Oral arguments at the Supreme Court on Monday over the president’s power to remove the commissioners of independent agencies left little doubt that its Republican-appointed justices are about to fundamentally reorder our system of government. They appear ready to eliminate most pockets of expertise and nonpartisanship that we rely on as stewards of important economic, political, scientific, and regulatory power.
They will do this, if this morning’s arguments are any indication, without grappling with the predictable and disastrous fallout, with the endpoint of their own logic, or the historical record to the contrary. Instead, the six Republican appointees appear ready to race headlong into a Trumpian future in which no agency or decision is beyond the reach of the precedent’s political cronies.
“You’re asking us to destroy the structure of government,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor observed Monday, “and to take away from Congress its ability to protect its idea that the government is better structured with some agencies that are independent.”
There isn’t. The problem is systemic and Trump is a symptom. The solution to the disease is reversing the drastic wealth inequality that gave unprecedented power to the owner class over the system, whose primary rep is currently Trump.
People always say this yet trump is uniquely evil and shows it daily.
I mean, he’s not not uniquely evil, but have you looked at the people around him? Your Spehen Millers, Tom Homans, and so on. There’s evil alternatives.
It’s not a coincidence that Stephen Miller and all these other evil fucks associate with one another. If Trump is just another bad politician we probably wouldn’t notice that literally everything he does is evil and everything evil is connected to him also. Tell me, if he’s just a symptom, which of the other US politicians is Putin friendly with? Certainly no Democrat I’ve heard of, at minimum.
You can play that same game with any dictator from around the world. They all love trump and you’d be hard pressed to find other US politicians they would publicly swoon over.
Look into Peter Thiel’s background. He’s a HUGE component of how we got to where we are now. Yes, Stephen Miller is a completely racist shitgoblin, but he’s “traditionally” heinous instead of Thiel’s “I’m going to forcefully restructure human society by using it against itself” heinous. Thiel honestly makes most of the rest of the appalling people involved in this regime look comparatively tame.
Thiel is a very weird freak. Not only does he associate with that weird little troll Curtis Yarvin, but he wrote the forward to a new edition (in 2020) of The Sovereign Individual.
These people are fucking weird. Democrats should really take up that mantra when talking about the enemies of the people. Walz started down that path and it was resonating, then someone reeled him in.
The reason the cons all try to make everything about trans is to try to paint their opposition as weird, when the reality is that the Republicans and conservatives are the real freaks here and they are just projecting again.
It was crazy - it was working, and then I guess the consultant class was like “oh wait, we don’t want to offend the fascists”. Like… what the actual fuck…?
I’ll give you a non-US example - Mutti Merkel and Putin were pretty close. But I think the reverse is more informative - that these kinds of conditions tend to prop up ugly figures around the world. E.g. Nigel Farage in the UK. Geert Wilders in The Netherlands. Pierre Poilievre* in Canada. Etc. This isn’t random. The typical policies that arise as a solution to wealth inequality that don’t tackle inequality tend to be about finding scape goats and turning society against them. Now what kind of person does it take to either honestly believe that some part of society should be repressed, or doesn’t but works to convice people to hate for a living? It tends to not be the empathetic, nice kind.
* Oh god Pierre is a truly disgusting human being.
Merkel famously hated Putin. They worked together, for better or for worse, but she did not personally like him. She has a phobia of dogs and he’s a dog lover, which she would have obviously been fine, but he brought a large dog to one of their meetings after her office had requested otherwise, which she felt was an attempt to intimidate her.
Most of his base is evil.
As are all of his nominees, most of his lawyers, most GOP governors, at least half of SCOTUS, most Fox News anchors, and every right wing influencer.
Every movement needs a starting point
The starting point here is probably Reagan. But sure Trump is def a bright orange mid point. 😄 He would likely not be the final point, given his age and where the socioeconomic system is headed.
Ronnie Raygun’s admin started the ball rolling on so many awful things.
However, some of what really motivated the extremist right wing predates that - the Watergate stuff infuriated the same sort of people that make up today’s base, and not because Nixon committed crimes, but that Nixon eventually was forced out of office because those crimes were uncovered and reported on. They vowed to construct their own parallel Orwellian mediaverse to counter factual reporting - they actively set out to create fake news, and now they have the gall to call anyone else “fake news”.
And, always, ever since the first red scare (1917) at least, you’ve always had very fringe individuals and groups and plots, from the fascist plot to have corporations seize the white house (Business Plot - 1933) and Father Coughlin and The John Birch Society, we have always had conservatives trying to ruin this country.
But yeah, a whole lot of stupid conservative schemes wormed their way into our institutions under Ronnie Raygun. Until Donvict, anyway, he was probably the very worst president in history. Certainly he had the most criminal administration in history, objectively.