Thanks!

raises fear that confidence in America is fading

Just now that fear is being raised?

Is there an article linked that I’m missing somehow?

Well some of those people will surely be brown and poor, so no way R is going to go for this.

I’m sorry about whatever stunted your reading comprehension.

Where the fuck are the, “Mah rights!” people now that the government is actually trampling on the constitution?

Let’s just cross out fingers mass deportation turns out to be the cheaper solution.

Well, if there’s any positive stereotype about Germans it’s that they are pretty good at efficiencies, and we know what their final solution was. I’m sure Trump won’t want to reinvent the wheel.

The more I’ve thought about this, the more I’m sure you are right.

OTOH this is still uplifting news because thinking, compassionate people will get another chance to stop it.

nah. I’ve been alive a long time. Conservative policies, attitudes, and talking points have for many decades pointed to exactly the place we have landed, and for 8+ years now any Republican resistance whatsoever to Trump has been essentially undetectable, and the few actual Republican leaders who have stood up to him in any meaningful way have destroyed their own political careers.

The Republicans in power have clearly been cool with every single thing that has happened until these tariffs started to impact the wealthy. And who keeps voting in the Republicans in power? (and Trump himself) The rank and file.

Fuck them all, every last one. If these Republicans accidentally voted in a way that isn’t going to harm someone, it’s because they have another plan in mind or it otherwise benefits them in some way. I’m glad it happened because reasonable people get another chance to stop them, but no part of me thinks they won’t try again.

As it turns out politics is not absolute.

Any Republican who hasn’t spent the past several years raising hell in their own party about where Trump was taking it, and especially any who voted for him in 2024, is at best complicit in where we are today, and in wherever this finally bottoms out.

I have some news for you about how they will keep enough space in the camps.

FWIW, I left .ml after about a year (and around a month ago) because there were just enough threads shit flinging and just enough posts like below, and just enough people who would dismiss any argument based on seeing .ml that it annoyed the shit out of me.

Not for how anyone at .ml ever treated me. (And FTR I’m not a communist)

So I’d say how much you worry about it is up to you, but switching instances is also pretty easy.

Hungary’s government launches war on drugs, but ignores root causes

Well that sounds pretty familiar to folks in the US.

On-brand for R though. That’s what makes the other 17 so surprising.

100% it’s because they are being financially hurt and no other reason. I know for sure that Portnoy has been complaining about losing millions.

What we are seeing in the last few months of this administration is not the traditional Republican party. Trump has hijacked the Republican party much like Hitler hijacked the Nazi party. There is no more Republican party- it’s the Trump party.

I’m in my mid 50s, as context.

I:

• just missed being old enough for awareness of key events in the civil rights movement, but:

• grew up in a very racially diverse area, surrounded by people who lived those events

• Lived through through/witnessed:

  • the Satanic Panic
  • the Tipper Gore, 700 Club/Pat Robertson heyday
  • the pre- and post- dont-ask-don’t-tell period in the military
  • the AIDS Epidemic and homophobia feedback loop that came with it
  • the steady progression as it became more and more acceptable over decades for gay people to be open about their sexuality
  • the beginnings of the same thing happening for trans people
  • and more changes to and challenges to our social norms than I will possibly remember to list here, all along with each and every step of progress continuously made against the strong opposition of conservatives.

• then watched as the entire Republican party gleefully worked to destroy and roll back all areas of progress the very moment they had enough power to do so. They are shitting up the place and destroying as much as they can, as wantonly as they can.

From the rank and file infiltrating and twisting local school boards and libraries all the way up to the whitehouse, they are making things as shitty as they can as fast as they can for as many people as they can. And it didn’t start 2.5 months ago, you could feel it from the moment Trump took office the first time, though even then it was just a louder version of what was already clearly under the surface for decades. We are literally headed towards some freaky blend of WWII Germany and Gilead.

Everything being done now is something conservatives and Republicans I’ve known have been preaching to a greater or lesser degree for as long as I can remember. They were just better in couching it behind nice words back then, and less of them were comfortable being vocal about it. As far as I can tell, Trump has hijacked nothing and no one.

Resistance to him by Republicans at any level has been weak to undetectable the entire time, coming from a tiny minority of (now ousted) Republicans, and that is precisely what gives the lie to this idea that he hijacked a damn thing.

The commenter saying to line them all up is being ridiculous, of course, but they aren’t getting any disdain they haven’t earned, and in any case they aren’t interested in having unity with anyone not like them anyhow, so I don’t see any point whatsoever in this idea that we’re supposed to talk nice and mollycoddle them into some kind of class-aware coalition. That ship has sailed.

a great many edits

Not one time have I seen a Republican acknowledge those statistics, no matter in what form they are presented. Not once.

Which is not a knock against you, but yet more evidence how how willfully they will bury their heads in the sand if you encourage them to hate people they already want to hate + tell them they are patriots for doing so.

I will go to my grave before I support a Republican for anything. I wouldn’t vote for a Republican for street sweeper.