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That’s the point of his bad news smokescreen. There was such turbulence in the media throughout his entire presidency that the majority of the real damage he has done was only noticed by people who actively seek out information. It’s a brilliant way to obfuscate his agenda from the eyes of the passively informed.
Its the Russian stratagem. Flood the air waves with anything and everything. Call what's true false and what's false true. Now consensus reality no longer exists.
I guess I'm going fully red-string crazy because yeah, we've been under a russian propaganda storm for years now and like... why does the cia just let them? I think we have to recognize that the global information apparatus is allied against the ignorant public, their mutual targets.
Because we were already in one of the hugest propaganda storms in human history, and the Russians just started using the American apparatus effectively.
It's not like Noam Chomsky hasn't been talking about this for decades
This. "This is a Russian stratagem" is the same level of oblivious as the guy in the image.
The difference between the Russian strategem and the preceding "normal operation" was that normally consent was manufactured through capture of the news media, and selective airing of stories.
The novelty of what the Russians doing is that they don't need to control what gets said, they just shout gibberish louder than anyone else. Not that a lot of Western interests didn't start doing the same as well.
It's just the logical continuation of the Fox model - if your stories aren't internally consistent, but the audience still buys it because the want to believe, and change day to day, but the audience still buys it because the want to believe, the next step is to make separate channels and pump out stories that conflict with eachother, simultaneously, and let the audience pick whichever version they like best.
How can the secret service let a 20y/o survalence a presidential candidates campaign site; see the guy with a view finder scope out the building your snipers are in; then let him grab his gun and climb in the building you are in?
Our law enforcement is about as useful as a pool noodle.
Spend some time looking into true crime. Crimes go unsolved not because the murders are geniuses. 9 out of 10 our law enforcement is incompetent.
Flood the zone with shit
~ Steve "I'll take a bath when I'm dead" Bannon
Now its Steve "I'll take a shower when the guards tell me to" Bannon.
God damn, I hate him reguardless. But sometimes you forget how absurd it is. He started and endorsed a riot that stormed the capital with gallows, pressured the vice president not to certify an election that was obviously legit. Then supposedly Pence was afraid to get into a ss car because he knew his safety was in question.
That's fucking insane. It's fucking insane how obvious it is that he is trying to undermine America and its institutions, its government, its "democracy ". He's not even trying to hide it. It's his rallying cry. In the country that his party pretends to love.
And whats even more insane is here we are, in a situation where we are worried about half the country voluntarily wanting it to happen.
I am as apathetic as they come about our broken system. I want the whole thing to burn down and rebuild, but not by handing the keys over to a tyrant. There is no rebuilding after that. Not in my lifetime.
Your lede is sort of buried and is far more telling and scary.
Pence afraid to get in an SS car…
So if we expand on this - Pence was afraid for his life. He was afraid of the very agency sworn to protect him. Despite the potential threat to his life, even today he will not directly speak out against the authoritarianism that led to the situation he found himself in. He will not speak out against trump. The most he has done is simply not endorse trump.
So that’s how completely fucked up the republicans are. You can have your life in the balance as one of the literal highest elected officials in the nation, yet you won’t speak out. You won’t try to stop it from getting worse.
This is no different than Stalin’s regime, Mao’s, or any other uber-dictator that caused millions of deaths in the name of power and control.
I cannot possibly emphasize enough how hell-bent on boot-licking dictatorship the Republican Party must be if this is the case.
People keep pestering me about how Republicans aren't literal Nazis when I compare them to literal Nazis.
I don't want to be judicious and exact about Nazis. I want to freak out and notice when a group starts seeming like Nazis.
So due to the fact that they're probably going to kill us all now that we hesitated too many times, I'll say it at last: it's morally correct to punch people who aren't freaked out about Nazis.
People who say "they aren't as bad as the Nazis" always only think about the time after 1934 or even 1939. This, right now is the before-time. Of course they aren't as bad as the successful, established, in control Nazis yet. But if you look at the time between 1920 and 1933, when the NSDAP wasn't in power yet, the parallels are terrifying.
Maybe the biggest reason he won't speak out is because he won't get reelected. Which is scary in itself. But, let's not pretend Pence is some sort of Saint. He is evil too.
After not having crimed Trump into a second Term, he has to know that the MAGA crowd would rather hang him than let him have any office while they're in power. So if getting elected were his primary concern, making sure Trump is not put into power would be Pence's primary objective. And he's just laying low, not working against Trump, so we can be sure that getting reelected is either not his goal or he's more afraid than he is ambitious.
Maybe they want a tyrant so they can finally exercise those second amendment rights and fulfill the fantasy they have of overthrowing a corrupt government. Can't overthrow a corrupt government if you don't elect for the government to be corrupt as fuck. 🤷🏻♂️
Yeah no.
Their fantasies are more about murdering all those they don't like. You know, the gays, the Mexicans, the blacks (oh wait, no, those will be useful as slaves again, bible says it's okay), the Muslims, the atheists, basically murder anyone not white Christian.
Funny detail though that Grindr went through the roof at the RNC. I'm sure it's purely coincidental.
Pence declined to endorse him, but is still gonna vote for him anyhow.
As is the way of the cult
I mean, can't let a blood pact with the devil himself go to waste. You know how much blood of the innocent that cost them?
Sunk Cost is still a fallacy, even if it's applied to Hell.
The one mystery that hasn't been answered to my knowledge is why didn't Pence want to get into the car with Secret Service?
He knew they would whisk him off to a "secure location" and he wouldn't be able to certify the election. A big part of the Trump plan was for Pence to refuse to certify the election and throw the process into chaos. When he refused to do that they came up with a plan to physically remove him instead. Luckily he was smart enough to see through it.
He knew they were going to kill him. Ultimately there would be no other way around it.
Or he suspected they would kidnap him until he declared Trump the winner of the election.
Oh he knew. Trump told him the plan.
I don't think they were going to kill him. I think their play was to bring him off-site "for his safety" so he couldn't certify the election, at most a kidnapping.
The whole thing was too noncommittal by the big players in case things went to shit, which it did. They didn't have the balls to plan out an assassination of the VP.
It might have worked if they had the balls to do that, and other things.
Gallows says they wanted to kill him
The angry mob wanted to kill him, not the orchestrators that would have pull with the USSS. Do you think they were going to drive him out into the mob to the world's shittiest gallows?
If it ever came out that people in the Trump administration actively participated in a well-defined plot to kill Pence, they would fry. That's why they sicced the mob on the capital to commit spontaneous violence. Difficult if not impossible to prove conspiracy, and the people getting jail time would be the red hat morons, not the people in charge. Again, they (the orchestrators) were half-hearted cowards that were more concerned with saving themselves if it failed than doing anything to make sure it succeeded, and for this moment in time we should be thankful for that.
They didn't want to kill him, they just sent an angry mob after him. What the angry mod decided to do, that's on them.
There's no telling what mob mentality would do. Some were chanting "hang Mike Pence" and had gallows erected in front of the Capitol. It wasn't going to be Trump who would have tied the noose, but a crazy trump cult member would have probably done it.
at most a kidnapping.
Right but what then? You can’t let him go then, or they’ll face a kidnapping / attempted murder etc charge. He knew they were going to lock him up so they could admit the false electors and complete the coup. They’d have to kill him.
There are few things I would agree with Mike Pence on, not endorsing someone who tried to get me murdered is definitely one.
Edit: TY, u/homesweethomeMrL! I left out the key word, "not" above. Ack!
I assume you meant “not endorsing”?
d'oh! Thanks, will edit.
I’m pretty sure pence toed the line, though. Like he’s not speaking against him either.
Yeah, I wouldn't 'toe the line', I'd be telling the world about the guy to tried to get me murdered. And doing my best to keep him out of the office of the presidency, and to get him into jail for a long time. But hey, Mike Pence, you do you, kid.
Where can I read about this? (I'm a silly little European I didn't know about this)
Jan 6, 2021, invasion of the US Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress from counting electoral votes as part of the process to confirm Joe Biden as President. The mob had erected a gallows and were chanting "Hang Mike Pence!"
Mike Pence was Trump's Vice President. Trump insisted (confidently incorrect) that Pence had the authority to reject the electoral count. Pence refused to do so. Trump expressed his "disappointment" in Pence during the Capitol invasion, directly leading tho the above.
Search for “Jan 6”
Shame how memory fades so readily in the face of such an onslaught of bullshit
As Murdoch, Banon, and Cambridge Analytica know too well - propaganda works like fucking magic.
Well, Tumblr has a fairly regular influx of middle school age progressives that are just now learning about all this.
So it's less of a Galadriel situation and more of a Vimes situation.