Mere hours after some House Republicans reported progress on a proposal to avoid a government shutdown at the end of the month, Donald Trump demanded they use the opportunity to "defund" Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team.
It's fucked when you're looking in from the outside. From the inside, they're all convinced that they're correct about everything and that Trump is their Messiah. It's a cult.
Oh it’s a lot more than that. And actually, I underestimated their numbers before. As per this, 45 members of the House are members of the Freedom Caucus.
About 30% of the country appears to be a lost cause. We need to show up and vote against them, because there are more of us than there are of them. This, incidentally, is why GOP voter suppression tactics are so serious and frightening - they’re trying to make it super hard for anyone who doesn’t share their ideology to cast a vote at all. They try to spread their ideology, sure, but at the end of the day, they know there’s a TON of stuff they want that’s incredibly unpopular and regressive. They’re trying to game the system to win in spite of modern demographic and societal shifts.
And yeah: I’m done beating around the bush. If you’re voting for Trump, you’re either racist, a religious fundamentalist, an imbecile, a wealthy psychopath, or some combination of the above.
Here’s a longer story (shamelessly stolen from reddit, because fuck Reddit) to the same effect:
(transcribed from a series of tweets) - @iamragesparkle
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, "no. get out."
And the dude next to me says, "hey i'm not doing anything, i'm a paying customer." and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, "out. now." and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, "you didn't see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them."
And i was like, ohok and he continues.
"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
And i was like, 'oh damn.' and he said "yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people."
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven't forgotten that at all.
One of mine is in the FC. He’s as bad as you would imagine. Sadly though where I live he’s never really in any danger of losing. It’s very frustrating, especially because I will be directly impacted by any potential shutdown. I imagine I’m not the only one in this area who would be, so maybe this will change some minds. I don’t know.
It makes primaries much harder for any semi-moderates left in the House, and just generally complicates an already extremely messy political situation.