There are obviously huge black marks in US history from that to slavery to the genocide of the natives to overthrowing democratically elected governments around the world to things like MK-ULTRA, Jim Crow, redlining, etc. etc. But even among purely symbolic things that don’t materially impact people’s lives, it pales in comparison to Mt. Rushmore, which was a thousand times more gaudy, more narcissistic, and which destroyed something a thousand times more valuable. “The most shameful stains,” come on.

I don’t know what’s going on in the minds of these people. Some combination of ignorance of history, partisan brainworms, and misplaced pride in the symbols of our shitty government. It’s so cringe, it’s peak liberalism and shit like this validates the whole “Trump derangement syndrome” line, because there’s no way in hell any of these people would give half a shit if someone else was doing it.

And while we’re at it, unicorns for everyone!

The whole ballroom thing does not matter at all and the article is just random tweets and the tweets are shit like:

The fact that a felonious madman who incited an attack on our Capitol could turn around a few years later and desecrate the White House like this, will forever be one of the most shameful stains this nation has ever known.

“One of the most shameful stains this nation has ever known?” Are you fucking kidding me? It’s a fucking building.

This is literally what happened before to get us to Trump, and it’s on track to keep happening.

Bush was a violent extremist who started multiple wars of aggression and had people tortured in all sorts of horrific ways (some of whom were later proven innocent). But he also occasionally said not to be openly racist against all Muslims. The failure of the “War on Terror” was because of the aggression, and because of the wanton violence, torture, and disrespect for basic rights. But, the lesson people, especially on the right, took from that, was that the Bush administration lost because it was too humane, too “woke.”

So they went to Trump, who was openly racist, who appointed Hegseth, who, well, is Hegseth. And he still lost in Iran. Rather than questioning whether their ideas about the effectiveness of cruelty, the right concludes that the problem was that they still weren’t cruel enough.

Go back even further, it’s the same shit with Vietnam. Dropping agent orange all over the place, slaughtering villages, just extreme cruelty, but the propaganda was about “nation-building,” about “liberating” the Vietnamese. So when they lost, they blamed the equivalent of “woke,” they blamed the limp-wristed politicians who supposedly tied the hands of the military.

When President Fuentes gets his ass kicked invading wherever the fuck, the right will just say he was too woke and will vote for someone who changed his name to Adolf Hitler. It’ll continue until they start a nuclear war and end all life on earth.

Fundamentally, because right-wing ideas are just wrong and don’t produce the results they expect them to, the people who hold them will grow increasingly frustrated and increasingly extreme, thinking they just need to go further and try harder, never questioning the approach itself.

It’s socialism or barbarism. The “middle road” of aggression and interventionism while pretending to be nice, that’s going to keep failing and the more it fails the more it fuels their narratives. We need to put an end to the aggression altogether, to put an end to foreign wars. We need to ditch the notion that our acts of violence and terror were ever driven by some kind of “benevolence,” and instead denounce them for the brazen acts of imperialist plundering that they are. No war in Iran, no aid to Israel. Full stop.

This article is hilarious. What planet is the author living on?

First off, religious people generally don’t give a shit about these kinds of “gotchas” or contradictions, because their beliefs and texts are full of contradictions to start with. Second, nobody expects someone like Trump, who is not a religious leader, to have exactly correct answers to theological questions. Third, nothing he said there is really all that bad.

If people are pushing back (the article is very light on actual examples), it’s because the midterms, and the failed policies leading to them, have weakened his status as a “sacred cow.”

The article is complete nonsense.

They also want to avoid left-wing priorities such as ending US support for Israel or abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

These people are so useless.

The people are done with being told we have to tighten our belts while watching billions of dollars be sent abroad to fund war and genocide. Before Trump, that was the message that “centrists” of both parties pushed, with regards to Afghanistan and elsewhere. Then, the Trump administration made the insane decision to attack Iran and talk publicly about how gas prices were soaring because everyone just had to tighten their belts for the sake of “liberating” the Iranians. That’s the single biggest reason the Republicans got slaughtered in the midterms! Now they want to keep going all in on Israel, because it’s not a “kitchen table issue?” It is absolutely a kitchen table issue!

The Democrats took a hard right shift on immigration in 2024, running as border hawks, trying to push the line that they were the ones who would actually go after immigrants, and as a result, they lost the Latino vote. Now, Trump has been sending ICE to raid workplaces, going after citizens and non-citizens alike, people live in fear going about their daily lives, businesses in Latino communities have seen their customer base either locked up or to afraid to come out. I happened to see a Latino mall the other day and there were all sorts of signs posted declaring that ICE did not have permission to enter. How on earth is this not a “kitchen table issue?” I guess didn’t realize that phrase meant specifically white people’s kitchen tables.

You want to argue the mandate is limited in scope and doesn’t extend to “culture war” issues, fine. But they’re acting like there isn’t a mandate at all! If they won’t address these issues, then what on earth would they be addressing?

Yes, dumbass. He was the head of the head of the DoD, he was the commander-in-chief, with full authority to appoint whoever he wanted to be secretary of defense and to overrule them, literally whenever he felt like.

Do you not understand how the government works? Whatever happened to “The buck stops here?”

Trump and Hegseth made that OK to do.

Trump escalated it, but it actually goes back to Clinton if not before. From Wikipedia:

According to Clinton administration official Richard Clarke:

‘extraordinary renditions’, were operations to apprehend terrorists abroad, usually without the knowledge of and almost always without public acknowledgment of the host government … The first time I proposed a snatch, in 1993, the White House Counsel, Lloyd Cutler, demanded a meeting with the President to explain how it violated international law. Clinton had seemed to be siding with Cutler until Al Gore belatedly joined the meeting, having just flown overnight from South Africa. Clinton recapped the arguments on both sides for Gore: ‘Lloyd says this. Dick says that.’ Gore laughed and said, ‘That’s a no-brainer. Of course it’s a violation of international law, that’s why it’s a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.’

It escalated under Bush and continued under Obama, and now we’re at a point where they’ve straight up abducted a head of state.

My personal experience is that there are plenty of people on the right or center-right who despise centrist Democrats moreso than they do progressives. Like, my parents are conservative Catholics who would never dream of saying a kind word about someone like Clinton, Biden, Pelosi, or Schumer, but with Sanders they said things like, “I disagree with him on abortion but I do think he’s trying to help the country.” Even my brother, who watches shit like OAN, criticized him for “not actually being that different from the rest of them.” The mainstream, centrist wing of the party is a known quantity and they hate their guts, they don’t agree with or trust progressives, but if they had to pick they’d rather roll the dice.

People think of politics as being a linear spectrum of left-right but for most people it’s more complex than that. Some people are able to see people like Schumer for the slimeball that he is, but for whatever reason they might have a blind spot for the other side’s flaws.

No idea how relevant that is to your father-in-law but I’d wonder if he even knows anything about Van Hollen other than that his name isn’t Chuck Schumer.

Here is a clip posted by Forbes which has his full, unedited answer to the question, from a few months ago.

Most people rejected his message. They hated WoodScientist because he told the truth.

To be honest, I think there’s a serious possibility, if a president attempted to dismantle the “national security” apparatus, the NSA would stage a false flag attack themselves to discredit them and protect their positions. Even if the president had hard evidence that they had done so, it’s doubtful that Americans would believe it or care. There’d be back to back media coverage talking about how the move puts Americans at risk and warning of an attack, then an attack happens, people’s minds would be made up in an instant, and any pushback would be seen as both treasonous and blindly loyal to the president.

Look at the Cold War and how many times the CIA manipulated elections or overthrew democratically elected leaders, just for the sake of bananas being a little cheaper from a minor country half the world away. Do people really think they didn’t have contingencies in place for the possibility of a socialist president being elected, or just one who interfered with their aims? Why? Did they just have so much respect for democracy? Or did they somehow lack the capability to interfere, when they so easily did so abroad? And if they had contingencies then, what happened when to actually break that power?

The last time a president really acted against the aims of the intelligence community was when JFK fired Alan Dulles, months before he was assassinated. Dulles somehow ended up on the investigative committee into the assassination. Whether he was behind it or not, he was treated as above suspicion despite having the clearest motive.

Even if you somehow avoid getting assassinated and stop them from orchestrating a false flag, it’s likely they have connections in the media they can use against you. Try to suppress that, and you’re an evil authoritarian tankie. Basically any tool that the president, or that any head of state around the world, can use to survive when US spies are trying to get rid of them, is “authoritarian,” which in turn can be used to justify acting against them more openly.

As far as I can tell Van Hollen is a decent choice from what’s realistic at the moment. He supports M4A and at least stopping “offensive” aid to Israel. The biggest criticism I could find is just that he’s deep enough in the machine to not be fully trusted, but that also means he has the experience to make the case of being qualified for the role. He’s a compromise candidate between the left and right wings of the party, which is preferable to Schumer and the most that can be realistically achieved right now.

Anything short of that shows they aren’t serious about wanting to fix the damage they helped cause.

Serious? Since when do they even have a pretense of wanting to fix that damage?

It’s really strange, we pay these people to act as our representatives full time

The amount you pay them in taxes is pocket change compared to what they get from the ruling class to not do that.

Yeah, this is part of why I’ve been saying that it’s a silly and naive fantasy to think Trump would ever see significant legal consequences for his actions. Has been since day 1.

The Democrats’ mandate, especially Democrats like Hamilton who won in a red state, is to end the war and lower gas prices. Trump did plenty of corrupt and illegal shit in his first term, Kansas still voted for him overwhelmingly three times. It’s not the voters’ priority. And the reason they can’t “do both at the same time” is because it’s not a question of having the “time” to do it, but having the political will. Hamilton would presumably like to have a chance a reelection, and going hard after Republicans is not going to appeal to Kansas voters. And you don’t just need people like Hamilton, you’d need Republicans to defect and turn against their own party.

This isn’t the first time it’s played out this way, and I can only hope that this latest example helps people to see the system more clearly for what it is.

See also: Bush.

I’ve been saying for years that if you actually want to fracture the right or peel voters away from them, you have to go after the libertarian wing. Democrats keep trying to target the neocon wing, because they think we’re still living in the early 2000’s where there was a bipartisan neocon consensus, and Trump is just an anomaly to that. The reality is that the wars in the Middle East discredited the neocon wing, they became deeply unpopular, and Trump emerged as a response to that trend. Now that Trump did neocon shit with Iran, and got these midterm results, the neocons are even more discredited than they were before.

The Democrats have to get ahead of the next “antiwar” Republican, be more antiwar than they are, and call out their incenserity. Running on being pro-war and trying to pick up the remaining neocon dregs that the GOP will be casting off would be a massive strategic blunder, and one that the conservative wing of the Democratic party is probably looking to make.

I really think that only an antiwar, antizionist progressive is electable.

They’re going to say that the problem with Trump is that he didn’t follow through on isolationism so they’ll support someone like Vance or Carlson who promises to do real isolation, with “peace through strength” and then he’ll invade Cuba or some shit and say he was just doing the strength part and they’ll conclude that the problem was that Vance or Carlson didn’t follow through on real isolationism and repeat and repeat and repeat, stockpiling “fell for it again” awards, only learning the lesson about the specific individual each time.

As long as the Democrats remain hardcore interventionists, the person at least claiming that they’ll stay out of foreign conflicts will be seen as the “lesser evil,” by many potential swing voters. The only possible way for the Democrats throw in 2028 is if they nominate a Zionist.

This would be a transparent attempt to usurp the power of the Supreme Court and make it subservient, not co-equal, to the other two branches.

The Court should be subservient, not co-equal to the other branches. Because the court is not elected and not democratically accountable. The power of judicial review was not even stated in the constitution, so it was never intended to be “co-equal.” Likewise, the idea of the executive holding so much power that it could be considered “co-equal” to the entire legislative branch, one person holding that much power, was never intended.

Having said that, I do agree with you that, from a pragmatic perspective, we can’t make sweeping changes like that without a clear mandate from the people, which the Democratic party does not currently have and can’t expect to have even if they win in 2028.

While I agree in principle with expanding the court and breaking its power, I don’t think the time is right for seriously proposing it.

The midterms were more a rejection of Trump than an endorsement of a Democratic agenda. The upset, red-state victories were about ending the war and lowering gas prices, not about fundamentally transforming the balance of power in the state. The senators in those states will not support those measures (if they want to have a chance at reelection), so even with a trifecta it’s unlikely to go through. In the meantime, the Democrats will appear power-hungry and the right will have plenty of material to fear-monger, and there’s also legitimate concerns about the right taking power and doing the same thing.

The best way to approach major judicial reform would be to put it directly in the hands of the people, through something like a national referendum. There isn’t really a process for national level referendums here in the States, but even some kind of non-binding resolution could better assess the popular will and provide a clearer mandate. Currently, what we have are polls, which show a roughly even split for and against, with clearer support for term limits. So enact term limits, say you don’t think it goes far enough, but promise that you won’t go further without a clear mandate from the people.