I think this is the product of an underlying recognition by the various viziers, and even Trump himself (at least with regard to the Supreme Court), that the survival of this administration is entirely dependent on America's media and financial elites being able to pretend that everything is normal.

Incidentally, I also think this may be how you lose (at least part of) the military. The Maduro kidnapping was illegal, but 1) Maduro is (rightly) widely hated, and 2) the op itself was similar to precedents like 1989 Panama. Starting a war with NATO over Greenland is not that.

Miller and his goons love talk like this. This is the kind of stuff he says to himself in the mirror as a daily affirmation. But even among MAGA voters, the actual receptive audience for this is *vanishingly* small. Starting a war with NATO over Greenland is how you get Ameri-Maidan'ed.

A whole lot of media elites have convinced themselves that they can either placate the face-eating leopards, or else cower behind others whose faces get eaten in the hope that someone else will stop the leopards or the leopards will get full.

Right, there are these little moments where you can see them going “no rules! Arrest the enemies of the state” and then they get to the station and they’re like “but wait, we got nothing on this guy, we gotta let him go” like it’s Law and Order

That's one heck of a Freudian slip

And not just intentionally chased off right-wingers and bad actors, but regular people with regular views! Sky Marcini is not some kind of reactionary administration apologist, but rather a very qualified economist with utterly mainstream left-of-center political opinions!

many people on here might benefit from blocking 50-100,000 people. this site is still perfectly usable if you screen out 50-100,000 people. i cannot recommend highly enough blocking 50-100,000 people.

I just have a miniature shoulder version of my mom telling me my prose is too opinionated like every Bluesky post is an 11th grade essay

My solution is just to block early and often enough that I don't generally end up interacting with the sort of people who can trigger dogpiles. I have no compunctions about blocking anyone at any time. If you're a jerk on the internet, why would I want to interact with you?

In thirty years, the majority consensus will be that stuff like this is just made up--it has to be, because no person this staggeringly dumb and conceited could possibly be elected president. It Can't Happen Here.

The main reason the Constitution has proven so inadequate over the past year is that the framers never contemplated a congressional majority so desperate to be subservient to the executive. The whole idea behind checks and balances is that the branches are supposed to be rivals to an extent.

You can have democracy or you can have a military that fixes the mistakes of the electorate. You can’t have both.

Very Bad People have killed the government, and are walking around in its skinsuit. The question is: do you do what they say, simply because they're wearing the skinsuit?

I think at this point its entirely fair to just wait 48hrs and see which political entities appear to actually be exercising control on the ground, probably the actual govt led by the VP. Not many other ways to really tell what’s happening there w/o great on the ground journalism, which is unlikely.

The nominal anti-Trump neocons on Twitter are all posting rapturous celebrations of Maduro's capture like Trump didn't immediately install his vice president to replace him lol. They literally did this for the DEA photo op, and presumably to steal as much low-grade oil as possible.

This is honestly a fantastic encapsulation of everything this administration stands for. This is government of the posters, by the posters, and for the posters. They do what they do specifically with the intent, desire, and goal to drive social media engagement. This IS the Trump era.

Finally we can do Sicario type operations in Latin America as shown in the movie Sicario: US Interventions In Latin America Are Bad

This is definitely not a SCIF and, among many other things, this alone is a major national security breach. Random third rate intelligence agencies would have known about this attack before Congressional leaders did.

Even among nominally liberal reporters, I think there's still a virtually ironclad assumption that someone as irrational and impaired as Trump could not possibly ascend to the presidency, and that there must, therefore, be some kind of coherent intelligence behind what he says and does.

There also need to be elected Democrats, particularly anyone considering a 2028 run, out in public post haste making it clear that a Democratic administration will aggressively prosecute those who carry out illegal orders.

I genuinely don't think Trump has thought about this since authorizing it.

This is also, incidentally, the final legacy of Charlie Kirk and the social media-fication of the MAGA movement. The Republican Party's leadership has been gutted and replaced with a collection of social media addicts.

This is the end stage of a political movement built entirely on escalating purity tests and runaway groupthink. These people exist entirely within echo chambers that tell them that all of their ideas are good, anyone who disagrees is subhuman, and the world should revolve around their whims.

It's also characteristic of this administration's style of governance-by-poster. These people have no concept of how they are viewed by their actual voters. They just know that their snark, juvenile, fascistic tweets get tens and hundreds of thousands of likes, so they assume they're doing great.

The U.S. is functionally now a pariah state and must be treated as such until the cancer rotting out the heart of the White House is cut out.

The world must boycott the World Cup and the Olympics. It is both the only moral choice and will actually get the attention of these dead-eyed clout demons.

Yeah, as evil as this is, it's also just politically insane. Nobody wants this. Even Maduro's fiercest Western critics don't want a unilateral American invasion of Venezuela with no clear end goal and no semblance of constitutional legitimacy. There is no audience for this!

Donald Trump permanently lives his life with the sort of liminal, semiconscious view of "reality" that one has immediately after waking up from wisdom tooth surgery, and the controlling majorities of both other branches of government have decided that they exist to serve his bizarre whims.

This kind of switch doesn't just happen--there's definitely some underlying bigotry there--but having that bigotry reinforced, echoed back at you, and rewarded with positive engagement 24/7 is how you go from "person with bad opinions" to "person openly calling for ethnic cleansing".

/3 Also, Trumpism is more or less collectivism for the benefit of a white male conservative affluent polity rather than other groups. It’s not like Trumpism is remotely individualistic in terms of thought, speech, or tolerance. So going with the “not gleefully bigoted” one is an easy choice.

/2 That’s because I think the choice between a mainstream vibe-collectivist (who only seems extreme through Overton Window abuse) and a cult of white nationalist nihilists is not a close call. Taking the least charitable view of Mamdani, we’ve lived with it plenty before, and he’s not a psychopath.

Turns out that if you come from a tradition where you are perfectly comfortable believing in a deity that would condemn 99% of the world's historical population to hell for eternity because they weren't baptized Protestants, you are probably a lot more likely to be a bigot.

There is a cruel streak on the far left that rivals anything on the right--the only difference is that the far left has never been the dominant left-of-center political influence in America that MAGA has been for the right.

I must stop this Christmas from coming...but how?

This is my favorite lol

Like sorry Christians but Satan won the Satanic Panic. Great job Satan. Really underestimated you there. 4/

Few are as bad as Weiss, but just about the entire mainstream media has become conditioned to view covering politics as a business with no moral constraints to speak of.

My 4th-great grandfather died of pneumonia after hiding out in the woods for a week to avoid a Confederate conscription gang.

Sequel era Republic households commonly put up portraits of Dooku, Grievous, and Skywalker, and in turn First Order loyalists display Vader, Palpatine, and Obi-wan (for killing Grievous)

Also, "Knights of Dooku" is a really dang funny name for a new order

From the perspective of the average person in universe, Star Wars is the story of Count Dooku warning everyone Palpatine was a tyrant and being tragically ignored the misguided old Jedi companions he was forced to take up arms against, only to be vindicated upon death.

It's also useless to call for civil debate as "politics in the right way" because the framework wherein civil debaters were punished for lying or making bad-faith arguments no longer exists. There is no point in asymmetrical civil debate where one side feels bound by truth and the other does not.

I knew a guy living in a rougher part of Jackson, Missouri, who had had 5-7 beers *by 10am* a lot of days.

So many of the elite seem to feel the need to impose legitimate political order and motivations on MAGA, as though it is just a normal political movement, because "it can't happen here".

It may even be simpler than this. The world is big and scary, and internet fascists are the people who can't cope with being adults in an adult world and are willing to burn down civilization in the hope that they can be twelve again.

An interesting difference between the right in the US and the UK is that the US right has been so captured by isolationist nutcases that *all* immigration is seen as bad to a degree. In the UK, there's a level of national pride that makes right-wingers mad that white people don't want to immigrate.

It is possible both to encourage and celebrate opposition to Trump for any reason, while also not celebrating the people doing it if, like MTG, they are vicious racists and antisemites.