voters to compromise on their principles?
Please do tell us more about this perfect political ideology! 😇
To anyone making excuses for him, saying “it wasn’t Nazi” or “just excited!” or whatever…just ask yourself?
…if literally ANYONE not with Trump did that, would you disregard it as quickly, or pounce like a staving hyena?
We all know the truth in your answer, they’d be demonized in seconds, so stop making yourself look foolish and accept Elon’s actions as the fascist signalling they are.
One of the grosses things I’ve seen in my life.
I am sincerely curious about the mysterious 3rd party that won the Vicar’s vote. I hope it wasn’t the Green Party, since that’s nothing but a corrupt platform for Jill Stein’s grift. It better not be the Libertarians, because in many ways they are worse than the Republicans. Was it the Party for Socialism and Liberation party, because I could sympathize with some of their ideals at least, but I don’t care for Marxism/Leninism. I have no truck with the Constitution party, which is just more radical Republicans and Christian Nationalists. Same with the American Solidarity Party, another splinter off the Christian Nationalist tree.
There is a principle of confidentiality in your vote, so he doesn’t have to admit who he voted for, but I can’t imagine an American party that is superior to the Democrats in any way, and I would be vastly entertained by the spectacle of seeing the Vicar trashed for his election choices.
Remembering our reaction to the way they bashed Tim Walz’s son, they are now using the “Elon’s autistic! How dare you attack a neurodivergent person!” line at us.
Of course, the difference is that Gus Walz is actually autistic. Elon’s just a fucking fash.
Good point.
After that it gets worse. A lot worse.
The next step is to set up concentration camps and round up the
Jews, I mean the foreign migrant refugees and other undesirables such as MDs like Dr. Fauci.Which starts today.
That is what Trump did last time.
There are ca. 11 million undocumented immigrants in the USA right now. After the GOP rounds them up, where are they going to put them?
We don’t have jail space for 11 million people, many of which are children.
Sending a lot of these people back to their home countries is in some cases going to be difficult. It isn’t like we have a lot of planes flying to Yemen, except the jet bombers we periodically send over their territory to bomb them. Or Russians who fled their own murderous Nazi-like killers in the Kremlin. A lot of those refugees who made the effort to get the USA are fleeing religious, ethnic, or political persecution.
They are also theoretically entitled to Due Process for deportation since they are now under the laws of the USA. That would be a court hearing at the least.
There is also likely to be an increase it hate attacks on the current hate targets of the Nazis in power now. That would be Trans, gays, women, Progressives, nonwhites, nonxians, Muslims, etc..
The Vicar@
No, I neither said nor implied that. Since I’m not American (something you might have picked up if you ever paid any attention to anything beyond your own self-righteousness), my ability to resist Trump is pretty much limited to opposing his admirers and enablers in the UK, and his commercial activities there, which I’ve been doing since some years before he declared his candidacy for the presidency.
So fucking what? Your actions and words still say you don’t give a shit about others in those groups. For all of them, Trump is going to be worse than Harris would have been – and I notice you don’t even try to argue otherwise.
Actually, the claim rests on (a) Trump’s declared hostility to any and all measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, (b) the Inflation Reduction Act which:
and (c) That withdrawal as a signatory of the Paris Accord will be used, in Europe for example, as an argument against any measures to reduce emissions here.
You ignore the specifics of my point because they reveal your dishonesty. I’m well aware the USA has never signed up to the ICC – but Trump is AFAIK unique in the threats he has made against it as an organisation and anyone working for it. And Trump is also unique in his brazen threats to attack states posing no conceivable threat to the USA in order to seize their territory.
As for point 5, you simply ignore what I actually said – that Trump’s victory encourages fascism everywhere, while a defeat for him would have been a setback – because you know it’s true, so you try to divert attention by pretending I have claimed that Biden is a stalwart anti-fascist.
Simply parroting Putin talking points tells us what we need to know about you. No, NATO should not have been expanded, but Putin’s invasion had fuck-all to do with that expansion; and the overthrow of Yanukovych was not a “coup” in any reasonable sense, as several hundred thousand people were involved (yes, including neo-Nazis, but the latter received 2% of the vote in the subsequent election). I notice you once again fail to give a source for an important point in your “argument” – this time for your claim that his administration admitted it was a coup.
Well, yes, it would be. Clearly, you would rather the Ukrainians had been left to the tender mercies of Putin. The Ukrainian left – with whom I am in touch – are overwhelmingly in support of armed resistance to Putin’s fascism, and keen to take weapons from any source. See for example Razom We Stand and Sotsialny Rukh. And as I’m sure they would say to you and your loathsome kind: “Fuck off, you scumbag enabler of fascist imperialism.”
Of course I do, you dolt. I realise you have to go on pretending anyone who wanted Trump to lose is an admirer of Biden and Harris, but you can only do it by continually ignoring the abundant evidence to the contrary.
That’s yet another shameless lie from you. I’ve pointed out repreatedly that Biden has throughout been breaking US law by supplying arms to a state which is blocking American humanitarian aid, and relying on the lie that it is not doing so to justify this.
More shameless lies from you; you know very well I am not “okay” with genocide or lies, but you continue to pretend otherwise. Of course I didn’t have a vote, but I would have supported voting for whoever had a chance of defeating Trump, as long as they were likely to do less harm than Trump himself – as Harris clearly was. If there had been evidence that Harris was planning, if elected, to launch a nuclear first-strike, then I would have supported voting for Trump. Voting for someone does not imply approval of them – it implies, for anyone who really cares about others, that their victory is the best plausible outcome of the election. As an enabler of “the MAGA crowd” I’m not sure your not even worse than them – because you’re clearly not stupid, while most of them are.
Former acting Ice director John Sandweg added that an executive order Donald Trump signed yesterday telling the military to construct detention camps was a sign that he was serious about carrying out his campaign promise of mass deportations.
It would only be fair if one of the camps was called “Camp Jill Stein”.
@ 51 & 53 Who is Cheetolini going to get to build these camps?
The US currently does not have a budget, the entire nation is currently running on a continuing resolution, which Congress has been doing for several years now, which just extends the prior budget temporarily. So, to be clear, when Congress votes on the budget in March (or when Cheetolini shuts the federal government down in March, which is more likely), at best they will be voting on 6 months of a 12 month budget. (If they really wanted to cut government waste, Congress should be the first to go, since they get paid year round but apparently only work for 6 months out of the year.)
The lack of budget for new projects, coupled with Cheetolini’s 90 day federal hiring freeze means that there is no agency to hire anyone to actually build these camps. The 90 day hiring freeze also includes government contractors (as opposed to federal employees.)
Sooo… who will actually be building these camps for no pay and with no money for materials?
Will the same grifters who turned “build the wall” into “we need YOUR donations to build the wall” (and then didn’t actually build the wall) be turned loose on the same halfwits who donated the first time?
Aren’t they the same people who are constantly pissing and moaning about taxes being too high and government waste?
KG @52 (and elsewhere): kudos for your comprehensive responses to The Vicar.
Yes, I am aware that Cheetolini wants the military to build the detention camps but again, where is the budget?
If Cheetolini wants the camps built, which military endeavors will be cut to provide the budget and the personnel to build them?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/21/trump-executive-orders-challenges-lawsuits/
In other news, Cheetolini wants one of the Secret Service agents who shielded him at Butler PA to head up the Secret Service.
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-selects-agent-who-shielded-him-bullets-lead-secret-service-2016972
So there’s still hope for the future.
Wonder how many of the Secret Service agents will be willing to take a bullet for Cheetolini after their federal employee protections are stripped away and they are forced to work for a month with no pay.
silverhalide@54, 56,
Good point. I’ve said elsewhere that what I expect is a good deal of demonstrative cruelty aimed at recent migrants (whether documented or undocumented), without having much if any effect on the actual number of migrants (again, whether documented or undocumented), because that would hurt corporate profits. I’ve seen it pointed out (by Peter Turchin in his End Times) that the most effective anti-undocumented-migrant measure would be requiring employers to show that they had made serious efforts (by demanding and checking the relevant documents) to ensure that their employees had a legal right to reside in the USA. I predict that that will not be done. Announcing planned camps will be good enough for the next couple of years, then a couple “built” (tents or prefabricated shacks), staffed at minimal pay rates, and shown to be treating those confined badly, will suffice for a couple more. Then declare the “probblem” (which isn’t really a problem in most respects) solved. I could be wrong about this, but only if the really dedicated racists win out over the broligarchs, which looks unlikely at present.
Rob Grigjanis@55,
Thanks!
It’s goddamn 2025 and we STILL have online “leftists” chucklefucks trying to claim that the Euromaidan was a Nazi/CIA/Grey Alien conspiracy to push poor, powerless widdle Putin into murdering thousands of innocent people?
@KG #52 I admire your patience in answering the Pootin stooge, I do, however, disagree with you on one point, to wit:
“NATO should not have been expanded”
That is nonsense that plays into the imbecilic Kremlin propaganda about NATO encroaching on Russia.
NATO was not expanded by the nefarious will of the USA as an act of imperial conquest and subjugation or an act of shrinking the Russian sphere of influence. It was expanded by the will of people of former Warsaw Pact countries who did not feel safe next to Russia that has licked its wounds and started rattling sabers at their neighbors again.
We wanted to enter NATO not because we wanted to threaten Russia, but because we were threatened by it. And NATO allowed us to enter.
NATO did not expand from the inside out by extending its influence. NATO was expanded from outside by people converging towards its protective umbrella. It is not possible to know what would happen if NATO did not accept us but I think it is safe to assume that Ukraine would be invaded all the same under a different pretense, although possibly only after the Baltics.
In the news: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/21/trump-un-elise-stefanik-israel
Charly @59: History is complicated. It’s not imbecilic that Russia would have felt threatened by NATO’s expressed intent in the mid 1990s to expand eastward.
As the son of Latvian refugees, in the current climate, I’m glad that Latvia is a NATO member. But maybe that wouldn’t have been necessary (and maybe Putin wouldn’t be in power) if NATO had been more circumspect 30 years ago. Shoulda, woulda, coulda, maybe. Whatever.
@Rob Grigjanis, I might use too harsh language, but this really angers me, especially when it comes from tankies and assorted useful (to Russia) idiots, who spout abject nonsense ad nauseam (like Vicar).
I am sure Russia felt threatened. The same way that slaveholders felt threatened by slave emancipation. Let’s be real, Russia did not feel threatened because someone would harm it, let alone invade it. That was never going to happen and Russian leaders knew it. They have nukes to ensure that. Russia felt threatened purely because its ability to harm and exploit others was being reduced. To an oppressor, a move towards equality is threatening, sure. But that kind of “feeling threatened” does not deserve respect, neither on an individual nor on a state level.
I lived through the process of my country joining NATO, I watched it on the news as it very, very slowly developed. It was not easy, it was not quick, and most importantly we were not invited. It was considered unnecessary (by the USA and its allies) for us to join. Our (and Polish and Hungarian) politicians had to work hard for years for the idea of our joining NATO to be brought to the table.
It is not entirely coincidental that CZ, HU, and PL all joined NATO just after the first Chechen war when we saw the destruction of Grozny and the accompanied attempt at cultural genocide of Chechens in the news in 1995 (and little did we know that something worse was coming for Grozny just shortly after), just as it is not coincidental that Finland and Sweden joined after the invasion of Ukraine.
This is a pretty good summary:
On a possibly lighter note, from @16 ABC News quote: “American Defamation League.” After reading that and a couple of other stories that had unintelligible gibberish sprinkled in, I think they’ve handed off their written reporting to ChatGPT.
@ 42. Putin supporting Trump via 3rd party troll Vicar : “I’d like you to answer a question: Trump famously bragged that he could go out and shoot somebody and it wouldn’t lose him any followers. Is there anything Biden or Harris could have done which would have lost them your vote?”
Actually, YES I do have a few deal breakers that would stop me* from voting for a candidate even Biden or Kamala if they had done any of these :
(1.) If they were a Climate Science Denier like Trump is.
(2.) If they were a pandemic science denier that killed millions of people by lying about and mishandling, say, a covid epidemic as Trump did.
(3.) If they refused to condemn and instead cheered on (& were funded by and freed) actual nazis e.g. those at Charlottesville’s Unite the Reich march or Elon Musk as seen seig heiling t’other day at Trump’s inauguration. Thanks again to you for making that happen Vicar, beholder, et al. You really truly should NOT have. Wish you hadn’t.
(4) If they incited an attack on the US Capitol and Democracy trying to stay POTUS despite losing an election merely to try & stay in power which, well, Jan 6th dude. Remember that?
(5) If they boasted about being able to repeatedly sexually assault people and get away with it because they were famous as Trump did.
Pity those weren’t deal breakers for YOU when you actually de facto voted for Trump, Vicar! (Ditto beholder, et al..)
There were two choices for POTUS one of them was Trump who did all the things listed above and yet that wasn’t enough to make you vote for Kamala Harris the ONLY actual alternative instead thereby putting Trump in power .
Guess my standards and ethics are just a shitload better than yours, Vicar, beholder and the rest of the Putridity Disunity mob.
I also second everything #29 KG wrote in yet another excellent debunking of your tedious Russian imperialist talking
pointslies..* Of course, I am Aussie and couldn’t vote in the USoA anyhow but as a hypothetical if I could anyhow.
Rob Grigjanis #61
No, Russia wouldn’t have felt threatened by NATO expansion, they would have felt threatened for their dreams of imperial expansion and domination of their neighbors which they feel entiitled to thanks to their supremacist thinking. And that’s exactly why all those ex-Warsaw Pact countries sought NATO membership. All the wars that Russia or the USSR were involved in were either started by them directly or by their imperialist ambitions. Even in WW2 Stalin’s ultimate aim was to dominate Europe after the Nazis and western allies had exhausted each other fighting.
If all those states had not joined NATO, Russia would have simply started their “Empire building” efforts sooner.
@53. KG : “It would only be fair if one of the (detention / concentration – ed) camps was called “Camp Jill Stein”.
Agreed – and another one named for Cornel West too.
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornel_West_2024_presidential_campaign
Not so pro- tip : If Trump is supporting you, well, you’re probly on the wrong side here. Ditto if yYOU are effectively supporting Trump – take note Vicar, beholder et al albiet a bit fucking late now..
@59 & #62. Charly : Good points, thankyou.
@58. wobbly :
Truth! Quoted for.
Wonder if Vicar or beholder et al will bother responding to that reality? Actually, no I don’t.
@46. PZ Myers : “So I, a person who publicly stated my dislike of Biden, ”
Disliking Biden is fine by me. There’s a lot to dislike about him.
Biden wasn’t the candidate nor is it compulsory to like the candidate.
Trump was so much worse.
Kamala was so much better.
Moot points now anyhow.
Charly@59,
I know east European states wanted to enter NATO. The question is whether it was wise to allow them to do so. The push for NATO expansion from within the alliance, and specifically from the USA began with a debate within the Bush administration in the early 1990s which ended with a consensus in favour (apparently to reinforce American dominance in Europe), and continued with a mid-1990s decision by the Clinton administration. In 1996, Clinton called for former Warsaw Pact countries and post-Soviet republics to join NATO, and made NATO enlargement a part of his foreign policy.. Note that this was before the emergence of Putin and the Second Chechen War.
Of course that’s propaganda – but it’s the expansion that has made that propaganda plausible.
No, I don’t think it is safe to assume that – the assumption requires an essentialist and bordering-on-racist view of Russia as inevitably an aggressive, expansionist power. My view is that a serious effort should have been made to design a new security architecture for Europe including Russia, along with an equally serious effort to prevent the disastrous transition to kleptocracy in post-Soviet Russia (and for that matter, post-Soviet Ukraine, Kazakhstan, etc.) – which is what led to the rise of Putin. A positive outcome would not have been guaranteed, but the outcome of the course taken is self-evidently disastrous.
From my link above on NATO enlargement:
So the push to join NATO (and the EU) preceded the First Chechen War, as did the initial NATO moves in the direction of acceding to that push. I note that one outcome of admitting these states to NATO and the EU has been that they now contain a pro-Putin de facto dictatorship which is a considerable obstacle to aiding Ukraine. Both organisations need (but will not now get) provision for expelling a member which has violated democratic norms and refuses to return to them.
Dubious, at least with regard to WW1. Most analyses which make any serious attempt at objectivity distribute blame for the outbreak of that war fairly widely among the initial combatants, all of which had expansionist aims.
AugustusVerger @66:
Interesting how you ignore French (1812) and German (1941) imperial ambitions in their immensely costly (on both sides) invasions of Russia.
@KG #69 I really do not see how anything you said contradicts what I said. The push to join NATO preceded the first Chechen war, the actual joining did not. And you admit the push was, just as I said, initialized from outside and it took nine years of work in our countries and one war of aggression from Russia to actually finalize it. If you think you contradict what I wrote, I don’t understand how.
As far as “racist” or “essentialist” views against Russia go, what you say makes as much sense as when white people in the USA moan that “talking about white privilege is racist”. Of course Russians as individuals are people like people everywhere in the world, good, bad, daft, intelligent and all that jazz. They are not inherently bad. But Russia as a state ever since the tzars was built on supremacy and domination both outward and inward. Russia also has a history of reverting to totalitarianism after every single regime change for over hundred years now. I am highly skeptical that anything that could be done on the outside could prevent that if the people in Russia are not willing. Maybe something could be done differently and lead to a different outcome, I do not deny that such a “whatif” scenario is hypothetically possible. But the desire for change must come from within Russia, it cannot be forced from outside. Most regime changes forced from the outside fail, and in the case of Russia, even those from the inside did so. Thus on weighing the evidence I am personally convinced that the probabilities were always stacked for Russia to ending up exactly where it is today, as a fascist expansionist totalitarian oligarchy.
I completely agree that both EU and NATO should have mechanisms for expelling members who do not adhere to their core principles, Hungary today is a mess and Slovakia with Fico is on its way there too. Czechia hangs on democracy by its teeth. It is a significant flaw in both organisations that such mechanisms are absent and that it is now nigh impossible to implement them.
One, Napoleon didn’t invade Russia just because he felt like it, Russia had been an active member in the anti-French coalition at least since 1806 and even after Tilsit signalled they could not be trusted to keep the peace.
AFTER the Napoleonic Wars the Russians were also one of the major reactionary forces, the Holy Alliance, in Europe who were active in crushing any political movements in countries they didn’t like.
Two, it’s always funny when people forget that Hitler and Stalin carved up and distributed eastern-Europe among themselves before the invasion in 1941 and Hitler went back to his Lebensraum spiel only once Stalin made it clear he wanted more, especially the Dardanelles, an old tsarist dream. The USSR were not innocent victims, they were perpetrators who got backstabbed first,
AugustusVerger @73:
I certainly didn’t forget it. The point is that Russia wasn’t the only imperialist power trampling around Europe in their big-boy boots. I have no illusions about Russia or the USSR. My grandfather (and other Latvians in my family on both sides) spent years in a gulag after WWII.
But insisting that Russia was only concerned about its imperial aspirations is just blinkered nonsense. They had legitimate concerns about their territorial integrity. And of course, that genuine concern has been used by the psychopathic grifter Putin, but that doesn’t negate the concern, given the millions of Russians who suffered and/or died.
Whatever the characteristics of Russia as an entity in itself, this is Putin that’s at work.
He for sure wants to go down in history as He who Made Russia Great Again.
Starting with reclaiming hegemonic influence over the former USSR states.
And he can’t possibly back out now, all he can do is surf the landslide.
But Putin is for sure the only imperialist power trampling around Europe in their big-boy boots, right now.
(Vlad Vexler has discussed this at length, and it’s the consensus among political analysts)
Only in the sense that its outlying republics (e.g. Chechnya, ahem) might want to leave the federation.
It was never, ever gonna be invaded by a purely defensive alliance.
It was invaded by France and Germany, you twit. People don’t forget that shit, even if it was long ago. Ask your own indigenous compatriots.
“purely defensive”. I love unintentional humour.
Um, Rob, the claim is “They had legitimate concerns about their territorial integrity” [due to NATO].
You phrased it thus in that context; it was the NATO expansion that made them feel threatened.
Nato is (and can be seen to be) defensive; if you watched the video I adduced, it’s much more than mere military might. It’s cooperation, it’s leveraging each member’s strength in some area. Etc.
But it’s clearly not an expeditionary army, such as the USA has.
It’s designed to defend its members, not to invade the world’s largest territory.
And they have the ultimate deterrent in any case, MAD as it may be.
BTW, why the EU would countenance invading Russia when Russia was providing them with heaps and heaps of very cheap gas (but so much of it Russia still earned a huge amount)?
(In passing, it’s very evident Putin thought that was the leverage that would stop them from opposing his invasion. Obs, not so)
But, seriously — to imagine any fear of invasion of Russia via Nato was in any way justified is ridiculous.
That was not fear, that was teeth-grinding anger that Russia had lost its hegemonic power after the fall of the USSR — Putin has called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”. That you bought that justification, Rob, does not make it true.
John, your persistent missing of the point has attained epic levels. By all means, declare victory and go away. You’re not worth the energy.
What point have I supposedly missed? Epically, even?
You have claimed Russia was justified to fear invasion, and I disagree.
I’ve put forth the basis for my disagreement.
—
Anway, Putin has sure achieved the greatest military build up in Europe since WW2 and the accession of new and very very useful and complementary to the alliance members.
That which you think he feared has come to pass, in spades, and Russia itself has been invaded.
This time, Rob, he’s right. Stopped clock, twice a day, etc.
[well, yeah]
I was born in Madrid (Spain) in 1960.
Grew up indoctrinated by Franco’s Spain, and the Falange was taught, as was national pride and whatnot.
Francisco Goya’s paintings were taught in school.
Etc.
—
But that’s Europe.
(And, you know, Charlie’s point is pretty spot-on. They know who the wolf is, and it ain’t NATO)
Ah, right.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Disasters_of_War
Which, BTW, is basically what Putin has done to Russia.
The economy is now a war economy, the school curriculum is as I once knew it as a boy (basically, national pride and social nationalism).
Now, as his declared special military operation to “demilitarize and denazify Ukraine” and protect its people from genocide by the Kiev regime is in its third year and Russia has a few months’ worth of stockpiled USSR war materiel that’s still salvageable, the crunch is in sight.
(And then, there’s Trump, who might as well be Loki in this case)
[how much stuff Russia has burned through in this war is quite remarkable; those stockpiles were so very vast, at the start…]
An expert opines: