Post AWyFEHH0GY6UQewkkq by Bargdaffy@defcon.social
(DIR) More posts by Bargdaffy@defcon.social
(DIR) Post #AWu404MNc0SNPmhJUe by mattsheffield@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T01:17:42Z
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🧵 When Republicans speak of a "weaponized" DOJ or a "two-tiered system of justice," they are really describing what they want to create and what already exists--in their favor.The record shows that Republicans like Donald Trump & Roger Stone get favorable treatment.The gun charge Hunter Biden pled guilty to is rarely prosecuted: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/legal-experts-say-charges-hunter-biden-are-rarely-brought-rcna90191...🧵
(DIR) Post #AWu405fuirfzUeqQa0 by Hyperhidrosis@shitposter.club
2023-06-21T03:18:39.252148Z
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@mattsheffield you know you have like 1000 character limit, you can minimize the need for posting multiple smaller retarded posts and condense it into a few bigger posts. Unless your admin cringe and gives you peasant character limit.
(DIR) Post #AWu4087dcl2d5Dpb4S by mattsheffield@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T01:19:17Z
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After Donald Trump illegally took thousands of government documents with him to Mar-a-Largo, the government begged him to return them for more than a year. He refused and lied.Mike Pence, Joe Biden, and and Hillary Clinton all delivered documents or voluntarily disclosed that they took presidential administration documents. The docs which Joe Biden had from his Senate career are not subject to NARA forfeiture requirements.
(DIR) Post #AWu40Y8Ev8yHkcJRcO by mattsheffield@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T01:20:19Z
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Jack Smith did not charge Donald Trump for possession of documents which he had voluntarily turned over.Trump was charged for deliberately lying and refusing to return stolen military secrets.Further, regarding Hunter Biden and the federal investigation of him, as Media Matters has documented, his case has been overseen entirely by Republicans. Democrats did not handle it in any major way. https://www.mediamatters.org/ben-shapiro/after-hunter-biden-charges-right-wing-media-immediately-move-goalposts
(DIR) Post #AWu40ho2x4lDkswSX2 by mattsheffield@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T01:23:19Z
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Beyond trying to make excuses for Trump's obvious and flagrant criminality, however, the constant Republican caterwauling about "weaponized law enforcement" is their attempt to create a permission structure to actually weaponize government.They're already doing it to a huge extent with House hearings trying to make Jack Smith and other prosecutors illegally disclose grand jury material.But the reactionary activist base has far more radical designs than this.
(DIR) Post #AWu40ifvijrWS09UWG by mattsheffield@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T01:24:51Z
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There is a multimillion dollar effort now to create a weaponized federal bureaucracy for the service of Republicans who become president. They aim to totally eliminate civil service protections and also to force the Department of Justice to take direct orders from the White House.Trump and his top cronies are all-in on this. They love it: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/15/us/politics/trump-indictment-justice-department.html
(DIR) Post #AWu40mzZfdx7q5NEh6 by mattsheffield@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T01:26:52Z
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The goal is to make a "unitary executive" under totalitarian control of the president. They're pursuing this not just because they hate democratic elections, but also because reactionary activists are not competent enough to obtain high-level federal employee jobs the way everyone else does.They want mandatory affirmative action for Republican bureaucrats: https://newrepublic.com/article/164050/executive-privilege-steve-bannon-trump
(DIR) Post #AWu40o3rhAyl9gOB1M by mattsheffield@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T01:30:24Z
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But the "unitary executive" idea is part of an even larger reactionary plan which Christian reactionaries are seeking to force the state to completely submit to the church.This is largely a product of far-right Catholic elites like Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen. He literally calls his goal "regime change." He wants to ban swearing in public, ban pornography, ban stores being open on Sunday, and of course ban abortion and birth control. Details here: https://publicseminar.org/essays/toward-a-postliberal-future/
(DIR) Post #AWu40pIn5AVp0GNbvM by mattsheffield@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T01:33:14Z
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Despite the fact that Republicans' most influential and powerful activists and thinkers are openly planning to gut democracy and replace it with theocratic fascism, the mainstream media almost never systematically reports this information.There are isolated stories here and there about various plans or people, but the daily coverage of Trump and other Republicans' activities almost never mentions the context. As a result, most people do not know this information.
(DIR) Post #AWu40qEZcKjVtTPkzQ by mattsheffield@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T01:34:34Z
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This failure to tell the full truth originates in the "both sides" fallacy of MSM reporting, but how it manifests here is especially dangerous to American democracy.The Washington Post provided a terrible example recently of what I'm talking about in a report from a very disturbing Turning Point USA conference for young women.
(DIR) Post #AWu40rFfpjCv3Aw9LM by mattsheffield@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T01:35:49Z
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The first thing to understand about Turning Point USA is that it's basically an evangelical cult run with an iron fist by grifter Charlie Kirk. Between the various organizations Kirk controls, they have an annual budget over over $50 million. Here is an overview of the organization if you're not very familiar:https://flux.community/matthew-sheffield/2022/01/charlie-kirk-and-turning-point-usa-are-building-reactionary-cult-young/
(DIR) Post #AWu40tIwCZ0TPsTmi0 by mattsheffield@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T01:37:16Z
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The evidence that Kirk is a radical reactionary who hates the majority of Americans, believes that LGBT people are Satan's servants, and is obsessed with the rapture is overwhelming.And yet these facts are never mentioned in reports about TPUSA's activities.MSM reporters know about his radicalism. But they are loath to mention this because it's impolite and harmful to their newsgathering model which requires placating Republicans. Instead, they use the circumlocution "culture war."
(DIR) Post #AWu40vAVGtRrCIY4q8 by mattsheffield@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T01:38:40Z
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You hear the term "culture war" incessantly in MSM reporting. But there is no culture war. Instead, what we have is a small core of ever-radicalizing Republicans who hate the overwhelming majority of people who support religious pluralism, racial justice, birth control, abortion access, and LGBTQ rights.It's analogous to those Japanese soldiers who didn't know World War II was over, or the Louisianans who didn't know slavery had been abolished.The "culture war" ended in the 1970s basically.
(DIR) Post #AWu40x5c82j39iHCUq by mattsheffield@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T01:39:04Z
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Reporters who want to tell the truth about TPUSA events need to disclose these facts. The Young Women’s Leadership Summit was nothing but rage against modernity by totalitarian Christians.But in the WaPo piece I linked, this is only hinted at obliquely.The word "Christian" is mentioned only 3 times in this very long article. That's burying the lede.It's the equivalent of writing about the Muslim Brotherhood and barely mentioning Islam.
(DIR) Post #AWu40ymtoawaQFXHbU by mattsheffield@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T01:40:55Z
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Writer Madeline Peltz wrote a much better report of the extremist ideas that were being relentlessly drilled into the teenagers and twentysomethings who attended Kirk's women's conference.TPUSA is literally telling young women to drop out of college, get married asap, abandon birth control, and start churning out babies.https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/career-women-right-wing-media-tell-young-girls-give-their-dreams-young-womens
(DIR) Post #AWu410cgzVy47Am9yK by mattsheffield@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T01:42:51Z
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The other barely covered fact about this reactionary Christian activist core is that its ideas come from the former Confederacy. It is not an exaggeration to call it "Confederate Christianity."Confederate Christians have finally realized that they cannot convince most people. They cannot recruit so they must reproduce.The radical right is openly trying to out-breed everyone else. TPUSA is a breeding program. This event was about turning attendees into baby factories.
(DIR) Post #AWu412OaOvs9c0BvGK by mattsheffield@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T01:45:17Z
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Understanding that the Republican Party has been overrun with Confederate Christians is the real "red pill" in American politics. The ideas originate in the theology of Southern Protestantism: Black people accepting lower status, of women withdrawing from public life, abortion and birth control being prohibited, and of sexual minorities being repressed.The celebration of murderous right-wing vigilantes has direct parallels in the KKK. There are many direct connections https://www.thedailybeast.com/this-juneteenth-remember-the-gop-is-the-neo-confederate-party?ref=home
(DIR) Post #AWu4167MYuTL9kADyK by mattsheffield@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T01:47:10Z
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For professional journalists who were brought up in what @jayrosen_nyu calls the "view from nowhere," accepting that a major political party is owned by Christian fanatics goes against everything they were taught.They're desperate to deny this. They want to save the Republican party.It's a fool's errand. The Republican Party cannot be saved. It must be destroyed electorally. FDR's biggest achievement was militarily crushing the Axis. A close second was how he crushed American reactionaries.
(DIR) Post #AWu417vjp6MUmGjy88 by mattsheffield@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T01:50:00Z
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The Republican Party cannot be saved, but individual Republicans can be. I am a former Republican so there is hope. But not everyone has the circumstances or state of mind to change.Seeing through from the inside of Republicans' miasma of lies is very difficult because the elites have inculcated in their followers an inverted epistemology. They think truth comes from "first principles" rather than observing reality.They do not use empirical reasoning. https://flux.community/matthew-sheffield/2021/05/liz-cheney-epistemic-collapse-conservatism/
(DIR) Post #AWu419lX01NyTByqUy by mattsheffield@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T01:51:28Z
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This broken epistemology is also shared by secular libertarians, incidentally. They have the same reactionary thought process as fundamentalist Christians, even though they start from slightly different places.I did an episode of my podcast "Theory of Change" about the parallels, if you're interested. https://theoryofchange.flux.community/p/theory-of-change-029-former-libertarian-5e1#details
(DIR) Post #AWu41BPyr7KravufBY by mattsheffield@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T01:54:12Z
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People always ask "what happened to Republicans?"They finally realized they were not the majority. Believe it or not, they actually thought they were for a long time. That's why they called themselves the "silent majority."After winning the presidential popular vote once in the last 30 years, they finally got the message: Most people hate their Confederate Christian beliefs.And now they're mad as hell: https://flux.community/matthew-sheffield/2021/02/why-do-republican-elites-keep-talking-about-dying-jesus//end
(DIR) Post #AWu41FW9c6eOJEpeMa by mattsheffield@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T02:02:13Z
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If you liked this thread, please boost the first post so others in the fediverse can see it.There is no algorithm here so individual accounts sharing threads and posts is much, much more important than on birdsite.Thanks for your support!
(DIR) Post #AWuF1cSlP118y7cpGK by icedquinn@blob.cat
2023-06-21T05:22:11.637622Z
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> republicansnah its the uniparty. but you're close. :blobcatthumbsup:
(DIR) Post #AWyFEHH0GY6UQewkkq by Bargdaffy@defcon.social
2023-06-23T03:39:16Z
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@mattsheffield Wow, you are completely wrong. The "Culture War" isn't about changing the Domestic Policies of the United States Government. The Culture War is about maintaining the Status Quo or going Backwards in Time. Fund Raising for the Two Right Wing Corporate Parties and Maintaining the Delusion of Average Joe American that the Democrats are actually an opposition party to the Republicans. If it were for anything else, we wouldn't still have Issues like Reproductive Rights, Gun Control, Climate Chaos or M4A, they would have been solved long ago.