Stephan: The MAGAt Republicans have reached a level of vileness unlike anything we have seen in living memory. This is not going to stop, in my opinion, until two things happen. Trump and members of Congress must be held accountable in public trials, and those of us who support democracy and justice have to vote for Democrats in such overwhelming numbers that the election outcome is irrefutable and Democratic dominance in both houses of Congress increases significantly. If we don't stop this trend in November I'm not sure we will recover.
Speaking to MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan, reporter Brandy Zadrozny explained that the recent bomb threats called into Boston Children’s Hospital are just more of the same from the right-wing that has been going after anyone helping to treat transgender children. The Washington Post reported that a right-wing digital group is behind attacks on a Washington, D.C. children’s hospital. To make matters worse, social media sites are allowing it to continue.
“Children’s hospitals across the U.S. are facing growing threats of violence, driven by an online anti-LGBTQ campaign attacking the facilities for providing care to transgender kids and teens,” the Post reported.
Zadrozny said that this is the next step for MAGA Republicans, who she believes are setting their sights on attacking doctors and hospitals
Stephan: The uber-rich are buying vast acreage in the lonely central states, and building bunkers like something out of a science fiction novel. They pay people large sums to alert them to trends and they can see what is coming. This is what wealth inequality is going to look like.
Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse they helped create, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequences.
As a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist. The people most interested in hiring me for my opinions about technology are usually less concerned with building tools that help people live better lives in the present than they are in identifying the Next Big Thing through which to dominate them in the future. I don’t usually respond to their inquiries. Why help these guys ruin what’s left of the internet, much less civilisation?
Still, sometimes a combination of morbid curiosity and cold hard cash is enough to get me on a stage in front of the tech elite, where I try to talk some sense into them about how their businesses are affecting our lives out here in the real world. That’s how I found myself accepting an invitation […]
Stephan: I watched and read clips and articles of Trump's two-hour Pennsylvania speech and was appalled. Why is this man not under arrest? Why has he not be indicted? He is actively and without any restraint promoting violence, and it is clear to me his behavior is going to get worse as we approach November, and then onto 2024.
At one time in my life, I held clearances well above Top Secret. Every night the Chief Petty Officer who ran my office put every classified piece of paper in the file cabinet safes we had lining one wall in his office, and when I forgot to take the little type ball that went to my IBM typewriter off each night along with the carbon tape ribbon and put them in the safes, they put a safe door on my office suite, and bars on my windows. If I had taken a single sheet of Top Secret / CSI paper home with me, I would have been arrested and probably still be in prison. The idea that Trump had 11,000 pages of such data scattered around his country club estate, to anyone who has ever held those levels of clearances, what Trump did was mind-boggling, and that is just one of his many crimes. No one is above the law, and Donald Trump deserves and should be in prison.
MAGAt leader Trump screaming
Among the documents disclosed in a Justice Department filing last night in the case involving former President Donald Trump’s possession of classified documents is a striking photograph, one showing documents marked secret and top secret strewn across the floor of Mar-a-Lago.
When the search of Trump’s home by the FBI was first announced, conservatives howled that the former president was a target of political persecution. That accusation was without basis, but it was also not impossible that the bureau might have abused its powers in its pursuit of a warrant to search Trump’s home. In truth, Trump’s defenders seemed less convinced by their accusations against the FBI than by their own conviction that Trump himself is above the law.
Retaining classified documents is not even close to the worst thing Trump has done. We are, after all, speaking of a man who twice tried to subvert the democratic process, first by using foreign aid in an attempt to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into falsely implicating then–Democratic rival Joe […]
Stephan: I have watched the Fox propaganda channel several times recently and watched MSNBC this afternoon, and the contrast dramatically made clear the Great Schism Trend. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and other papers have all been remiss in not calling out what has been going on. The christofascist MAGAts are gearing up for civil violence, and the country, in my view, is in a place it has not been in our lifetimes or, really, since 1861. And if we do not face up to that reality the United States may not be a functional country capable of a fair election by 2024
President Trump telling America the truth
Thursday, former President Donald Trump said again that if he’s reelected, he’ll not only pardon Jan. 6 rioters who attacked police and stormed the Capitol but also apologize for their persecution on behalf of a regretful nation.
Also on Thursday, it was revealed that a right-wing activist—who’s by the way the spouse of a Supreme Court justice—lobbied yet another group of state officials to overturn the election just as she’d lobbied the White House chief of staff; that a failed GOP congressional candidate in Alaska insisted she’d won her election the instant she lost; and that the former president of the United States could soon be charged with obstructing yet another investigation.
Later in the evening, President Joe Biden gave a speech in Philadelphia, where he warned a (cable-only) TV audience that the Republican Party has been taken over by authoritarians who embrace violence, cynically abuse the rule of law, and reject fair elections.
“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” Biden said. He […]
Stephan: Am I exaggerating about the current state of America, and the potential for civil violence? Let's deal with some actual data.
Trump supporters clash with police and security forces in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021. Credit: Brent Stirton/Getty
A new poll found that 43% of Americans believe a civil war will break out in the next 10 years.
It found that Republicans are more likely to agree that such a conflict will take place soon.
The poll of 1,500 US citizens was sampled based on surveys conducted by the US Census Bureau.
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A new poll of 1,500 American citizens found that 43% of them think it’s likely a civil war will break out over the next decade, an indicator of the growing concern about America’s political divide.
The poll conducted last week by the Economist and UK-headquartered analytics firm YouGov found that 55% of self-identified “strong” Republicans believed civil war is at least somewhat likely, while 40% of self-identified “strong” Democrats felt the […]
