Hesitate to write this, no one cares for a broken record
but calling out one sided press coverage is not the same as supporting someone - that’s been my beef all along
in fairness however, I root for the underdog, or the person w/the target on his back w/no defense against potshots
“A wayward press handicaps national security” JFK
I guess it depends on what you mean by the "press". Right wing "sources" like Fox, Newsmax, OAN, Breitbart, etc. coddled Trump and made excuses for everything he did - did you include them? Trump went months without holding a press conference - he had a press secretary who held exactly zero press conferences. Then he put Kayleigh in, and her first press conference said 'I will not lie to you' - and then proceeded to lie in just about every press conference after that. What is the press supposed to report?
You are right - no one likes a broken record - like Trump claiming the election would be stolen months before it happened, and then claiming he won by a landslide (still) with absolutely zero proof ... even when he told the rioters to go home, he still claimed it was stolen...
Exactly, we have a general sense of how people voted w/o asking them outright twice. Some people don't vote the top of the ticket, some don't vote, & some don't mind discussing their vote. We know he supports Trump; that's enough for a basis of discussion of the issues you mentioned.
I'm not calling you out personally. Democracy is under attack and even a mild intrusion on a music forum into a basic principle like the right to vote w/o justifying it to anyone caught my attention & seems like an insidious side-effect of 4 years of Trump. No harm intended.
I dunno, Cyclone. Let me say that I have no problem with most everything you post. We are probably on the same page 99% of the time. And I do know that you're not calling me out personally. In this case, I will say I think we may have a philosophical difference of opinion. I think asking someone on political forum about a vote and justification is more than fair game based upon poster's prior statements made and also based upon statements in support of a despot acting as POTUS or in deferring blame away from the culprit POTUS. It's not some sort of sacrosanct question that someone can't answer. The answer helps foster an understanding of the "why".
This is mostly a political forum, and IMHO these types of discussion are fair, good, and productive. This site is much more tame than it was a few years ago when unnamed trolls lived here.
If we all believed in the same things and agreed upon things all the time, it would be boring. I believe challenges done above board expand knowledge and perspectives.
I could write paragraphs on this but will leave it at that.
@stephen I believe the JFK quote you are paraphrasing was in regards to the the press and the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was not a general caution to the press.
If the press is awaiting a declaration of war before it imposes the self-discipline of combat conditions, then I can only say that no war ever posed a greater threat to our security.
Here is another JFK quote that better applies to today:
Ignorance and misinformation can handicap the progress of a city or a company, but they can, if allowed to prevail in foreign policy, handicap this country’s security.
There is no shortage of differing opinions to be found in the press - if you don't like Maddow, you can dial up Tucker. The larger issue is the constant attack and discredit of the press by this administration.
I believe that people should be prepared to explain or defend any of their beliefs and votes. I voted for Trump in 2016, I will speak to that reasoning any time that it might be appropriate. I did not vote for President this cycle. I voted 3rd party in 2008 and 2012. Being transparent about those choices can be an important piece of information when having these discussions. It makes for the most open and honest discourse we can have and while I may not agree with how a person feels or who they voted for, If I'm willing to listen and they are willing to explain, I can understand why they did something or believe something when allowing myself to view it from their point of view.
As for the press, there is bias preconceived narratives everywhere. If you try to be independent and open minded you will see it on all sides. You will see it in one respect on Fox and the WSJ, you will see it with another respect on CNN and the NYT. At this point I flat out expect it. It's only a problem when somebody can't identify it...or isn't willing to acknowledge it.
Trump was always and remains his worst enemy. Some corners of the nasty political media machine were going to hate him and dig up dirt on him regardless of what he said or did. Both left and right do this to their opponents. So there may be these gravediggers ready and waiting to pounce be they left or right, but Trump would actually help dig his own grave. It's hard to complain about not being treated fairly when time and time and time again and over and over Trump gives them the ammo to shot him with.
A little long, but fits into the discussion. This is from Matt Taibbi, who was the political reporter at Rolling Stone, and I am copying this from his blog on Substack:
We Need a New Media System
The moment a group of people stormed the Capitol building last Wednesday, news companies began the process of sorting and commoditizing information that long ago became standard in American media.
Media firms work backward. They first ask, “How does our target demographic want to understand what’s just unfolded?” Then they pick both the words and the facts they want to emphasize.
It’s why Fox News uses the term, “Pro-Trump protesters,” while New York and The Atlantic use “Insurrectionists.” It’s why conservative media today is stressing how Apple, Google, and Amazon shut down the “Free Speech” platform Parler over the weekend, while mainstream outlets are emphasizing a new round of potentially armed protests reportedly planned for January 19th or 20th.
What happened last Wednesday was the apotheosis of the Hate Inc. era, when this audience-first model became the primary means of communicating facts to the population. For a hundred reasons dating back to the mid-eighties, from the advent of the Internet to the development of the 24-hour news cycle to the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the Fox-led discovery that news can be sold as character-driven, episodic TV in the manner of soap operas, the concept of a “Just the facts” newscast designed to be consumed by everyone died out.
News companies now clean world events like whalers, using every part of the animal, funneling different facts to different consumers based upon calculations about what will bring back the biggest engagement kick. The Migrant Caravan? Fox slices off comments from a Homeland Security official describing most of the border-crossers as single adults coming for “economic reasons.” The New York Times counters by running a story about how the caravan was deployed as a political issue by a Trump White House staring at poor results in midterm elections.
Repeat this info-sifting process a few billion times and this is how we became, as none other than Mitch McConnell put it last week, a country:
Drifting apart into two separate tribes, with a separate set of facts and separate realities, with nothing in common except our hostility towards each other and mistrust for the few national institutions that we all still share.
The flaw in the system is that even the biggest news companies now operate under the assumption that at least half their potential audience isn’t listening. This leads to all sorts of problems, and the fact that the easiest way to keep your own demographic is to feed it negative stories about others is only the most obvious. On all sides, we now lean into inflammatory caricatures, because the financial incentives encourage it.
Everyone monetized Trump. The Fox wing surrendered to the Trump phenomenon from the start, abandoning its supposed fealty to “family values” from the Megyn Kelly incident on. Without a thought, Rupert Murdoch sacrificed the paper-thin veneer of pseudo-respectability Fox had always maintained up to a point (that point being the moment advertisers started to bail in horror, as they did with Glenn Beck). He reinvented Fox as a platform for Trump’s conspiratorial brand of cartoon populism, rather than let some more-Fox-than-Fox imitator like OAN sell the ads to Trump’s voters for four years.
In between its titillating quasi-porn headlines (“Lesbian Prison Gangs Waiting To Get Hands on Lindsay Lohan, Inmate Says” is one from years ago that stuck in my mind), Fox’s business model has long been based on scaring the crap out of aging Silent Majority viewers with a parade of anything-but-the-truth explanations for America’s decline. It villainized immigrants, Muslims, the new Black Panthers, environmentalists — anyone but ADM, Wal-Mart, Countrywide, JP Morgan Chase, and other sponsors of Fortress America. Donald Trump was one of the people who got hooked on Fox’s narrative.
The rival media ecosystem chose cash over truth also. It could have responded to the last election by looking harder at the tensions they didn’t see coming in Trump’s America, which might have meant a more intense examination of the problems that gave Trump his opening: the jobs that never came back after bankers and retailers decided to move them to unfree labor zones in places like China, the severe debt and addiction crises, the ridiculous contradiction of an expanding international military garrison manned by a population fast losing belief in the mission, etc., etc.
Instead, outlets like CNN and MSNBC took a Fox-like approach, downplaying issues in favor of shoving Trump’s agitating personality in the faces of audiences over and over, to the point where many people could no longer think about anything else. To juice ratings, the Trump story — which didn’t need the slightest exaggeration to be fantastic — was more or less constantly distorted.
Trump began to be described as a cause of America’s problems, rather than a symptom, and his followers, every last one, were demonized right along with him, in caricatures that tickled the urbane audiences of channels like CNN but made conservatives want to reach for something sharp. This technique was borrowed from Fox, which learned in the Bush years that you could boost ratings by selling audiences on the idea that their liberal neighbors were terrorist traitors. Such messaging worked better by far than bashing al-Qaeda, because this enemy was closer, making the hate more real.
I came into the news business convinced that the traditional “objective” style of reporting was boring, deceptive, and deserving of mockery. I used to laugh at the parade of “above the fray” columnists and stone-dull house editorials that took no position on anything and always ended, “Only one thing’s for sure: time will tell.” As a teenager I was struck by a passage in Tim Crouse’s book about the 1972 presidential campaign, The Boys in the Bus, describing the work of Hunter Thompson:
Thompson had the freedom to describe the campaign as he actually experienced it: the crummy hotels, the tedium of the press bus, the calculated lies of the press secretaries, the agony of writing about the campaign when it seemed dull and meaningless, the hopeless fatigue. When other reporters went home, their wives asked them, “What was it really like?” Thompson’s wife knew from reading his pieces.
What Rolling Stone did in giving a political reporter the freedom to write about the banalities of the system was revolutionary at the time. They also allowed their writer to be a sides-taker and a rooter, which seemed natural and appropriate because biases end up in media anyway. They were just hidden in the traditional dull “objective” format.
The problem is that the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction of politicized hot-taking that reporters now lack freedom in the opposite direction, i.e. the freedom to mitigate.
If you work in conservative media, you probably felt tremendous pressure all November to stay away from information suggesting Trump lost the election. If you work in the other ecosystem, you probably feel right now that even suggesting what happened last Wednesday was not a coup in the literal sense of the word (e.g. an attempt at seizing power with an actual chance of success) not only wouldn’t clear an editor, but might make you suspect in the eyes of co-workers, a potentially job-imperiling problem in this environment.
We need a new media channel, the press version of a third party, where those financial pressures to maintain audience are absent. Ideally, it would:
-
not be aligned with either Democrats or Republicans;
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employ a Fairness Doctrine-inspired approach that discourages groupthink and requires at least occasional explorations of alternative points of view;
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embrace a utilitarian mission stressing credibility over ratings, including by;
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operating on a distribution model that as much as possible doesn’t depend upon the indulgence of Apple, Google, and Amazon.
Innovations like Substack are great for opinionated individual voices like me, but what’s desperately needed is an institutional reporting mechanism that has credibility with the whole population. That means a channel that sees its mission as something separate from politics, or at least as separate from politics as possible.
The media used to derive its institutional power from this perception of separateness. Politicians feared investigation by the news media precisely because they knew audiences perceived them as neutral arbiters.
Now there are no major commercial outlets not firmly associated with one or the other political party. Criticism of Republicans is as baked into New York Times coverage as the lambasting of Democrats is at Fox, and politicians don’t fear them as much because they know their constituents do not consider rival media sources credible. Probably, they don’t even read them. Echo chambers have limited utility in changing minds.
Media companies need to get out of the audience-stroking business, and by extension the politics business. They’d then be more likely to be believed when making pronouncements about elections or masks or anything else, for that matter. Creating that kind of outlet also has a much better shot of restoring sanity to the country than the current strategy, which seems based on stamping out access to “wrong” information.
What we’ve been watching for four years, and what we saw explode last week, is a paradox: a political and informational system that profits from division and conflict, and uses a factory-style process to stimulate it, but professes shock and horror when real conflict happens. It’s time to admit this is a failed system. You can’t sell hatred and seriously expect it to end.
Good contribution Sang.
I don't know how...it's one thing to identify what should happen or what we need to happen and then it's an entirely different thing to visualize how that happens or if it is even possible.
@sang well put. It's a big ship to turn around and it's the "conflict" that attracts viewers and advertisers.
People take satisfaction in being "right", and the more incredulous they can be made, the more righteous and satisfied they become. It's why I can't stomach the editorialists like Maddow, Olberman, Carlson, or Hannity. They each fancy themselves a modern day Murrow, but all their ratings just increase pitchforks and torches. A lot of people are hooked on that kind of infotainment, in order to give it up you have to convince a lot of people that what the "know" isn't truth. Maybe the next generation will be better.
@martin and @nebish, I do think "who did you vote for?" has always been a sacrosanct question. It's one of the many tenets of democracy that our votes are done in secret, counted anonymously, and can't be held against us for any reason. Chipping away at that chips away at democracy.
However, I agree when someone volunteers who they voted for as nebish did, it does inform the discussion that follows. I've said many times I've voted the straight dem ticket every time except for a write-in against Carter because I thought his brand of southern Christianity didn't belong in the White House and that his faith, which I consider to be strongly held, would lead him to not make hard decisions. He would be perceived as weak & he was - the Iran hostage crisis being the most glaring example.
Great context. Thanks.
However, I still think Americans have an obligation to know enough basic civics to know what is fact & what is fiction in politics. I don't think any POTUS before Trump labeled news outlets as "fake" or "whatever he called Fox."
If people can stand in a grocery line in the pre-Covid days & see a headline that says "Dolly Parton is having Elvis's baby at age 74" & know that it's not true, they ought to be skeptical about whatever TV is spoonfeeding them. And yes, I know some of them think it is true.
Frankly, I'm not sure how people under 40, 30, and 20 get news much less how they learn to distinguish truth from fiction. Influencers like Kylie Jenner & her billion dollar site have far more impact on what her followers buy, believe, and causes/movements to support than any traditional media outlet.
At the end of this, there will be conspiracy theories for the next 50 years, but facts remain - for 2 months following the election, the POTUS used combative rhetoric that prompted the Stop the Steal movement, he invited them to DC on 1/6 to force Pence to do what 50 states & 60 court challenges didn't do - ceremonially call the election. It's undisputed that the business of Congress was disrupted by rioters & Congressmen were safely secured in a pre-determined location for hours, a noose & scaffolding was brought to "Kill Pence, Hang Pence," that Pence was taken to a secure location, there were calls they'd "Come for Pelosi," and live video of the break-in, damage, and looting. There's live video of one Capitol Police officer w/his head caught between doors being beaten. And then there are 5 bodies lying dead.
Call it whatever you want. Spin it. That wasn't a lawful democratic action.
I agree - most people don't research things (or have time to research) and glob on to sources that fit their narrative.
I have a friend who I have known and worked with for years. He is a pretty smart guy. I knew he was a little racist, but is pretty much a good guy. Then Obama got elected, and he started sending out all the right wing emails - you know - Obama is wearing a tan suit, didn't salute, didn't wear his flag pin, etc. I started out sending back the snopes and politifact articles debunking what he said. I finally told him to take me off his list. I asked him why he kept sending out false info, and he said 'Because I want to believe it.' Still a friend, but I lost a lot of respect for him then. He's gone even further down the right wing, racist, gun-loving worm hole now. It's sad. Haven't had a chance to talk to him in a while - be interesting to hear his take on what is going on....
I don't have any answers - but we need to find a way to get rid of 'alternate facts'. I don't mind disagreeing on policy, ideals, etc., but I don't know how we get back to all believing the same set of agreed upon facts...
I agree - most people don't research things (or have time to research) and glob on to sources that fit their narrative.
I have a friend who I have known and worked with for years. He is a pretty smart guy. I knew he was a little racist, but is pretty much a good guy. Then Obama got elected, and he started sending out all the right wing emails - you know - Obama is wearing a tan suit, didn't salute, didn't wear his flag pin, etc. I started out sending back the snopes and politifact articles debunking what he said. I finally told him to take me off his list. I asked him why he kept sending out false info, and he said 'Because I want to believe it.' Still a friend, but I lost a lot of respect for him then. He's gone even further down the right wing, racist, gun-loving worm hole now. It's sad. Haven't had a chance to talk to him in a while - be interesting to hear his take on what is going on....
I don't have any answers - but we need to find a way to get rid of 'alternate facts'. I don't mind disagreeing on policy, ideals, etc., but I don't know how we get back to all believing the same set of agreed upon facts...
Time to find a new friend. One of my mine went off about Trump and Obama and I finally told him unless he has something pleasant to say or share, don't bother. His reply was "you're offended and I deleted your email." My reply was "Not offended. Just annoyed." To hell with him and I've moved on. His loss.
Two things I never want to hear again: Al Gore called a sore loser and Barack Obama called the Great Divider. Current POTUS is a much more deserving recipient of both titles.
Trump has managed to "out" a lot of people for the racists and haters that they are, -among these - many of my life-long friends and relatives. There were some that I kinda knew this about - others, that I've been shocked to learn this of.
I'm not a full-blooded liberal by any means. I've got a little bit of "practical conservatism" running in my veins. I've been teased, taunted and even ridiculed for my liberal leanings by a lot of the aforementioned relations in my life. Over the past four years, the tone and volume have both gotten cranked up.
I don't know if I should blame Trump for my loss of friends or thank him for the removal of bad people in my life. But at the end of his term (tenure, regime, reign of terror - pick it), I find myself with very few real friends anymore. I wonder if anyone else here finds themself in a similar boat?
There are a few who have drank the Trump Kool-aid with gusto. I try to console myself and my friendship with, "they're really pretty good people at heart". But their level of speech, behavior and rhetoric have really stepped up over the past couple of years.
I honestly hope that some of these people have been shocked at the revelations and events of last week and will start to reevaluate some of their politics. There are a few whom I think will. Sadly, a few others who have followed the rabid lemmings over the edge.
Peace.
R
I have an uncle who used to be a bit of a hippy. Then he got a corporate job, a family, moved to OK, and now shares far right wing memes all day. A huge proportion of the memes could be easily debunked in five minutes on Google. But most won't bother checking if it's something that immediately makes sense to them.
The memes about the capitol rioter tasing his balls to death while stealing a Tip O'Neil painting was so obviously not true (no detailed causes of death were available, what MAGA is going to go for a Tip O'Neil painting?, etc) but a lot of people re-shared it anyways. Turns out the guy had a heart attack outside the capitol while on the phone with his wife. It turned into entertainment that fit people's world view for the day.
Sorry/not sorry about your loss of friends. Friends are supposed to be there for us no matter what & if their politics have blinded them to common sense, it's probably best not to count on them.
25 years ago, I was visiting my family in the south & a friend's 5-6 yr old son constantly used the word Democrat as a curse word - "you're a democrat; I'm not going to play w/you." I was surprised, but everyone else encouraged him. Needless to say, we're no longer friends after the N-word started to be a part of the family vocabulary. I knew it was my friend's husband who was directing this & she showed signs of being an abused wife, but refused my offers of help. She traded her values for diamond tennis bracelets, a jag, and a big house.
I think using words like liberal, conservative, progressive have lost their meaning except as pejoratives. Do we really need to label ourselves? My political views are .001% of who I am. Perhaps if we stop using divisive language, things can move forward more peacefully.
I have an uncle who used to be a bit of a hippy. Then he got a corporate job, a family, moved to OK, and now shares far right wing memes all day. A huge proportion of the memes could be easily debunked in five minutes on Google. But most won't bother checking if it's something that immediately makes sense to them.
The memes about the capitol rioter tasing his balls to death while stealing a Tip O'Neil painting was so obviously not true (no detailed causes of death were available, what MAGA is going to go for a Tip O'Neil painting?, etc) but a lot of people re-shared it anyways. Turns out the guy had a heart attack outside the capitol while on the phone with his wife. It turned into entertainment that fit people's world view for the day.
This sounds like something straight out of a Carl Hiassen novel! Speaking of which - I strongly recommend his most recent, "Squeeze Me" - which features a POTUS and his exotic, foreign wife and their social life in southern Florida. Only code names are used, but it sure sounds familiar! If you need a laugh (who doesn't, these days?) - go for it!
@stephen I believe the JFK quote you are paraphrasing was in regards to the the press and the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was not a general caution to the press.
If the press is awaiting a declaration of war before it imposes the self-discipline of combat conditions, then I can only say that no war ever posed a greater threat to our security.
Here is another JFK quote that better applies to today:
Ignorance and misinformation can handicap the progress of a city or a company, but they can, if allowed to prevail in foreign policy, handicap this country’s security.
There is no shortage of differing opinions to be found in the press - if you don't like Maddow, you can dial up Tucker. The larger issue is the constant attack and discredit of the press by this administration.
The latter one is the one I had in mind
In the confusion of 11/22/1963 he was reported to have made those remarks in Dallas - one radio reporter, Sid Davis of Westinghouse, jumped the gun & said Kennedy made these remarks at the Dallas Trade Mart - NBC also reported this in this erroneous manner - a journalistic gaffe for the ages
🤙yes, tit for tat etc on topic - what some see as black, others white - what’s 1 person’s treasure is another’s trash etc & so forth....the constant attack & discrediting worked both ways imho - I know most feel the press was fair & reasonable in its coverage - Not Me, & w/malice toward none & friendship to all on this music site
he’s now burnt all his bridges, Belichick, the VP & others around him now want little to do w/him - no one could stick up for his recent behavior - if Inauguration Day is disrupted at his behest, he deserves all the consequences
it’s gotten to a point now where, no matter how strongly he might feel about the election being stolen from him, what’s worse is his ensuing actions - his being a spoilsport - he’s worn thin & everyone wants to move on peaceably
🤙🦅that said, still stand by previous posts✌️
Sorry/not sorry about your loss of friends. Friends are supposed to be there for us no matter what & if their politics have blinded them to common sense, it's probably best not to count on them.
25 years ago, I was visiting my family in the south & a friend's 5-6 yr old son constantly used the word Democrat as a curse word - "you're a democrat; I'm not going to play w/you." I was surprised, but everyone else encouraged him. Needless to say, we're no longer friends after the N-word started to be a part of the family vocabulary. I knew it was my friend's husband who was directing this & she showed signs of being an abused wife, but refused my offers of help. She traded her values for diamond tennis bracelets, a jag, and a big house.
I think using words like liberal, conservative, progressive have lost their meaning except as pejoratives. Do we really need to label ourselves? My political views are .001% of who I am. Perhaps if we stop using divisive language, things can move forward more peacefully.
One of my "acquaintances" has developed sophistication above using the "N" word. He uses the term, "African-Americans" with the exact amount of disrespect - and with a gleam of self-amusement and satisfaction in his eye when he does so.
@stephen It was actually a reasonable gaffe, the speech was to be delivered on 11/22/63. Likely the text was distributed to the media prior to JFK's assassination.
The press is actually doing an outstanding job this past week considering there isn't an information flow via briefings. Reporters have had to hit the pavement to get information directly from officials. The press (and the public) have been doing a great job of identifying these idiots, with the help of the mob's own footage. But new information is not being handed out by the administration or its "acting" directors. Any other administration, that would be unheard of during such a situation. Trump would rather go look at his Wall.
A couple of interesting things in today's news
Kevin Mcintyre, House Minority Leader and Trump supporter (I believe he voted in favor of objections) both privately and publicly state that it was MAGA in the capital, not Antifa. He even told the donald, who wasn't very pleased to be contradicted with
Giuliani's sources re Hunter Biden have been determined by a WH agency to be related to Russian misinformation and therefore bogus. This comes a few months after a bipartisan Senate committee chaired by Trump supporters came to the same conclusion.
The FBI warned of possibilities of a riot on Jan 5, but were obviously ignored.
RE- PA votes. Pardon me if I mentioned it elsewhere but I saw it questioned on this thread. According to PA law (the state legislature is controlled by GOP), mail in ballots were not to be opened until election day. There is previous data documenting that the vast majority of mail ins were registered Dems while those registered GOP voted in person on E day. On E day, the mail ins have to be opened (2 envelopes, both signed), verified and only then counted by hand. This process takes much longer. The mail ins were counted after the in person votes, and were predominantly from Philly and Pittsburgh - both largely Dem. The fact that the count turned in Biden's favor late is not only legit and logical, it was predicted ahead of time. The press talked about early and deceiving blue and red surges in various states, depending on how the votes were counted.
@stephen It was actually a reasonable gaffe, the speech was to be delivered on 11/22/63. Likely the text was distributed to the media prior to JFK's assassination.
The press is actually doing an outstanding job this past week considering there isn't an information flow via briefings. Reporters have had to hit the pavement to get information directly from officials. The press (and the public) have been doing a great job of identifying these idiots, with the help of the mob's own footage. But new information is not being handed out by the administration or its "acting" directors. Any other administration, that would be unheard of during such a situation. Trump would rather go look at his Wall.
Wow - all they had to do was say, the president is expected to address such and such topics in his luncheon speech at the Dallas Trade Mart - I guess they had their reasons for saying he already said it, even tho they, & their listeners, knew he hadn’t
can you imagine people at the Trade Mart getting ready for his visit, only to hear on their radios that he’d already been there🙃😵
It would’ve made news of the shooting more unbelievable than it was as it gradually filtered in - “yeah sure - 1st he’s already been here, now he’s shot, get the eff outta here.....”
let’s hope cooler heads prevail next week - it has to begin w/the president, he has to stop thinking of himself, change his tune & pledge support for the American process of a peaceful orderly transfer of power in accordance w/the Constitution
let’s hope cooler heads prevail next week - it has to begin w/the president, he has to stop thinking of himself, change his tune & pledge support for the American process of a peaceful orderly transfer of power in accordance w/the Constitution
You can't possibly be referring to Trump then.
January 17th is the day people go to Washington from the Washington Memorial to the White House. The Million Man Militia March occurs. They meet 15,000 National Guardsmen. One of protest marches plans to encircle the Capital building, the Supreme Court and White House, intensity expected.
The FBI uncovered plans of the Boogaloo Boys for Minnesota and Michigan. Minnesota's are particularly disturbing, in addition to breaching buildings if there are police snipers who might shoot them upon exiting they planned to blow the buildings up to be able to escape during the confusion.
There are to be armed marches on capitals in 50 states.
The states with contested votes could be expected to be hit harder than others.
Someone wants to take the federal and state governments down which leads to martial law and then an invading force like China can come in and take us over.
That's what's really going on.
That's what's really going on.
These must be exciting times for you Gina. So much for conspiracy, so much for conjecture, anything and everything appears possible over the next week.
“Just imagine what this thing in Wash DC will do to the covid #s”
—————
one only has to look at the photo on the espn home page, to realize how fruitless & hollow all the talk is of social distancing, staying quarantined etc
It Will Never Happen - you can’t stop a happy throng, a peaceful assembly or an angry mob - Every Day, people are in close quarters, most w/masks, a few not, mainly b/c it impedes their breathing or they need fresh air.....
so now the superspreaders return by the millions next week in the marches on the state capitols etc
read that various armed detachments/batallions/brigades/special units of the Nat’ Guard will be at the Capitol on Wednesday, when Biden is sworn in - some 10,000 in all, I read somewhere - how will this not be “a superspreader event”? Which is more deadly?
this isn’t the America anyone wants - a lot of people are sick of it, they want out of this crap, but martial law under the guise of ‘a federally issued national medical emergency’ is near at hand
at the very least we’re vulnerable to/ripe for this imo
✌️✌️
Wow - all they had to do was say, the president is expected to address such and such topics in his luncheon speech at the Dallas Trade Mart - I guess they had their reasons for saying he already said it, even tho they, & their listeners, knew he hadn’t
@stephen Sid Davis was in the motorcade so the initial radio report regarding the Trade Mart speech was done in advance (the wheels turned a little slower in 1963). He then reported the assassination from the Trade Mart.
Hundreds of National Guard troops are already in the hallways of the Capital, ahead of the impeachment vote today. The future is not looking good. Protests are scheduled before the Inauguration and after. The people who disagree with the election results are not going to just go away and be quiet.
Hundreds of National Guard troops quarter in Capitol hallways, in 5 astonishing photos
NYC Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez stoked the flames with her remarks about "liberating the south".
The South does not need liberation from a New York Puerto Rican lady who does not know what the South went thru during our last Civil War. They will resolve their problems themselves.
I do think a Civil War will start because there are divides in beliefs between the Democrats and the Republicans and the Democratic support of the BLM movement who vandalized and attacked businesses especially here in NY during some of their protest marches. Nobody wants that in their town. The concept of 'defund the police' is not going to be embraced by Republicans or conservatives either.
People need to sit down, identify their different ideologies, then find like minded people and live in communities and states where people can live those values. That is the resolution to the problems. There will be a break up of the country. One analyst said it will break up into five regions where states largely manage themselves pooling their resources to sustain themselves and whatever is left of the federal government will be used to deal with federal or international issues.
Italy's government is on the verge of breaking down, are we responsible to bail them out? Lots of new policy questions will unfold.
In case nobody has noticed, the onset of demonstrations will be Sunday January 17th.
Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday
Wednesday after that is the Inauguration.
I think once the demonstrations start we will face at least of week of uprisings, violence, deaths etc.
