US Politics

[Tracker]

'Embarrassing and terrifying': Poll finds nearly one-third of Republicans are QAnon believers
   
Roughly 15-20 percent of Americans — and nearly one-third of Republicans — agree with core tenets of the QAnon conspiracy theory, according to a poll released Wednesday by the Public Religion Research Institute.

The poll's findings prompted one New York Times columnist to suggest that QAnon believers could soon "dominate the political system."

This is slightly less than the % of Americans who supported Trump circa early 2015. Under our system's structural i… https://t.co/9XIZtDKIz8
— Max Fisher (@Max Fisher) 1622126054.0

The poll's findings prompted one New York Times columnist to suggest that QAnon believers could soon "dominate the political system."

"This is slightly less than the % of Americans who supported Trump circa early 2015," wrote Max Fisher, who authors NYT's The Interpreter column. "Under our system's structural imbalances, that's enough to overtake the GOP and therefore dominate the political system.

"Reminder that QAnon orthodoxy explicitly calls, as a central plank of the movement, for publicly executing hundreds of thousands of Democrats and cultural figures," Fisher added.

The poll found that 28 percent of Republicans agree that "there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders," and that "because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country."

A slightly smaller number of Republicans, 23 percent, agreed that "the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation."

[HardCoreBlue]

11 minutes ago, Tracker said:

'Embarrassing and terrifying': Poll finds nearly one-third of Republicans are QAnon believers
   
Roughly 15-20 percent of Americans — and nearly one-third of Republicans — agree with core tenets of the QAnon conspiracy theory, according to a poll released Wednesday by the Public Religion Research Institute.

The poll's findings prompted one New York Times columnist to suggest that QAnon believers could soon "dominate the political system."

This is slightly less than the % of Americans who supported Trump circa early 2015. Under our system's structural i… https://t.co/9XIZtDKIz8
— Max Fisher (@Max Fisher) 1622126054.0

The poll's findings prompted one New York Times columnist to suggest that QAnon believers could soon "dominate the political system."

"This is slightly less than the % of Americans who supported Trump circa early 2015," wrote Max Fisher, who authors NYT's The Interpreter column. "Under our system's structural imbalances, that's enough to overtake the GOP and therefore dominate the political system.

"Reminder that QAnon orthodoxy explicitly calls, as a central plank of the movement, for publicly executing hundreds of thousands of Democrats and cultural figures," Fisher added.

The poll found that 28 percent of Republicans agree that "there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders," and that "because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country."

A slightly smaller number of Republicans, 23 percent, agreed that "the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation."

At this stage, this is has practically nothing to do with political ideologies and differing viewpoints. This is all to do with where we are at as a species.

I think a lot of us way overestimated our progress to date. The rocks have been lifted and there’s gross stuff there that we thought was long gone but in actual fact as been festering and growing.

Time to look at new creative ways to dissolve it more permanently. 

[bustamente]

Why exactly are Republicans afraid of an independent commission for 1/6, I think we all know the answer as it will come out that yes Republicans themselves aided and abetted the pro Trump crowd and so did the Trump government and people that Trump put in power, even some Capitol police were involved

[Mark F]

17 minutes ago, HardCoreBlue said:

Time to look at new creative ways to dissolve it more permanently.

mother nature is well along in the process of solving the problem.

 

"Environmentalists are warning President Joe Biden against ditching critical green energy investments and other climate policies in his effort to strike an infrastructure deal with congressional Republicans, many of whom continue to deny the scientific reality of human-caused planetary heating.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that "in multiple rounds of talks, Republican lawmakers have held firm in opposition against key White House plans to address the changing climate"

 

actually all Republicans are in denial about climate change.

we are governed by psychotics.

Edited May 27, 2021 by Mark F

[Tracker]

Trump DOJ secretly collected CNN reporter's email, phone records: report.  The DOJ covertly obtained CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr's records over a two-month period in 2017

On Thursday, CNN reported that the Justice Department, under former President Donald Trump, secretly collected email and phone records from a CNN reporter, without notifying either the reporter or the news organization.

"The Justice Department informed CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr, in a May 13 letter, that prosecutors had obtained her phone and email records covering two months, between June 1, 2017 to July 31, 2017," reported Jeremy Herb and Jessica Schneider. "The letter listed phone numbers for Starr's Pentagon extension, the CNN Pentagon booth phone number and her home and cell phones, as well as Starr's work and personal email accounts."

"The seizure of Starr's records is the third disclosure in as many weeks where the Trump administration used its Justice Department to secretly obtain communications of journalists or to expose the identity of critics of former President Donald Trump's allies," continued the report.

Starr reportedly was not the target of a criminal investigation.

"CNN strongly condemns the secret collection of any aspect of a journalist's correspondence, which is clearly protected by the First Amendment," CNN President Jeff Zucker said in a statement. "We are asking for an immediate meeting with the Justice Department for an explanation."

Under Trump, the Justice Department was frequently controversial for its attitude towards the press. At his confirmation hearing, Attorney General William Barr stumbled over a question about whether he would use the DOJ to imprison journalists.

[the watcher]

7 hours ago, Tracker said:

'Embarrassing and terrifying': Poll finds nearly one-third of Republicans are QAnon believers
   
Roughly 15-20 percent of Americans — and nearly one-third of Republicans — agree with core tenets of the QAnon conspiracy theory, according to a poll released Wednesday by the Public Religion Research Institute.

The poll's findings prompted one New York Times columnist to suggest that QAnon believers could soon "dominate the political system."

This is slightly less than the % of Americans who supported Trump circa early 2015. Under our system's structural i… https://t.co/9XIZtDKIz8
— Max Fisher (@Max Fisher) 1622126054.0

The poll's findings prompted one New York Times columnist to suggest that QAnon believers could soon "dominate the political system."

"This is slightly less than the % of Americans who supported Trump circa early 2015," wrote Max Fisher, who authors NYT's The Interpreter column. "Under our system's structural imbalances, that's enough to overtake the GOP and therefore dominate the political system.

"Reminder that QAnon orthodoxy explicitly calls, as a central plank of the movement, for publicly executing hundreds of thousands of Democrats and cultural figures," Fisher added.

The poll found that 28 percent of Republicans agree that "there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders," and that "because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country."

A slightly smaller number of Republicans, 23 percent, agreed that "the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation."

I've said over and over, Trump was/ is a symptom  not the cause. A stable society would never have elected him.  The fact that up to % 20 of their population believe  the fairy tales of Qanon shows that their madness will continue.

[Tracker]

The Rise of Christian Fascism and Its Threat to American Democracy

Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told his students that when we were his age -- he was then close to 80 -- we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."

The warning, given 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and television evangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts toward taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. This call for fundamentalists and evangelicals to take political power was a radical and ominous mutation of traditional Christianity. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.

He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States. It was a suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolf Hitler placed over the contents of his suitcases to hide the rolls of home-movie film he had taken of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied the Nazis, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked when the border police lifted the tops of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Fuehrer and closed them up again. I watched hours of the grainy black-and-white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge.

Adams understood that totalitarian movements are built out of deep personal and economic despair. He warned that the flight of manufacturing jobs, the impoverishment of the American working class, the physical obliteration of communities in the vast, soulless exurbs and decaying Rust Belt, were swiftly deforming our society. The current assault on the middle class, which now lives in a world in which anything that can be put on software can be outsourced, would have terrified him. The stories that many in this movement told me over the past two years as I worked on "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" were stories of this failure -- personal, communal and often economic. This despair, Adams said, would empower dangerous dreamers -- those who today bombard the airwaves with an idealistic and religious utopianism that promises, through violent apocalyptic purification, to eradicate the old, sinful world that has failed many Americans.

These Christian utopians promise to replace this internal and external emptiness with a mythical world where time stops and all problems are solved. The mounting despair rippling across the United States, one I witnessed repeatedly as I traveled the country, remains unaddressed by the Democratic Party, which has abandoned the working class, like its Republican counterpart, for massive corporate funding.

The Christian right has lured tens of millions of Americans, who rightly feel abandoned and betrayed by the political system, from the reality-based world to one of magic -- to fantastic visions of angels and miracles, to a childlike belief that God has a plan for them and Jesus will guide and protect them. This mythological worldview, one that has no use for science or dispassionate, honest intellectual inquiry, one that promises that the loss of jobs and health insurance does not matter, as long as you are right with Jesus, offers a lying world of consistency that addresses the emotional yearnings of desperate followers at the expense of reality. It creates a world where facts become interchangeable with opinions, where lies become true -- the very essence of the totalitarian state. It includes a dark license to kill, to obliterate all those who do not conform to this vision, from Muslims in the Middle East to those at home who refuse to submit to the movement. And it conveniently empowers a rapacious oligarchy whose god is maximum profit at the expense of citizens.

We now live in a nation where the top 1 percent control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, where we have legalized torture and can lock up citizens without trial. Arthur Schlesinger, in "The Cycles of American History," wrote that "the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights in the contemporary sense -- not only for their acquiescence in poverty, inequality and oppression, but for their enthusiastic justification of slavery, persecution, torture and genocide."

Adams saw in the Christian right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities that he said would, in the event of prolonged social instability or a national crisis, see American fascists rise under the guise of religion to dismantle the open society. He despaired of U.S. liberals, who, he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed silly platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil or the cold reality of how the world worked. The current hand-wringing by Democrats, with many asking how they can reach out to a movement whose leaders brand them "demonic" and "satanic," would not have surprised Adams. Like Bonhoeffer, he did not believe that those who would fight effectively in coming times of turmoil, a fight that for him was an integral part of the biblical message, would come from the church or the liberal, secular elite.

The Rise of Christian Fascism and Its Threat to American Democracy - Alternet.org

Edited May 28, 2021 by Tracker

[bustamente]

It's funny that the Democrats have the Presidency, Senate and House but the Republicans are still running things, come midterms they will lose the Senate and House and they will cry and cry and the Republicans will just laugh at them and then they will neuter Biden and steal back the Presidency unless the Democrats wake up and wake up real fast grow a spine and fight back

[JCon]

4 minutes ago, bustamente said:

It's funny that the Democrats have the Presidency, Senate and House but the Republicans are still running things, come midterms they will lose the Senate and House and they will cry and cry and the Republicans will just laugh at them and then they will neuter Biden and steal back the Presidency unless the Democrats wake up and wake up real fast grow a spine and fight back

Same old, same old. 

They control the DOJ! The DOJ can investigate this. Who the **** needs a Congressional committee investigation. 

Democrats are still trying to negotiate with terrorists. 

[HardCoreBlue]

This whole thing happening in US politics is unbelievably surreal. I keep on asking myself, what am missing? What do I need to do to keep things in perspective because nothing to date is working. So much posturing by so many with little to no impact to quell the chaos. The only recourse is out of sight out of mind i.e logging off social media.

[Tracker]

3 hours ago, HardCoreBlue said:

This whole thing happening in US politics is unbelievably surreal. I keep on asking myself, what am missing? What do I need to do to keep things in perspective because nothing to date is working. So much posturing by so many with little to no impact to quell the chaos. The only recourse is out of sight out of mind i.e logging off social media.

I suspect we are seeing the birth of "Christian" fascism as a major political movement. 

[HardCoreBlue]

Schumer, Peliso mad twitting all the time. Posers, that’s all they are.

[Tracker]

3 hours ago, HardCoreBlue said:

Schumer, Pelosi mad twitting all the time. Posers, that’s all they are.

The future of democracy in the US depends on whether the Democrats and any Republicans who still have a conscience are willing to literally fight for it. If the Democrats adopt Bernie Sanders' position that the plutocrats and culpable Republicans must be confronted and prosecuted to the full extent of the law, then they have a chance. If they wimp out and seek "bipartisan" support to ensure the reign of democracy and the law, they are merely delaying the ascendancy of Trump-branded fascism and the probable return of Trump or someone like him to the White House. The next version of Trump and his cronies will be way more corrupt and violent.

[Wanna-B-Fanboy]

4 hours ago, HardCoreBlue said:

Schumer, Peliso mad twitting all the time. Posers, that’s all they are.

Yeah, they need to adopt this position:

 

[Mark F]

Trump prosecution

 

"Former Manhattan assistant district attorney Alissa Marque Heydari, who now runs the academic Institute for Innovation in Prosecution, sounded more hopeful.

“Using the grand jury to focus on the acts of the most powerful will help restore trust in the criminal justice system,” she said. “Too often, those tools are brought to bear on the last powerful in our society. But the investigations of the AG and DA buck this norm.”

digby

Edited May 29, 2021 by Mark F

[Mark F]

1 hour ago, Tracker said:

chance. If they wimp out and seek "bipartisan" support to ensure the reign of democracy and the law, they are merely delaying the ascendancy of Trump-branded fascism

rachel maddow

 

"As Senate Republicans prepared to kill the bipartisan plan for a Jan. 6 commission, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) was seen on the chamber floor having a tense conversation with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). It was obvious to those who saw the discussion that the conservative Democrat was not pleased.

That was understandable. This fight, more than any other in recent memory, put Manchin's entire political worldview to the test -- and it lost.

After the vote, the West Virginian expressed his disappointment to reporters.

"Mitch McConnell makes it extremely difficult," Manchin said. "The commission is something this country needs. There's no excuse. It's just pure raw politics. And that's just so, so disheartening. It really, really is disheartening. I never thought I'd see it up close and personal that politics could trump our country. And I'm going to fight to save this country."

 

"disheartening"

This guy Manchin must be a simpleton.

[Tracker]

1 hour ago, Mark F said:

rachel maddow

 

"As Senate Republicans prepared to kill the bipartisan plan for a Jan. 6 commission, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) was seen on the chamber floor having a tense conversation with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). It was obvious to those who saw the discussion that the conservative Democrat was not pleased.

That was understandable. This fight, more than any other in recent memory, put Manchin's entire political worldview to the test -- and it lost.

After the vote, the West Virginian expressed his disappointment to reporters.

"Mitch McConnell makes it extremely difficult," Manchin said. "The commission is something this country needs. There's no excuse. It's just pure raw politics. And that's just so, so disheartening. It really, really is disheartening. I never thought I'd see it up close and personal that politics could trump our country. And I'm going to fight to save this country."

 

"disheartening"   This guy Manchin must be a simpleton.

Manichin is stupid but smart and amoral enough to sell himself to the highest bidder. 

[bustamente]

There is all levels of crazy but this is insanity and people are lapping it up

 

[Mark F]

47 minutes ago, bustamente said:

There is all levels of crazy but this is insanity and people are lapping it up

Brilliant strategy as far as being sued by voting computer company Dominion.

Her lawyer must be delighted.

 

Edited May 30, 2021 by Mark F

[Tracker]

2 hours ago, Mark F said:

Brilliant strategy as far as being sued by voting computer company Dominion.

Her lawyer must be delighted.

 

So long as the lawyers get paid, they are happy.

[Tracker]

Americans demand court-martial for Flynn after call for military coup: 'Honor veterans — arrest this traitor'

   
Lt. Gen Michael Flynn proclaimed that he thinks there should be a military coup to replace President Joe Biden with Donald Trump in the White House. It's something that sent many to demand he be court-martialed, the legal process of prosecution in the U.S. Military.

It isn't unheard of, Jan. 2020, the Navy Appeals Court decided that "a Navy retiree was properly court-martialed and convicted for a crime committed after he had left active duty," reported the Military Times.

Even the Federalist Society noted that the Uniform Code of Military Justice allowed for some retirees to be court-martialed though they are rare. But in the civil case Larrabee v. Braithwaite there is a question before the DC Circuit about whether a military member can be court-martialed for a civil crime. For advocating the overthrow of the government, it's a different issue entirely.

Americans demand court-martial for Flynn after call for military coup: 'Honor veterans — arrest this traitor' - Alternet.org

[rebusrankin]

If these Q followers believe that everything is run by a cabal of satanic pedophiles how can they believe Trump will be reinstated by said system if he's the good guy?

[JCon]

6 minutes ago, rebusrankin said:

If these Q followers believe that everything is run by a cabal of satanic pedophiles how can they believe Trump will be reinstated by said system if he's the good guy?

The military is going to seize power, like in Myanmar. It's been a big talking point that they can save democracy by having the military seize power. Truly, astonishingly stupid. But, what do you expect? 

 

I'm actually quite amazed that any of these fascists can find their way to a polling place on election day. That's a small miracle in itself. 

[Tracker]

22 minutes ago, rebusrankin said:

If these Q followers believe that everything is run by a cabal of satanic pedophiles how can they believe Trump will be reinstated by said system if he's the good guy?

Once you understand the enormity of twisted belief that drove 3 medical doctors to give poisoned Koolaid to people, including their own spouses and children, it is not that hard to see how Q-anon lives and thrives.

[rebusrankin]

23 minutes ago, JCon said:

The military is going to seize power, like in Myanmar. It's been a big talking point that they can save democracy by having the military seize power. Truly, astonishingly stupid. But, what do you expect? 

 

I'm actually quite amazed that any of these fascists can find their way to a polling place on election day. That's a small miracle in itself. 

Yes, your explanation makes sense.

 

Scary times.