Splitting off from the midterm election thread, because this will derail it:
Citations for this stupidity are here
I can say this, although the
outcome of the midterms looks
mostly okay, the Democratic party was doing tap dancing on top of dangerously thin ice deliberately supporting the fascist crazies Trump endorsed in their primaries who support throwing out election results entirely on zero evidence, trying to get them through a primary in a year where Democrats are not doing well.
That is the kind of
insanely irresponsible stuff that causes the country to actually stop being the Weimar Republic and turn into fascist Germany. You do not support the far right authoritarians who want to destroy democracy over people who are simply incapable of coming up with a plan to govern.
Always support terrible governors over actual fascists. The Democratic party almost played itself into never being able to have power again. That's Russian roulette and the Russian connection isn't metaphorical either.
Every time the Democrats think they can win by throwing support to ever more crazy people in Republican primaries, you get people like Boebert and Greene and Trump instead of someone who is simply awful at governing and bad for the country. Those are the folks who will destroy elections and human rights, not just the economy.
As a student of history I am reminded of how all the parties did not unite against the NSDAP, from the far left to the right wing. They didn't see the danger until it was too late to remove that party from power, and all the other parties were outlawed.
Trumpists are moving to undermine every election and throw out as many ballots as possible especially mail-in ballots from disabled people and people in cities with no transportation, because that demo skews against Republicans. They've gerrymandered the bleep out of the whole country as much as they can, to gain an advantage in representation where they have none in votes. They want to make it harder to vote, and close as many polling stations as possible, and station armed psychopaths outside polling places to intimidate people into not voting, and they tried to overturn the last election using a direct assault on the Capitol.
There is no greater threat to the United States than these fascist thugs who want to make it so your vote literally doesn't matter, and will turn to violence unless they get their way.
Not China, not Russia. None of those people can destroy the USA like a fascist coup here in the USA. It will rip the country apart and I don't mean people peacefully seceding. I mean national guard and police shooting civilians en masse for protesting the regime, until the USA is Russia exactly.
Then the USA and China and Russia will all be in the hands of autocrats and not the people, and there's no way to undo that situation once you get into it. That's the end of the game, and the future of our children is nothing but darkness beyond that point.
There will not be any popular uprising after that, and no way to remove such a regime through a rebellion. That's just the end of your human rights and the entire world becomes a pretty hostile place to exist especially if you live in a democracy that the autocratic regimes want to undermine.
That's the cold war that we're losing, big time. It's the end of human rights, governments respecting human life, and the end of the power of the vote.
That all ends pretty soon. And it ends because people decided hey, we could probably win an election if we secretly fund and support the authoritarian fascist crazies over the incompetents.
That's the absolute dumbest gamble anyone has ever made, and because it worked out this time, the Democratic party will be stupid enough to keep doing it.
And that will blow up in their faces in 2 years, and I weep for the world and my children and yours when they get too cute and pull such a stunt.
They aren't keeping the Senate in 2024 and they're not keeping the White House either, and attacks on our voters will continue, and the Supreme Court will sign off on all of it.
You have nothing left as a line of defense between you and the end of freedom. It's all gone now.
And the Democrats, your only chance of stopping it, are being so stupid as to gamble with that future happening, by supporting extremists over simply stupid. People who believe in absolutely nothing, and think ending the vote, ending your rights, securing absolute authoritarian control, using guns to accomplish this, is all acceptable. Throwing away the Constitution to do so, no problem. That's what the extreme right wing nationalist has been dreaming of for their entire life.
As long as they get power, there's no amount of laws they won't break, no amount of human rights they will not trample. No amount of unethical behavior and destructive behavior they won't engage in, no amount of criminality they won't overlook or pardon, and no amount of partisan control of the courts they will find unacceptable.
One year ago on Quora I posted about how the Republican party under Trump would begin to switch their support for Ukraine within the year, precisely because they do not think, they follow the leader, who praised Putin and said it was a bold move to invade a peaceful neighboring Democracy once again, after having done so repeatedly since the end of the USSR.
Before the 2020 election I predicted that Trump would call for violence specifically aimed at the Capitol.
I said that there would be a move to undo the results through violence and egging on his most insane supporters, meaning NOT people who simply dislike or loathe Democrats, meaning NOT people who are lifelong Republicans, meaning NOT red state people with families who have sane to moderately sane and semi competent government.
Not those people. I mean the people who brand Nazi tattoos on themselves and Don't tread on me and talk about QANON and Flat Earth conspiracies and talk about (insert religious minority group) they claim is evil and controlling the world or all a bunch of terrorists, and lumping non-believers and all liberals in with them as some kind of Axis of evil.
The people who playtime pretend to be a soldier on the weekends with their racist drinking buddies and own 25 automatic weapons. Those people. There are a lot of them, and they absolutely worship Trump and tried to intimidate poll workers and voters this election.
Once Trump's party is back in power you will not be able to rely on the government to prosecute those nuts, nor the police to put a stop to the violence, especially since the police are the group that these people try to join in order to wield authoritarian power in a democracy in the first place, and can't get reliably screened out and fired due to police unions.
It may only be 5 to 10 percent of them, but those are responsible for practically all the racist and authoritarian violence committed by the police, and what happens is good people QUIT such a corrupt force and they keep protecting and hiring crazies like that, with no way to remove them, and no way for the voters to override such policy.
Those people also want their ideological allies to become judges, and Supreme Court justices. Your human rights are things they don't want to ever have to deal with, so putting extremist religious nutters and authoritarian fascists on as justices and judges are how it all ends for us.
From the police to the courts to the polling booth, your right and ability to stop them are being slowly squeezed from you, and it is happening quickly enough that you have noticed this trend throughout the past decade or two. It's happening within your lifetime and it all comes to a head in 2024.
I would love to be wrong here, but the problem with the majority is that most folks do not pay attention. There's family and work and dating and sports teams and movies and video games and much much more interesting things than dry politics. The majority notices and grumbles when suddenly decades of precedent are thrown out and now women have the same rights as a barnyard animal to say no to being forcibly bred and forced by the state to bear offspring against their will.
But even that sudden and depraved loss of human rights is just the beginning, as the deliberate targeting of trans people like my sister continues.
On the chopping block are her rights and her ability to even legally identify or be out in public or use a public restroom or exist in a public school without being harassed and bullied by government policy let alone psychopath kids raised by bigots.
On the chopping block is the ability for disabled people to vote from home. Silencing them so you can cut off their medicare, medicaid, social security, and welfare, and they cannot even show up and vote to stop you.
On the chopping block are the legal precedents that allowed gay people to marry and hold jobs and be protected from discrimination due to government policy.
On the chopping block are decades of precedent that allowed poor people who are already oppressed minorities living in poverty and targeted politically to actually go to college and try to escape the cycle of poverty.
On the chopping block is the ability for an active duty soldier to even cast a ballot that counts, because you can always send people to fight in a war, the poor will be the first to go, and if it's the demographic of poor and female or poor and non-white those votes skew sharply toward not the Republican side. Just deny them their overseas ballots, their mail in ballots. Silence their voices too.
Make it so that the only people who can vote at all are elderly wealthy white folks in the suburbs who can comfortably drive their car to their local church where they will vote, and the white nationalist gun nuts don't actually bother or intimidate those people, and the polling place is close by, and there are no long lines.
Then close hundreds of polling locations, shorten polling hours, cut funding to poll workers, and assign police sparingly so there's no protection for the voter. Make them stand in line.
Criminalize the act of bringing them water for standing in line, make it legal for armed thugs to intimidate them.
Make it so that you can "challenge" the result of an election with absolutely no evidence, no proof, with arguments so poor even Trump appointed judges threw them out without these cases even going to trial. But next time, have election officials who are willing to lie and suggest the election they just oversaw and conducted while being the party friendly to Trump was horribly compromised and therefore a new slate of electors must be hand picked by the officials loyal to Trump.
That's your future.
That's what you're actually up against, is guns pointed at you, elected officials making sure elections stop happening, your rights vanishing, and these crazy fascists coming to power and turning the power of the state on you, specifically its power to gun you down in the street via soldier or police officer, or put you in prison, or execute you.
It will make sense at that point while police have been armed with more and more heavily armed vehicles, riot gear, and so forth. And because the police are on a team and want to keep the peace and most aren't actually political, once they're standing there with riot shields faced off against a mob of angry voters, it won't matter what their political views are.
As soon as those two groups engage in violence every police officer will stand side by side with the most fascist and violent and bloodthirsty among them, for the same reason why civil wars are always bloody.
Once someone attacks your brother, sister, wife, husband, family, it's like gang violence. The hatred and cycle of violence can never stop after that. And it is a fight no one wins.
And it is a fight that will happen as soon as these absolute nutballs throw out the next election and just openly talk about how there was fraud, and never prove it. And just install loyal people at every level and purge the party of the disloyal, as in the Night of Long Knives, redux.
True believers in the GOP and the right wing cause and even those loyal to Trump himself will, as always, find themselves cast aside the moment they are no longer
useful (there's a term here I need to avoid using.)
Just like his Vice President and most of his cabinet and much of his own white house staff and Mitch McConnell and anyone, anywhere, who was ever actually trying to give Donald Trump a chance because he was a "member of their party", only to find out he has zero loyalty to anyone but himself.
Just like his supporters who marched on the capitol, killed, and died, were arrested, thrown in jail, and sentenced to years in prison, Trump never cared about any of those people.
Hundreds of people who believed in Trump are in prison because they believed in him over American law, morality, and democracy itself.
They, the true believers, believed they were right to follow this man. All were betrayed.
There is nothing that man is not capable of. If he treats his own supporters like disposable meat sacks, you can imagine what his regime will do to my trans sister, any disabled person, any immigrant or vaguely foreign looking person, any non-believer, any believer of the WRONG KIND, any political opponent, any member of the free press, any government official loyal to the country or the constitution over him, any judge who dares rule against him.
He and his supporters openly encourage and want violence to happen, planned for it to happen, made T-shirts saying which date the violence would happen, planned it out days and weeks ahead of time, and folks like Bannon and Roger Stone, all privy to what kind of sick twisted individual Trump is, talking about how possession is 9/10ths of the law, and how he was going to say he won at any point his numbers looked okay, and ask the counting of ballots be stopped, and then go after anyone who didn't follow his commands exactly, especially in Georgia where he demanded tens of thousands of votes to be "found".
Trump who asked for the violence in the Capitol to happen sat back and watched it happen on TV for hours, hoping his supporters would succeed.
If you think having high gas prices due to the Trump negotiated deal with the Saudis to limit oil production, and the Russia-Ukraine war, and the otherwise good economy causing high demand but low supplies due to global supply chain issues is a bad situation, none of that goes away with Trump in power.
Trump and his ally Putin and the Saudis all caused all of those things. None of those things are things Biden can wish away with magic.
If we are silly enough to endorse Trump and vote him or his allies into power after all they have said, and done, and destroyed, and how many laws they've broken, and how many elections they've tried to undermine, then we will lose democracy forever.
This will absolutely happen and it's not me being a crackpot. It's me being able to see how this stuff has happened over and over again in history, anywhere a democracy has fallen? Other than foreign invasion, this is how it has happened every single time.
Russia and China want nothing more than to pick who is in charge of the USA. Trump wants nothing more than to have absolute power. That is why all his crimes are aimed at achieving that one singular goal.
Because you have seen the violence, seen them on TV openly talk about how Trump will lie about the election before the votes even came in in 2020, seen him harass election workers and judges and Republicans who ran elections that didn't give him what he wanted, because you've seen the fascist militia groups loyal to Trump literally attack the Capitol, because you have seen human rights get undermined by the new radical authoritarian Supreme Court, because you have seen Trump cuddle up with Putin and shake down Ukraine and threaten NATO and cozy up with Kim Jong Un and call for hate and violence against the media, minorities both racial and religious, and ask for elections to be thrown away, and all of that has happened right before your eyes, it shouldn't be a stretch for me to have predicted the Capitol attack on January 6th based on knowledge of history.
It shouldn't be a stretch for me to have predicted the Republican party would turn on Ukraine the moment it was politically convenient.
It shouldn't be a stretch for me to predict further and further voting, human rights, and Constitutional protections will be undermined, and the next election will have an even greater attack on it than the first.
This is not like QANON where there's never any evidence and the predictions are always wrong.
I haven't failed a single prediction since before Trump came to power, on any of these things.
You need to consider my words, and make absolutely sure I am wrong in 2024, using the peaceful, legal, sane method available to you.
You have to vote, and it has to be for anyone who can defeat the extremist wing of the Republican party.
If you fail, the result will be the same as every single other failed democracy that fell to autocrats. The same as the Weimar Republic.
This is not happy news, I don't enjoy writing stuff like this. But if this happens and I said nothing, then I failed to do anything to protect my kids from the events to come.
I need you to stop this dark future, and make me look like a moron.
Because so far, I'm batting 1000. If you want, I can post all my predictions that have come true so far, months or years before they happened.
Take me seriously on this stuff, because I am citing real world events you can prove occurred because there's video of it and Trump allies admitting to it and former Trump allies openly testifying to it.
I am not wrong about this. Which is the worst aspect about it. Only the American voter can make me go from being right about this to being wrong.
I plead with you, if you can vote in the 2024 elections, make me the single wrongest person who ever posted on this site.
I will thank you forever.
I have no idea how much this kind of open acknowledgement of the dire circumstances of our democracy will pass the sniff test of the Mod team here, and if I have crossed some rule, feel free to correct me on it.
However, I want to make it clear, I am pointing out real world events that have happened, and I am pointing to testimony from the perpetrators of this in their own words, you can find with a simple google search. Look for what Bannon said about how Trump would declare he won, see Roger Stone. I heard the Jan 6th Committee testimony that was basically all given by Trump supporting Republicans who were employed by Trump or worked most closely with him.
Those are my citations. This can only ever sound unfamiliar if you do not watch the reputable news and see video of these events.
Nothing I have talked about in this post besides my prediction for the future is something I cannot prove actually happened so far. Ask me to prove it, one by one. I will grab video and put it in front of your face.
Ask me anything.
Also note, I have called for zero action except legal, peaceful voting. We do not prevent violence by being violent.
We just need to vote intelligently and this all goes away. But we have to vote more intelligently than we have been. And we cannot accept a fascist takeover of our elections, ever.
That's the whole ball game. Everything you like about the USA goes away if you don't draw the line here at our elections being attacked by the biggest liar in the past 80 years.
You have to register, you have to vote, you have to vote en masse. Make sure even after they throw out tons of your ballots the result isn't even close.
Make them have to set boxes and boxes of your votes on fire just to erase the paper trail. Make it REALLY easy to prove they messed with the election when they do.
If you let it be ambiguous, everyone will just go back to work and we will be under a fascist regime from then onward, and the loss of rights and the end of democracy cannot be stopped past that event horizon.
It's a black hole, the only future ever being the destruction of our rights.
Make sure this doesn't happen to my sister, to every gay person, to every religious and racial minority, to everyone who ever dared not vote Republican, to all the Republicans with spines and morals and principles and values who believe in a thing called the truth who ever stood up and said Trump lied.
Do it for all of us. Stop this madness forever by making sure you do not repeat the mistakes of history.
Make sure you stop supporting the election deniers, call your congress critter and make them stop giving those election deniers help. Make sure you vote out every Republican who denies elections, if they are not vocally opposed and are neutral on the matter, they also must be voted out.
That is the solution to the problem. I got the facts, I got the diagnosis, I got the cure.
I just need you to take it seriously enough to vote.
No election-destroyers aligned with the Jan 6th push to end American democracy should ever be in charge of our democracy.
That includes very stupid Democratic officials who think they're so clever that they can cling to power if they support Trump Flat Earthers in Republican primaries.
That's something sane Democrats absolutely have to stop doing.
And sane Republicans for all their bad takes on governing policy are not the enemy and you have to reach out and befriend them and try to convince them that Trump is attacking and will ALWAYS attack Republicans just like them for being insufficiently loyal. Those will be the first to go. Those are the ones that suffer the immediate wrath of Trump, and face the wrath of his more cult-like supporters who view violence and terrorism as a means to an end.
There can be a day where there can be a sane person who votes for a Romney or a McCain again. Those days are done until the Republican party is non-violently purged of this cancer through the power of the vote, in a concerted effort by Republicans Democrats independents to get them out of power.
It can only be done as a coalition of people who only have one thing in common:
We are all people Trump considers his enemy. Someone to either be lied to, or lied about.
Anyone who tells you lies considers you to be an enemy. It is never the act of a loyal friend to lie to you.
No one has lied to all of us more than Donald Trump, and no one has attacked American Democracy more than Donald Trump.
Stand firm, together, and purge this menace with your vote in 2024.
Congrats on getting to the end of the page. I am putting myself out there, and I expect to be ridiculed or flamed or whatever.
I probably expect the thread to be closed.
But I am being serious and I would ask that the topic remain open, and taken seriously, rather than laughed off.
You can laugh off the QANON people and the Pizzagaters and the Flat Earthers and the Bush Did 9/11 people.
Do not mistake me for one of those. I am a rational human being and the pattern I described is the top news story of every week for the past seven years. I didn't invent it in my imagination, not even a little bit.
