I suppose fuck-it-up-and-leave is his M.O.

Yep. Just ask his kids.

I sometimes have this weird fantasy where Trump is an actual genius, and his plan all along was to destroy the Republican party. I imagine him sitting on the crapper with a McDouble in one hand and his phone in the other, trying to come up with the most insane tweets he can, getting frustrated that his plan is taking so long and thinking to himself “why are these people liking this shit? It’s obviously bat shit crazy!”

Then I come back down to this Hellscape reality and sigh as I accept that the world is just full of stupid, greedy, selfish people, and Trump is an avatar for all the worst human impulses, and that tens of millions of people would gladly follow him off a cliff so long as they get to drag the rest of us over the edge with them.

I truly hate this place.

That’s why they added the terrorism charges to his murder charges. That makes it federal, which means they can seek the death penalty.

You are working under the assumption that these “pedo hunter” groups are all acting in good faith and on good information. I encourage you to do some reading. There are many cases where these groups pretend to be 18 year olds, lure an unsuspecting person into a meeting, and then lie to their audience about the age they originally claimed to be online, as Xatolos has pointed out.

Lots of them do it to lure in and attack LGBTQ+ folks, while others act on false accusations they receive from third parties:

Innocent dad tortured and killed by group of chainsaw-wielding ‘paedophile hunters’
A gang of vigilantes tortured and killed a father of eight as they tried to force a confession out of him for crimes he didn’t commit.
The case of the brutal torture and murder of Bradley ‘BJ’ Lyons, which shook Australia in December 2018, is once again under the spotlight as a jury has brought to justice the gang leader, Albert Thorn, and some of his mates who helped during the hideous attack.
Mr Lyons was referred to the gang by his wife Jana Hooper, who had falsely accused her husband of sexually assaulting two of her teenage daughters.
Thorn, the leader of the vigilante gang with a specific hatred for paedophiles, was found guilty this month of the torture, imprisonment and murder of Mr Lyons. Later this year, he will face a pre-sentence hearing.
Two other members of the gang who took part in the ordeal, Jordan Bottom and Rikki Smith, were found not guilty last week of the killing of the father.

And I can’t tell you how many times they just straight up confront the wrong person. Here’s one example, and here’s another, here’s one more, and here’s yet another.

These are not professionals. They are YouTubers looking for fame and relying on outrage and violence to get it, and they all-too-often don’t care who gets hurt or killed in the process.

“There are, there are methods which you could do it, as you know,”

Those methods are:

Serving as VP, followed by ascension - The 12th Amendment says no one ineligible to be president can be VP, but the 22nd Amendment only bars election to a third term, not holding office. Trump could potentially be Vance’s (or someone else’s) VP, then that President resigns, making Trump president for a third term without being elected. This is legally untested and would be widely challenged. It doesn’t seem like a route Trump would take.

Repealing the 22nd Amendment - This requires the proposal and ratification of a new amendment. This new amendment must be passed by a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress, or by a constitutional convention called by two-thirds of state legislatures, followed by ratification from three-fourths of the states. This is an unlikely path for Trump to take. Even with massive cheating, he would never get the numbers in his favor.

Ignoring the 22nd Amendment - AKA the “what the fuck you gonna do” method, which the Trump regime has employed with great success in lots of other areas. This is almost certainly what he means.

Any other method to remain president, such as declaring martial law, declaring a national emergency, using the Insurrection Act, etc, would basically be a military coup that would spark a civil war and Balkanize the US.

Some of these “pedo hunter” groups have attacked completely innocent people where the accusation of someone being a pedo was completely unsubstantiated. This is the problem with monetizing vigilantism: It creates a demand, and if that demand is not being met by a supply of actual criminals, then it will be filled by vigilantes criminalizing innocent people.

Surely this will not go over well with President Elon “Free Speech Absolutist” Musk, right? RIGHT???

Elon Musk (after buying Twitter): “Comedy is now legal.”

Elon Musk: “[the] Left found nothing funny, wanted to make comedy illegal.”

Trump tried to get DOJ to go after Saturday Night Live for mocking him

“As president, Trump briefly attempted to get Justice officials to twist campaign finance laws and the federal equal-time rule to declare that anti-Trump material broadcast by Saturday Night Live, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and others was somehow illegal,” the publication writes.

“During his 2024 campaign, according to a source with direct knowledge, Trump has raised this topic again, venting about the need to punish late-night comedians for giving “illegal” campaign contributions to the Democratic Party — in the form of jokes and on-air satire.”

While career officials at the DOJ ignored these orders from Trump during his first term, the publication notes that they could actually become a reality should Trump win a second term given how much his allies have worked to weed out anyone who might be disloyal to his agenda.

“There are no guardrails,” Yale scholar Jason Stanley told Rolling Stone of Trump. “He already has control of any institutions that might stop him.”

This story is so depressing on so many levels.

First and most obviously, we have a biological male entering a women’s bathroom to harass and threaten a biological woman because he doesn’t want biological males entering the women’s bathroom to harass and threaten biological women. Dumb redneck stared into the abyss and it stared back, as it always does. Congrats, dickhead. You are the thing you claim to hate.

But then we have this shit:

Dani Davis, who is queer, took to social media on March 24 and wrote a post about what she said happened while she was at work. The incident occurred on March 14 at the Walmart in Lake City, Florida. She noted she was a nearly seven-year employee of Walmart and holds several other part-time jobs, including the “joy and privilege" of tutoring "special-needs children as requested,” describing herself as a hard worker who has never been in trouble.

How many more reminders do we need that Capitalism hates us and our employers don’t even see us as human? A person should not have to work “several part-time jobs”, one of which is with the biggest private employer on earth, just to get by.

Does anyone else remember the ‘Hey Mon’ sketch from ‘In Living Color’ about an immigrant family that all had like 10 jobs each? It was supposed to be a joke to have to work that much to make ends meet. We weren’t supposed to make it a reality for everyone.

I hate this world.

This is the correct answer. Once Youtube and other platforms figured out that the only thing that sells better than sex is hate, they built algorithms around feeding their viewers a constant stream of hate to keep their eyeballs glued to the screen. It’s yet another example of how Capitalism will always gravitate towards Fascism.

Yeah Pewdiepie was an entry point for kids. There were a ton of them back in the early 00s that did video games and other seemingly innocuous stuff on YouTube, but would slow-drip the racism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry, while promoting the “heroic death” trope. I have two nephews who loved those TY channels, and luckily my brother caught on real quick to their game and made some changes. Now I have two full grown Leftist nephews.

For some unknown reason though, younger Zoomers are ignorant, prudish, too easily contented, and weirdly conservative. I have yet to understand what happened to cause the divide,

The online manosphere/tradtube spent the past 10-15 years raising these kids while their parents fucked off. That’s what happened. These are the kids who made people like Andrew Tate famous, and made Joe Rogan way more relevant than he has any right to be. It’s a great lesson in why people need to pay more attention to the media that their children consume.

Even more interesting is that her mother (VP Vance’s mother-in-law) was instrumental in advancing DEI at the university she works at (UCSD).

I would pay a lot of money to see a journalist ask JD Vance if he approves of his mother-in-law’s work in promoting DEI. Just knowing how awkward that next family gathering would be would make it worth it.

We’ve become so complacent. A unified community would have intervened, violently if necessary. I would love nothing more than to see a crowd of folks popping out of houses and cars and surrounding these terrorists at gunpoint.

Then why you didn’t ask if the kid in my previous comment was also named Labron?

Correct. Just like Orlová is without a doubt worse than San Diego, because it’s an apples to oranges comparison.

“Join the IDF - We put the infant in infantry”

Not gonna lie, it’s pretty catchy.

New Prague is a small town in Minnesota with less than 10k people and has only been around for 150 years, and OP is comparing it with a city of almost a million and a half that has been around for over 700 years. It’s like watching Lebron James dunk on some middle school kid at the park and then mocking the kid for sucking at basketball.

What a stupid post. Each one of those European cities has areas that look just as bad, if not worse, than the cherry picked images of their American counterparts.

America fucking sucks right now, but not because the worst parts of our cities don’t look like the best parts of European cities. This is some low effort bullshit.

You may be shocked at the number of ethnic enclaves in the US.

If i had to guess, it’s probably less money (certainly right now that’s the case) and more to do with all the bureaucracy.

That Forbes article is 6 years old. Money has been the issue for a long time. On top of a dwindling and almost nonexistent middle class, traveling abroad from the US is just more expensive than traveling abroad from a European country because we have to cross huge oceans.

You can wake up tomorrow and drive all the way across america, with basically no paper work. I would be surprised if many people in america even had valid passports to be honest.

With travel to Europe being so expensive for Americans, our foreign destinations of choice have historically been Mexico or Canada. Americans didn’t used to need a passport to travel to Mexico or Canada, and even some Caribbean countries, as long as we went by land or by sea (flying always required a passport). We could just drive or take a cruise there like we were going to any other state. After 9/11, the government began pushing the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, and in 2007, passports became mandatory even for driving to Mexico and Canada. So instead of going through the hassle of getting a passport, a lot of Americans are just choosing not to travel outside the country at all.

Not to mention all the work you have to do in preparing overseas accommodations. And potential language barriers. Traveling outside of the US has got to be like 10x more difficult than traveling inside the US.

It really is. And since we don’t make it mandatory to learn a foreign language in school (unlike most European countries), the language barrier is a big deal.

I also imagine that if people DO travel outside, they’re going to go on a big trip, to see a lot of things, and it’s going to be more expensive. It’s just how that kind of thing tends to work. It’ll be some shit like a wedding, for example.

Which puts overseas travel out of reach for most Americans.