#and to be clear i also hate obama

[esmeyaleal]

person in the last reblog does bring up a good point tho: this isnt all bidens fault, its also rbg's fault for not retiring while obama was president.

[dilfenthusiast]

I don’t like seeing Misha Collins in any other media, I’ll be honest. I think he should be able to live off the residuals from Supernatural for the rest of his life and never show up in another TV show or movie or anything for the rest of eternity. Seeing him or Jensen in anything is like an immediate time warp jumpscare where I’m suddenly 15 again for a few tumultuous seconds and I’m watching Supernatural. Don’t want to ever experience that again

[mariacallous]

“Don’t mention the word ‘liberalism,’ ” the talk-show host says to the guy who’s written a book on it. “Liberalism,” he explains, might mean Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to his suspicious audience, alienating more people than it invites. Talk instead about “liberal democracy,” a more expansive term that includes John McCain and Ronald Reagan. When you cross the border to Canada, you are allowed to say “liberalism” but are asked never to praise “liberals,” since that means implicitly endorsing the ruling Trudeau government and the long-dominant Liberal Party. In England, you are warned off both words, since “liberals” suggests the membership of a quaintly failed political party and “liberalism” its dated program. In France, of course, the vagaries of language have made “liberalism” mean free-market fervor, doomed from the start in that country, while what we call liberalism is more hygienically referred to as “republicanism.” Say that.

Liberalism is, truly, the love that dare not speak its name. Liberal thinkers hardly improve matters, since the first thing they will say is that the thing called “liberalism” is not actually a thing. This discouraging reflection is, to be sure, usually followed by an explanation: liberalism is a practice, a set of institutions, a tradition, a temperament, even. A clear contrast can be made with its ideological competitors: both Marxism and Catholicism, for instance, have more or less explicable rules—call them, nonpejoratively, dogmas. You can’t really be a Marxist without believing that a revolution against the existing capitalist order would be a good thing, and that parliamentary government is something of a bourgeois trick played on the working class. You can’t really be a Catholic without believing that a crisis point in cosmic history came two millennia ago in the Middle East, when a dissident rabbi was crucified and mysteriously revived. You can push either of these beliefs to the edge of metaphor—maybe the rabbi was only believed to be resurrected, and the inner experience of that epiphany is what counts; maybe the revolution will take place peacefully within a parliament and without Molotov cocktails—but you can’t really discard them. Liberalism, on the other hand, can include both faith in free markets and skepticism of free markets, an embrace of social democracy and a rejection of its statism. Its greatest figure, the nineteenth-century British philosopher and parliamentarian John Stuart Mill, was a socialist but also the author of “On Liberty,” which is (to the leftist imagination, at least) a suspiciously libertarian manifesto.

Whatever liberalism is, we’re regularly assured that it’s dying—in need of those shock paddles they regularly take out in TV medical dramas. (“C’mon! Breathe, damn it! Breathe! ”) As on television, this is not guaranteed to work. (“We’ve lost him, Holly. Damn it, we’ve lost him.”) Later this year, a certain demagogue who hates all these terms—liberals, liberalism, liberal democracy—might be lifted to power again. So what is to be done? New books on the liberal crisis tend to divide into three kinds: the professional, the professorial, and the polemical—books by those with practical experience; books by academics, outlining, sometimes in dreamily abstract form, a reformed liberal democracy; and then a few wishing the whole damn thing over, and well rid of it.

The professional books tend to come from people whose lives have been spent as pundits and as advisers to politicians. Robert Kagan, a Brookings fellow and a former State Department maven who has made the brave journey from neoconservatism to resolute anti-Trumpism, has a new book on the subject, “Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again” (Knopf). Kagan’s is a particular type of book—I have written one myself—that makes the case for liberalism mostly to other liberals, by trying to remind readers of what they have and what they stand to lose. For Kagan, that “again” in the title is the crucial word; instead of seeing Trumpism as a new danger, he recapitulates the long history of anti-liberalism in the U.S., characterizing the current crisis as an especially foul wave rising from otherwise predictable currents. Since the founding of the secular-liberal Republic—secular at least in declining to pick one faith over another as official, liberal at least in its faith in individualism—anti-liberal elements have been at war with it. Kagan details, mordantly, the anti-liberalism that emerged during and after the Civil War, a strain that, just as much as today’s version, insisted on a “Christian commonwealth” founded essentially on wounded white working-class pride.

The relevance of such books may be manifest, but their contemplative depth is, of necessity, limited. Not to worry. Two welcomely ambitious and professorial books are joining them: “Liberalism as a Way of Life” (Princeton), by Alexandre Lefebvre, who teaches politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney, and “Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society” (Knopf), by Daniel Chandler, an economist and a philosopher at the London School of Economics.

The two take slightly different tacks. Chandler emphasizes programs of reform, and toys with the many bells and whistles on the liberal busy box: he’s inclined to try more random advancements, like elevating ordinary people into temporary power, on an Athenian model that’s now restricted to jury service. But, on the whole, his is a sanely conventional vision of a state reformed in the direction of ever greater fairness and equity, one able to curb the excesses of capitalism and to accommodate the demands of diversity.

The program that Chandler recommends to save liberalism essentially represents the politics of the leftier edge of the British Labour Party—which historically has been unpopular with the very people he wants to appeal to, gaining power only after exhaustion with Tory governments. In the classic Fabian manner, though, Chandler tends to breeze past some formidable practical problems. While advocating for more aggressive government intervention in the market, he admits equably that there may be problems with state ownership of industry and infrastructure. Yet the problem with state ownership is not a theoretical one: Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister because of the widely felt failures of state ownership in the nineteen-seventies. The overreaction to those failures may have been destructive, but it was certainly democratic, and Tony Blair’s much criticized temporizing began in this recognition. Chandler is essentially arguing for an updated version of the social-democratic status quo—no bad place to be but not exactly a new place, either.

Lefebvre, on the other hand, wants to write about liberalism chiefly as a cultural phenomenon—as the water we swim in without knowing that it’s wet—and his book is packed, in the tradition of William James, with racy anecdotes and pop-culture references. He finds more truths about contemporary liberals in the earnest figures of the comedy series “Parks and Recreation” than in the words of any professional pundit. A lot of this is fun, and none of it is frivolous.

Yet, given that we may be months away from the greatest crisis the liberal state has known since the Civil War, both books seem curiously calm. Lefebvre suggests that liberalism may be passing away, but he doesn’t seem especially perturbed by the prospect, and at his book’s climax he recommends a permanent stance of “reflective equilibrium” as an antidote to all anxiety, a stance that seems not unlike Richard Rorty’s idea of irony—cultivating an ability both to hold to a position and to recognize its provisionality. “Reflective equilibrium trains us to see weakness and difference in ourselves,” Lefebvre writes, and to see “how singular each of us is in that any equilibrium we reach will be specific to us as individuals and our constellation of considered judgments.” However excellent as a spiritual exercise, a posture of reflective equilibrium seems scarcely more likely to get us through 2024 than smoking weed all day, though that, too, can certainly be calming in a crisis.

Both professors, significantly, are passionate evangelists for the great American philosopher John Rawls, and both books use Rawls as their fount of wisdom about the ideal liberal arrangement. Indeed, the dust-jacket sell line of Chandler’s book is a distillation of Rawls: “Imagine: You are designing a society, but you don’t know who you’ll be within it—rich or poor, man or woman, gay or straight. What would you want that society to look like?” Lefebvre’s “reflective equilibrium” is borrowed from Rawls, too. Rawls’s classic “A Theory of Justice” (1971) was a theory about fairness, which revolved around the “liberty principle” (you’re entitled to the basic liberties you’d get from a scheme in which everyone got those same liberties) and the “difference principle” (any inequalities must benefit the worst off). The emphasis on “justice as fairness” presses both professors to stress equality; it’s not “A Theory of Liberty,” after all. “Free and equal” is not the same as “free and fair,” and the difference is where most of the arguing happens among people committed to a liberal society.

Indeed, readers may feel that the work of reconciling Rawls’s very abstract consideration of ideal justice and community with actual experience is more daunting than these books, written by professional philosophers who swim in this water, make it out to be. A confidence that our problems can be managed with the right adjustments to the right model helps explain why the tone of both books—richly erudite and thoughtful—is, for all their implication of crisis, so contemplative and even-humored. No doubt it is a good idea to tell people to keep cool in a fire, but that does not make the fire cooler.

Rawls devised one of the most powerful of all thought experiments: the idea of the “veil of ignorance,” behind which we must imagine the society we would want to live in without knowing which role in that society’s hierarchy we would occupy. Simple as it is, it has ever-arresting force, making it clear that, behind this veil, rational and self-interested people would never design a society like that of, say, the slave states of the American South, given that, dropped into it at random, they could very well be enslaved. It also suggests that Norway might be a fairly just place, because a person would almost certainly land in a comfortable and secure middle-class life, however boringly Norwegian.

Still, thought experiments may not translate well to the real world. Einstein’s similarly epoch-altering account of what it would be like to travel on a beam of light, and how it would affect the hands on one’s watch, is profound for what it reveals about the nature of time. Yet it isn’t much of a guide to setting the timer on the coffeemaker in the kitchen so that the pot will fill in time for breakfast. Actual politics is much more like setting the timer on the coffeemaker than like riding on a beam of light. Breakfast is part of the cosmos, but studying the cosmos won’t cook breakfast. It’s telling that in neither of these Rawlsian books is there any real study of the life and the working method of an actual, functioning liberal politician. No F.D.R. or Clement Attlee, Pierre Mendès France or François Mitterrand (a socialist who was such a master of coalition politics that he effectively killed off the French Communist Party). Not to mention Tony Blair or Joe Biden or Barack Obama. Biden’s name appears once in Chandler’s index; Obama’s, though he gets a passing mention, not at all.

The reason is that theirs are not ideal stories about the unimpeded pursuit of freedom and fairness but necessarily contingent tales of adjustments and amendments—compromised stories, in every sense. Both philosophers would, I think, accept this truth in principle, yet neither is drawn to it from the heart. Still, this is how the good work of governing gets done, by those who accept the weight of the world as they act to lighten it. Obama’s history—including the feints back and forth on national health insurance, which ended, amid all the compromises, with the closest thing America has had to a just health-care system—is uninspiring to the idealizing mind. But these compromises were not a result of neglecting to analyze the idea of justice adequately; they were the result of the pluralism of an open society marked by disagreement on fundamental values. The troubles of current American politics do not arise from a failure on the part of people in Ohio to have read Rawls; they are the consequence of the truth that, even if everybody in Ohio read Rawls, not everybody would agree with him.

Ideals can shape the real world. In some ultimate sense, Biden, like F.D.R. before him, has tried to build the sort of society we might design from behind the veil of ignorance—but, also like F.D.R., he has had to do so empirically, and often through tactics overloaded with contradictions. If your thought experiment is premised on a group of free and equal planners, it may not tell you what you need to know about a society marred by entrenched hierarchies. Ask Biden if he wants a free and fair society and he would say that he does. But Thatcher would have said so, too, and just as passionately. Oscillation of power and points of view within that common framework are what makes liberal democracies liberal. It has less to do with the ideally just plan than with the guarantee of the right to talk back to the planner. That is the great breakthrough in human affairs, as much as the far older search for social justice. Plato’s rulers wanted social justice, of a kind; what they didn’t want was back talk.

Both philosophers also seem to accept, at least by implication, the familiar idea that there is a natural tension between two aspects of the liberal project. One is the desire for social justice, the other the practice of individual freedom. Wanting to speak our minds is very different from wanting to feed our neighbors. An egalitarian society might seem inherently limited in liberty, while one that emphasizes individual rights might seem limited in its capacity for social fairness.

Yet the evidence suggests the opposite. Show me a society in which people are able to curse the king and I will show you a society more broadly equal than the one next door, if only because the ability to curse the king will make the king more likely to spread the royal wealth, for fear of the cursing. The rights of sexual minorities are uniquely protected in Western liberal democracies, but this gain in social equality is the result of a history of protected expression that allowed gay experience to be articulated and “normalized,” in high and popular culture. We want to live on common streets, not in fortified castles. It isn’t a paradox that John Stuart Mill and his partner, Harriet Taylor, threw themselves into both “On Liberty,” a testament to individual freedom, and “The Subjection of Women,” a program for social justice and mass emancipation through group action. The habit of seeking happiness for one through the fulfillment of many others was part of the habit of their liberalism. Mill wanted to be happy, and he couldn’t be if Taylor wasn’t.

Liberals are at a disadvantage when it comes to authoritarians, because liberals are committed to procedures and institutions, and persist in that commitment even when those things falter and let them down. The asymmetry between the Trumpite assault on the judiciary and Biden’s reluctance even to consider enlarging the Supreme Court is typical. Trumpites can and will say anything on earth about judges; liberals are far more reticent, since they don’t want to undermine the institutions that give reality to their ideals.

Where Kagan, Lefebvre, and Chandler are all more or less sympathetic to the liberal “project,” the British political philosopher John Gray deplores it, and his recent book, “The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is one long complaint. Gray is one of those leftists so repelled by the follies of the progressive party of the moment—to borrow a phrase of Orwell’s about Jonathan Swift—that, in a familiar horseshoe pattern, he has become hard to distinguish from a reactionary. He insists that liberalism is a product of Christianity (being in thrall to the notion of the world’s perfectibility) and that it has culminated in what he calls “hyper-liberalism,” which would emancipate individuals from history and historically shaped identities. Gray hates all things “woke”—a word that he seems to know secondhand from news reports about American universities. If “woke” points to anything except the rage of those who use it, however, it is a discourse directed against liberalism—Ibram X. Kendi is no ally of Bayard Rustin, nor Judith Butler of John Stuart Mill. So it is hard to see it as an expression of the same trends, any more than Trump is a product of Burke’s conservative philosophy, despite strenuous efforts on the progressive side to make it seem so.

Gray’s views are learned, and his targets are many and often deserved: he has sharp things to say about how certain left liberals have reclaimed the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his thesis that politics is a battle to the death between friends and foes. In the end, Gray turns to Dostoyevsky’s warning that (as Gray reads him) “the logic of limitless freedom is unlimited despotism.” Hyper-liberals, Gray tells us, think that we can compete with the authority of God, and what they leave behind is wild disorder and crazed egotism.

As for Dostoyevsky’s positive doctrines—authoritarian and mystical in nature—Gray waves them away as being “of no interest.” But they are of interest, exactly because they raise the central pragmatic issue: If you believe all this about liberal modernity, what do you propose to do about it? Given that the announced alternatives are obviously worse or just crazy (as is the idea of a Christian commonwealth, something that could be achieved only by a degree of social coercion that makes the worst of “woke” culture look benign), perhaps the evil might better be ameliorated than abolished.

Between authority and anarchy lies argument. The trick is not to have unified societies that “share values”—those societies have never existed or have existed only at the edge of a headsman’s axe—but to have societies that can get along nonviolently without shared values, aside from the shared value of trying to settle disputes nonviolently. Certainly, Americans were far more polarized in the nineteen-sixties than they are today—many favored permanent apartheid (“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”)—and what happened was not that values changed on their own but that a form of rights-based liberalism of protest and free speech convinced just enough people that the old order wouldn’t work and that it wasn’t worth fighting for a clearly lost cause.

What’s curious about anti-liberal critics such as Gray is their evident belief that, after the institutions and the practices on which their working lives and welfare depend are destroyed, the features of the liberal state they like will somehow survive. After liberalism is over, the neat bits will be easily reassembled, and the nasty bits will be gone. Gray can revile what he perceives to be a ruling élite and call to burn it all down, and nothing impedes the dissemination of his views. Without the institutions and the practices that he despises, fear would prevent oppositional books from being published. Try publishing an anti-Communist book in China or a critique of theocracy in Iran. Liberal institutions are the reason that he is allowed to publish his views and to have the career that he and all the other authors here rightly have. Liberal values and practices allow their most fervent critics a livelihood and a life—which they believe will somehow magically be reconstituted “after liberalism.” They won’t be.

The vociferous critics of liberalism are like passengers on the Titanic who root for the iceberg. After all, an iceberg is thrilling, and anyway the White Star Line has classes, and the music the band plays is second-rate, and why is the food French instead of honestly English? “Just as I told you, the age of the steamship is over!” they cry as the water slips over their shoes. They imagine that another boat will miraculously appear—where all will be in first class, the food will be authentic, and the band will perform only Mozart or Motown, depending on your wishes. Meanwhile, the ship goes down. At least the band will be playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” which they will take as some vindication. The rest of us may drown.

One turns back to Helena Rosenblatt’s 2018 book, “The Lost History of Liberalism,” which makes the case that liberalism is not a recent ideology but an age-old series of intuitions about existence. When the book appeared, it may have seemed unduly overgeneralized—depicting liberalism as a humane generosity that flared up at moments and then died down again. But, as the world picture darkens, her dark picture illuminates. There surely are a set of identifiable values that connect men and women of different times along a single golden thread: an aversion to fanaticism, a will toward the coexistence of different kinds and creeds, a readiness for reform, a belief in the public criticism of power without penalty, and perhaps, above all, a knowledge that institutions of civic peace are much harder to build than to destroy, being immeasurably more fragile than their complacent inheritors imagine. These values will persist no matter how evil the moment may become, and by whatever name we choose to whisper in the dark.

[odinsblog]

You jew haters love a good token. Norm F or Masha or any white passing ashkie american jew who hasnt been to shul or a secular even in a decade... brb gonna cite thomas sowell and clarence thomas any time you bring up the hotep hasbara about "systemic racism" or ignore black on black crime is more prevalent then cops shooting unarmed trayvons. One day you might feel shame about going all in on jew hate. Probably not.

[re: this series of posts, or this one, or maybe this one?]

I don’t hate Jewish people. So jot that down and let’s get that straight, okay? I dO, however, hate what the state of Israel, Likud and Benjamin Netanyahu are doing (and have been doing for decades) to Palestinians

Note: Jewish people are Jewish whether they’re religious Jews who have been to a synagogue, or not. Non-religious, non-observant Jewish people are still Jewish people. Intentionally conflating “religious Jews” with all Jewish people is antisemitic

And another note: conflating Israel with all Jewish people is also antisemitic, so let’s not do that either, cool?

We could quibble about “white passing” Jewish people, but there most definitely are Jewish people who self-identify as white (just as there are Jewish people who self-identify as Black), but ultimately, I believe that this “argument” is a red-herring, and ultimately, secondary or even tertiary to what’s happening in Palestine

I know you think you’ve made some kind of “gotcha” point, but you really haven’t

We can easily dismantle Clarence Thomas and his hypocritical conservative, anti-Black SCOTUS rulings without ever once mentioning his race. We can prove that structural racism is a real thing simply by looking at lived reality and history. We can show that Black-on-Black crime is roughly the same as white-on-white crime, and is only invoked as a derailment tactic to take the focus away from anti-Black racism. Simple statistics and observations prove that the police routinely Stop-and-Frisk and execute more Black and Brown people than white people, usually without the same consequences that would occur if their victims were white

And we can very easily do the same thing with everything that Israel has been doing to Palestinians for decades; we can look at the definition of war crimes and objectively understand that Israel has been committing war crimes against Palestinians since before October 7th, and we can see that Israel’s reaction to October 7th has been the definition of “disproportionate,” and has been since 1948

And before I continue, I really want to make something clear: you can agree with someone on 80% of what they believe, and vehemently disagree with them in other areas that are not their area of expertise. No one is right about everything, and no one is wrong about everything—even broken clocks are accurate two times a day, right?

Moving on…

Look, there was a time when I used to think as simplistically as you do, anon. As you’ve correctly noted, I am Black, and there was a time when I used to believe that anyone who criticized Barack Obama, for example, was a racist, and if they were Black, then they were a Black person who had internalized anti-Blackness. It was a very insular way of thinking, but it kept me safe in a mental bubble of my own making. A bubble where, as long as I called people racists or self hating Black people, I was always right in my thinking and never had to challenge myself

But then, eventually, something wonderful happened. This thing called nuance happened and I learned that many things could simultaneously be true: yes, there absolutely positively are self-hating Black people like Clarence Thomas; and yes, there are people like Trump who only criticized Obama simply because he was Black and because they were racist white people (or frequently, NBPoC); but the existence of those racists do not magically invalidate all legitimate criticisms of Obama

So I learned how to do two things that proved invaluable: 1) look at the specific critiques, and separate the critiques, and evaluate the critiques on their own, 2) look at the source of the critiques, and their history of criticisms, and evaluate how fairly they applied those exact same critiques to others who were doing the same or similar things. Talk about cutting through all the bullshit!

So I learned that it was possible to be living in the real world that simultaneously had: white supremacists + self-hating Black people + people with legitimate grievances against Obama

You can (and should) apply this same line of reasoning with Hillary Clinton; yes, there definitely are misogynistic people who hate her simply because she is a woman, but that doesn’t nullify the criticisms of those people who have problems with her strictly because of her deeply conservative values

Anon, is Bernie Sanders a token self-hating Jew if he doesn’t side with YOU? (hint: he isn’t and he doesn’t)

Think about what you’re implying anon. You’re saying that Israel has never been wrong? About anything? And consequently, all Zionist Jewish people are right and anyone who disagrees with them is automatically antisemitic and hates all Jewish people?

Does that even sound right to you anon?

That’s a very comforting, if not somewhat mentally lazy, self-serving view of the world. One that doesn’t require any additional thought or self-reflection (or growth, tbh) on your part. It’s an adolescent version of reality

What we are talking about here, anon, is weaponized identity politics

anyone who disagrees with my good Black person is racist

anyone who disagrees with my good female is misogynistic

anyone who disagrees with my good Jew is antisemitic

This type of logic really makes “winning” arguments super easy, for people who don’t have any real arguments to defend their ideology

[qqueenofhades]

I hate to rain on today’s much needed joy parade, but do you think the USA is headed for civil war in the near future? It’s increasingly feeling like 2024 is going to be a make or break year and with division at an all time high it feels like there’s going to be complete chaos in the streets even if we avoid crisis at the polls. Like, even though I’m in a “safe state” (for now) I’m seriously considering strategies of fleeing the country, just in case. Don’t know what I’m asking for, help? Reassurance maybe? Advice?

I think my answer to that is... yes but also no, and no but also yes, and yes but also no. Which I realize is not entirely helpful and not as clear as anyone would like, but let me try to explain:

The far-right has always been militant, violent, and prone to apocalyptic and fascist rhetoric. This isn't a new thing in American history, and it's come to the fore at moments of particular stress and division. Trump's presidency obviously gave much-unwanted oxygen to them, right when people were starting to claim that Obama's election meant that America was in a "post-racial era" (LOL), but they themselves are not new. We had the Civil War itself, we had the lynchings and racial terror and Jim Crow/Ku Klux Klan era, we had the Bund (the American Nazis) holding huge public gatherings in the run-up to WWII and enjoying substantial domestic support, etc etc etc. This is all scary and unsettling, and most of us don't have a personal memory of dealing with it before, because we're not old enough. But that doesn't mean it hasn't happened before, and that we haven't survived it.

Let's take yesterday, for instance. Trump spent all week promising fire and death and vengeance and playing literal videos of January 6th at his campaign rally in Waco, Texas (famed as the site of the Waco Siege of 1994; look it up). He insisted his supporters would rain vengeance on anyone who dared to arrest him and otherwise threatened mass-scale disturbances and the other tools of public violence that fascists use to enforce their will. And what happened? It's 12+ hours since the first indictment went through (30 counts of business/document fraud, which is not a piddling charge) and we've had bupkis. We've had a lot of Republican politicians tweeting their performative hypocritical outrage, yes, but we haven't suddenly had the country explode in fire and flame either. I'm sure there have been localized protests, but I haven't heard about major anything. And one set of indictments has gone through, others will be empowered to follow. In a way, I think it's a good thing that non-political crimes went first? Yes, the Republicans are screaming about a political witch hunt because that's literally the only thing they can do, but starting by nabbing Trump for relatively low-level (but still extensive) business fraud and then moving onto the treason sets a pattern and makes it easier to comprehend.

The thing is: Nazis, at heart, are cowards. They like to paint themselves as bold and valiant soldiers fighting for the Right Way of Life, but it's all fantasy, delusion, and cosplay. They were empowered to do January 6th because Trump was literally the sitting president and told them to do it, but that's no longer the case, and they're shit scared of facing anyone who might enforce real consequences on them. (Once again, if you take nothing else from following me: Nazis are punk-ass fucking pissant cowards who think they're tough and are in fact a bunch of asshole morons, the end.) The mantra of "Make Racists Afraid Again" is working, to an extent. Yes, we have hellholes like Missouri, Florida, Texas, and Tennessee where the state GOP is working as hard as they can to enforce the worst and most regressive laws imaginable, but that's still not universal. As I also say a lot, the reason Republicans attack, discredit, and outlaw voting so much is because they can never win a fair election on the merits. Their ideas suck, and on some level they know that. They just care about being cruel, fascist, and stupid, and while that's certainly a troubling and significant minority in America, it's not as big as anyone thinks.

Almost 60% of Americans think both that "woke" is a good thing and the cases against Trump should permanently disqualify him from holding any office again. Yet again: the GOP is in the minority, and that's why they use so many dirty tricks to establish and enforce their power. Also, I can guarantee you that not one of the keyboard warriors fulminating about how The Democrat Party Is Being So Mean To President Trump is ever going to actually go out and start an actual civil war. They have established interests, money, benefits from the system, and they don't want to overturn that. They want the masses angry and stupid, yes, but they want them angry and stupid in support of keeping discriminatory structures and systems in place. That can't work if there are no systems at all. Yes, we will still have white supremacists and fascists committing ongoing individual acts of violence, i.e. school shootings, and it's hard to argue that this doesn't constitute a civil war of some sort, or at least ongoing stochastic terrorism. But while you have people like Marge Two Names Greene out there blabbing about a National Divorce, I can guarantee you that if it ever came to actually DOING it, Marge and Brave Brave Sir Kevin would be nowhere to be found. Again: they want to derive power and money from the operation of an unfair system, not the end of that system. It sucks, but still.

Honestly, I want the Dominion lawsuit to keep going on, and dragging all of Fox News' hypocrisy, deception, and disinformation into the public eye. Fox is the biggest cancer on this country, as is the case with Rupert Murdoch's global disinformation empire overall (when, WHEN will HE fucking die, if we're talking death lottery wishlists?) But the lawsuit and its subsequent publicity has had an effect: a small but significant number of Fox viewers (26%) realized the network was lying to them, and 13% said that they no longer believed the 2020 election was stolen after reading about the Fox efforts to lie about it and then cover up their lies. So while the right-wing media bubble is huge and terrible, it's also not impenetrable, and taking Fox down/substantially discrediting it would have a major effect on the pay-for-play misinformation media sphere.

This is getting long, so let me try to sum up: the far-right advocating separatist fantasies of violence/war/fascist domination is not new, and has been a thing in American history for as long as there has been America. But at least in the current moment, it is not the majority, it is not widely popular, it will never be embraced by ordinary mainstream Americans and not just the insane cultists, its so-called devoted soldiers yell on Twitter and cable news and will never once be spotted actually fighting for it, and it's the cynical last gasp of a hate movement that is seeing its institutional and generational hold on America (and the world) finally on the brink of permanently shifting. So of course it's trying to make itself look as big and scary as possible, like any wounded animal, but it's on the back foot, and we have a chance to really kill it. Not permanently or forever, since that's the nature of human history, but at least for now and buy us some more time, and despite everything, I remain cautiously optimistic about our likelihood of doing so. I know it's scary, I know it's awful, I know it feels overwhelming, but it is still not winning, and it won't. As long as we do our part.

Hugs. Hang in there.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

George Danby

* * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

May 20, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAY 21, 2024

There is a curious dynamic at work in politics these days. Trump does not appear to be trying to court voters to his standard. If he were, he would be reaching out to Nikki Haley voters and trying to moderate his stances. Instead, he is rejecting her voters and doubling down on extreme positions. Rather than trying to appeal to swing voters, he seems to be trying to whip up his right-wing base to engage in violence on his behalf. 

In Minnesota on Friday, Trump echoed fascists when he told supporters, "No matter how hateful and corrupt the communists and criminals we are fighting against may be, you must never forget this is not a nation that belongs to them. This is a nation that totally belongs to you. It belongs to you. This is your home, this is your heritage."

Saturday, at the annual meeting of the National Rifle Association in Dallas, Texas, Trump floated the idea that he could throw out the constitutional amendment limiting a president to two terms. “You know, FDR 16 years—almost 16 years—he was four terms. I don’t know, are we going to be considered three-term? Or two-term?” he asked the crowd. Some yelled, “Three!”

In the same speech, Trump told attendees that the Second Amendment “is very much on the ballot” in November, and he urged gun owners to vote and to “be rebellious.” Then he told the crowd that Biden’s actions were such that if he “were a Republican, he would have been given the electric chair, they would have brought back the death penalty.”

This evening, Trump’s Instagram account posted a video of what a newspaper would look like after a 2024 MAGA win. Under the headline “WHAT’S NEXT FOR AMERICA?” were the words “INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH SIGNIFICANTLY INCREASED DRIVEN BY THE CREATION OF A UNIFIED REICH,” a clear reference to fascism and German dictator Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

It is not clear to me how anyone can any longer deny that Trump is promising to destroy our democracy and usher in authoritarianism.

But it is also not clear that he is still a figure that any but the extremes of his base will follow to that end. Hence his emphasis on turning them to violence. 

His lies have become increasingly outrageous. On Friday he told a crowd in Minnesota that he won the state by “a landslide” in 2020 even though he actually lost it by more than 7 points. At the NRA annual meeting, Trump claimed that his former physician told him he is “healthier” and “a better physical specimen” than the famously athletic former president Barack Obama. At that same event he boasted that he won 31 club golf championships; the day before, he boasted that he won 29.

Significantly, he continues to insist that the area around the courtroom is like “Fort Knox.” “There are more police than I’ve ever seen anywhere because they don’t want to have anybody come down,” he said today, “There’s not a civilian within three blocks of the courthouse.” But this is, quite simply, a lie. Virtually no one has turned out to support him. As conservative lawyer George Conway noted today, “There is virtually complete freedom of movement around that courthouse.” 

Social media contributor Eddie Smith, who filmed the handful of Trump protesters in New York today, put it more colorfully. After noting that “MAGA’s not repping in New York,” he added: “Wait a minute! You guys hear that? There is a mouse pissing on a ball of cotton in China. That’s how quiet it is out here.” 

Republican lawmakers are stepping in where Trump’s base followers are not. Republicans attacked as unfit for office 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server. They tried to impeach current president Biden on unfounded accusations that he took bribes from foreign countries. Now they find themselves forced to defend a man who is currently the defendant in a criminal trial that is showing that his associates acted like a criminal gang. As Tom Nichols put it today in The Atlantic, that defense is partly because they are afraid of their own voters. 

Nichols also called out those “now circling Trump like the cold fragments of a destroyed planet” who “resent the people who stuck to their principles.” Those MAGA Republicans lawmakers are, like Trump, trying to gin up anger with lies. Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), who went to Trump’s Manhattan trial to support him on Thursday, told Jesse Watters of the Fox News Channel and later posted on social media that “[t]hey’re trying to keep cameras out of the courtroom so that the American people don’t see what’s happening.” Former federal prosecutor Ron Filipkowski noted in response that “New York has banned cameras in courtrooms since June 30, 1997.” 

The most important of their lies, though, is that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that to protect the 2024 election, it is imperative to police the election. This is the same tactic Trump used in 2020, claiming exactly four years ago that “they send in thousands and thousands of fake ballots.”

Those lies have resulted in a huge increase in threats against those whom MAGA perceives as an enemy. Danny Hakim, Ken Bensinger, and Eileen Sullivan reported in the New York Times yesterday that last year, threats against federal judges increased 150% over 2019: 450 federal judges were targeted. Since 2018, threats to members of Congress have increased by 50%, with more than 8,000 such threats last year. More than 80% of local officials also say they have been threatened or harassed.

MAGA lawmakers refuse to say they will accept the results of the 2024 election. On Saturday, Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson refused to commit to that fundamental tenet of our democracy. On Meet the Press on Sunday, Florida senator Marco Rubio also declined to say he would accept the election results. Those vying for the Republican vice presidential nomination, including North Dakota governor Doug Burgum and South Carolina senator Tim Scott, have refused to say they would accept the results. 

Their tactics are working among the Republican base. A CBS News/YouGov poll released this weekend showed that only 47% of Arizona Republicans say they will accept the results of the 2024 election no matter who wins. An equal number—47%—say they will challenge the results if the other side wins. That result is not symmetrical with the Democrats: 82% of them say they will accept the results, while only 14% say they will challenge the results if their opponents win.  

But people are pushing back against the MAGA narrative. On May 15 the Texas Tribune and ProPublica published a story by Jeremy Schwartz about Courtney Gore, a woman who ran for a Texas school board to combat pornography and critical race theory in the schools, only to find there wasn’t any. When she told the public, her former colleagues turned on her. “I’m over the political agenda, hypocrisy bs,” Gore wrote. “I took part in it myself. I refuse to participate in it any longer. It’s not serving our party. We have to do better.”

Steve MacLaughlin, a meteorologist for NBC 6 News in Miami, reported on a new law Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed into law last week that will remove references to climate change from state law. “On Thursday, we reported on NBC 6 News that the government of Florida was beginning to roll back really important climate change legislation and really important climate change language in spite of the fact that the state of Florida, over the last couple of years, has seen record heat, record flooding, record rain, record insurance rates, and the corals are dying all around the state,” MacLaughlin said. “The entire world is looking to Florida to lead in climate change, and our government is saying that climate change is no longer the priority it once was. Please keep in mind, the most powerful climate change solution is the one you already have in the palm of your hands: the right to vote. And we will never tell you who to vote for, but we will tell you this: We implore you to please do your research and know that there are candidates that believe in climate change and that there are solutions, and there are candidates that don’t.”

On May 17, former lieutenant governor of Georgia Geoffrey Duncan noted on Amanpour & Company that Trump had done less for rural voters than any other president in modern history. “At the end of the day,” he said, “we just cannot get into the business in America of electing dishonest human beings to represent us…. The world’s watching us. I’m hoping we get this right.” 

Tonight, Sarah Matthews, who was deputy press secretary for the Trump administration, wrote: “Trump’s continued use of Nazi rhetoric is un-American and despicable. Yet too many Americans are brushing off the glaring red flags about what could happen if he returns to the White House. When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[im-a-simp-for-my-ships]

I've been seeing a lot of posts talking about the upcoming election, and that because of the atrocities happening in Palestine, which are genuinely horrific and need to stop, that voting for Biden is the same as voting for Trump, because they're both terrible people, Biden doubly worse because he's put the US on Israel's side. I'm not Palestinian, I can't even imagine the horrors they're going through and do not deserve. Palestine deserves to be free, full stop.

And to be supportive of a free Palestine may mean not siding with either Trump or Biden, but for me, yes, Biden is no better on this policy than Trump would be, I honestly think if you're the president of the US, no matter who it's been, there's never been a policy that I can remember that's made the middle east a better place, or hasn't been selfish in nature. The US's policy towards Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, for instance, has never been a policy of peace or support for the people who have to live under oppressive/muderous regimes. So I don't care if it's been Carter, Bush, Clinton, Obama, Trump, or Biden, the innocent civilians in those countries will always be canon fodder and unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

But as someone who is a citizen of the US, while I can hate what my country is doing with their foreign policy, I also have to worry about what happens HERE. With women's rights, lgbtq rights, minority rights, voting rights, the list goes on.

If Republicans gain control of the White House again, if they gain control of congress, we are done. That's it, game over. Trump and his cohorts have made it abundantly clear that if they get it back, they will do everything they can to never give up that power up again. And if you don't think they' have the balls to do it, just remember January 6th.

If you think roe v wade repeal was bad, just look at what else they've done to reproductive rights on the state level, imagine if they could ban abortion or other reproductive services on a federal level! Don't forget the book banning here, anti lgbtq laws there, and it can't be missed that the Supreme Court, which is full of Trump appointees, have shown that they're not afraid to throw the constitution or precedent under the bus and rule according to their own, and right wing MAGA, whims!

So yes, it may seem contradictory on my part, to say I'm pro Palestine but still voting blue across the board, and I'm probably going to get a lot of hate for saying any of this, but for me, and this is partly selfish and partly for the future of so many different communities in the US, if there is no difference in foreign policy between Trump and Biden, there at least is an EXTREMELY BIG DIFFERENCE in domestic policy when it comes to rights for the people who live here too.

If anyone really thinks those with a MAGA mindset are no different than the party that doesn't actively want to take away reproductive rights or want to protect our right to vote or don't want to make trans people disappear, then I'm sorry, your rightful indignation at what's happening to the Palestinian people is making you forget what can happen to you, your family, your friends, and strangers across this country if Trump and his cohorts win this upcoming election. And I understand why, because the genocide that's happening is beyond atrocious, and the country I live in is playing a part in it. Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel that you can want the atrocities to stop, to care about what's happening, but also care about what's happening in your own backyard, in your own country too.

Remember, no one thought Trump could win, and he did. And he did what we all feared. He pushed through like-minded people into one of the most powerful institutions in this country, and they reversed a nearly 50 year old ruling protecting the right to choose. Then they took Affirmative Action. And even though state law prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation, they ruled in favor of homophobes who don't want to create sites for same-sex weddings. And as of now, they'll be hearing cases on access to medication for abortions, and emergency abortion care at hospitals. Who knows what else will land at their feet next, and who else they may try to appoint if an opportunity comes to get another one of his people in there.

This got way too long, but I wanted to get out my feelings on this. I know this is not a both sides issue, just like reproductive rights are not a both sides issue, or racism isn't a both sides issue.

Palestine deserves to be free. Palestinians deserve to live a life without fear of death and persecution. They deserve to live, period.

I also can't ignore what happens here either. So I will continue to vote blue no matter who, because that's what I can do right now, and that's the only choice I feel I can make with the shitty cards we've been dealt.

[fandomshatepeopleofcolor]

I love that you have this place for us Poc! ❤️ Just discovered your blog

it bothers the hell out of me that some people read fiction and sometimes can also assume that an author is using something from real life ALL the time. this is referring to the white/eurowhite readers when it comes to acotar. the eurowhite readers (which there are alot of ofc) white wash all of the bat boys and lucien vanserra DESPITE knowing that for one, lucien is part black from his father. the second which is my main point with the eurowhite readers in acotar is that because SJM uses the name of a race called “Illyrians” in her books to refer to a race of poc and because “the map looks just like the UK/Europe!” they all ASSUME that because illyria (where balkans are, no longer referred to as illyrians) looks like the Prythians map and because it’s the same name that it means they’re eurowhite characters. There’s been no confirmation of them being europeans but they ASSUME they are when telling other poc readers that “they aren’t Poc” DESPITE SJM referring to them as “golden brown skin” “brown skin” “Light brown skin” multiple times the ENTIRE series. Most arts they’re in they’re brown too! Aside from the ones that whitewash them. Maybe she stole the name (which is like her taking the name of a race and denying they’re that race) BUT STILL she never confirmed they’re european in her fantasy version of illyrians they just assume and use this argument whenever someone says they’re poc. racist asses unable to accept the fact that they’re canonly referred to as BROWN. not WHITE. not PALE. GOLDEN BROWN. does that sound like white to you?

Im a a poc who doesn’t mind SJM not being clear about race, it’s somewhat refreshing not to have it be so “black white asian” like it is IRL, and I don’t mind her using the same name, but she makes illyrians her OWN and made them brownskinned even if people in europes “Illyria” were “Olive skinned” and not brown. It’s obvious she tweaked it and made them darker so either way they aren’t white like these readers want them to be. And if there are White casted for these roles in her possible Acotar Tv show? It’s only going to piss all her Poc readers off so I hope her team is careful and Hulu when they do casting. Bc I know they would all get canceled for whitewashing, whole show burned to flames via twitter for it, regardless of her using an IRL country’s name.

Also don’t believe those that thinks she’s racist again as a black reader they woman’s best friend is black, she’s a obama supporter, Anti republicans and trump, Young and super modern and she’s not a dumbass. People call her racist for her blurred lines of race and for supposedly “Posted about Breonna taylor for Attention and more money from Poc readers” When …where tf is the proof that was her reasoning? Maybe she just wanted justice for her. As a poc I hate seeing poc acotar readers act like she’s racist like use your brain and not bias to make it seem like something it’s not. Idk your stances on her but this is just mines.

Ok so here's the thing... I'm trying to read more diverse books. Like my white bestie from college wanted me to read acotar and the rest of the series but i honestly just watched a youtuber do a rundown of the first 3 books. and it was fine? so I will say this about sarah j maas: like her books do seem v white to me. BUT I also can't really say anything definitive about her works because I'm experiencing them through a white youtubers lens. so if she didn't pick up on diversity in the books I didn't think of it as diverse. you're welcome to have your opinion though but in general.... don't stan white authors.

Like I'll give you an example.

a favorite author of mine that wrote american gods, good omens and coraline is on this v site so that's why I won't name him but like even he's done some problematic stuff. like ok the biggest example is the marvel comic 1602 where he had a chance to race bend steve rogers but instead had a white steve rogers that was raised by native americans.

like just please don't waste your time stanning white authors. next thing you know they turn into jkrowling.

mod ali

[catflowerqueen]

Just saw an interesting discussion between @twinanimatronics and @crazedauthor here about the various jobs that people give Y/Ns in the Daycare Attendant fandom for FNAF Security Breach, and the reasoning behind them. It got me thinking about various scenarios and jobs that Y/Ns could have that, while not the “typical” ones, would still give them job-related reasons to interact with Sun and Moon on a regular basis.

…As well as some very AU scenarios where Y/N might not be entirely “human,” but might still find themselves hanging around.

And some scenarios are better for shipping purposes than others.

I’ll go ahead and put them under a readmore since I ended up thinking of… quite a lot them.

They are all up for grabs in case anyone wants to use them, though if they do end inspiring someone (whether via art or writing), then please @ me so I can take a look?

“Normal” jobs for Y/Ns

1. Remember when Michelle Obama did that thing with nutrition and school lunches? What if the Pizzaplex was also forced to make changes in the meals they serve the daycare attendants (or were just trying to jump on some health craze bandwagon and wanted to use the daycare kids to test some things out since they would basically be a captive audience) and Y/N was a chef or nutritionist hired specifically for the daycare?

2. A not-quite-OSHA person Fazbear’s hired to ensure that the bare minimum in safety standards is attained so that they don’t get in trouble with actual OSHA. They pay special attention to the daycare because parents are more likely to make safety complaints there (and also possibly because the daycare attendants secretly and deliberately break things/put in comments or complaints so that they have an excuse to see Y/N basically every day/night)

3. Random temp agency worker Y/N who keeps getting called to the Pizzaplex, especially after management noticed the positive effect they have on the daycare attendant. But they don’t actually want to give them a full-time position or anything, because then it would mean actually giving them benefits. And we all know how much Fazbear’s hates doing stuff like that.

4. Some sort or artist or designer who was called in to do some redecorating after the Pizzaplex suffered some major fire damage. One of the areas they were told to focus on is the daycare, so they end up spending a lot of time with Sun and Moon. More specifically—at the start, they basically see Sun and Moon as their actual “clients,” (since while Fazbear’s might be the one signing the paycheck, Sun and Moon are the ones who are going to be seeing the art every single day), so they want to make sure they paint something the two of them enjoy, and that they get their input when they can.

(And then even after the paint job is done—whether or not they’re the ones actually doing the painting—they stay on to do things like design promotional materials, flyers, etc. that would star the glamrocks and other animatronics—so they end up spending a lot of time “observing them for modelling purposes”)

5. Some random visitor who just got dragged into the daycare one day while Fazbear’s was trying to find a handler that Sun/Moon wouldn’t maim or otherwise scare off/whichever guard or employee was stationed there that day thought it was their break time or something because Y/N happened to be wearing a shirt that was either the same color or had a similar design to an actual employee’s shirt, and they were too meek/embarrassed/didn’t get the chance to clear up the confusion.

Either they then get hired for real (partially to stave off a potential lawsuit, partially because for some reason Sun and Moon actually liked them/Moon was put off his menacing game by the hilarity of the situation once he figured out what had happened that management just assumed it all worked out and Moon finds the situation funny enough to continue tolerating it), or it just keeps happening repeatedly (because, idk, Y/N is colorblind and doesn’t realize it or just doesn’t understand that the reason they keep getting pulled in is due to their outfits) until they pretty much basically are just an unpaid employee at that point and no one takes notice until, like, tax season or something when the paperwork isn’t matching up. Only then would someone would think to offer them an actual job.

(Hopefully including some amount of back pay and/or refunds for all the entry fees they paid to actually get into the pizzaplex—though that's unlikely, since this is Fazbear’s we’re talking about. Probably they’d just give a hush-money payout) (Also let’s assume that Sun and Moon don’t attack Y/N on sight for being an unauthorized adult in the daycare—this could probably be accomplished via a combination of them actually being in the customer database, since they would have paid an entry fee, and then the act of getting dragged/tossed in by an actual employee or management would put them under the “authorized” section and Sun and Moon would just assume that their being placed in the customer database was just some sort of glitch)

6. Similar to the above, Y/N is the identical twin to an actual employee (possibly one who has gone missing under mysterious circumstances…?) and Sun and Moon’s facial recognition programming gets them confused for their sibling. Then they find Y/N charming or interesting enough that they just don’t bother actually fixing this and/or just manually authorize them to be there.

7. Sort of similar to number 4, except this time Y/N is a musician/composer who was hired to update the music around the Pizzaplex and give the daycare more than one song to play. Again, Y/N wants Sun and Moon’s input since they are the ones who would be listening to the music all the time.

8. A student (possibly even a teenager, if we wanted to go the platonic friendship route) who needs to do community service as part of a civics class or something (like what we had to do in my high school) and chose the daycare. Or possibly an actual student teacher who is doing their required teaching hours at the daycare

9. A children’s book author who periodically comes to the daycare to volunteer so that they can make sure that their material stays relevant to their target audience and basically use the kids as a test audience. Possibly they also were or will get commissioned by Fazbear’s to write children’s stories about Sun, Moon, and the Glamrocks to act as further promotional material

10. Y/N is one of those people who are handlers for dogs and other therapy animals who regularly visits hospital patients and participates in those events where animals get taken to libraries so kids can read to them, thus practicing their own speaking and reading skills. The Pizzaplex regularly hires them to bring their pet/various animals to the daycare kids.

“Supernatural” explanations for Y/Ns continued presence in the daycare

1. Y/N is some form of grim reaper/psychopomp intern whose higher ups assigned them to basically watch Fazbear’s Entertainment as a whole because for some reason (*cough* William Afton messing around with forces he shouldn’t be messing around with—like remnant and glitchtrap possession nonsense *cough*) this industry generates a lot of weird paperwork, and even though it seems to have stopped in recent times (thanks to Gregory being the little menace that he is), they don’t want it happening again. But, also, it isn’t a very “prestigious” position, so they basically threw it to the new person—aka Y/N.

The daycare ends up fascinating them, because they normally aren’t in a position to be able to see people—and especially not children—just getting to happily enjoy living their lives. Usually when they come into contact with children, it is due to understandably sad or distressing circumstances. So this is a nice change of pace for them. …And, also, depending on who or what was actually causing those people to go missing, they might be curious about Sun and Moon for… other reasons.

Cue misunderstandings about the actual job of a grim reaper/psycopomp on Sun and Moon’s part as well as discussions about whether or not AI have “souls,” and “can a robot ever actually die,” the standard waxing philosophical that happens in these kinds of stories. And also probably Sun and Moon hating Y/N at the beginning for either the aforementioned misunderstandings about their actual job, or just plain them not being able to kick the unauthorized (in their minds) vaguely-adult person out of their daycare. Whether or not anyone else can see them is up for debate/the author’s discretion—whether this is because Y/N is actively hiding their presence from others, or if it is some sort of natural defense mechanism or whatever that Sun and Moon (and other animatronics) end up bypassing because they technically aren’t “humans”.

2. Y/N is a Borrower who lives in the Pizzaplex. A couple of possible scenarios here—like, they might come out and greet Sun and Moon directly because their non-human status grants them a loophole in the “don’t be seen by humans” rule. Or, for more angst, their family is gone—presumed (and most likely actually are) dead because the scouts who got sent out to search for a better location to live in the Pizzaplex/outside never came back. The reason they decided to find a better place to live? Sun and Moon are just that good at cleaning that the Borrowers couldn’t even find a single crumb to use as a food source, and the nearest pantry got a better door/lock that they couldn’t get in. Also, the tiny Music Man living in the vents will catch and kill them if they try and use that as a system to get around.

So an initial meeting between Y/N and Sun and Moon would probably involve Y/N deciding to utilize that loophole regarding species to come out and basically beg them for help—whether just to get them to use their giant height and long strides/the security wire to help Y/N travel a longer distance in a way shorter amount of time or to ask for some food because they are literally on the brink of starvation.

3. Y/N is some random ghost who, surprisingly enough, did not get killed due to anything Afton-related, but was still drawn to the Pizzaplex due to the aura of murder/some weird reaction to remnant and just decided to hang out there. Not even as a vengeful spirit or anything—they were basically just bored, and then Sun and Moon caught their attention. Possibly because it’s fun to troll them since they can’t actually kick Y/N out or effectively ban them for being an “unauthorized adult.” Also because the kids like their ghostly shenanigans.

4. Y/N is some sort of “imaginary friend” or “guardian spirit of the daycare” thing brought to life by a mix or weird remnant shenanigans and the power of the children’s imaginations/love and positive feelings for the daycare over a long period of time. They’re tied to the Daycare (at least at first), and it might actually be a situation where Sun and Moon are the ones to introduce them to the concept of the “outside world” (as limited as their own reach is), rather than the usual reverse.

5. A little similar to the above—except Y/N is specifically a beloved toy brought to life Velveteen Rabbit-style.

6. Y/N is a random cat/bird/dog/lizard who somehow found their way into the daycare and ends up basically becoming its mascot by the end. Possibly they were wild, possibly they were brought in specifically as a type of “class pet” scenario to help teach the kids about responsibility.

7. Kind of like number 10 for the “normal” jobs, except this time Y/N is the therapy animal in the equation who management assigned to Sun and Moon. Either they assigned Y/N to them specifically, or Y/N is supposed to be a general calming presence/mascot for the kids at large or act like one of those dogs that sometimes gets taken to libraries so kids can practice speech and reading skills via reading books to the animals.

If it’s the latter situation, then possibly you’d get a situation where Sun and Moon adopt them one day when their handler goes “missing” after leaving them behind in the daycare to go on a bathroom break or get food or something. Either the adoption is secret, or Management just basically tells Sun and Moon to “deal with it” as part of covering up their actual handler’s disappearance. Whether the “deal with it” was literal or… y’know… a euphemism for something else is up to you—but the end result is Y/N gets adopted by the Daycare attendant.

Also, they probably get an "official" rename to something like "Cloud," just to further hide their original owner's disappearance.

(…Wow, this ended up getting long…)

[twilightarcade]

What is the best/most recent/most interesting (up to you!) Dream youve had that you can somewhat rememeber?

OK SO. my dreams are somewhat all over the board. Either bleeding into reality (this is annoying as hell and really fucks with me sometimes), being mildly off the walls (Things Occurring in rapid succession with no clear reason or logic), or something really silly we're not geting into. Generally this is more of a spectrum however (imagine an xyz plane of borderline reality to clearly never happened, off the walls things happening to basic and understandable narrative, and silly to not silly). Last night's dream for example lands on the slightly silly, would be near reality if not for the batshit plot.

MORE UNDER CUT IDFJFT HOW LOMG IT SHOUDL BE BEFORE I CUT IT BUT I LOOKED AT IT LIKE HM. THATS LONG.

THAT SAID. We aren't talking about lasts night dream sorry babe (BABE REFFERINGTO THE DREAM). I DO however have a few assorted dreams that I've tucked under the "try not to forget because they were of interest" category (they're living in my brain right next to the dreams that I won't forget.) I may or may not have talked about them before, but we have the reoccurring power rangers plot, the dragon under the Italian restaurant dream, THEN THIS ONE DREAM.

power rangers plot. Alright. Basically, I'm generally at my house or my childhood home (feels dramatic to say it like that), and like. Things start occurring. Ranging from me getting evicted to there being fighting outside for no good reason. Regardless of the case, I get contacted by none other than the power rangers. For some reason, I have the morphin crystal whatevers in my possession and I need to go fight whatever evil is occurring directly outside my home (they want to steal the crystals. Obviously.) I, a power ranger, go fight them, nearly die a bunch of times (can't actually die I'm a power ranger. Duh.) And inevitably wake up with no real. Conclusion.

DRAGON DREAM. Had this dream when I was a kid (I forget exact age) and fell absolutely in love like I thought about this dream so much I expanded the world and made more characters and plot lines to fit in and everything. I tried sooo hard to have this dream again just so I could make my dreams (thoughts???) a reality (dream.?) I don't think I ever managed to. Very basic plot summary is: restaurant is advertising dragon slides, huge room with dragon, one real, one clearly fake, dragon advertised as hyper realistic replica, dragon is real and literally eating people. I fell. Absolutely in love with this concept. Thought about it for days on end. There was even this "plot"??? Where people were divided over whether they hated and wanted to kill the dragon or wanted to continue living under the dragon in fear (dragon was orchestrating the whole thing in this plotline and threatened to eat anyone who disagreed) and I don't think that plotline ever actually reached a conclusion.

ANYWAYS DROPPING THAT FOR NOW umm. There's a lot of like. People from my dreams I think about a bit. There was this one particularly fucked up dream I'm not getting into, and there's this one lady I think about a bit. She was a deeply saddened individual to say the least and I wish her the best. There's potato the white lab (maybe?) who I kind of love and would do anything for (he got lost then I found him. Ignoring the rest of the dream. Obama was there.) Who wasn't there for like half the dream and wasn't even my dog. There's the awkward host from dragon dream. Absolute loser. A few days ago we had the lesbians that blocked my way to the drinking fountain because they were making out and i didnt want to bother them (this dream had an absolutely unfollowable plot too.)

ALSO shout out to all those silly dreams that appealed to my fears. Generally those have the most solid plotline which is mildly annoying. Honestly I don't really need their help to be scared thanks I do that to myself enough though. I'm still not sure if the screwdriver thing was from a dream or just a really stupidly active imagination because well! It's certainly active. Just don't know why that in particular really stuck with me.

I think we would be here all day if I ever got to talk about everything I remember in depth </3

[otnesse]

George Lucas has always been a radical leftist, and there's hints at him having deliberately yet subtly forcing in his radical leftist messaging into Star Wars even with the Original Trilogy. He's also shilled for Obama quite a few times such as calling him a hero, and when asked he without any hesitation said Obama would "obviously" be a Jedi. Made the Jedi's rather dank depiction in the Prequel Trilogy look even worse that he felt a malignant narcissist like Obama who did a huge amount to wreck America was Jedi material. But oh, it gets even worse. Apparently back in 2009, when Obama was in the early stages of Obama's presidency, George Lucas saw it fit to actually trash-talk Luke Skywalker just to prop Obama up. I'm not kidding, read this:

Lucas: Obama more powerful than Skywalker - POLITICO

And in case you think it's a clickbait title, here's the meat of the article:

We all know that Barack Obama has achieved superstar status. But is he an actual hero? Like in the action movie sense? You betcha! says “Star Wars” creator George Lucas, who was in Washington Wednesday night for the Ford’s Theatre reopening celebration where both he and screen legend Sidney Poitier were being honored with the Ford Theatre Society’s Lincoln medal in a ceremony attended by President Barack Obama, a Lincoln aficionado. Lucas says that, in a contest between Luke Skywalker and Obama, our 44th president wins hands down—even without the lightsaber. In addition, Poitier told Politico that Obama’s rockstar status is still going strong.

Seriously, he treated a well-respected hero like Luke Skywalker, one who redeemed his father and helped save a galaxy from tyranny through that bit, and in fact was one of the few unambiguous heroes in the overall saga even WITH Lucas' shameful revelation that he modeled the heroes after the Viet-friggin-cong and the villains after us Americans DESPITE news making clear the VC were the actual bad guys after the Vietnam War ended, like complete and total trash just to praise a pathologically lying, unscrupulous, malignantly narcissistic manchild who hates even the slightest criticism and actively tries to destroy America's standing by literally bowing in apology to Arabs, was VERY open about wanting to have more babies killed via abortion to such an extent that he outright BLOCKED any attempts at getting red letters through [and I'd know that bit personally as I was involved in the red envelope campaign to try and talk Obama into stopping abortion. Never even voted for him either, precisely BECAUSE he supported abortion, baby killing in other words] and probably being a huge factor in why we've gone so suicidally woke recently especially with his buying out Netflix, claim someone like THAT was a better Jedi than Luke?! And I thought DISNEY disrespected Luke in the sequel trilogy (well, they did, don't get me wrong, but this somehow comes off as even WORSE)... Guess that's another sign why George Lucas ultimately should NOT have had the reins to Star Wars, with or without Disney (not that Disney's any better mind you. Basically the whole situation with Lucas and Disney running Star Wars would be best summed up as "pick your poison").

It's already bad enough that Lucas threw shade at his father Anakin by effectively calling his compassion for Padme and Shmi "greedy" when explaining why Anakin turned to the Dark Side DESPITE his intention of him being a tragic hero (not the TV Tropes definition, the actual Greek concept) who ultimately got redeemed (not to mention implying that a truly compassionate Jedi would throw them under the bus). Didn't think he'd actually go as far as to outright disrespect Luke in that manner by inferring Luke was inferior to someone like Barack Obama regarding the Jedi way.

[lastweeksshirttonight]

Guess who's back

Lee is back, tell a friend.

I know I let this project sit fallow for the last few weeks, but I'm gonna kick it back in gear - especially now that we don't have any new LWTs to pick apart every week.

Last Lee Tonight (wherein Lee is still alive, he promises) Season One, Episode Five

(original air date: 6/8/2014) Major topics covered: Net Neutrality, the spelling bee, European elections

"Is there anyone into both anti-Zionist conspiracy theories AND smooth jazz?"

Welcome back from our mini-break! When we last left off, Last Week Tonight was still trying to figure out how, exactly, to structure its show, now that it's determined longer-form dissections of issues can and will work as stand-alone viral bits. This episode is, at least in some respects, where things start gelling into the format we know and love - and gives us our first really big viral bit from the show. I think this, more than the episode on the death penalty, is where LWT really starts to take shape.

Our episode is a rare start where John does not slap his desk a lot, but instead bobs around like a weird bird while everyone claps. It is delightful and important for you to know this, and he should do this more often. (Did you know that one of my main character traits is 'strong opinions about objectively useless shit'? SURPRISE IT IS)

The episode kicks off discussing a surge of far-right victories in European elections. Good to know people were worried about this getting out of hand in 2014. John makes it very clear this is a bad sign - "when Europe goes far right, they go far right through Belgium" is an amazing joke - and showcases multiple far-right Nazi groups that now have seats in their countries' governments. I hate how numb to a lot of this shit I am now because of the US' slow descent into fascism, but this was a startling warning sign at the time.

In contrast, Ukraine elected a chocolate baron as their president, and John takes the opportunity to sing badly and "whimsically". My heart.

Next is an update on Afghanistan, and a new plan for pulling out of the country by the end of 2014. Or the end of 2015. They've been just about to leave Afghanistan for a long time, and John has some further updates on plans going into 2016 and 2017.

These first bits before the "And Now This" feel a lot more like the modern introductory sections of Last Week Tonight. Everything aside from the brief Afghanistan update is centered around one singular theme (European elections), goes on for about 6 minutes (leaving plenty of time for the main topics), and goes into at least slight depth about the news (unlike earlier, extremely brief tossed-off news updates that expected at least a modicum of familiarity with current events). Things are starting to come together everyone!

Our first "And Now This" is about Jay Carney resigning from being White House Press Secretary, which they frame his resignation speech declaring his respect and love for the job with clips of him getting irritated, bemused, and drained by the idiocy of the press pool he dealt with. I honestly completely forgot this guy existed but all the memories of those Obama-era press conferences came back hard to me while watching this clip.

The first main story starts with the Internet, and John going on an extremely long tangent about buying coyote urine before bringing us to the actual topic - Net Neutrality.

This episode had a massive social impact when it aired in 2014. I remember this being such a huge deal, it seemed like every news organization was covering John's show and, through that coverage, informing the public about why net neutrality would be an absolute disaster for the US. Looking at this now, it also was a huge turning point in the marketing of the show - I've mentioned multiple times for previous episodes that the YouTube clips pulled from each episode so far make absolutely no sense, sometimes chopping up bits and not showing full context (like with the GM recalls), sometimes having shorter and longer versions of the same thing (like with the climate debate and the Bill Nye cameo). This episode marks the first time I can share the entirety of the episode's main bit with you as a YouTube video. It is absolutely wild to think that most audience's main way of interacting with this show, through longform YouTube bits, was not a thing at the start.

While the YouTube channel continues to have some smaller fragments of LWT episodes from this point on (usually the smaller intro bits or episode enders divorced from the main topic), and episode 7 inexplicably doesn't have video of its main topic at all (oh boy, that'll make my write up fun), by episode 8, the main subject of every episode has its own longform YouTube clip.

Here's the net neutrality clip for your viewing pleasure:

John opens the clip noting that discussions of net neutrality are boring as shit, saying he'd rather watch Caillou with his niece than listen to them. That's one of the most casually damning insults I've ever heard, because Caillou is fucking terrible. But net neutrality, I think as we all know now, is extremely important to the function of the internet as we know it.

I said I won't go deeply through each bit on a technical level, and this clip is very technical. It shows really well how LWT, at its best, really breaks down a complex issue and makes it easy to understand - and easy to get incensed about. Helps that cable companies get shit on CONSTANTLY in this one. I am still ready to destroy Spectrum over my early year internet fuckery.

I wish I remembered what I put in that FCC comment website, lol.

The episode shifts to another Other Countries' Presidents of the United States, which focuses on Tony Abbott of Australia, a religiously anti-immigrant shitheel who was an immigrant to Australia himself. It's always projection with these idiots. He's got a cavalcade of bad thoughts and ideas, a lot of which feel like they were pulled directly from a Thick of It episode. "I've given you the response you deserve", Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ.

He also looks a bit like a Paul Scheer character. I can't unsee it.

The last segment of the episode focuses on the Scripps National Spelling Bee. I made it to the regional tournament for this godawful stress-inducing nightmare in middle school, and I'm pretty sure the only reason I got that far is because my dad promised to buy me the Game Boy Advance game 'Ed Edd n Eddy: Jawbreakers' if I made it to state. I did not make it, and my dad felt so bad about it that he still bought me the game. I loved that game far more than I ever loved the goddamn spelling bee.

As an expert on this subject, "the Hunger Games of the mind" is a super accurate assessment and I related very very hard to the girl who said she was going to get every horror movie ever upon losing. I did much the same, except with Ed Edd n Eddy. (I was fucking obsessed with that show.)

I have to note that John also says "pop that pussy" in this clip. This is of interest to me and my gremlin followers.

Also Jesus Christ, Chris Cuomo, go to a fucking fight club or something to get out that Mortal Kombat-ass rage. My God, you absolute lunatic.

Random notes:

Lee obviously focuses on important things corner: plum tie, light blue shirt, dark gray jacket, holy shit it is too early for me to be this flustered. A LOOK. 10/10 no notes

Weird items from the Last Week Tonight YouTube page: a video of a singular joke from the Net Neutrality clip. I am not entirely sure what they were going for here - did they think one joke might go more viral than an entire 15 minute clip? Did they make this as a lead-in on a long-lost corporate website? Did they predict TikTok? I have so many questions.

A couple of years after the Spelling Bee bit, in 2016, John sent his congratulations to Scripps for their 90 year anniversary and some encouragement to participants. This is worth watching because a) all-ages/family-friendly John content is generally adorable and this is no exception, and b) John is smoking hot in it. Not even including the 'imo' there, he just IS. 11/10. 12/10 even. Ranking scale destroyed.

I would ask you all to guess who my favorite character on Ed Edd n Eddy was, but I am such a stereotype of a human being that if you guessed anyone other than Double D, you don't know me at all. Also this show is still hilarious as an adult, and I maybe got sidetracked watching a bunch of clips of it this morning.

[embryhallowed]

I finally posted something on my main socials in vocal support of Palestine, outlining the history and violence of the Nakba, listing various sources including many anti-zionist Jewish voices.

I got one comment, from a woman I went to college with, who is Jewish, and who moved to Israel after Trump was elected.

Her response was pretty much what I expected. She said it seems like my only point is that the Israelis deserve the violence and had it coming, that I'm spewing revisionist history, asking where my essays about Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and so on are, and that I'm writing all of this from the safety of America, which is a country that is "worse than Israel by every metric" and she ends with telling me to fuck off.

So yeah, pretty much what I expected, if not a little weak sauce?

Like, it is not revisionist to tell the history of the Nakba. 750,000 people displaced, 15k killed, 500 villages destroyed. It's not revisionist to talk about the massacre of Kafr Qasim where Israeli police killed 48 unarmed civilians, 23 of which were children and the youngest was 8 years old, and then an officer responsible for the murders was put in charge of "Arab Affairs" in a nearby city. It's not revisionist to say Israel funded and supported Hamas to crush secular progressive movements in Gaza. Those things happened. It is well documented. They happened. They did. You can Google it and it will be the first result you see. And these things have continued to happen ever since.

I've been vocal for years about how it's fucked that America killed a quarter of a million Afghans, how Obama bombed the middle east so much that children in these countries grew to fear says with a clear sky, because the drones could fly on those days. I've talked about Yemen and Syria, I've talked about how AMERICAN influence made all of these situations worse. I've talked about Saudi Arabia and how they murdered an American journalist and nothing was done about it, but the reason THIS gets an essay right now is because it feels like we are witnessing genocide in real time, and most of the people in this country seem fine with it.

And like. "You're sitting there safely in a country worse than Israel."

Ma'am, idk what to tell you, you chose to move from America to Israel. Dunno what to tell you there. Otherwise, I HAVE BEEN VOCALLY CRITICAL OF THE USA FOR YEARS. I've openly said that the CIA, the industrial war complex, and American capitalism, has been the single greatest source of evil and suffering on the globe in the modern era. Like, I hate American government, politics, and the influence we have on the globe. We ARE the evil empire! WE'RE the baddies! I've been saying this for AGESSSSS.

IDK guys. I just gotta spew my feelings out here so I don't pop off to her. I have my sympathies for her, because she moved to flee from Trump and to ensure her mother had the healthcare she needs to live. She's married and now has a baby, she lives in Haifa. I understand why she's angry and defensive, I fully sympathize with how scary it must be for her.

But like. That doesn't change history. It doesn't change the fact that zionist military forces violently forced people out of the city of Haifa and cleared it for new Israelis. I've wondered, how old is the building she lives in? Did Palestinians live there once before her? I've never said the Israeli civilians "had this coming" but this situation IS a ticking time bomb, which is what leftist voices have been saying for ages.

She also said "we've offered peace and they never take it!" Iirc Israel hasn't actually met to negotiate with Palestinians for like a decade?? And like. WHAT HAVE YOU OFFERED?! "Hey guys, stop resisting us and we promise to stop taking your land and bulldozing your homes. I know we already did that like 70 years ago and completely ignored the borders we, Israel, agreed to, but believe us! We'll for sure hold up our end of the bargain this time! Also no we still want to have an ethnostate and we still want to treat you as second class citizens." WHAT PEACE OFFERINGS???

She said "you haven't offered any solutions!" I'm not here to offer the perfect solution for peace in the middle east, I'm here to say genocide is wrong, I'm here to elevate the voices of Palestinians and anti-zionist Jews. You already had the bones of a "two state solution" when the UN carved up the land, and Israel didn't respect that (not that it was great to begin with). And honestly, if you say "I kinda think a single secular state where everyone gets equal rights regardless of religion or ethnicity" you will get crucified??

Anyway. I'm just ranting at this point. I knew I'd get blow back for speaking out, but it honestly wasn't as bad as I expected.

I just hearted her comment and will reply later, though idk if she'll see it, since she promptly unfriended me. Also unsurprising.

Anyway, free Palestine

[areyouafraid]

trump opinions

i have a lot of complicated feelings abt donald trump for one he is an objectively evil man and i want to make my stance clear on him first and foremost hes a racist, xenophobic, imperialist, capitalist pedophile & serial rapist; i am NOT a centrist i dont want anyone walking away from this post taking away anything irt my feelings on him besides that i think time in alcatraz would be too lenient a punishment for him i think he needs to be slathered in peanut butter and thrown in a ring full of starving dogs and the footage of him being literally torn limb from limb broadcast on national tv, i think what he did to those girls on little saint james is enough to warrant him being executed by firing squad and knowing that they saw him not only getting away scot free but also being president of the fucking united states in spite of it because hes rich and white makes me hope he gets an inoperable cancer in his brain.

i think the fact that he was elected in and of itself, the fact that the electoral college (infernal invention to begin with) overrode a majority vote in front of the entire country in favor of literally one of the most hated men in modern times, should have pushed democrats way left but that would have required them challenging their beliefs about america. also the average us president is a racist, xenophobic, imperialist, capitalist pedophile & serial rapist and literally the only difference between trump and any of the other fucking american figureheads is his willingness to voice his opinions. it pisses me off that trump has become a sort of boogeyman not because he isnt evil but because hes like almost this cartoonish caricature of american policy that democrats now have someone to posit as the Big Bad and make their own incredibly racist capitalist warlords look "morally upstanding" in comparison, the fact that im still seeing people insist you vote for biden makes me want to scrape my face off on the tar. it doesnt matter to them that biden's politics are not meaningfully different from trump's, it doesnt matter that obama's presidency (under which biden was VP) laid the groundwork for trump's aggressive and bloody immigration policies and that obama and previous presidents are responsible for not codifying the laws that the trump administration would later overturn, it doesnt matter that biden is actively funding an alt-right ethnostate's imperial crusade and genocide of the indigenous people of the levant, it doesnt matter that biden has his own library of sexual abuse allegations under his belt and that he was a segregationist in recent memory. because democrats are not leftists, they dont give a fuck about progress, they care about saving face for the state, their modus operandi is dodging threats to the status quo and maintaining enough plausible deniability that any american president can be falsely posited as the face of empowerment and social progress while ordering drone strikes and maintaining military bases in overseas countries. biden smiles for the camera and shakes hands the way hes supposed to its all a fucking puppet show and no one gives a fuck as long as they feel like the peace is being kept. got away from me a little bit here but like i feel like donald trump's election peeled the facade back on what a fucking evil and rotten country america is and maybe thats part of the reason he's become this mythical figure to democrats despite not really being meaningfully different from any other president in terms of his beliefs and policies

again it lkinda got away from trump for a second but his cult following is another thing. like yes trump is in his own right a cult leader but it's like... he's not a bill gothard. he's not a joseph smith. he's not a jim jones. because donald trump is a very obviously unintelligent man and hes also either senile or the years of cocaine use and medical cocktails have fucked up his brain to the point of being barely functional. and i mean its not like there havent been cult leaders or fundamentalist juggernauts that were incredibly stupid or insane. look at mark driscoll or kenneth copeland or fuck honestly even people like charles manson or roch theriault. but trump lacks charm. do you know what i mean? he lacks grace or prose. hes not well spoken he can barely string together a fucking coherent sentence. i believe the only reason hes gained the following he has is because of the power afforded to men like him by our society. i mean fuck even elon musk has a similar thing going on despite the fact he is also observably unintelligent and has an incredibly unlikeable personality. donald trump grew like a weed out of the poison soil of reagan-era economics and we all know money is power in america. honestly i cant even believe he was able to like, apply to run for president. there's not a point where you're like, considered psychologically unfit to hold a position of power? can literally anyone be president? can i be president? fucks sake didnt jim bob duggar run for president... what a fucking nightmare

[madamspeaker]

There’s certainly no love lost between Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump, frequent sparring partners during the latter’s sole term in the White House.

But the ex-House Speaker said in a wide-ranging interview with Spectrum News Wednesday that she doesn't even like to say the former president's name, saying "it's like a curse word to me."

Pelosi made clear she does not think the former president has the country’s best interests at heart, charging that the biggest challenge the United States is facing is the “negativity” he “has spewed forth into our country.”

“There's always been a level of anti-women, anti-gay, LGBTQ, anti-people of color,” she charged. “There's always been some of that there, but he normalized it. And the things that he says are so damaging to our country coming together for a more perfect union and they're so damaging to our national security,” citing his comments about encouraging Russia to attack delinquent NATO allies, rhetoric about Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and other dictators, and reported statements about veterans.

“I think that right now, the biggest problem for our country is in the person of Donald Trump and the hate that he spews forth, and the disrespect that he has for our Constitution, and the disrespect he had for the office of president,” she added. “He was impeached twice, defeated once. I hope he's ready for another defeat.”

When asked if she was concerned for her or her family’s safety should Trump be reelected, Pelosi said she was, though she acknowledged that they’ve “already been attacked in our own home,” referencing the October 2022 assault on her husband, Paul Pelosi, by a man wielding a hammer. The attacker, a Canadian citizen who told jurors he believed news outlets lied about Trump and echoed far-right conspiracy theories in online postings, was convicted of federal charges connected to the assault late last year. 

She also recalled that a supporter of Trump who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, "said they're going to put a bullet in my friggin head."

“That’s what I tell [members of Congress],” she said. “We stepped into the arena, but our families didn’t, and … it shouldn't happen that way. And so we have to, if we win this election, do so in a unifying way to bring people together.”

“Of course we have differences,” Pelosi added. “I've been here a long time. I've worked with Republicans over the years. Now it's kind of a different thing because they're dictated to from outside — rather than outside by their constituents, outside by one person who has no patriotism, no commitment to his oath of office to protect and defend, no respect for the office that he held, and really a dangerous person who should never have been in the White House. And we have to make sure he isn’t again.”

Pelosi, who stepped down from her Democratic leadership role last year, told Spectrum News that she stayed in Congress to help President Joe Biden’s reelection effort. Pelosi, for her part, is participating in a national organizing call with Biden and former President Barack Obama to mark the anniversary of the Affordable Care Act, mobilizing supporters and volunteers to protect the landmark health care law which has been a target of Trump and Republicans in Congress.

“It's not just about me, but I do continue to support politically, and that one of the reasons I stayed was because we have to elect Joe Biden President of the United States,” she said. “We have to elect a Democratic Congress. We just must. That means House and Senate. So my ability to do that is enhanced by still being here.”

She also sought to dispel the notion that Biden, who is 81, is too old to run for president again, quipping: “Frankly, he’s younger than I am.” (Pelosi turns 84 next week.)

“I can tell you this from personal experience: As you serve, you gain knowledge, you gain wisdom,” Pelosi said. “You have improved judgment, and this is a president … who has a beautiful vision for the future. He knows why he wants to do this. He knows the subject matter. He's been here a long time. So he knows what has worked, what hasn't and what the possibilities are.”

But polling continues to show concerns about the age of the president — dwarfing, in many instances, similar concerns about Trump, who is just three years Biden’s junior.

“[Biden’s] not that much older than what's his name, but nobody seems to make a fuss about what's his name,” Pelosi said, referencing Trump.

"And that's just really what is so funny to me, including the press, just always saying, ‘Well, he's old now.’ Yeah, the other guy's old too," she added.

“I understand how people would rather see somebody younger, but Joe Biden is doing fabulously well in the primaries, so people are voting for him even though they'd rather be younger,” she added.

Spectrum News has reached out to Trump's reelection campaign for response to Pelosi's comments.

Pelosi also addressed Senate Majority Chuck Schumer’s recent speech about the war between Israel and Hamas, during which the New York Democrat — the highest-ranking elected Jewish official in U.S. history — called for new elections to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. His comments were rebuked by Israeli officials, as well as Republicans and even some Democrats in Congress for interfering in another country’s elections.

When asked if she agreed with Schumer’s call, Pelosi replied: “I thought it was a very courageous speech. I congratulated him on it. It was a speech of courage. And it was a speech of love for for Israel.”

Pelosi said that Schumer “spoke from the head and from the heart” about his support for Israel and his comments are being “mischaracterized.”

“I say to people, read the speech. He talks about the problem that Hamas is and how horrible Oct. 7 was,” she said, referencing the surprise attack on Israel that left 1,200 dead. “He talks about the lack of leadership on the side of the Palestinians to be good, to be strong partners for peace. He talks about the radical right-wing cabinet in Israel and he talks about Netanyahu being a problem.”

She charged that Netanyahu “isn't interested in peace, he’s only interested in his own political survival,” adding: “I support the leader and what he said, and I understand how heart-rending it was for him to make such a statement.”

[qqueenofhades]

With 2016, people just don’t understand how everything works. Getting the popular vote isn’t how the game is played, getting the electoral vote is. The popular vote doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things because candidate’s strategies would completely change if they were trying to get the popular vote rather than win individual states. Did I vote for Hillary? Yes. Do I still think she didn’t approach the vote with the right strategy and played it for the popular vote rather than the electoral vote and lost as a result? Also yes.

Okay, but you do get how that's a flawed metric for an argument, right? Hillary DID win the popular vote by three million plus, and in any sane system, that would have been enough to net her the presidency. "Hillary ran a flawed campaign" is to some extent, a true statement, as is "Hillary didn't focus enough on Michigan/Wisconsin/Pennsylvania because the Democrats assumed she had them on lockdown and didn't take into account the amount of Midwestern white people voting for Trump because of white backlash against Obama." But that is something that a) only became clear in hindsight and b) yet again, in any sane universe, should not have decided the election. Because:

Hillary was, and is, possibly the single most qualified presidential candidate the Democrats have ever had;

Voters were predisposed to hate her not because she "wasn't likable" or was "too corporate," but because the Republicans had been running literal decades of virulent smear campaigns against her to poison the well for this very eventuality;

The media almost never bothered to point this out at all and spent endless airtime on BUT HER EEEEEEEMAILS and doing sympathetic pieces about Trump voters, implying that their vote for Trump was a justified or moral protest against Both Sides Badism, and this was even the so-called "mainstream" media;

Fox News, of course, pumped out endless hit pieces and then some, all of which was echoed in some degree by those outlets;

James Comey announced TEN DAYS BEFORE THE ELECTION that suddenly oops, he was investigating her emails again;

Even though there was nothing there and it is absolutely small potatoes compared to the much worse things Republicans are doing on the regular, because SELLING NUCLEAR SECRETS TO FOREIGN ENEMIES is okay as long as it is Trump doing it;

America is still so fucking racist and misogynistic that even after Trump spewed off terrible things about every non-white group, scapegoated Mexicans and Muslims and black people, and was caught on tape bragging about grabbing women by the pussy, this didn't actually make much of an impact on people planning to vote for him, because they evidently figured it "wasn't real" or "he would change" once he became president, while for others, the open hatred was the main attraction;

Bernie refused to concede until the actual convention, implied that if you couldn't vote for him, you shouldn't vote for anyone, and generally fanned the kind of I'll Take My Pony and Go Home rhetoric that is a poison in "progressive" online circles today;

Almost 10% of Bernie voters voted for Trump instead of Clinton;

Gary Johnson and Jill Fucking "Russian Asset" Stein were somehow treated as valid "protest vote" options, even while Hillary was warning everyone left and right about how much Trump sucked, how much SCOTUS (AND SPECIFICALLY ROE) was at risk, and how much democracy would be damaged if he won, which -- GUESS WHAT -- happened exactly as she predicted;

Speaking of the Russians, they were interfering the hell out of it, whether through Wikileaks/the DNC email hack, social media psyops, organized troll farms, or anything else they could think of;

And on and on. Against the backdrop of sheer and unmitigated fuckery that was the 2016 election, and the fact that so many people couldn't be bothered to vote for Hillary because she was a Smart Woman who was Too Corporate when the alternative was literally Trump, "Hillary didn't campaign enough in MI/WI/PA" is.... hardly a valid way to explain or excuse the many, many bad-faith actors, bad choices, and general lethargy, misinformation, deliberate destruction of faith in democracy, racism, Russian interference, misogyny, and white fragility that fucked us over and continues to do so.