Trump 2025 - Resuming The National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity (Part 1)

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
8086

I live in a nicely mellow place, and am pretty close geographically to @twojarslave. The hippies and the rednecks live in relative peace. Homelessness is an issue, particularly since Covid, but it’s nothing like Lewiston here. I have close friends around the country and don’t hear this from them. We share shock and dismay at the news, but I don’t think really encounter it day-to-day. This includes a high school tech teacher/manager in a suburb just outside of DC, whose main complaints (and there are many and they are vigorous) are about staff being idiots and kids also being idiots, but they are kids and are expected to be idiots.

Texas, Detroit, and a military base in Ohio are also represented by my daily contacts (I have what I call a shared journal, which started in the early days of forums/message boards and is now private - we all post pretty much daily, about whatever’s going on or on our minds) (Estrogen Nation).

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8087

I think a lot of the impacts, especially visually acute differences, amount to whether or not enough critical political mass gets reached in any given area. In the case of Lewiston and Portland, getting the combination of one-party rule at local, state, and federal levels simultaneously means a cascade of radical policies actually get implemented at every level of government. Perhaps more importantly, the funding gets directed to social transformation, specifically to things like migrant importation, various social justice nonprofits like our sacred Church of Safe Injection and their “decarceration” allies, policies that attract and concentrate homeless people, all things transgender get public funding and fully incorporated into law, and funding DOESN’T get directed to core government functions like the courts, the jails, the police forces, and even vital public services like water for putting out fires in places like California.

It all makes sense when you look at the modern Democratic party as what their policies tell us they are – Democratic Socialist revolutionaries, beginning with the Obama administration and DEI. If you hang on to the idea that they’re somehow moderates or don’t really mean what they say, everything gets a lot harder to explain.

Portland is actually easier to explain than Lewiston, since they’ve been electing open Democratic Socialists for years. Lewiston was comparatively conservative, with a huge population of French-Canadian Catholics when I moved here, so they needed more deception and gaslighting to pull it off, along with pumping the city full of migrants.

There are still large numbers of Maine Democrat voters who are completely and utterly uninformed about the state of the party, who mostly campaign as moderates but govern as revolutionaries. People still think they’re the party of JFK, or Jimmy Carter, or Bill Clinton. In my opinion, the people of Maine in particular were sitting ducks, waiting to be plundered by the rainbow mafia who hoodwinked a lot of people into believing they were moderate Democrats.

Plus our system of voting makes it so literally anyone reading this could easily register and cast a vote in any election in Maine. You don’t even need to show up, you can register online and request an absentee ballot, as long as you remember to lie on the form, use a fake name, claim residency, etc.

I know one thing, AP US History will be a crazy subject in 2050.

8088

I heard DeSantis was trying to get rid of that.

8089

From what I remember, DeSantis was getting rid of critical race theory in public education, meaning we don’t teach the ridiculous 1619 project as well-supported historical fact, because it isn’t.

There is a world of difference between history books like The People’s History of The United States, which does get taught in some jurisdictions just like the 1619 project, and actual academic literature.

In local news, The Church of Safe Injection posted a bizarre response, yielding a response from a former board member suggesting that most of the $300,000 in grants they received mysteriously went missing. It seems pretty obvious that the whole operation is run by addicts, for addicts, but mostly for the addict owner.

One thing about socialist revolutionaries, they’re always at each other’s throats eventually, and even then they can always find a way to explain away the disastrous results of their own policies while taking no responsibility. Even the former board member still believes in the idea of “harm reduction” as public policy, despite all of the easily observable evidence of its failure in front of her.

This debacle in Lewiston is a really good example of how the whole woke narrative we’ve been fed can no longer be sustained due to reality. This organization were the “experts” our city council deferred to on local syringe ordinances.

Hopefully our council president resigns in disgrace, but I doubt he will.

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8090

I actually know very little about this debate. I should read about it at some point.

Slavery was of course very important to US for a long time, and it was peculiar kind of slavery, since it was ”race” based. Russia hold on to slavery longer for example, but it was class based (and later just ruthlessly practical, done by political prisoners).

But it’s also hypocritical to say that slavery is long gone. Maybe in the west yes, but we need only go to China or to some other east-asian country, and bingo!

8091

We learned all about slavery in the USA without DEI and critical race theory in the 1980’s and 1990’s. We learned Indiana state history of the Klu Klux Klan, too. The whole idea that slavery wasn’t taught or was inadequately taught in public schools is pure fiction.

In a nutshell, the re-writing history part of all socialist revolutions was attempted and succeeded in some states, including Maine. It even made its way into the curriculum in a lot of purple and red states. It changed the “lesson” from one of understanding facts about the past to warping the past through a race-based lens designed to support the rest of the Democratic Socialist revolution by characterizing America as a fundamentally flawed political entity in need of Democratic Socialist revolutionary ideas. In other words, liberal tolerance was replaced with the intolerance of DEI.

Education can vary wildly by state, but even in the deep south they learned about the Civil War, slavery, etc.

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8092

Sounds like stuff in Russia these days. History lessons are sometimes almost scripted there.

8093

History as an academic pursuit is in a bad state in the USA right now, but everyone definitely knows that we had slavery in the past. It’s probably the single most well-understood historical fact in the entire country right now.

I would estimate that the number of Americans who can give even a semi-coherent, partially accurate description of fascism is less than one percent, yet that word forms the basis of our entire national political discussion right now.

I would guess that the number of history teachers who could give an accurate, graduate student level description of fascism is also quite low, outside of students studying that aspect of history specifically.

The long campaign to associate “right wing” with both Nazi Germany and American Republicans has been very successful, mostly through repetition, lack of curiosity, and enduring WWII propaganda.

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8094

4char

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8095

4char

8096

You should come to LA, San Fran, or Seattle.

It is not exaggerated in these places. If anything, its downplayed compared to how common it is. At least as far as trannies go.

8097

Most likely indicates Voter ID vote will be coming for the rest of the country; if the whole Maine as a petri dish hypothesis is valid.

8098

I think democrats should introduce a bill that says no president can be pardoned for crimes against a minor, and watch every republican vote against it.

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8099

Oh, that would be interesting.

8100

Not even just the 1980s and 1990s, I graduated HS in 2014 and had a relatively bias-free education. A lot of things changed very quickly. I started to notice it in my last two years of college that there was a much stronger liberal bias among my professors, specifically my economics professors. That was 2016 though, which started the downfall of a lot of people mentally.

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8101

In tariff news:

Over 30 countries and counting have suspended all shipments to the US over the new removal of the de minimum (under $800) exemption, and the fact that Trump now wants the exporting country to collect the tariff when the item is received in the new country, something none of them are set up to do.

And stateside the “reciprocal” tariffs have been ruled illegal almost entirely ( Most Trump tariffs are not legal, US appeals court rules | KELO-AM ) because the law doesn’t give the president the power to do so unilaterally (in that courts opinion)

Although they are allowed to stand until mid October to give time for appeals

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8102

Liberal/Keynesian economists are nothing new, nor are liberals entering the education profession.

You were probably subjected to a lot of the precursor ideas to full blown DEI, Social and Emotional Learning, and transgenderism that were virtually absent during my time in school. I’m guessing you knew all about micro aggressions, white privilege, and other social justice ideas.

Of course it varies wildly by state, but here in Maine a whole lot of narcissistic, sociopathic, woke white women got onto school boards and into the state house, then diligently implemented full blown DEI racism, transgenderism, and the cult like Social and Emotional Learning framework, along with adjacent ideas like restorative justice.

Here’s several of these education ideas at work simultaneously in a situation last year in coastal Maine. In Maine, public school staff are not allowed to break up fights, which is why you see two grown men allowing the transgender to continue assaulting the girl instead of acting like men.

The girl who was assaulted by the transgender boy was suspended for 5 days. This is very similar to how my barber’s white daughter was beaten by multiple black children on the bus, then told her attackers get to stay on the bus and she would have to ride a different bus.

That’s two examples of DEI, transgenderism, and restorative justice all wrapped up into grievously insulting administrative decisions in public school.

I don’t think Animal Farm is on the curriculum anymore in Maine, because we’re already on the farm, where some of the animals are more equal than others.

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8103

This might be just useless academic nitpicking, but Keynesians aren’t liberal by definition. It’s an economic school which drops between liberal economists and socialist economists.

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8104

I see what you’re getting at and yes, Keynesians aren’t capital S socialists or communist left, but in practical terms today it seems like there is a pretty broad overlap between American Democrats and Keynesian ideas you’ll find from guys like Robert Reich or in The Economist. I’m old enough to remember some of Reich’s spectacularly wrong predictions, like how the internet wasn’t going to be a very big economic deal. He’s still at it, with lots of fans of his brand of political and economic tarot card reading.

I’m unsure of how much Friedman or Sowell most college students get exposed to, but from the outside looking in it seems like very little.

So many of the terms get really mushy in practical use. Democrats promote Democratic Socialist ideas, which come from a combination of communist ideas and National Socialist ideas, and Nazi economic ideas have a lot of common thought with Keynesian ideas, but Democrats go around calling their opponents Nazis while not being strict socialists themselves either, kind of like the Nazis.

8105

I’m not an expert economist, but as far as I understand Adam Smith had it best. Later most economists miss the mark more or less (either Liberal ones like Friedman or Hayek, Keynesians or Socialists).

This is still a huge simplification, and has lot of shades in it. But that’s roughly how I view it.