Awww. Some Trump apparatchiks are feeling uncomfortable.
I have a source inside the Trump regime who feels, in their own words,
a little disillusioned.This person says they signed on to the Trump team because ofDEI going too farand becausewoke culture was dividing the country,but is now concerned about theblatant criminal behaviorof Donald Trump. Really? His last administration didn’t show you that? Well, OK.
DEI never went too far. If you think it did, that says more about you than it does about the policies, which were all about reasonable recognition of disparities. Everyone complaining about DEI are simply bigots who resent any awareness of their privilege.
Woke culture was not and is not dividing the country. If you want to be concerned about any attitudes, wake up to the culture of greed and so-called rugged individualism. What divides the country is that some people are incapable of sharing the wealth. We’re the richest country in the world with huge numbers of the poor, and a government that likes the idea of starving them to death as a tactic to end poverty.
The problem here, dear reporter, is that your source is a colossal asshole who cannot be trusted. They do not like the corruption, but the instant a trans person or a black person wanders into view they’ll go running into the arms of their orange Daddy. Screw ’em.
You can’t finish 15th in the English National League anymore because of Woking.
/rim shot
Why is that “wokeness” divides the country and not white suprmacy, misogyny, anti-LGBTQ bigotry, etc.?
Edit: …supremacy…
Honestly, a full read of that article tells me these people are irredeemable. They acknowledge how terrible things are, but they’ll still vote R anyway, because they think AOC is just as bad as Miller.
From the article —
Miller has become Trump’s mini-Kissinger. They both share an exaggerated sense of self-importance. Kissinger once said, “Power is the great aphrodisiac.” I haven’t heard Miller say anything quite that self-revealing, but you just know he must get a hard-on when he walks into the Oval Office unannounced. Though, he did once say, “Powerful ideas are just in your pocket.” Makes me wonder if he has one hand in his pocket, massaging his balls.
Yeah, I no longer have the slightest sympathy for the MAGAts.
I don’t want anything from them except for them to lose and go away.
Why should I?
They’ve completely wrecked my country, turned a well functioning democracy into a Fascist dictatorship that is now failing big time.
They are threatening my existence in a lot of ways.
The retirement IRAs and 401(K) plans are all part of the US economy via the stock markets. If the GOP crashes the US economy with a recession, they go down too. This happened once before with Bush’s Great Recession.
They also want people like me to just go away and die quietly somewhere.
Not going to happen.
I think you mean Trump’s mini-Goebbels.
I and many have been following the budget bill atrocity story right now in Congress.
Those cuts to Medicaid are going to all but destroy the health care system in the USA!!!
Here is what will happen by example.
.1. My local nonprofit giant regional medical center is running at a loss right now. They are losing a few million dollars a year, not a lot considering their size but not sustainable.
.2. Here is why.
75% of their income is Medicare and Medicaid.
These government program’s reimbursement levels haven’t kept up with expenses. They pay less and less of what medical care actually costs.
Also, a lot of Medicare and Medicaid patients aren’t paying their copays. Some think they are optional but a lot of them more or less can’t. They don’t have the money.
.3. The system right now is stable but starting to lean towards collapse.
If the GOP cuts deeply into Medicaid and also cuts Medicare (there are Medicare cuts in the bill), this hospital system of one main center and 8 satellites is in serious trouble. It will fail one way or another. Most likely, it gets sold to private equity, which has a history of never working and eventually ends in bankruptcy. Possible the state steps in but that isn’t likely because the states have their own financial problems.
BTW, this regional center is in a well off area of the West Coast. There is a lot of money floating around here.
I’m sure it is a lot worse in rural areas and less well off areas.
I can’t tell you how many hospitals, health care systems, and medical clinics will end up in big trouble and/or close down.
But it will be a whole lot.
This person is a “little” disillusioned? Jeez.
Love how this person and Rep. Joe Walsh blame Democrats ultimately because they hate Republicans and there’s no room for “center-right” Republicans in the Democrats. The Democrats are about as center-right as a political party can get. I think these center-right Republicans could squeeze in if they really wanted to.
I actually I think the problem is US political parties have entrenched party affiliations on geographic lines for generations. You can’t run as party X in district Y because district Y has always elected party Z candidates. The biggest change in this is when the South…long a bastion of the Democratic Party…swung Republican because the GOP promised to reverse desegregation. Racism was such a core value among Southerners that it was more important than voting against the “party of Lincoln.”
Here we are today with a president heavily favored in the South who just happens to be the epitome of the classic “Carpetbagger”: “a person from the northern states who went to the South after the Civil War to profit from the Reconstruction”; also, ” a person perceived as an unscrupulous opportunist.”
I think this is a common right wing talk point because I only only hear that from people currently onboard with whatever the right wing is doing, or people who is ignorant enough to think Musk is somehow “left wing”.
Liz Cheney was campaigning with Harris, even Steven Bannon endorsed her. How did that go?
Oh, does someone maybe begin to suspect that living in a fascist dictatorship is crap, even if you are part of the master race?
Oh well, in the end they will believe it’s all anybody else’s fault, as usual.
AstrySol @10: Do you have a citation for Bannon endorsing Harris? I can’t find anything like that.
Here’s a reel of regrets. Unverified social media stuff but it could be real.
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@straightshooter240/video/7498894299145489710
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/reel/704372042105689
Sorry, but they’re outta network for sympathy and my Give-A-Fuck is broken.
I don’t think that thing about Bannon is correct. Plenty of articles like this if you google.
https://www.newsweek.com/steve-bannon-securing-election-trump-1980486
Re Bannon endorsing Harris: There’s this piece in The Independent: Even neo-Nazis say it’s getting a ‘little excessive’ following Steve Bannon’s CPAC salute that claims Bannon endorsed Harris. However, the link they provide that goes to an article in The New York Post about this claim is about Richard Spencer endorsing Harris which does not mention Bannon. Given the sources, I wouldn’t take any of this seriously.
I still have some sympathy for these people.
We’ve gone through an enormous amount of social change in the last few decades. Although most of it seems like it was necessary, even overdue, it fundamentally changed the social expectations around gender roles. This has created a great deal of uncertainty for individuals, particularly men, in constructing their identity. This was not helped by the continued insistence in the old social order by the conservative movements, nor by the failure of liberal movements to establish the needed social infrastructure (standardized social signals, etc). Additionally, the move from single-income households to both parents working has resulted in children having less cross-age group socialization (where they would normally learn social behaviors expected for each age group).
The right wing vultures swooped down on the anxious teenagers trying to navigate such an environment and offer them someone to blame for their social difficulties. “It’s not your fault,” they say. “DEI has set you up to fail”. Even though this is untrue, it allows them to avoid having to learn to navigate the new social order, knowing that any failures are “not their fault” and if they get angry enough they can make things “simple” again.
So, basically, you have sympathy for insecure saps (particularly men) who seek succor in right-wing authoritarianism due to changing social circumstances, and are supposedly uncertain in “constructing their identity”. Very nice of you, IX-103.
Me, I never had to “construct” my identity — it just happened naturally.
Not like your sympathy is gonna change any of that, so it’s rather pointless, no?
(Maybe construct yourself a different identity, where you don’t need to have sympathy for the saps that vote for and enable authoritarian xenophobia and a desire for adherence to the old patriarchal social rules; same thing, really)
If only they had paid some attention to history, they would realise that racism and other bigotry have long served as distractions for rich white people to fuck over poorer white people
@PZ #7
except it is a well known historical fact that Goebbels had no balls, at all.
IX-103–
We’ve had enormous social change every few decades since history began. It’s no excuse.
The current right-wing movement in the US can be traced directly back to Reagan. That’s more than four decades of regressive social politics and increasing wealth inequality. Yet within those decades there have been periods under Clinton and Obama that show how much better the US can be even with Republican-shackled milquetoast-progressive administrations, compared to terms under Reagan, Bush Jr and Trump that cost hundreds of thousands of American lives (and in Bush’s case, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani lives, just to enrich his friends in the private military industry).
Anyone who still believes in that corrupt, plutocratic, racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-education, anti-science mindset deserves zero sympathy. (With a limited exemption for young people raised in a blinkered culture who should be given some grace time into adulthood to figure things out for themselves.) I can extend sympathy to those who abandoned modern conservatism on the basis of its morally bankruptcy. I cannot extend sympathy to those who continue to embrace it, in its fifth decade of failing, while complaining about how unfair it is that none of the cruelty to others improved their social standing and none of the plunder trickled into their pockets.
Apparently the DEI Trump wants to eliminate is Decency, Ethics, and Intellect.
“Woke culture was not and is not dividing the country.”
Woke culture is dividing the country. It’s dividing the racists from the rest of us, and it can’t happen fast enough for me.
devnll, I do get you. But, the way you write presumes that it’s some ideological thing, rather than a natural default.
See, that takes the concept of “Woke culture” as an actual thing.
So you are validating that such a thing actually exists — all that’s left is the arguing about what constitutes it.
But by then, you’ve ceded the framing. Tsk.
“Sensible culture” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, does it?
Nor does ‘socially conscious culture’.
Me, i’d rather have a tolerant culture. You know, like Ian Banks’ fantasy Culture.
@robro
It’s possible that this was among the sources (I did remember reading something before the election but could not find it immediately now given that nothing really sticks with those right wing talking heads), and I did not follow though to see what he really said. I many have also mistaken Bannon with Richard Spencer.
However, if you ask me, all of these right wing talking heads’ “endorsement” is a facade that attempts to brand the other party as R-lite thus losing support from their bases. Democrats should have learned that pursuing the mythical people called “middle-ground voters” won’t get them anywhere a long time ago.