#the inner monologue is so law core

[darlington-v]

A Sympathetic Character is Better than a Morally Just Character

part of this was drafted from a month or so ago but i’ve been thinking about it so i’m going to finish it now and post it on this blog instead of the og ranboocore blog haha! 

i would really wish this fandom would understand though that, 

a morally good, righteous, upstanding character =/= a GOOD character like yes. they are morally good. but that does not inherently make them the better written, more satisfying character. like i enjoy characters like dream, ranboo, technoblade, wilbur, quackity, and sam (my favorites especially are dream and ranboo) because they have depth. they are multifaceted and have internal conflict and clear character flaws. 

sam is actually a good example of a character being righteous and that being a flaw. BECAUSE of his values, tommy died on his hands. because he adheres to laws, he has internal conflict as the world has shown him that maybe he was wrong. maybe it is not good to be so righteous. 

i see a lot of posts like condemning characters for their actions and i get so utterly confused because thats the point. like yes. they did the bad thing. yes. you’re right that is bad. but like... can you analyze it? can you break down the character motivations, that characters reasoning behind it, is it relatable? is it sympathetic? is it compelling to you? 

if it’s not why are you here. because these ARE sympathetic characters. they make mistakes and it is clear that the mistakes they made ARE INDEED MISTAKES. because that is human. and we can relate.  “dreams not sympathetic, he’s evil” immmmm SORRY are you telling me that if you were repeatedly told that you were an awful person, that you were toxic, that you were the bad one EVEN THOUGH YOU WEREN’T, you wouldn’t get frustrated? you wouldn’t get upset and maybe act drastically? you wouldn’t lash out? 

“i wouldn’t manipulate someone and blow up a country.” no shit! i wouldn’t either! but i would get angry! i would get mad and upset and i might say something mean or out of line or like make a mistake and start a fight. the beauty of writing is that we can exaggerate things to extremes. this raises the stakes and makes the actions so much more meaningful, but because we at our core can relate to similar actions and the line of logic, it makes it moving. it makes it sympathetic and relatable. like? no obviously, i don’t condone abuse or like manipulating someone. but i can understand and relate to the idea of “the ends justify the means.” which is the type of character dream is. in his head, the ends will justify the means. 

so i need you to understand that a SYMPATHETIC character is better than JUST a MORALLY RIGHT character. ESPECIALLY in the dream smp. this is the narrative where EVERYONE is their OWN MAIN CHARACTER. and the main character NEEDS to be sympathetic. the villain doesn’t necessarily, though a sympathetic villain is always so much better than a flat, 2D villain, but the protagonist NEEDS to be sympathetic. and by sympathetic i mean like... can i follow their line of logic? can i understand this character? like maybe i personally wouldn’t do the things they’ve done, but can i understand why they’ve done what they have? am i rooting for this character because i can relate and sympathize with them?

this is SO important in writing. it GIVES characters depth. it makes them feel real, and not just like... a 2d caricature of something. thats part of WHY i love ranboos character and WHY he is very obviously a fan favorite. ranboo, hands down, undoubtedly, PUTS THE WORK IN. his character is deeply flawed and for that extremely relatable. ranboo makes SURE that there is subtext there for you to understand it. the way his character rationalizes things is such a good testament to him providing subtext, but it’s definitely not the ONLY way he provides subtext. he doesn’t TELL you that his character has anxiety (in lore i mean out of lore he’s said it plenty of times) BUT HE SHOWS THAT. 

his character catastrophizes, his character is pessimistic at times, his character is worried pretty frequently, he displays signs of paranoia among like... so many other characteristics that are clear results of anxiety or just SHOW his anxiety. he doesn’t just SAY that flat out, but he shows it in the way he talks, the way he thinks, his actions. like YES. yes ranboo IS a hypocrite but you can understand WHY he is a hypocrite. it’s because, ironically enough, his character VALUES being morally correct. ranboos morals are important to himself and he CANNOT conceptualize being the morally wrong one. and that’s SHOWN in the way he rationalizes his acts of hypocrisy. he excuses himself because he doesn’t want to be the one thats wrong, and it’s clear that that is a character flaw of his. 

it’s intended that you pick up that ranboo is wrong, but he is excusing himself and trying to rationalize that he’s not the wrong one because thats one of his character motivations. whenever ranboo monologues and its him rationalizing, it is clearly him CONVINCING himself that he hasn’t done anything bad. he KNOWS he has done the wrong thing, but he DOESN’T WANT TO ADMIT IT.

his character HAS depth. his character feels REAL.

there are plenty of characters you can break down in this way, and i know people are aware of it because i’ve seen posts about how tubbo provides subtext through largely his actions rather than monologuing (which is a pretty good way to get across inner thought in this medium). i think that ranboo’s character is amongst the ones display depth the best because he very clearly does dedicate himself to his character and his narrative. he provides subtext and small mannerisms and goes through a monologue fairly realistically i feel where he’s working himself through a situation.

there’s also sam, who i’m VERY excited for more lore from, because he’s had a fall from grace. this is such an extraordinarily human thing that i think so many people can relate to and i think it makes him such a driving character. like no, i’m not gonna torture someone, but because i can and have fallen from grace before, i’m inherently intrigued by his story. how did he get here? and what was he thinking and where did the lines begin to break down for him? also he’s just kinda ahhah hah hah whus poppin babeyyyyyy but thats irrelevant

other characters i can think of off the top of my head are quackity, technoblade, wilbur, and tubbo but im sure there are other streamers im missing simply because i don’t watch them enough? i feel like niki’s character probably has depth it’s just that i don’t follow her character arc enough, so i wouldn’t actually know.

either way though, these characters all have depth because they’ve dealt with their issues in interesting, pressing, and ultimately human ways to their barest degrees because like i said the beauty of writing is that we can exaggerate these feelings to their extremes, but... ultimately we still experience these feelings.

like no i wouldnt do any of the shit these characters have done, but i can follow their line of reasoning and i can relate deeply to all of these issues.

and i think that’s what we really should be discussing rather than morality on the matter of like “good character” or “bad character” because i see that happen so frequently. like, in enjoying a character you’re not justifying their actions and if someone assumes that then... they should really go back to english class. that’s not how human nature works, and it’s not how literature works. 

a good character is someone i can relate to and understand. including a villain. 

TLDR; a sympathetic character is far more enjoyable and better than a morally just character. sympathetic characters are undeniably good characters because they are inherently characters you root for or simply just enjoy more. morally just characters, while they can be sympathetic, aren’t inherently good because being morally just isn’t inherently relatable. a good character is one that has depth.

[oof-big-oof]

ACOTAR and Setups Part II: Tamlin and Rhysand

SPOILERS: ACOTAR series (and Macbeth too ig)

Part 1: Feyre

In "Macbeth", Macbeth and Banquo are narrative foils to each other. While Banquo is loyal to the king and uses language of growth and imagery of nature when he speaks, the traitor Macbeth's words are full of references to destruction, fire, and unholy happenings. Foils are not just good ways to explore character traits, but also excellent for setting up conflicts and exploring the thematic concerns of the world.

I think it's safe to say Tamlin and Rhysand are foils. They have opposing imagery (spring, flowers and sun for Tamlin, winter, snow and night for Rhysand) and always stand in opposition to each other when it comes to Feyre's narrative, switching in and out of being the "bad guy" and the "good guy". But the way this is handled is .... eh.

I'm going to look at shifts in Feyre, Tamlin and Rhys that work of this foil - and try to look for when and how they were set up.

1. Feyre's shift - TW: discussions of abuse, mental health issues

In the first book, Tamlin is a source of protection and love for Feyre. But by the second book, Feyre is not only struggling with her PTSD but has begun to realise that life at the Spring Court as a dolled up accessory might not be for her. By the end of the book, she has found her place in the Night Court - by Rhysand's side. And honestly? Go girl! Go live up to your potential!

The problem arises with how this is done - that is, Sarah J Mass never does the brunt work of showing us why Feyre cares. It is plausible she is motivated by a desire to protect the human lands, but we never actually see that. There isn't a moment where she realises she needs to work for a greater good, or a moment she realises that she needs to protect those more vulnerable than her - instead, the narrative has her tolerating abuse until she finally has had enough.

Which is great. I have got to admit that I really like the explicit rejection of a happily ever after storyline for Feyre because it took away her agency. But we get this radical shift in character motivation from wanting to be protected and comfortable with those she loves to desiring agency and understanding of herself in two lines:

"The girl who had needed to be protected and who had craved stability and comfort... she had died Under the Mountain"

and

"I didn't know how to go back to those things. To being docile"

hhhhhh. I mean - if you have to say it that explicitly, you're already doing something wrong. But also, why? We never see Feyre struggling with herself in her new body, and wondering why she does not want the same things as she did when she was a human, never see an impetus point for when her desires shifted.

But honestly? I don't mind Feyre's arc. I think it's a bit confused and lacks clarity or intent, and as a result, it is harder to root for her because you don't quite know what she wants, but I think it's still quite good. Where I really have problems are with Tamlin ad Rhys.

2. Tamlin - TW: discussions of abuse, mental health issues

I am not a fan of Tamlin's arc. You could argue that it is part of the thematic message of the series: that things are not as they seem. Tamlin is the wolf to the savour to the abuser, Rhysand is the "most beautiful man " Feyre had ever seen to Amarantha's monster to Feyre's eventual mate. But - the constant twists are unnecessary, more importantly, they and have little to no foreshadowing and just seem like retcons- making it seem as if they are there to keep the audience guessing rather than genuine plot progressions. This becomes even more obvious when the series abandons its core theme of "appearance vs reality" altogether, and as a result loses a lot of its cohesion: a direct consequence of having a bad setup.

His reason for doing the abusive things he does is conveyed to us in two lines, in the same monologue that Feyre's motivation is:

"Tamlin had gotten his powers back, had become whole again - become that protector and provider he wished to be"

Sure. He was much more powerful than Feyre when they first met, so I am having a hard time buying it is the return of the powers that his making him act this way. We know that his actions come from a genuine desire to protect Feyre - this is the guy that was willing to sacrifice his life multiple times and the future of his entire court to keep her safe. The only justification we have left then for the way he acts is that his PTSD, borne out of the trauma and torture he underwent and watched Feyre undergo changed him in some way.

This is why the endless villainizing of Tamlin makes me really uncomfortable. While it is true that the abused can become the abuser, and figuring out how to help them while protecting yourself is something that absolutely needs to be discussed and explored - the way it is done with Tamlin is horrendous because he is never given a chance to heal. Instead, he is thrown from plot point to plot point, an eternal punching bag for the Inner Circle and others to seem morally superior in front of.

And his treatment of Feyre is just weird. If he's so concerned about her safety - why does he not wake up when she has nightmares? Is he instead trying to pretend like everything is okay - if so why does he give Feyre an escort of guards? If his core motivation is protecting Feyre at all costs - why does he lash out at her?? And the text really tries to tell us how to feel about him in this regard, but it doesn't do it very well. For example, take the scene where Tamlin says "There is no such thing as a High Lady". Feyre a second before expressed her desire not to take on any responsibility, and Tamlin responded with this - and the text really makes us want to hate him for it, but all you can see is a person who is perhaps not the best at reading subtext trying his best.

In conclusion - Tamlin's shift to the villain of the narrative is hamhanded and underexplained, making it hard to genuinely hate him, and further confusing the narrative.

3. Rhys the foil gets the girl - TW: discussions of abuse, sexual assault mental health issues

Rhysand in the first book is interesting - he clearly has a heart and a soft spot for Feyre but is also a schemer with dubious motives that drugs and sexually harasses Feyre. There are places in the set up where we understand he cares - but never where we can begin to see he might be a genuine paragon of virtue.

And I will address this more in my post on ACOMAF, but the point I am trying to make here is: we are told through the constantly opposing imagery that Rhys and Tamlin are wolds apart - but never actually given examples of how. Rhys is said to be different from Tamlin because he respects Feyre's choice - but he drugs her in a bunch of weird scenes (that serve no clear narrative purpose by the way - like what was he trying to achieve? why he couldn't he just let Feyre in on that part of the plan?) and withholds information from her about life-threatening situations. Rhys is said to pull less rank - but we multiple times see others defer to him, especially in later books, and never actually see rank being enforced in Tamlin's court with his treatment of Lucien (many times described as his partner, and openly questioning him) and later Ianthe. Rhys is said to have less archaic laws in opposition to Tamlin's Tithe - but he abandons the Court of Nightmares to the monsters who rule it, and never takes serious actions against the Illyrian people who clip of women's wings, and a lot of Tamlin's idea of racial superiority and general superiority just come completely out of left field in the middle of ACOMAF.

Both of them are problematic - it's just that the text tells us to root for one, without actually showing us how one is better, or setting up any clear ideological difference between them. And that cheapens Feyre's character shift and lessen the efficacy of the foil - turning it into Feyre hopping from one lover to the other with little to no character consistency and no nuanced exploration of the theme of the series or trauma.

[catboyshinsou]

it doesn’t have to be 18+ but i keep thinking of like,,, singer/performer y/n x keigo ??? like he goes to a performance and gets flustered or soth over the lyrics or the choreo,,,, thank you <3333

Eyes don't lie

pairing: Hawks x gn! performer reader

warnings: none rlly ? choking mention maybe

summary: hawks is assigned as security guard at an upcoming artists show

a/n: sorry it took so long :P also i hope this is okay for u even if i drifted from the request a bit <3

In a world full of quirks, heroes act as celebrities and law enforcement. There wasn't one country or place you could go where people didn't adore heroes, even in the tiniest villages you could find one or the other All Might or Endeavour fan lurking around the streets.

You yourself weren't a fan of heroism. You could appreciate the ones that dedicated their life to it, whether it be as a part of hero society or a mere fan but the streets just weren't your terrain to play on.

Yet you loved the spotlight, being admired and making people smile. Being on the big stage and having a stadium chant your songs with you while your dancers and band hyped everyone up. That was what you'd craved all your life.

It was the first time in a while since you performed in Japan. You tried to visit home as often as possible and give it the best performances even if your management wanted to focus on your breakthrough in the west. It wasn't like you didn't have a big enough fan base in the west to not sell tickets but somehow your management wanted to make you a real deal, even though you did this for fun not fame.

“KYUSHUUUUU! HOW ARE WE TONIGHT?!”

After your band played the opening of your intro song, you stepped on stage with confetti flying through the arena. The crowd cheered at your appearance while also humming along to the melody. You adjusted your outfit, pulling on the places that had moved from their original position while getting ready to start the night.

It wasn't unusual for heroes to be recruited as security forces in public events. Especially with the League of Villains on the rise and using public spaces to intimidate people, the commission was extra careful on the streets.

Hawks, currently number 3 hero on the Japanese Hero Billboards, sat in the security booth with his feet kicked up and a soda can in his hand. The venue was his patrol territory, it was close to his agency and had the best layout for him to keep an eye on everyone.

Though he didn't do this on his own accord. Concerts were worse to watch over for him, the music and constant movement made it hard for him to actually listen to potential threats. His feathers sensed everything, even giving him a light headache from having to process everything but still stay alert enough to react as fast as possible.

“I know I haven't been… too present in Japan the last few months…” You walked around the stage, waving and winking at the front rows as your stage crew changed the setups. The spotlight only showed you, everything else in darkness except for some flashlights in the crowd and light sticks that weren't yours, blinking in a colourful pattern. You weren't sure if it was trying one's best to support or mockery but either way you appreciated the effort.

The crowd booed in response to your comment on your almost year abroad, all in a lighthearted manner of course but your tummy couldn't help but turn. Especially at this next number which was again, not entirely your idea but part of the plan of breaking through in the west. At least they gave you the opportunity to choose the song.

Hawks watched you intently, cocking an eyebrow at your trembles and tight grasp around the mic. There was a bunch of his feathers placed around the stage area to keep you as safe as he could and the one that you had around your neck was the loudest of them all.

Of course nobody in the audience noticed your nervousness, it took a trained eye to look through the cover of a pop star but your elevated heart wasn't from your performance and the shaking in your hands most definitely not from you being tired. He looked into the crowd.

Was there anyone suspicious he had missed? No that couldn't be. Him and 3 of his sidekicks were watching over this place, there couldn't be any type of danger around. Maybe it was something personal? An ex maybe? Would that pose a threat to you or the crowd?

Hawks’ thoughts were cut off by a synth or some type of organ playing two chords and the lights getting brighter on stage. This hadn't been part of the rehearsal in the morning, was this the reason you trembled so much? A new song?

The crowd went quiet as you positioned yourself in the middle of the stage, mic clipped into the stand and your foot tapping to keep you on beat. When touring through England especially, you had heard this song up and down on the bus you used whenever you travelled in the country.

The simplicity of the progression that pulled through the song, the adding of instruments as a way to build up for the high of the song to then slowly dropping instruments until it came back down to the organ and guitar as it was in the beginning…. Something about it had just struck you and you were more than glad to perform this in your own rendition in your home. Yet you couldn't keep focus on what was happening.

Come on, breathe, y/n you've practiced and it will be okay… Your inner monologue went wild as the synth waited for you to finally start the song. The crowd became restless at the tension you'd built up with seemingly no resolve, you felt more judgment on you than normal.

Your eyes searched for something to ground yourself with, like you used to when you were a rookie. Anything or anyone to look at while you performed to keep your nerves from getting the best of you.

Then your eyes met those of the pro hero assigned to security this time. Hawks’ yellow eyes sparkled as he winked at you with a smirk. His arms rested on the railing of the security lounge, laying over each other and hiding most of his face. The red wings poked through from behind him and you could see that he took off his signature feathered jacket. You took a deep breath before intently looking him in the eyes.

“I'm going back to 505… If it's a 7 hour flight or a 45 minute drive…” Your hands grabbed the mic and the stand as you swayed to the beat, lulling the crowd to do the same and take out their lights. There were quiet screeches from a few people who seemed to know the song. But you didn't let them disturb your new found focus or let them stop your new found anchor look.

“In my imagination, you're waiting lying on your side… With your hands between your thighs…” The guitar kicked in. Your hands left the mic and you stretched them into the air to get rid of their stiffness. The confidence of the first song came back to your core, no trace of nerves found in any of your movements.

The pro hero lazily stared at you after your first eye contact, relaxing as the feather around your neck got quieter. He raised his eyebrows at that last line, even if he knew that it probably wasn't at all intended for him. Your not breaking eye contact suggested something else but he wouldn't fall for the invitations of a worldwide known pop star. He was more than just smarter than that.

“Stop and wait a sec…” You stretched out your hands towards the security manager and tilted your head as you sang the next words. You had loosened up quite a bit as the instruments joined for the first verse. “When you look at me like that my darling, what did you expect?”

The hand slowly came back towards you and softly grabbed your neck before smoothly rolling into a cheek hold. “I'd probably still adore you with your hands around my neck… Or I did last time I checked…”

Pro hero Hawks had been trained to be a hero longer than he could remember. His training included quirk enhancement, multiple language studies and espionage training which had also taught him to stay cool in every situation.

Yet his cheeks flushed red and he rose from his slouched posture as your pointed at him and almost seductively grabbed your neck, all while not breaking your eye contact with him. He cleared his throat multiple times and averted his eyes whenever it became too much for him. Hawks couldn't be charmed by such simple actions. That's what he told himself anyways.

Having regained your confidence after fearing that your audience would be disappointed, you closed your eyes and went through the rest of the song in the lower register of your voice. It was nice to perform something like this between your usual set. It almost cleansed a palette like coffee beans after entering a perfume shop.

But then the bridge hit. The kick drum and snares were hit in unison before a quick second of silence fell, your hands flinging towards the mic and you opening your eyes on beat. “BUT I CRUMBLE COMPLETELY WHEN YOU CRY. IT SEEMS LIKE ONE AGAIN YOU’VE HAD TO GREET ME WITH GOODBYE”

You opened your lungs and let out the higher notes, almost screaming them out as your eyes looked at Hawks again. The instruments filled the room completely, screaming in their own way but also complementing each other.

Like a wave, Hawks was hit with your passionate voice singing him those words as if they had been only written for him. His embarrassment to be addressed in such a manner switched to curiosity and excitement. He tipped one of his sidekicks on the shoulder.

“Make sure we act as security on their next performance in Japan too.”

“But Hawks, we aren't a security agency-”

“Oh yeah? Well for them we are, I want to be part of the security team for every japanese performance to come.”

In a stern but gentle voice, Hawks commanded him to find your manager to arrange future collaborations. His flushed cheeks reappeared when you finished the song and just stood there, eyes closed and sweat glistening on your face as you breathed out the last emotions of the song. Something about you looked, ethereal. Was that the right word for it? He didn't know, but it felt right in any way .

[buttherainbowhadabeard]

The Father (2021)

*contains spoilers*

Based on the world-renowned and re-enacted stage play of the same name by French writer and first-time director Florian Zeller, ‘The Father’ is a very personal portrayal of a very universal experience. Not only is it a masterclass in acting by legendary Welshman Sir Anthony Hopkins, even more importantly than that, it’s an intimate and powerful portrait of a man’s life in the throes of dementia.

These days there is an emphasis on embracing ageing and the wisdom, life experiences and insights that come from a long life. For a lot of people, however, ageing gracefully isn’t an option, and instead of shuffling off this mortal coil with memories of a life well lived and their dignity and humanity intact, they have to struggle and fight their way out.

Most of us of know something about or someone with dementia or Alzheimer's and can quite easily substitute Hopkins’ character for one of our own loved ones, but the poignancy in the performance doesn’t rely on prior knowledge. We know how hard it is for the families but we don’t think about it enough from the sufferer’s point of view. ‘The Father’ puts Anthony’s upsetting, chaotic and confusing frame of mind front and centre.

Hopkins is a powerhouse, that we know, but when you think that he won his first Oscar playing the terrifyingly magnetic and metallic tongued cannibal Hannibal Lecter in ‘Silence of The Lambs’, and has now just won his second Oscar as the frighteningly forgetful and fragile Anthony in ‘The Father’, his talent and range really does astound. At the age of 83, he is still in his prime and taking on another great role, and arguably his greatest role to date.

Banal moments of everyday life are peppered with sudden shocks and utter bewilderment as Anthony battles to make sense of his confronting new world. His existence may seem small and within the confides of one room or one flat, but his struggle is of earth-shattering proportions. Although dialogue, inner monologues and interactions are often the key cinematic tools used to convey a character’s thoughts and feelings, someone with memory loss doesn’t have the neurological energy or cohesion to explain the confusion inside their heads, so as Anthony’s descent into full blown dementia escalates, the audience is taken with him. Feelings of distress, disorientation, frustration, anger, loneliness, exhaustion, and heart-break increasingly consume Anthony’s every waking hour, and as a viewer, you very quickly begin to share the same sentiments and concerns.

Stylistically, script and production design wise, the film’s psychological roller coaster ride is strongly supported by a physical assault on the senses too. Scenes are repeated with slight variations in dialogue and staging, day becomes night and then suddenly back to day again, rooms are rearranged in the blink of an eye and a revolving door of actors come and go as the same characters. It’s amazing just how claustrophobic it can get inside your own head!

You begin to wonder how many days, weeks, or months the story is being played out over, and was he in the nursing home the whole time or did we chronologically journey from his flat, to Anne’s and then the home? Did the trauma of losing his beloved youngest daughter Lucy to an accident bring on his dementia or was it predisposed? Like the disease that is rapidly ravaging his mind, the movie and the character of Anthony is complex, with emotions that run the gamut from gentle, charming and cooperative to irate, stubborn and paranoid. He was, until very recently, a man of great intelligence and independence, so losing control and purpose understandably rocks him to the core.

His daughter Anne (the always brilliant Olivia Colman and momentarily also played by Olivia Williams) has great love, empathy and patience, but like most carers, there is only so much of her father’s everchanging moods and manners that she can endure. Her husband Paul (a deliberately disjointed joint acting effort by Mark Gatiss and Rufus Sewell) barely hides his insensitivity and implies that Anthony is intentionally burdening them by exaggerating his symptoms. He mainly treats his father-in-law’s condition with contempt and cruelty, and unless it was another lapse in reality, even physically attacks him in one of many harrowing scenes.

And like the supporting cast, ‘The Father’ often has you too paralysed by indecision. No, Anne shouldn’t have to give up her whole life to care for her ill father, however when she eventually does, you resent her for leaving him when he needs her the most. In the traumatic finale, when in a brief moment of clarity, he realises the extent of his condition and circumstance, Anthony cries “I feel as if I’m losing all my leaves”. It’s such a potent and poetic line. He feels vulnerable, exposed, upset, lonely, lost and afraid. It’s impossible to sum up how agonising and isolating it must feel to know you are slowly slipping away, but this goes some way to explain it in the simplest and saddest of terms. And if Hopkins sobbing for his “mummy” doesn’t reduce you to tears then I don’t know what will.

There are brief moments of levity, from Anthony’s obsession with his watch (or lack of it) and Parisian’s not speaking English, to his energetic interactions with his young new carer Laura (Imogen Poots), but I’m not going to lie. When I say the smiles and laughs are brief, I mean just that. Ultimately, ‘The Father’ isn’t a movie that can accommodate a happy ending and it would do a huge disservice to the ethos of the story if it did. The reality of dementia is that it doesn’t get worse before it gets better, it just gets worse. Sufferers slowly and painfully fade away into oblivion and their loved ones have to watch from the sidelines, helpless to do anything about it.

I’ve never cried as many times as I did during and after this screening, but please don’t let that put you off. Although on an emotional level it’s not for the faint of heart, anybody with a heart will feel privileged to have witnessed one of the best performances of Anthony Hopkins’ stellar career and one of the most damaging and demoralising real-life issues affecting our ageing population today.

Whether by design or devastating irony, ‘The Father’ is a movie about forgetting, but for me (and no doubt so many others), it’s a movie I will never forget.

5/5 stars

‘The Father’ is in cinemas now!

[minthysugamon]

Everybody wants to Rule the World. (Part 2)

Noble Assistant,Sergeant! Namjoon x Assassin! Reader.

1789! AU

Word Count: 2,111 (angel number go brrr again)

Warnings: Slight misogyny,beheading,blood,death...i think that's all.

(Credit for the Original Photo: @/athenaa. I only edited it a little bit. But all credit goes to the original artist who posted the photo first in it's original version)

(Painting: La liberté guidant le peuple by Eugène Delacroix)

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12 Août,1787. (Flashback)

After reading every word of Voltaire,Maximilien became more and more riled up by the thrill of the revolution. The adrenaline of change was getting the best of him,he had no time to care about his little sister,(Y/n) Robespierre,who would simply block him from getting in the city. The Robespierre family was more than just concerned about their eldest child,the Gem of their family. (Y/n) hated the injustice their father casted upon them. She wanted to learn,he wouldn't let her. Henriette tried to reason her but stubborn,like her brother,she went up in Paris,alone,in the quest of knowledge.

After arriving at Le Marais,her first goal was to find her brother. Nothing more,nothing less. And finding him,she did. But not in his expected state. "Maximilien,laissez moi entrer.¹" A groan was heard from the man but he got up to let his sistet in. "What are you doing here? I told you to stay at home,in Arras. Is it so hard to follow my or father's wishes?" He sighed and pulled a chair out for her. 'How chivalrous.' (Y/n) thought to herself. "Mon frère,i came here to ask you a favor." Her eyes,full of hope,heart racing,the negative answer from him already anticipated. "And what would that favor be? If it's to join some political club,it's a no. And i won't listen to any begging. No is-" "I know. No is no. I don't even want to join those. All i wanted to ask from you is to teach me the art of law."

Maximilien sighed. He knew she will never be accepted as a lawyer,as much as she wanted. In the end,(Y/n) was a woman. Not a male apprentice. But a simple woman. "So...? Will you please teach me...?" Her voice resonated through the small living room,a hint of hope and a dust of desperation sticking to it. "No. I can't. I already taught you everything you had to know. I can't teach you more." Maximilien simply sat down on a chair,looking at her. How could have his sister,a woman from such a delicate mother,turned out like a man? "Is it because i'm a woman?" "It's because you won't be accepted. I'm only doing you a favor here,if you haven't noticed. Ta demande est ridicule. Et tu le sais très bien.² I won't let a Robespierre be turned into laughing stock. Not only your honor depends on it,but our whole family's."

Objecting her brother was the worst thing she could ever do. The man was stubborn and always stuck to his own ideologies for the better or the worst. "But you know-" "STOP IT. NOW. I DON'T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT THAT ANYMORE. I SAID NO. AND NOTHING WILL CHANGE THAT. YOU ARE A WOMAN. KNOW YOUR PLACE FOR GOD'S SAKE." The heavy breathing coming from the eldest was enough to make the atmosphere heavy between them. (Y/n) stood up and put the chair back as if she was never on it. "Alright. Thank you for your time,Maître Robespierre. Je me tâcherai à ne plus vous contre-dire.³" Stepping out of the residence,(Y/n) let the door slam against it's frame. The silence was too heavy around Maximilien. He wanted to tell her he's sorry,but he knew it won't change anything. Her pride was too high for her own good. So he put his aside for once,as unwilling as he was. "Alright. Come back. If you want to learn. You will learn. From me. But don't tell anyone about this. Est-ce clair?⁴"

The young woman's eyes lit up. For the first time,she achieved to coerce something useful out of her brother,something that will be helpful for her future. "Crystal clear,Maximilien." She did a 180 and started walking towards the door of the small and stuffed place the elder was living in,passing right beside him. "So? When do we start? I wanna know everything." An innocent but playful smile spreading on her face as she spoke took Maximilien by surprise. "Quoi?⁵ Not even a simple thank you?" The tone in his voice was laced with fake-hurt. He was annoyed but somewhat proud of her sister's persuasion skills. If she was a man,she would've been a very good lawyer. Putting ultimatums where they belong,it requires skill.

14 Juillet,1789.

After getting some powder,Namjoon was finally recharging his gun,the fact he owed his life to a revolutionist still had him shocked. 'Why?' wasn't his only question though,he wanted to know more about that woman. "COUPEZ-LUI LA TÊTE!⁶" the chant of the crowd grew louder and louder as his foster father was escorted by some peasants. While the sergeant of the troop was laying dead jn the hallway,the squad's organisation itself was frantic,none of them had endured such debauchery before.

"Sir,what should we do? We can't let the colonel down." One of the soldiers finally spoke up after a long moment of silence. His ears were ringing. The loud gun noises made him lose all auditory senses,but he still spoke up despite not being able to think clearly and having no military experience. "Wait here. If i signal the path is cleared,you follow. Divide in two divisions. We can't sacrifice anyone. If anything,i prefer sacrificing myself if there's a chance to lead you into safety. May God be with all of you."

Namjoon had no idea what came over him and moreover had no idea how to command,but he strong leadership De Launay has showed during his younger years may have stuck with him. One thing is sure,he won't commit the error of turning his troops against himself. Maybe getting killed was his destiny after all,but he would do everything in his power to not have the one who raised him killed. After hiding behind a pillar,the man signaled to the first troop to come and hide behind the chariot. The chariot the battle was going on for,the precious gun powder those uncultured men couldn't use. Hell,even him,he was new to the battle but the situation couldn't degrade more.

"Here's what we're going to do. We have to use up all the powder while the second troop can finally get to safety. Negociating with these savages already failed,we have to act." The youngest soldier, Nathanaël du Rhône, looked him in awe, their leader, Kim Namjoon, the man who was once a Stranger, was more worried about their safety than his. The newly appointed Staff Sergeant pointed to Nathanaël. "You. Signal to the others that they can come,then hide and leave. You have more than just a fight to live. The others,you come with me. Hide,aim and charge. I'll signal you when to shoot." De Launay has noticed his son due to his inattention,his hat was in the wrong direction. He simply smiled at the determination of the young chief then mouthed a simple 'You'll be alright son." in his direction while the three man were still escorting him out to the court of the prison.

"Wait....Now. Shoot." And the men acted as Namjoon said,including himself. They fired the shots,simultaneously touching the three who were holding the Colonel. Recharge,aim shoot again all the people who were flocking in the court. Once they had no other choice and were blocked,the hiding spot was discovered too. But he won't let his men down easily,he wasn't raised to do so. "Gather the explosives. We must light them and decimate the crowd or else this hell will never end."

After throwing one of the smoke torches in the crowd,he started running towards his elder, successfully stabbing one of the new detainers in the throat with the bayonette of his shotgun. "Père.⁷You must come. I beg you." De Launay simply nodded a no and smiled "My destiny was to die protecting the king and the prison. Now go before they get you too. You're too young to die." Namjoon wanted to do another round before he saw the head of the Colonel falling,in addition thhe man's blood splattered over his face as he wasn't more than 3 meters away. "Chef. Ils nous ont encerclé⁸. We must go." A new smoke torch was thrown by the youngest soldier on the ground,blinding the revolutionists as he held back his chief from going rampage over the ones who killed the one he called father. "NO I CAN'T. I CAN'T LET HIM DIE." Namjoon screamed frantically as Nathanaël was pulling him by the arm, at the same time asking for help from his troop mates. Two other men came to hold the new and young Sergeant down,escorting him to a hiding place,not wanting to lose their only commandant in this butchery.

15 Juillet,1789.

After staying up all night,the sun was rising. 'Finally', (Y/N) thought to herself. The night was long enough already when she simply had woken up from night terrors and waited for the light of the day to reassure her,but now that she had to wait for her brother, it seemed like an eternity. Sitting on the roof of the house Maître Robespierre lived in,she had the privilege to eat something that many couldn't, an apple. The thought of saving that guy in the early afternoon was prancing around her mind, not fully understanding why she did what she did. 'I should've killed him. Now he's one of my countless problems.' Her inner monologue was eating her up,much like she was munching on the green fruit. Due to the bad harvests of the previous years,it was as sour as her mood.

After finishing the apple,eating the core,even if it was more than just acidic and putting the seeds into a small pocket of her leather pants,she knew she should get down the roof and change back into her normal attire to hide her activity. As long as Maximilien didn't know about anything,she was safe. He wouldn't condone her actions even if she was killing the noblemen he oh so strongly opposed. As murderous as his desires were, the thought of a woman being better than him made his skin crawl. The crowd had finally died down too,people went back to their residences or the small shelter they were at to sleep,it was around two in the morning that the chants started to become more and more quiet and at three,not a single soul was seen wandering the streets. It was although now five in the morning and she knew,her brother would soon come back from the whorehouse he went to. After finally getting into her dress,she went out the door to finally get some bread. 'Oh to be a man and not give a piece of mind about the opinions of others.' she thought as she entered the local bakery.

"Bien le bonjour, mademoiselle⁹ ,early today,i see! Let me guess,the usual or are we changing it up today?" The baker, Jean-Hugues Lefèvre, was known for his kindness towards his costumers although since bread was a missing article nowadays,he always managed to sneak some to the poorest families,giving up his rations to save others. The baker had already started packing the two loaves,as usual until his actions were interrupted by (Y/n)'s voice.  "Just one loaf will be enough,thank you. I'm only buying for my brother,i am going back home today." As he was choosing the best loaf,he raised an eyebrow. "Oh? So soon? It hasn't been two months thought,as you said ten days ago." She smiled awkwardly,not knowing how to engage in the small talk,making herself feel smaller. "Well...i guess the Parisian air made me feel a little bit exthau-" her phrase couldn't be finished as somebody barged into the shop.

"Bonjour, Monsieur Lefèvre." The intruder was a tall man,smelling like gunpowder and cologne "Bonjour, Sergent Kim. Congratulations on your rank. You fought well. I am sorry about what happened with the Colonel. What can i serve you with?" Jean-Hugues gave (Y/N) the loaf as he told her the price and the  another man looked at her. "Three loaves please..." Thoughtful was the only way to describe him once he caught a look of the eyes of the woman,and (Y/N) had a suspicion why,so she ushered herself out of the bakery. "Wait a minute." The man called out. So she turned around "Yes?" Trying to seem confident out of the cape and mask that hid her face yesterday was harder to do than to say. "Haven't we met somewhere?" A genuine curiosity was displayed on his face. As much as she knew the right answer,the lie was necessary. "I don't think so. Have a nice day,Monsieur Lefèvre." And the girl started heading to the Robespierre residence.

Left dumbfounded and with three loaves for his 10 men, Namjoon was thinking about where he had seen those eyes before. "The girl from yesterday."

+

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Translations

¹ Let me enter

² Your request is ridiculous. And you know that well.

³ I'll make sure to never argue with you again.

⁴ Is it clear?

⁵ What?

⁶ Chop his head off!

⁷ Father.

⁸Chief,they have surrounded us.

⁹Well good morning there,Miss.

A/N: Hello there. There will be probably a part 3,but i don't know when. I don't promise it will be before april but i'll try to write it before. Please note that i try to stay as close to history as possible but as this is an AU,there are some modifications here and there. This is pure fiction please do not take this for something real. Thank you. (Only saying because i've gotten some hateful DMs bc of the first part).

[aion-rsa]

Birdgirl Flips The Script On Harvey Birdman And Superhero Culture

https://ift.tt/3fGXSMf

This article contains no spoilers and is based on the first two episodes of Birdgirl.

Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law was one of the five original series to debut back on Adult Swim when the programming block was first created. The network has evolved in considerable ways since its inception, but even back then Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law was an important series that helped establish the acerbic and dadaist style of humor that continues to define Adult Swim to this day. 

Now, 20 years after the premiere of Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law and Adult Swim as a whole, Birdgirl returns to this beloved universe, appropriately enough as Adult Swim heads into a new phase. Birdgirl is a delight that’s a worthy successor to one of Adult Swim’s flagship programs, but it’s also its own entity that has something very different to say about bureaucratic superheroes in bird costumes.

One of the smartest things that Birdgirl does is embrace a self-aware attitude where it’s able to have a conversation about the legacy of these Harvey Birdman characters while also commenting upon the legacy of superhero stories. In doing so, Birdgirl becomes a show that’s about honoring the past and using it to establish a unique identity that has a viable future. Judy Ken Sebben’s Birdgirl was easily one of the most chaotic characters in Harvey Birdman and there’s an understandable concern around a series that revolves around her when the universe already has a breakneck pace behind its jokes. Birdgirl is aware that too much Birdgirl can be a bad thing and devises a clever way to remedy this that doesn’t cripple Birdgirl’s character.

Harvey Birdman can get ridiculous and impulsive, but he typically functions as the straight man of his series. Birdgirl is the wild card of whatever room she’s in and she’s given a more grounded supporting cast to balance out her mania, whereas Birdman often needs to make sense of the exaggerated personalities in his inner circle. There’s a subtle, yet perfect, touch during the Birdgirl theme song where the bass line is just Judy’s nonstop interior monologue of doubt. Even the series’ theme is a place where Judy’s insecurities mix together with Birdgirl’s brash confidence.

These supporting characters that compose Judy’s “Birdteam” are all entertaining simply because they all are such contrasts from Birdgirl. The weirdest characters of the lot are Dog With Bucket Hat, who is not Droopy but brings the Hanna-Barbera character to mind, and Meredith the Mind Taker. It’s nice to see that Birdgirl doesn’t fill itself with needless vestiges of the past. It’d be very easy to make Peter Potamus or Peanut some carryover cast member from the old guard, but instead Birdgirl confidently moves forward. Meredith even functions as an example of how to take a concept from Harvey Birdman and update it in a more modern way. Birdgirl also allows its supporting cast to take the lead at times, whereas Harvey Birdman still usually had to have Harvey at the center of everything or at least provide an excuse around his absence and why someone else needs to step in.

This direction is ultimately positive for Birdgirl, but fans of the original may lament the utter lack of Hanna-Barbera connections when that’s what makes Harvey Birdman such a clever series in the first place. It serves as a brilliant deconstruction of both vintage Hanna-Barbera cartoons as well as washed up superheroes. That angle is admittedly less original now, but it still has a stronger hook than Birdgirl, which focuses purely on the dichotomy between the two sides of Judy’s life, almost in a Jekyll/Hyde sense. That’s considerably different to the original Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, so I can understand the appeal of this angle rather than Birdgirl just retreading the former series’ greatest hits. 

Harvey Birdman: Attorney General is an excellent special that doesn’t rely on a cavalcade of Hanna-Barbera references and does establish a new direction for the property that works and shows that this is possible. It’s just unfortunate timing that Birdgirl arrives at a moment where the market is utterly drowning in superhero content and it’s now difficult to find a point of view that still feels fresh. 

Read more

TV

Harvey Birdman, Attorney General: The Creators Break Down The Hero’s Star-Spangled Return

By Daniel Kurland

This does make Birdgirl feel slightly more disposable, rather than an aggressive successor to one of Adult Swim’s original flagship programs, but it’s still overflowing with strong, strange jokes. Birdgirl’s initial premise may cause eyes to roll in a way that Harvey Birdman didn’t, but there’s at least a solid foundation underneath it all that makes sure that these episodes are always entertaining. There’s a greater focus on character that helps Birdgirl connect on an emotional level and not just function as a joke machine. 

The pacing and energy to Birdgirl’s comedy is just as chaotic as it was in Harvey Birdman. Most jokes operate with a Rube Goldbergian sensibility where each gag triggers subsequent punchlines at the perfect moments. Characters from different scenes finish each other’s thoughts and comedy builds through the connected visual gags that fill out the background. There’s such a meticulous nature to the progression of each joke and the gags are allowed to drive the storytelling forward. Scenes in Harvey Birdman can almost feel overwhelming due to how much is going on and how the show can cram a half hour’s worth of comedy into 11 minutes. That’s harder to not just sustain for a half-hour program, but also to tolerate. Birdgirl reaches the right tempo where episodes are packed with gags, but it never feels like it’s too much to process. 

Another surprising turn for Birdgirl is that the series briefly gets into the superhero’s origins and why Judy first adopted this alternate personality. It’s quite a sweet backstory that adds legitimate depth to someone who’s always been a caricature of a figure in the past. Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law posits that Birdman’s law career is his twilight chapter after his retirement as a superhero. Space Ghost Coast to Coast operates off of the same general premise. Heroics remain a major part of Judy Ken Sebben’s life and so Birdgirl forces her to juggle these two very different lifestyles. 

The reflexive twist to all of this is that Judy isn’t a normal person who dreams about being a superhero. Birdgirl is a superhero who longs to be taken seriously as a CEO figure. Her life has no lack of danger, but what she can benefit from is a gamma ray blast of responsibility. Birdgirl broaches the idea that Judy can only save one person at a time as a superhero, but as a corporate CEO she’s able to technically help millions at once. It’s a realization that’s said somewhat glibly, but it does feel integral to the core message of Birdgirl.

The superhero nature of Birdgirl is never fully removed from the series and it typically finds a way to naturally connect with Judy’s office affairs. Judy’s Birdteam typically unite to resolve whatever radical madness is at hand, but they still function more like office workers than Avengers. This does help give Birdgirl a certain level of freedom that Harvey Birdman can sometimes lack. 

Birdman is far from predictable, but the courtroom structure largely defines nearly every episode. There’s a wider variety of material for Birdgirl to tackle as Judy deals with assistant woes, company secrets, corporate espionage, or even broader problems like the literal headquarters of Sebben & Sebben gaining sentience and developing a desire to murder Judy. The office backdrop turns out to not be a restrictive environment for Birdgirl since Sebben & Sebben is responsible for an infinite melange of products.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Birdgirl is an exciting new Adult Swim venture that’s able to successfully carry on the unhinged atmosphere of the original Harvey Birdman while it takes the material to entirely different places. There may be less cache to Birdgirl since it’s not steeped in references to classic cartoons, but the work that it does to make Birdgirl and company new classic characters is an acceptable trade. Harvey Birdman grows better each season and gains a better grasp on how to tell its stories. There’s a lot of potential in Birdgirl and hopefully it gets the same opportunity to grow and help anchor the network’s next wave of programming.

The post Birdgirl Flips The Script On Harvey Birdman And Superhero Culture appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[antoine-roquentin]

ON DECEMBER 11, 1981 in El Salvador, a Salvadoran military unit created and trained by the U.S. Army began slaughtering everyone they could find in a remote village called El Mozote. Before murdering the women and girls, the soldiers raped them repeatedly, including some as young as 10 years old, and joked that their favorites were the 12-year-olds. One witness described a soldier tossing a 3-year-old child into the air and impaling him with his bayonet. The final death toll was over 800 people.

The next day, December 12, was the first day on the job for Elliott Abrams as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs in the Reagan administration. Abrams snapped into action, helping to lead a cover-up of the massacre. News reports of what had happened, Abrams told the Senate, were “not credible,” and the whole thing was being “significantly misused” as propaganda by anti-government guerillas.

This past Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo named Abrams as America’s special envoy for Venezuela. According to Pompeo, Abrams “will have responsibility for all things related to our efforts to restore democracy” in the oil-rich nation.

The choice of Abrams sends a clear message to Venezuela and the world: The Trump administration intends to brutalize Venezuela, while producing a stream of unctuous rhetoric about America’s love for democracy and human rights. Combining these two factors — the brutality and the unctuousness — is Abrams’s core competency.

Abrams previously served in a multitude of positions in the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations, often with titles declaring their focus on morality. First, he was assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs (in 1981); then the State Department “human rights” position mentioned above (1981-85); assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs (1985-89); senior director for democracy, human rights, and international operations for the National Security Council (2001-05); and finally, Bush’s deputy national security adviser for global democracy strategy (2005-09).

In these positions, Abrams participated in many of the most ghastly acts of U.S. foreign policy from the past 40 years, all the while proclaiming how deeply he cared about the foreigners he and his friends were murdering. Looking back, it’s uncanny to see how Abrams has almost always been there when U.S. actions were at their most sordid.

ABRAMS, A GRADUATE of both Harvard College and Harvard Law School, joined the Reagan administration in 1981, at age 33. He soon received a promotion due to a stroke of luck: Reagan wanted to name Ernest Lefever as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, but Lefever’s nomination ran aground when two of his own brothers revealed that he believed African-Americans were “inferior, intellectually speaking.” A disappointed Reagan was forced to turn to Abrams as a second choice.

A key Reagan administration concern at the time was Central America — in particular, the four adjoining nations of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. All had been dominated by tiny, cruel, white elites since their founding, with a century’s worth of help from U.S. interventions. In each country, the ruling families saw their society’s other inhabitants as human-shaped animals, who could be harnessed or killed as needed.

But shortly before Reagan took office, Anastasio Somoza, the dictator of Nicaragua and a U.S. ally, had been overthrown by a socialist revolution. The Reaganites rationally saw this as a threat to the governments of Nicaragua’s neighbors. Each country had large populations who similarly did not enjoy being worked to death on coffee plantations or watching their children die of easily treated diseases. Some would take up arms, and some would simply try to keep their heads down, but all, from the perspective of the cold warriors in the White House, were likely “communists” taking orders from Moscow. They needed to be taught a lesson.

The extermination of El Mozote was just a drop in the river of what happened in El Salvador during the 1980s. About 75,000 Salvadorans died during what’s called a “civil war,” although almost all the killing was done by the government and its associated death squads.

The numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. El Salvador is a small country, about the size of New Jersey. The equivalent number of deaths in the U.S. would be almost 5 million. Moreover, the Salvadoran regime continually engaged in acts of barbarism so heinous that there is no contemporary equivalent, except perhaps ISIS. In one instance, a Catholic priest reported that a peasant woman briefly left her three small children in the care of her mother and sister. When she returned, she found that all five had been decapitated by the Salvadoran National Guard. Their bodies were sitting around a table, with their hands placed on their heads in front of them, “as though each body was stroking its own head.” The hand of one, a toddler, apparently kept slipping off her small head, so it had been nailed onto it. At the center of the table was a large bowl full of blood.

Criticism of U.S. policy at the time was not confined to the left. During this period, Charles Maechling Jr., who had led State Department planning for counterinsurgencies during the 1960s, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that the U.S. was supporting “Mafia-like oligarchies” in El Salvador and elsewhere and was directly complicit in “the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads.”

Abrams was one of the architects of the Reagan administration’s policy of full-throated support for the Salvadoran government. He had no qualms about any of it and no mercy for anyone who escaped the Salvadoran abattoir. In 1984, sounding exactly like Trump officials today, he explained that Salvadorans who were in the U.S. illegally should not receive any kind of special status. “Some groups argue that illegal aliens who are sent back to El Salvador meet persecution and often death,” he told the House of Representatives. “Obviously, we do not believe these claims or we would not deport these people.”

Even when out of office, 10 years after the El Mozote massacre, Abrams expressed doubt that anything untoward had occurred there. In 1993, when a United Nations truth commission found that 95 percent of the acts of violence that had taken place in El Salvador since 1980 had been committed by Abrams’s friends in the Salvadoran government, he called what he and his colleagues in the Reagan administration had done a “fabulous achievement.”

The situation in Guatemala during the 1980s was much the same, as were Abrams’s actions. After the U.S. engineered the overthrow of Guatemala’s democratically elected president in 1954, the country had descended into a nightmare of revolving military dictatorships. Between 1960 and 1996, in another “civil war,” 200,000 Guatemalans were killed — the equivalent of maybe 8 million people in America. A U.N. commission later found that the Guatemalan state was responsible for 93 percent of the human rights violations.

Efraín Ríos Montt, who served as Guatemala’s president in the early 1980s, was found guilty in 2013, by Guatemala’s own justice system, of committing genocide against the country’s indigenous Mayans. During Ríos Montt’s administration, Abrams called for the lifting of an embargo on U.S. arms shipments to Guatemala, claiming that Ríos Montt had “brought considerable progress.” The U.S. had to support the Guatemalan government, Abrams argued, because “if we take the attitude ‘don’t come to us until you’re perfect, we’re going to walk away from this problem until Guatemala has a perfect human rights record,’ then we’re going to be leaving in the lurch people there who are trying to make progress.” One example of the people making an honest effort, according to Abrams, was Ríos Montt. Thanks to Ríos Montt, “there has been a tremendous change, especially in the attitude of the government toward the Indian population.” (Ríos Montt’s conviction was later set aside by Guatemala’s highest civilian court, and he died before a new trial could finish.)

Abrams would become best known for his enthusiastic involvement with the Reagan administration’s push to overthrow Nicaragua’s revolutionary Sandinista government. He advocated for a full invasion of Nicaragua in 1983, immediately after the successful U.S. attack on the teeny island nation of Grenada. When Congress cut off funds to the Contras, an anti-Sandinista guerrilla force created by the U.S., Abrams successfully persuaded the Sultan of Brunei to cough up $10 million for the cause. Unfortunately, Abrams, acting under the code name “Kenilworth,” provided the Sultan with the wrong Swiss bank account number, so the money was wired instead to a random lucky recipient.

Abrams was questioned by Congress about his Contra-related activities and lied voluminously. He later pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information. One was about the Sultan and his money, and another was about Abrams’s knowledge of a Contra resupply C-123 plane that had been shot down in 1986. In a nice historical rhyme with his new job in the Trump administration, Abrams had previously attempted to obtain two C-123s for the Contras from the military of Venezuela.

Abrams received a sentence of 100 hours of community service and perceived the whole affair as an injustice of cosmic proportions. He soon wrote a book in which he described his inner monologue about his prosecutors, which went: “You miserable, filthy bastards, you bloodsuckers!” He was later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush on the latter’s way out the door after he lost the 1992 election.

While it’s been forgotten now, before America invaded Panama to oust Manuel Noriega in 1989, he was a close ally of the U.S. — despite the fact the Reagan administration knew he was a large-scale drug trafficker.

In 1985, Hugo Spadafora, a popular figure in Panama and its one-time vice minister for health, believed he had obtained proof of Noriega’s involvement in cocaine smuggling. He was on a bus on his way to Panama City to release it publicly when he was seized by Noriega’s thugs.

According to the book “Overthrow” by former New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer, U.S. intelligence picked up Noriega giving his underlings the go-ahead to put Spadafora down like “a rabid dog.” They tortured Spadafora for a long night and then sawed off his head while he was still alive. When Spadafora’s body was found, his stomach was full of blood he’d swallowed.

This was so horrific that it got people’s attention. But Abrams leapt to Noriega’s defense, blocking the U.S. ambassador to Panama from increasing pressure on the Panamanian leader. When Spadafora’s brother persuaded North Carolina’s hyper-conservative GOP Sen. Jesse Helms to hold hearings on Panama, Abrams told Helms that Noriega was “being really helpful to us” and was “really not that big a problem. … The Panamanians have promised they are going to help us with the Contras. If you have the hearings, it’ll alienate them.”

Abrams also engaged in malfeasance for no discernible reason, perhaps just to stay in shape. In 1986 a Colombian journalist named Patricia Lara was invited to the U.S. to attend a dinner honoring writers who’d advanced “inter-American understanding and freedom of information.” When Lara arrived at New York’s Kennedy airport, she was taken into custody, then put on a plane back home. Soon afterward, Abrams went on “60 Minutes” to claim that Lara was a member of the “ruling committees” of M-19, a Colombian guerrilla movement. She also, according to Abrams, was ”an active liaison” between M-19 ”and the Cuban secret police.”

Given the frequent right-wing paramilitary violence against Colombian reporters, this painted a target on Lara’s back. There was no evidence then that Abrams’s assertions were true — Colombia’s own conservative government denied it — and none has appeared since.

Abrams’s never-ending, shameless deceptions wore downAmerican reporters. “They said that black was white,” Joanne Omang at the Washington Post later explained about Abrams and his White House colleague Robert McFarlane. “Although I had used all my professional resources I had misled my readers.” Omang was so exhausted by the experience that she quit her job trying to describe the real world to try to write fiction.

Post-conviction Abrams was seen as damaged goods who couldn’t return to government. This underestimated him. Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., the one-time chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tangled fiercely with Abrams in 1989 over the proper U.S. policy toward Noriega once it become clear he was more trouble than he was worth. Crowe strongly opposed a bright idea that Abrams had come up with: that the U.S. should establish a government-in-exile on Panamanian soil, which would require thousands of U.S. troops to guard. This was deeply boneheaded, Crowe said, but it didn’t matter. Crowe presciently issued a warning about Abrams: “This snake’s hard to kill.”

To the surprise of Washington’s more naive insiders, Abrams was back in business soon after George W. Bush entered the White House. It might have been difficult to get Senate approval for someone who had deceived Congress, so Bush put him in a slot at the National Security Council — where no legislative branch approval was needed. Just like 20 years before, Abrams was handed a portfolio involving “democracy” and “human rights.”

By the beginning of 2002, Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, had become deeply irritating to the Bush White House, which was filled with veterans of the battles of the 1980s. That April, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Chavez was pushed out of power in a coup. Whether and how the U.S. was involved is not yet known, and probably won’t be for decades until the relevant documents are declassified. But based on the previous 100 years, it would be surprising indeed if America didn’t play any behind-the-scenes role. For what it’s worth, the London Observer reported at the time that “the crucial figure around the coup was Abrams” and he “gave a nod” to the plotters. In any case, Chavez had enough popular support that he was able to regroup and return to office within days.

Abrams apparently did play a key role in squelching a peace proposal from Iran in 2003, just after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The plan arrived by fax, and should have gone to Abrams, and then to Condoleezza Rice, at the time Bush’s national security adviser. Instead it somehow never made it to Rice’s desk. When later asked about this, Abrams’s spokesperson replied that he “had no memory of any such fax.” (Abrams, like so many people who thrive at the highest level of politics, has a terrible memory for anything political. In 1984, he told Ted Koppel that he couldn’t recall for sure whether the U.S. had investigated reports of massacres in El Salvador. In 1986, when asked by the Senate Intelligence Committee if he’d discussed fundraising for the contras with anyone on the NSC’s staff, he likewise couldn’t remember.)

Abrams was also at the center of another attempt to thwart the outcome of a democratic election, in 2006. Bush had pushed for legislative elections in the West Bank and Gaza in order to give Fatah, the highly corrupt Palestinian organization headed by Yasser Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, some badly needed legitimacy. To everyone’s surprise, Fatah’s rival Hamas won, giving it the right to form a government.

This unpleasant outburst of democracy was not acceptable to the Bush administration, in particular Rice and Abrams. They hatched a plan to form a Fatah militia to take over the Gaza Strip, and crush Hamas in its home territory. As reported by Vanity Fair, this involved a great deal of torture and executions. But Hamas stole a march on Fatah with their own ultra-violence. David Wurmser, a neoconservative who worked for Dick Cheney at the time, told Vanity Fair, “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen.” Yet ever since, these events have been turned upside down in the U.S. media, with Hamas being presented as the aggressors.

While the U.S. plan was not a total success, it also was not a total failure from the perspective of America and Israel. The Palestinian civil war split the West Bank and Gaza into two entities, with rival governments in both. For the past 13 years, there’s been little sign of the political unity necessary for Palestinians to get a decent life for themselves.

Abrams then left office with Bush’s exit. But now he’s back for a third rotation through the corridors of power – with the same kinds of schemes he’s executed the first two times.

Looking back at Abrams’s lifetime of lies and savagery, it’s hard to imagine what he could say to justify it. But he does have a defense for everything he’s done — and it’s a good one.

In 1995, Abrams appeared on “The Charlie Rose Show” with Allan Nairn, one of the most knowledgable American reporters about U.S. foreign policy. Nairn noted that George H.W. Bush had once discussed putting Saddam Hussein on trial for crimes against humanity. This was a good idea, said Nairn, but “if you’re serious, you have to be even-handed” — which would mean also prosecuting officials like Abrams.

Abrams chuckled at the ludicrousness of such a concept. That would require, he said, “putting all the American officials who won the Cold War in the dock.”

[patriotsnet]

Why Do Republicans Still Back Trump

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-do-republicans-still-back-trump/

Why Do Republicans Still Back Trump

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Importantly, Trump is increasingly fixating on the Republican-backed audits as he pushes the lie that he won the election. He needs to keep talking about this lie because he faces an existential political threat: His brand is based on winning, but he lost. Winners don’t lose, particularly winners who promise their fans that “we will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning.”

Since When Do Republicans Care More About Criminals In Jail Than The Cops Who Put Them There Since Donald Trump

U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell pauses during his testimony at the first hearing of the select committee investigating the deadly storming of the Capitol, in Washington on Tuesday, July 27, 2021. “The GOP overwhelmingly stuck with Trump, perpetuating his sick mythology about a day we all saw with our own eyes,” writes The New York Times opinion columnist Maureen Dowd.

  | Aug. 3, 2021, 1:00 p.m.

Washington • It was, I must admit, a virtuoso performance by Sean Hannity.

Not since the sheriff in “Blazing Saddles” put a gun to his own head and took himself hostage has anyone executed such a nutty loop de loop.

Opening his show Tuesday night, Hannity gave a monologue defending the police . “Attacks on law enforcement are never and should never be acceptable ever, not at the Capitol and not anywhere,” he declaimed.

Yet Mr. Pro Police had nary a word for the four police officers who had appeared before Congress that morning to describe going to “hell and back,” as a Washington police officer, Michael Fanone, put it, as they relived the scarring, desperate hours of Jan. 6 when they were attacked by Trump’s mob .

When it came down to it, the question of whether Republican lawmakers in the House would side with Donald Trump or the police who risked their lives defending them, it wasn’t even a close call for the law-and-order party.

Since when do Republicans care more about criminals in jail than the cops who put them there? Since when do they coddle domestic terrorists?

We Looked At Which Gop Primary Voters Are Most Likely To Vote Based On Support For His False Election Claims

Many Republican senators, watching the harrowing footage of the Jan. 6Capitol insurrection played at Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, were moved to tears, presumably remembering their own experiences that day. Yet it did not persuade many of them to vote to convict the former president on the charge of inciting the insurrection. Even though many prominent Republicans, including Sen. Mitch McConnell , appeared to want a clean break with the president after the insurrection, those who turned on Trump have been rebuked by the party’s grass roots. And Trump has threatened to recruit and support primary challengers against Republicans who do not line up behind him.

So were the votes against conviction motivated by a desire to win primaries and, therefore, reelection? Our research shows that the situation is more complicated than that. The Republican rank and file is deeply divided over Trump and his false claims about a stolen 2020 election. This creates a minefield for Republican members of Congress.

Why Republicans haven’t abandoned Trumpism

Opiniona Republican Civil War Is Coming Rudy Giuliani’s Georgia Crusade Is Just The Beginning

After the Jan. 6 insurrection, moderate Republicans started to walk away from the party. Even some conservatives who stuck with Trump all through his presidency couldn’t stomach the insurrection. Currently, 53 percent of Republican voters believe Trump won the election. Similarly, in a national poll last month by Quinnipiac University, 66 percent of people who classified themselves as Republicans said they want Trump to run for president in 2024.

The fact that Trump still controls so many Republican voters explains the assertion by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., that the Republican Party can’t “move forward” without Trump. Speeding up the Republican Party’s hardening into a right-wing extremist party is Trump’s demand that anyone who doesn’t toe the line and repeat the lie be ousted and exiled.

Trump advisers and confidants have many reasons not to push back. For one, the former president often rebuffs advisers who tell him to drop the whole stolen election story. But those in Trump’s inner circle also need to keep voters riled up if Trump’s political future — and presumably theirs — is to continue. Dangling the possibility that Trump will be reinstated in August accomplishes this.

A Disturbing Number Of Republicans Still Believe All The Lies Donald Trump Tells Them

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One of the enduring legacies of Donald Trump’s runs for office and four years as president is the phenomenon in which a shameless politician can tell a brazen, easily fact-checkable lie and his or her supporters will buy it without question, even when evidence to the contrary is screaming in their faces. The earliest example of this was the claim Trump made when announcing his 2015 bid for office—that he was going to build a wall and Mexico was going to pay for it, an absurd lie that he was still telling in the fall of 2020. And of course an equally audacious lie was the one he started spreading last November and hasn’t stopped spewing to date—that he won the presidential election and a second term was stolen from him.

Obviously, the most chilling repercussion of Trump’s supporters believing he, and not Joe Biden, won the election, was the January 6 attack on the Capitol, an insurrection that left five people dead and which Trump, in his final tweet before being kicked off the platform, described as “the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.” And three months after the fact, a majority of Republicans still believe the Big Lie.

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A Large Share Of Republicans Want Trump To Remain Head Of The Party Cnbc Survey Shows

A CNBC survey conducted in the days before former President Donald Trump‘s impeachment trial finds a large share of Republicans want him to remain head of their party, but a majority of Americans want him out of politics.

The CNBC All-America Economic Survey shows 54% of Americans want Trump “to remove himself from politics entirely.” That was the sentiment of 81% of Democrats and 47% of Independents, but only 26% of Republicans.

When it comes to Republicans, 74% want him to stay active in some way, including 48% who want him to remain head of the Republican Party, 11% who want him to start a third party, and 12% who say he should remain active in politics but not as head of any party.

“If we’re talking about Donald Trump’s future, at the moment, the survey shows he still has this strong core support within his own party who really want him to continue to be their leader,” said Jay Campbell, a partner with Hart Research and the Democratic pollster for the survey.

But Micah Roberts, the survey’s Republican pollster, and a partner with Public Opinion Strategies, emphasized the change from when Trump was president. Polls before the election regularly showed Trump with GOP approval ratings around 90%, meaning at least some Republicans have defected from Trump.

Squawk on the Street

Trump Mike Lindell And Why The August Election Conspiracy Should Worry Republicans

In late May, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast, “War Room,” and said: “Donald Trump, I believe, will be back in by the end of August.” He also said that eventually even liberals such as Rachel Maddow would admit that the election was stolen. Lindell’s bizarre theory is that all Team Trump needs is a shred of proof of election fraud to overturn the entire election. Trump and others are watching the Republican-backed audit in Arizona because they believe in a “domino theory” — if Arizona ballots can be proven to be fraudulent, election results in other battleground states that President Joe Biden won can also be overturned.

There is, of course, no legal or factual basis backing up any of this.

Lindell’s bizarre theory is that all Team Trump needs is a shred of proof of election fraud to overturn the entire election.

‘this Was A Scam’: In Recorded Call Trump Pushed Official To Overturn Georgia Vote

It’s worth noting that, even without Georgia, Trump won 13 states where slavery had once been legal and these states provided nearly 70% of his Electoral College votes.

The move to the right, and the focus on the South, have been the route to renewed success for Republicans again and again.

It was there Trump began his big rally strategy nearly six years ago. It was there he would emerge as the clear front-runner for the nomination in 2016 by winning South Carolina’s primary, dominating among the staunchest conservatives in that legendary bastion of Southern independence.

So it seemed more than appropriate that South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham would be the first Republican senator summoned to confer with Trump about the party’s plans after the impeachment trial ended. And appropriate that the meeting took place at Mar-a-Lago, in Florida, where Trump has relocated his legal residence and political operation.

If Trump is to rise again, it will once again be as a born-again conservative and an adopted son of the South. And if the next Republican is not Trump, nearly all the top contenders to succeed him are from states with at least one college football team in the Southeastern Conference.

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Trump Blasts Mcconnell And His Leadership In Lengthy Response To Recent Criticism

Where will the party turn in its hour of crisis? If the past is any guide, it will turn in two directions: to the right, and to the South. These have been the wellsprings of strength and support that have brought the party back from the brink in recent decades.

That was the strategy that led to Richard Nixon’s elections as president in 1968 and 1972, and it was still working for Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

Solidifying the South and energizing conservatives were also crucial factors in the Republican tsunami of 1994, when the GOP surged to majorities in Congress and in statehouses. That hamstrung the remainder of Bill Clinton’s presidency and presaged the election of Republican George W. Bush in 2000.

It was a lesson not lost on Trump. While not even a Republican until late in life, he started his primary campaign billboarding the party’s most conservative positions on taxes, trade, immigration and abortion. And the first of his rallies to draw a crowd in the tens of thousands was in a football stadium in Mobile, Ala., two months after he declared his candidacy in the summer of 2015.

Whether the next standard-bearer for the GOP is Trump himself or someone else, there is little doubt the playbook will be the same.

Low points, then turnarounds

Perhaps the most discouraging of these for the GOP was Johnson’s tidal wave, which carried in the biggest majorities Democrats in Congress had enjoyed since the heyday of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.

Why Do Republicans Still Back Trump The Answer Is Simple: Attitude And Gratitude

Scott Jennings | Los Angeles Times

Why do Republicans stick with Donald Trump?

It’s a question I’m asked again and again by Democrats, “Never Trumpers”, and journalists. But the answer is simple.   Attitude and Gratitude.

For years, Republican voters wanted someone — anyone — to come along and do two things: Stick it to the Clintons and punch back against the media-Democratic Party alliance that fires on every Republican brave enough to stick a head out of the foxhole.

If you attended any GOP fundraiser or grassroots event between 2000 and 2016 — and I went to hundreds — you heard this sentiment over and over. And over. And over.

The secret sauce is Trump’s continued deliverance of an attitude for which Republicans thirsted for years.

For Republicans, it seemed like those awful Clintons got to play by a different set of rules than the rest of us. And they always seemed so smug about it. Many had tried and failed to oppose them. The first Bush and Bob Dole, decent men and dedicated public servants, were steamrolled by the Clintons in ’90s.

Sure, we had George W. Bush after Clinton was termed out, and Obama managed to knock Hillary down a peg in 2008. But she still wound up Secretary of State while Bill traveled the world, racking up speaking fees and foundation tributes that would embarrass Croesus himself. Damn those Clintons.

The natural conclusion of this pent-up anger finally boiled over in 2016!

Have Expressed Reluctance Or Misgivings But Havent Openly Dropped Their Backing

Paul Ryan and John Boehner, the former speakers of the House: Both have expressed their dislike of the president, but have not said whom they will support in November.

John Kelly, a former chief of staff to the president: Mr. Kelly has not said whom he plans to vote for, but did say he wished “we had some additional choices.”

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska: She has said that she’s grappling with whether to support Mr. Trump in November. She told reporters on Capitol Hill in June: “I am struggling with it. I have struggled with it for a long time.”

She said: “I think right now, as we are all struggling to find ways to express the words that need to be expressed appropriately, questions about who I’m going to vote for or not going to vote for, I think, are distracting at the moment. I know people might think that’s a dodge, but I think there are important conversations that we need to have as an American people among ourselves about where we are right now.”

Mark Sanford, a former congressman and governor of South Carolina: Mr. Sanford briefly challenged the president in this cycle’s Republican primary, and said last year that he would support Mr. Trump if the president won the nomination .

That has since changed.

“He’s treading on very thin ice,” Mr. Sanford said in June, worrying that the president is threatening the stability of the country.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

Republicans Still Orbiting Trump Dark Star Fail To Derail Bidens First 100 Days

Trump continues to exert a massive gravitational pull on the party while the president forges ahead with ambitious agenda

Last modified on Tue 27 Apr 2021 07.01 BST

For Democrats it has been a hundred days of sweeping legislation, barrier-breaking appointments and daring to dream big. For Republicans, a hundred days in the political wilderness.

The party that just four years ago controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress now finds itself shut out of power and struggling to find its feet. As Joe Biden forges ahead with ambitions to shift the political paradigm, Republicans still have a Donald Trump problem.

The former US president remains the unofficial leader of the party and exerts a massive gravitational pull on its senators, representatives, governors and state parties. Obsessed with “culture wars” and voter fraud, the Trump distortion field has made it difficult for Republicans to move on.

“Trump is like a fire,” said Ed Rogers, a political consultant and a veteran of the Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush administrations. “Too close and you get burned. Too far away, you’re out in the cold. So the party spends a lot of time talking about the fire, managing the fire, orbiting the fire. It takes a lot of energy out of the party.”

It’s a lot easier to grift on people’s fears of other people and prey on their concerns about culture wars that really don’t exist

Trump is still sucking all of the oxygen out of the room for Republicans

‘combative Tribal Angry’: Newt Gingrich Set The Stage For Trump Journalist Says

All these factors combined to produce a windfall for Republicans all over the country in the midterms of 1994, but it was a watershed election in the South. For more than a century after Reconstruction, Democrats had held a majority of the governorships and of the Senate and House seats in the South. Even as the region became accustomed to voting Republican for president, this pattern had held at the statewide and congressional levels.

But in November 1994, in a single day, the majority of Southern governorships, Senate seats and House seats shifted to the Republicans. That majority has held ever since, with more legislative seats and local offices shifting to the GOP as well. The South is now the home base of the Republican Party.

The 2020 aftermath

No wonder that in contesting the results in six swing states he lost, Trump seems to have worked hardest on Georgia. If he had won there, he still would have lost the Electoral College decisively. But as the third most populous Southern state, and the only Southern state to change its choice from 2016, it clearly held special significance.

Arizona Election Official Reacts To ‘check Your Six’ Threat From Republican

There was an exchange Thursday between Fox News’ John Roberts and Texas Rep. Kevin Brady that is remarkably telling about just how lost the Republican Party is at the moment.

Roberts: “President Donald Trump says the ‘Big Lie’ was the results of the 2020 election. Liz Cheney says, no, the ‘Big Lie’ was suggesting that the 2020 election was stolen. Between the two of them, who is right?”Brady: “I’ll leave that dispute to them.”alreadyhe is retiring

In each episode of his weekly YouTube show, Chris Cillizza will delve a little deeper into the surreal world of politics. Click to subscribe!

The Point: Political courage is in short supply among Republican elected officials these days. Very short supply.

Why Has No Trump Ally Faced Consequences For Trying To Overturn An Election

His solution is to insist that he won. To do this, he and his allies have devised an elaborate alternate reality in which he won the election but it was stolen from him through voter fraud.

Similarly, how does a would-be authoritarian retain power after having been ousted from office? Trump figured that one out, too: remain relevant by retaining control over the Republican Party. His election lies are a big part of this strategy, as well. It becomes self-fulfilling. The more people there are who believe the election was stolen, the more real it feels to Trump and the more he hammers the point home in speeches and blog posts.

List Of Republicans Who Opposed The Donald Trump 2020 Presidential Campaign

This article is part of a series about

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This is a list of Republicans and conservatives who opposed the re-election of incumbent Donald Trump, the 2020 Republican Party nominee for President of the United States. Among them are former Republicans who left the party in 2016 or later due to their opposition to Trump, those who held office as a Republican, Republicans who endorsed a different candidate, and Republican presidential primary election candidates that announced opposition to Trump as the presumptive nominee. Over 70 former senior Republican national security officials and 61 additional senior officials have also signed onto a statement declaring, “We are profoundly concerned about our nation’s security and standing in the world under the leadership of Donald Trump. The President has demonstrated that he is dangerously unfit to serve another term.”

A group of former senior U.S. government officials and conservatives—including from the Reagan, Bush 41, Bush 43, and Trump administrations have formed The Republican Political Alliance for Integrity and Reform to, “focus on a return to principles-based governing in the post-Trump era.”

A third group of Republicans, Republican Voters Against Trump was launched in May 2020 has collected over 500 testimonials opposing Donald Trump.

Opinionwe Want To Hear What You Think Please Submit A Letter To The Editor

Such an embrace of insanity creates a cycle in which the Republican Party sheds itself of nonbelievers, finds ways to keep the true believers angry and engaged and unhinges itself even more thoroughly from reality and becomes, arguably, increasingly dangerous. The result is that conspiracy theorists like Mike Lindell have somehow become influential, despite their very clear record of belligerent gibberish. And Trump, as he has been for five-plus years now, remains at the center of the Republican Party as it veers deeper into a made-up reality.

Related:

On Trump Approval Asking Why Reveals Differences By Education Within Gop

Many pollsters, including our team here at SurveyMonkey, track President Trump’s approval rating, which has fallen to an all-time low. We wanted to delve deeper—to ask respondents not just whether they approve or disapprove of the job Donald Trump is doing as president, but why.

We did this in the simplest way possible: by immediately following our question on presidential approval with the open-ended question “Why?” This way, we can get explanations in respondents’ own words as to how they feel about our current Commander in Chief.

Republican Approvers: “Kept Promises” —  Republican Disapprovers: “Childish”

In SurveyMonkey’s most recent Trump approval update, 59% of people said they disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president.

What’s making these Republicans frustrated enough to split with their own party? To find out, we used structural topic modeling to explore how different groups of people explained their various reasons for approving or disapproving of President Trump. Structural topic modeling is a machine learning technique that discovers themes or “topics” within a large collection of responses, then predicts the prevalence of these topics according to certain respondent characteristics .

The graph below presents the differences in prevalence of various topics mentioned in response to our “Why?” follow-up, comparing responses among Republicans by whether they approve or disapprove of Trump’s performance as president .

Most Republicans Still Believe 2020 Election Was Stolen From Trump Poll

May opinion poll finds that 53% of Republicans believe Trump is the ‘true president’ compared with 3% of Democrats

Last modified on Fri 4 Jun 2021 19.39 BST

A majority of Republicans still believe Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election and blame his loss to Joe Biden on baseless claims of illegal voting, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll.

The 17-19 May national poll found that 53% of Republicans believe Trump, their party’s nominee, is the “true president” now, compared with 3% of Democrats and 25% of all Americans.

About one-quarter of adults falsely believe the 3 November election was tainted by illegal voting, including 56% of Republicans, according to the poll. The figures were roughly the same in a poll that ran from 13-17 November which found that 28% of all Americans and 59% of Republicans felt that way.

Biden, a Democrat, won by more than 7m votes. Dozens of courts rejected Trump’s challenges to the results, but Trump and his supporters have persisted in pushing baseless conspiracy theories on conservative news outlets.

US federal and state officials have said repeatedly they have no evidence that votes were compromised or altered during the presidential election, rejecting the unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud advanced by Trump and many of his supporters. Voter fraud is extremely rare in the US.

Reuters contributed to this report

Why Does Donald Trump Still Seem To Hold Sway Over The Republican Party

Why — after leading the Republican Party during a period when it lost its majority in the US House of Representatives and the Senate and its power in the White House — does former president Donald Trump still seem to hold the Grand Old Party of Lincoln and Reagan in his thrall?

For US politics watchers, who on the weekend watched on as 43 Republican senators voted to acquit Trump of an act of reckless incitement played out in front of the cameras, that is the $64,000 question.

Or rather, it’s the 74,222,593-vote question.

That is the record number of Americans who voted for Donald Trump last November — more than has been cast for any previous president. Unfortunately for them, an even greater number — 81,281,502 — voted for his rival, now-President Joe Biden.

As much as anything else, those numbers sum up the quandary Republicans find themselves in.

They have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, and only remain competitive because older white voters, who tend to be more likely to support conservative candidates, also tend to vote in greater numbers in a non-compulsory electoral system.

Those same voters are also the most likely to cast a ballot in next year’s house and senate primaries, and the next midterm elections in November 2022 — which will again determine who holds power in congress. They are the voters who initially flocked to Donald Trump.

The Night In 1968 When A Nation Watched An American Presidency Crumble

When this fistful of five states defected, it was a stunner. They had resisted Republicans even when the Democrats nominated Northern liberals like Illinois’ Adlai Stevenson and Kennedy , who was not only a New Englander but a Catholic.

Before that they had stuck with the Democrats even in the party’s worst drubbings of the century, although some had left the fold for third-party attractions such as segregationist Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who left the Democrats for a time to form the States Rights Party in 1948.

This shift in Southern sensibilities in the 1960s was linked to the national Democrats’ embrace of the civil rights movement, the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and then to the creation of Medicare and other “Great Society” programs in 1965.

To be sure, there were other factors buoying what had been the “party of Lincoln” in Dixie, including the arrival of affluent Northern retirees and of industries lured by the lower cost of labor.

But the salient issue was race. As Republican strategist Kevin Phillips expressed it to New York Times reporter James Boyd in 1970: “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.”

“The Southern Strategy”

Why Do Republicans Continue To Support Trump Despite Years Of Scandal

773.834.9123

It was late September last year when a whistleblower complaint revealed that President Trump had tried to force the Ukrainian government to investigate Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Within moments the scandal captured headlines. What followed was months of back and forth as Republicans supported the president while the Democrats used their political capital to get him impeached.

But this was not the first time  – or the last time – the president was caught in the middle of a scandal. Since the impeachment trial that followed the Ukraine incident, episodes from The New York Times uncovering unsavory details from President Trump’s tax returns, to his questionable dismissal of multiple Inspectors General, to his refusal to clearly condemn white supremacists have all sparked widespread media attention and partisan fighting in 2020. 

Although with his polls dropping, some Republicans may finally be distancing themselves from the President, the question has been regularly asked the past four years: why do the Republicans continue to support the President despite these troubling charges being leveled at him? And, what is it that the Democrats stand to gain from repeated allegations?

 In addition to demonstrating how polarization accelerates scandals, the paper also found that: 

Republicans Fear That Trump Has Set The Party Back By A Generation

Republican leaders and operatives have been expressing concerns recently about the fact that Donald Trump has drive away plenty of talented lawmakers and would-be Republicans because of his behavior. They now fear that his antics have set the Party back a generation, and this has now become a “generation of lost talent” for Republicans. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains why they feel this way and why its a scary thought, even for those who despise the GOP.

Transcript:

*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Politico in recent weeks has spoken to more than 20 lawmakers, ex-lawmakers, top advisors, aids, and all sorts of other members of the Republican party, where they have all said the same thing. And that thing is that they’re terrified that Donald Trump has chased away what they call a generation of talent from the Republican Party. Here’s what they’re talking about. During the Trump years, we saw a record number of Republicans, including plenty of younger Republicans who could have had, you know, 10, 20, maybe even more years to keep running for office. Right. They were, they were in their prime. To be honest, Paul Ryan is one of those people, and I’m not saying we want any of those people in office, trust me. But these were people who had no reason to resign other than they understood the toxicity of Donald Trump, didn’t want any part of it. So there’s a lot of lost talent right there.

Republicans Fear Trump Will Lead To A Lost Generation Of Talent

The 45th president has brought new voices and voters to the party, but he’s driven them out too. Insiders fear the repercussions.

06/01/2021 04:30 AM EDT

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As Donald Trump ponders another presidential bid, top Republicans have grown fearful about what they’re calling the party’s “lost generation.”

In conversations with more than 20 lawmakers, ex-lawmakers, top advisers and aides, a common concern has emerged — that a host of national and statewide Republicans are either leaving office or may not choose to pursue it for fear that they can’t survive politically in the current GOP. The worry, these Republicans say, is that the party is embracing personality over policy, and that it is short sighted to align with Trump, who lost the general election and continues to alienate a large swath of the voting public with his grievances and false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Trump has driven sitting GOP lawmakers and political aspirants into early retirements ever since he burst onto the scene. But there was hope that things would change after his election loss. Instead, his influence on the GOP appears to be as solid as ever and the impact of those early shockwaves remain visible. When asked, for instance, if he feared the 45th president was causing a talent drain from the GOP ranks, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — perhaps inadvertently — offered a personal demonstration of the case.

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Knock Dramaturgy: Nive Petel @ Edfringe 2017

Niv Petel Knock Knock

Venue C primo, venue 41,

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Dates 2-28 Aug (not 14)

Time 19:30

How would you raise your child, if you knew that one day their turn will come to hold a rifle?

How is it to grow up in a place where children are destined to be soldiers from the day they are born? The parents– all former soldiers themselves – know that one day, a liaison officer might knock on their door too.

credit: Chris Gardner

What was the inspiration for this performance?

Knock Knock started out as my MA project as an acting student at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts in London, two years ago. I challenged myself with the following research topic:  “How to create your own solo performance?” 

And so I set off to explore this powerful theatrical medium – the Monodrama. 

The heroine of Knock Knock started as a private joke between me and my best friend. This character, a typical “Jewish Mother”, popped up into our conversations, humorously commenting, complaining, lecturing or just sharing her point of view of the world, which always revolved around raising her beloved only son. 

Those little “monologues” slowly accumulated into a colorful life story, until one day, one of them revealed what I like to call “an open wound” at its core. At that moment, I knew that this story has earned its right to be told on stage.

The reality of living in Israel is extremely polar, at least as I experience it. In a nut shell, you need to be a highly skilled “emotional acrobat”, and safely “hop” between birthdays and funerals. Metaphorically, of course. 

But also not. The dichotomy of this reality, in which life and death are inextricably intertwined in everyday life, has been at the heart of my motivation when creating Knock Knock. The army is part of your life in so many ways that you don’t even realize it until you step out of it for a while. 

My show celebrates life, joy, love and sacrifice, and salutes mothers, wherever they are in the world.     

Is performance still a good space for

credit: Chris Gardner

the public discussion of ideas? 

Yes, I certainly believe so. Recently, I went to see a show in London that dealt with terror and its implications on our society and laws system. People couldn’t stop talking about the themes and expressing their opinions during the interval and after the show. A good performance, in my opinion, doesn’t “tell you what to think”, but raises questions, open discussions and makes you reassess your views and opinions. That’s how a change can be made. In my view, provocative performances are more likely to create revulsion and fortification in one’s original opinions, rather than a change.

How did you become interested in making performance?

One of the courses in the first year of acting at The Performing Arts Studio Yoram Leowinstein, Tel-Aviv, where I trained, was all about creating your own piece, with the view of developing yourself as an artist, and generating work for yourself. 

This is where I first started to write and create short theatre pieces. I didn’t get to do enough of it after I graduated, maybe because I was lucky to almost constantly be working as an actor. But the writing “bug” was probably “incubating” in me, because when I moved to the UK and did my MA in Performance at Mountview, I realized how powerful expressing your own inner voice can be. 

You learn so much about yourself – you develop your skills, you get to meet your profession from different angles, you broaden your network, and, of course, you create job opportunities for yourself. 

My Alexander Technique tutor in Mountview, Louisa Gnafkis, asked me during one of our sessions: “How do you want a new breath to come in, if you don’t allow the previous one to fully go out first? And that applies to a lot of other things in life.” And indeed, delivering your inner voice into the world, allows new voices to emerge within you, so I am sure I will continue to write alongside acting.

Is there any particular approach to the making of the show?

Yes. As part of my research about solo-performances and monodramas, I came across many tools and approaches to the one-man-show. 

While creating Knock Knock, I put focus on three major elements: (1) minimalism – you can see that in the set, the costume, the reuse of the same props for different purposes and the lack of sound effects. (2) One character on stage – I do not portray the other characters of the play, but I evoke their existence to a level the audience can sense their presence. (3) Integrating physical theatre – between the scenes there are abstract movement sequences that provoke thoughts and feelings around the play’s themes, and provides answers and more questions. 

credit: Chris Gardner

Does the show fit with your usual productions?

I usually integrate physical movement aspects into my works. Even when I am playing in what we call a “straight” play.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

I hope that the audience will see in their minds all the characters in my play. I hope

they will complete the picture using their own life experiences and find their connection with the story and its messages. I hope they will laugh and be intrigued, maybe enlightened. I hope they will be moved. Maybe even cry. But mainly, think and question and debate and then talk about it with others.

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?

Through the writing and the directing, I “plant” many hints and clues for the audience to envisage the characters of the play. How they look like, how do they sound, what do they do. I left a lot of questions unanswered, but at the same time provided a lot of information. 

I strictly didn’t take any political side, and focused on the human aspect and the social effects, to allow the audience to debate and develop their views about the themes.

As a liaison officer for the army, Ilana, a single mother, supports families who’ve lost their sons and daughters to the wars. But when the time comes for her own only son to wear the army uniform, she faces a life-changing dilemma.

Niv Petel weaves a vivid and detailed familial relationship in Knock Knock, an immersive physical mono-drama about the effects of National Service on everyday life.

credit: Chris Gardner

Inspired by real life situations, and with a lot of humour, Knock Knock cuts through the thick curtain of politics to tell a story about parenthood, friendship, love and sacrifice.

After a successful run at the Etcetera Theatre London in 2016, and a special performance at the 30th Anniversary JFest Jewish International Season in Leeds, Knock Knock comes to Edinburgh.

Niv Petel originally trained in Israel, working in theatre, TV and voiceovers, and winning the award for Best Actor in Theatre for Youth and Children, 2014, for his role in the one-man show Snowball. UK credits include: NotMoses (Arts Theatre); Red Riding Hood (Hoxton Hall); and he is currently in La Strada (UK tour and West End season).

Artistic advisor, Maia Levy, is an Israeli actor and dramaturg, currently touring with two one-woman shows The Longest Week In Moran’s Life and Fish In The Net.

Set and costume design is by Rhiannon White who has previously designed for Walk the Plank and Liverpool Open Culture. Lighting design is by Association of Lighting Designers award-winner Oliver Bush who has worked around the country lighting aerial circus, musicals, dance and theatre.

Most recently he designed Giant! The Liverbird Song and John & Jen. Future projects include, Life On Wheels by Bella Kinetica, and The Ruby Slippers.

Ticket prices £8.50-£10.50 / concessions £6.50-£8.50 C venues box office 0845 260 1234 / www.CtheFestival.com Fringe box office 0131 226 0000 / www.edfringe.com

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[mrmichaelchadler]

SXSW 2019: Adopt a Highway, The Art of Self-Defense

Two socially stunted men tried to find themselves on Sunday in world premieres of very different films at the South by Southwest Film Festival. Both protagonists are the kind of men who go through their daily lives with a heady dose of fear. One tries to do something about it; one is thrust into a surprising chain of events by life and forced to adapt.

The better of the two is the directorial debut of “The Invitation” and “Upgrade” star Logan Marshall-Green, “Adopt a Highway.” With yet another anchored, character-driven performance from Ethan Hawke, Marshall-Green’s film has echoes of one of my favorite shows of the ‘10s, “Rectify,” a program about a boy sent to prison and asked to be a man when he’s released. That arc is similar here, as is a slightly off-center, almost quirky tone. Appropriately for a film about the unexpected places we find ourselves on life’s journey, the power of “Adopt a Highway” is cumulative. It’s an odd film, but it greatly rewards viewer patience, culminating in the only scenes at my SXSW so far that brought tears to my eyes.

Russell Millings was a victim of a three strikes law that sent him to prison for 21 years when he was really just a kid. He had an ounce of weed on him, an amount that’s basically legal everywhere now. And he was sent to prison for over two decades, cut off from a world that should have been teaching him how to grow into a man. Consequently, he’s almost child-like, remarkably fragile and awkward, as if he was forced to grow up in trauma. Of course, Hawke excels at this kind of emotionally stunted character, finding the humanity in Russ where other actors would have overplayed the archetype of the bitter ex-con.

Russ has a simple life with a job at a fast food burger joint and a lonely room in a motel. One night, after closing up the store, he finds a baby in a dumpster. The beautiful child is accompanied by a note that says only “Her name was Ella.” Russell does not call the cops, which may seem like something unbelievable for a grown man to do but not if you consider that this is basically a stupid teenager in a man’s body. He takes Ella home and he cares for her. He literally doesn’t know any better. He goes to an internet café and Googles if one can keep a baby they find, shocked to learn that it’s frowned upon.

If you’re thinking that you know where a movie about a con and what could be called a benevolent crime is going, don’t get ahead of this movie. The movie take a turn that I really wasn’t expecting and almost becomes something else, and I think that’s part of Marshall-Green’s point: major events can come completely out of nowhere and change the trajectory of our lives. Russ was a beloved kid one day and a criminal the next. Everything can be normal and then you find a baby in a dumpster. Chance encounters and events often shape our futures. They sure do for Russ, one of the most unforgettable characters of this year’s South by Southwest.

I won’t soon forget the characters of Riley Stearns’ “The Art of Self-Defense” either, but with less positive shading to my memories. These are broad caricatures, the kind of overdrawn personalities we’ve seen in comedies by Jody Hill and Jared Hess, two other directors interested in how modern men navigate the rocky terrain of modern masculinity. Like both Hill and Hess’ films, this one is a piece for which phrases like “your mileage may vary” are made. There's a very distinct brand of humor on display in “The Art of Self-Defense,” and it’s one that wore out its welcome for this viewer incredibly early. Whether or not you find the core ideas at play in “The Art of Self-Defense” funnier than I do, I can’t help but think that even fans of this movie will be frustrated by its often slack pacing and repetitive writing. It’s ultimately a piece with funny moments sprinkled throughout but that never comes together in a satisfying way.

Eisenberg leans into his nervous persona with Casey, a lonely accountant who is mocked at work and seems to have no friends outside of his dachshund. After being beaten by a band of motorcycle-riding bad guys one night, he goes to a buy a gun, but stumbles onto a karate dojo nearby at the same time. The studio is run by a walking ego who calls himself Sensei (Alessandro Nivola), the kind of guy who constantly shouts the rules of his studio to his students and pits them against one another. There’s one other teacher there, played by a relatively-wasted Imogen Poots, but this is Sensei’s dojo, and he inspires Casey to find his inner karate expert. Before you know it, Casey is throat-punching his boss and learning German instead of French because it’s a tougher language. But then he learns that Sensei’s brand of masculinity is toxic.

Clearly, there’s enough ambition in “The Art of Self-Defense” to allow it to stand out. At its best, it reminded me of films like Hill’s “Observe and Report,” another movie that challenges the concept of what makes a guy “tough.” However, there’s something about the rhythm of this movie, including several long scenes of Sensei monologuing, that allows the mind to wander. And this is the kind of piece that immediately falls apart if you can’t stay on its wavelength from front to back. Broad comedy is tricky in that way in that if it doesn’t keep you, it can be hard to get you back. To be fair, the final act of this one is so over the top that it win me back to a degree, but mostly just to wish I liked the whole tricky project just a bit more than I did. 

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[aion-rsa]

INTERVIEW: Bill Willingham Channels ERB for The Greatest Adventure

When Bill Willingham was a young boy, his mother would buy him comic books when he stayed home sick to occupy him while she maintained her home-based accounting business. One day, she betrayed him (his words) and brought home “The Return of Tarzan” by Edgar Rice Burroughs instead.

Due to sheer boredom, the disheartened child eventually cracked the spine of his new paperback novel, only to discover a wonderful world of action and adventure. His mother’s betrayal led to a lifelong love of the Lord of the Apes and the collected works of Burroughs that has lasted to this day, the writer told CBR. That’s why his latest project, illustrated by Cezar Razek, has filled him with joy and some heart-felt trepidation.

In “The Greatest Adventure,” an upcoming series from Dynamite Entertainment, Willingham is set to tell a story Burroughs never managed to deliver himself: the meeting of his two most iconic characters, Tarzan and John Carter of Mars. That, Willingham revealed, is why this is the most intimidating series that he has ever done, as he first imagined the possibility of such a meeting more than 50 years ago as a young reader.

The seven, eight or possibly nine-issue series will also feature many of Burrough’s other classic characters, including Tarzan’s immediate family (Jane Porter, his son Korak and his daughter-in-law Meriem), Jason Gridley from the Pellucidar series, and Billy Byrne from the Mucker series, as well as the little known Townsend Harper from “The Monster Men” and Kolani/Jim Stone from “The Resurrection of Jimber-Jaw.”

CBR: In “Fables,” you mashed together hundreds of characters from fairytales and folklore together in Fabletown, but — am I right in thinking Edgar Rice Burroughs very much wrote these characters as if they already existed in a shared universe?

Bill Willingham: That’s right. As a matter of fact, the discovery of that was a particularly fine moment for me. At first, it didn’t quite click because I read one of the books from the Tarzan series out of order. It was called “Tarzan at the Earth’s Core,” in which Tarzan goes to the hidden, inner world of Pellucidar and meets and interacts with David Innes from the Pellucidar series. But at that time, I didn’t realize there was a Pellucidar series. I just thought these were other interesting characters that Edgar Rice Burroughs had created for Tarzan to visit.

After that, I found out that there was a whole series of Pellucidar books. At the same time, I was a little disappointed because by the next book, Tarzan was off in some other recently discovered world. I was wishing that Tarzan could spend more time in Pellucidar. I ended catching up on the Pellucidar series, and that’s when I found out all of this stuff all takes place in the same world.

I tried to read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ books in order, but to a great extent, I was limited to what order that I discovered them. I found something called “The Mad King” that was part of a little two-book series that starred a character named Barney Custer. He was mistaken as the king of one of these fictionalized, Eastern European countries. His sister gets involved with a frozen caveman in a book called “The Eternal Lover,” and at the beginning of that book, Barney Custer and his sister are hanging out in the Greystoke Manor in Africa, just having cocktails and such as you do in an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel. That’s what finally cemented to me that all of this stuff takes place in the same world. I just went with that for this series.

One of the great disappointments amongst all of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fans is that, to anyone’s knowledge, he never wrote the Tarzan on Mars book that you know should have been written. Tarzan and John Carter really, really needed to meet each other, and yet, it didn’t happen. As a matter of fact, the issue that I am writing next is that meeting and the intimidation factor is dialed up about as high as it can be because it needs to be an important, big moment. Do I have the capability of doing it right? Probably not, but we’ll see. [Laughs]

I loved “Fables,” and a lot of that love came from your leading man, Bigby, aka the Big Bad Wolf. I didn’t see it before, but in hindsight, there is a lot of Tarzan in Bigby. What attributes does Tarzan possess that allow him to stand front and center and lead these men and women on this greatest adventure?

This is very much the book version of Tarzan. He thinks in real thoughts. By this time in his life, he knows about 30 different languages. He is a savant in picking up languages, which retroactively justifies the almost impossible task of a kid teaching himself to read with just one primer and a few books in a cabin. He is clearly some kind of mental giant, but he is also, because of the way that he was raised, almost a stoic. He does not wear his heart on his sleeve. The intimate moments that he has with Jane, thank God, are for the most part off-screen.

One of the things that I like that Edgar Rice Burroughs said early on about Tarzan – and in later books, he contradicted this – is that he seldom smiled and never laughed. He is a dour fellow. Not in a sense that he doesn’t have a sense of humor. He’s not grimly serious all of the time, but he was raised in the jungle, and if you want to survive, you don’t make extraneous noises. He learned from an early age to just keep things to himself. That’s the Tarzan that I am hoping to show here. I think Tarzan also has an internal monologue, where he is constantly weighing and evaluating things, including his opinions on the people that he is surrounded by.

Tarzan, like most, is a character I know well from TV, movies, cartoons, books and comics. Jason Gridley is someone that I didn’t know. What can you share about the character who actually brings this team together and basically appoints Tarzan to lead?

If you are going to do a take on Jason and the Argonauts, it helps to have a character named Jason. [laughs] Also, he is the scientist that invented the Gridley Wave, which is a means of instant communication that allowed Gridley to get full stories from people on Mars and David Innes down in Pellucidar. In the books, Edgar Rice Burroughs uses the Gridley Wave as a method of how he is able to tell you the story, because Edgar Rice Burroughs always wrote the books under the pretense that these stories really did happen.

This instant communication device that defies the limits of time and space also makes a very good MacGuffin in the sense that it gives the characters a reason to go on a quest because someone has taken the Gridley Wave with the intent to weaponize it. If you can communicate instantly, maybe you can do other, more terrible things, without having to worry about the barriers of time and space.

The bad guys actually capture Jason early on and try to get his cooperation in making his Gridley Wave into a death ray, but he escapes, gets a hold of Tarzan, and now we have a story. He’s essential to the story.

By setting “The Greatest Adventure” in Burroughs’ shared universe, does that mean that we also get to go back in time, to see Tarzan hunting dinosaurs in “The Land That Time Forgot” from the Caspak trilogy?

The biggest frustration with this entire series is that I have to keep it at a reasonable length. I am trying for seven issues, it’s probably going to be eight — dear God, it might have to expand into nine, but I can’t over that simply because it has to be an enclosed story. But I’m telling you, with the structure of this, and visiting all of these lands that Edgar Rice Burroughs created, I could spend a dozen issues in each one of them. Some of that stuff will have to be truncated. I will give something away: Yes, you are going to see Tarzan hunt a dinosaur in at least one point.

The best thing that was ever done on TV, animation-wise, and will never be beaten is one scene from an episode of “Jonny Quest.” Race, Johnny, Johnny’s dad and probably Hadji are in personal flying packs with bazookas hunting dinosaurs. That’s got it all. There is a nod to that fully formative moment in my life in this series, too, because as everyone who has read their Edgar Rice Burroughs knows, Martian Barsoomian tech includes something called the Equilibrimotor. It’s one of ERB’s most wonderful inventions with a terrible name, except that the name grows on me because it’s so terrible, it’s kind of charming. [Laughs]

Basically, they are flying harnesses — and they are almost never used in the books. They are used a few times, but as a reader, there were so many times in the Martian books where I was like, “This would be a good time to use an Equilibrimotor.” But who listens to me? But because that’s part of the tech available to the crew now, there will be a scene where there are a few characters flying around, hunting dinosaurs with Martian exploding bullet rifles and bazookas. Just because, why not?

We’ve talked about Tarzan and John Carter of Mars, Burroughs’ two most popular and enduring characters, but reading the scripts for the first two issues of this series also introduced me to a number of Burroughs’ creations that I never knew existed. I am very excited to go out and read “The Monster Men,” now.

“The Monster Men” takes place in Burma or one of the Far East countries. It’s an adventure where there is a mad scientist – Burroughs loved his mad scientists – and this one was doing the Frankenstein bit, attempting to create new human life from the ground up. In his case, he was growing them in vats, not sewing corpses together. The experiments were not successful, at least not right away, so you have a lot of grotesque monstrosities running around outside of this guy’s lab. Experiment Number Thirteen turns out to be the success amongst all of these failures. He looked entirely human, he was handsome, he was noble and the mad scientist’s daughter, of course, fell in love with him. In the book, and I hope I am not giving too much away, it turns out that he was human after all, and he had amnesia. He was basically clunked over the head and put in there to fake out the scientist that he had actually created a person. It’s a long and complex story, but yes, Experiment Number Thirteen from “The Monster Men” is part of the crew. [Laughs]

Just because, why not?

Exactly. If I am going to do this, why not wallow in it? [Laughs] We also have the writer from one book. We have The Oskaloosa Kid, a gunslinger from “The Oakdale Affair.” We have the Mucker, who starred in two books. He’s the closest thing we have to a thuggish brute that Burroughs ever wrote. Burroughs also wrote a morality play about what a nest of vipers Hollywood is. It was a snarky look at Hollywood after Burroughs went there with Tarzan. The book was called “The Girl from Hollywood” and so she’s in the crew. And I have to tell you, there was absolutely no reason to justify putting her in the crew other than another ‘why not’ but then it turned out — as it so often happens when you put some things in there that I know at the right time, I am confident, will pay off and I will figure out something to do with them – and that did happen with her. She became important to one part of the story at just right the time.

The Greatest Adventure,” by Bill Willingham and illustrated by Cezar Razek, begins on April 19.

The post INTERVIEW: Bill Willingham Channels ERB for The Greatest Adventure appeared first on CBR.com.

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[patriotsnet]

Why Do Republicans Still Back Trump

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-do-republicans-still-back-trump/

Why Do Republicans Still Back Trump

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Importantly, Trump is increasingly fixating on the Republican-backed audits as he pushes the lie that he won the election. He needs to keep talking about this lie because he faces an existential political threat: His brand is based on winning, but he lost. Winners don’t lose, particularly winners who promise their fans that “we will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning.”

Since When Do Republicans Care More About Criminals In Jail Than The Cops Who Put Them There Since Donald Trump

U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell pauses during his testimony at the first hearing of the select committee investigating the deadly storming of the Capitol, in Washington on Tuesday, July 27, 2021. “The GOP overwhelmingly stuck with Trump, perpetuating his sick mythology about a day we all saw with our own eyes,” writes The New York Times opinion columnist Maureen Dowd.

  | Aug. 3, 2021, 1:00 p.m.

Washington • It was, I must admit, a virtuoso performance by Sean Hannity.

Not since the sheriff in “Blazing Saddles” put a gun to his own head and took himself hostage has anyone executed such a nutty loop de loop.

Opening his show Tuesday night, Hannity gave a monologue defending the police . “Attacks on law enforcement are never and should never be acceptable ever, not at the Capitol and not anywhere,” he declaimed.

Yet Mr. Pro Police had nary a word for the four police officers who had appeared before Congress that morning to describe going to “hell and back,” as a Washington police officer, Michael Fanone, put it, as they relived the scarring, desperate hours of Jan. 6 when they were attacked by Trump’s mob .

When it came down to it, the question of whether Republican lawmakers in the House would side with Donald Trump or the police who risked their lives defending them, it wasn’t even a close call for the law-and-order party.

Since when do Republicans care more about criminals in jail than the cops who put them there? Since when do they coddle domestic terrorists?

We Looked At Which Gop Primary Voters Are Most Likely To Vote Based On Support For His False Election Claims

Many Republican senators, watching the harrowing footage of the Jan. 6Capitol insurrection played at Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, were moved to tears, presumably remembering their own experiences that day. Yet it did not persuade many of them to vote to convict the former president on the charge of inciting the insurrection. Even though many prominent Republicans, including Sen. Mitch McConnell , appeared to want a clean break with the president after the insurrection, those who turned on Trump have been rebuked by the party’s grass roots. And Trump has threatened to recruit and support primary challengers against Republicans who do not line up behind him.

So were the votes against conviction motivated by a desire to win primaries and, therefore, reelection? Our research shows that the situation is more complicated than that. The Republican rank and file is deeply divided over Trump and his false claims about a stolen 2020 election. This creates a minefield for Republican members of Congress.

Why Republicans haven’t abandoned Trumpism

Opiniona Republican Civil War Is Coming Rudy Giuliani’s Georgia Crusade Is Just The Beginning

After the Jan. 6 insurrection, moderate Republicans started to walk away from the party. Even some conservatives who stuck with Trump all through his presidency couldn’t stomach the insurrection. Currently, 53 percent of Republican voters believe Trump won the election. Similarly, in a national poll last month by Quinnipiac University, 66 percent of people who classified themselves as Republicans said they want Trump to run for president in 2024.

The fact that Trump still controls so many Republican voters explains the assertion by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., that the Republican Party can’t “move forward” without Trump. Speeding up the Republican Party’s hardening into a right-wing extremist party is Trump’s demand that anyone who doesn’t toe the line and repeat the lie be ousted and exiled.

Trump advisers and confidants have many reasons not to push back. For one, the former president often rebuffs advisers who tell him to drop the whole stolen election story. But those in Trump’s inner circle also need to keep voters riled up if Trump’s political future — and presumably theirs — is to continue. Dangling the possibility that Trump will be reinstated in August accomplishes this.

A Disturbing Number Of Republicans Still Believe All The Lies Donald Trump Tells Them

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One of the enduring legacies of Donald Trump’s runs for office and four years as president is the phenomenon in which a shameless politician can tell a brazen, easily fact-checkable lie and his or her supporters will buy it without question, even when evidence to the contrary is screaming in their faces. The earliest example of this was the claim Trump made when announcing his 2015 bid for office—that he was going to build a wall and Mexico was going to pay for it, an absurd lie that he was still telling in the fall of 2020. And of course an equally audacious lie was the one he started spreading last November and hasn’t stopped spewing to date—that he won the presidential election and a second term was stolen from him.

Obviously, the most chilling repercussion of Trump’s supporters believing he, and not Joe Biden, won the election, was the January 6 attack on the Capitol, an insurrection that left five people dead and which Trump, in his final tweet before being kicked off the platform, described as “the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.” And three months after the fact, a majority of Republicans still believe the Big Lie.

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A Large Share Of Republicans Want Trump To Remain Head Of The Party Cnbc Survey Shows

A CNBC survey conducted in the days before former President Donald Trump‘s impeachment trial finds a large share of Republicans want him to remain head of their party, but a majority of Americans want him out of politics.

The CNBC All-America Economic Survey shows 54% of Americans want Trump “to remove himself from politics entirely.” That was the sentiment of 81% of Democrats and 47% of Independents, but only 26% of Republicans.

When it comes to Republicans, 74% want him to stay active in some way, including 48% who want him to remain head of the Republican Party, 11% who want him to start a third party, and 12% who say he should remain active in politics but not as head of any party.

“If we’re talking about Donald Trump’s future, at the moment, the survey shows he still has this strong core support within his own party who really want him to continue to be their leader,” said Jay Campbell, a partner with Hart Research and the Democratic pollster for the survey.

But Micah Roberts, the survey’s Republican pollster, and a partner with Public Opinion Strategies, emphasized the change from when Trump was president. Polls before the election regularly showed Trump with GOP approval ratings around 90%, meaning at least some Republicans have defected from Trump.

Squawk on the Street

Trump Mike Lindell And Why The August Election Conspiracy Should Worry Republicans

In late May, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast, “War Room,” and said: “Donald Trump, I believe, will be back in by the end of August.” He also said that eventually even liberals such as Rachel Maddow would admit that the election was stolen. Lindell’s bizarre theory is that all Team Trump needs is a shred of proof of election fraud to overturn the entire election. Trump and others are watching the Republican-backed audit in Arizona because they believe in a “domino theory” — if Arizona ballots can be proven to be fraudulent, election results in other battleground states that President Joe Biden won can also be overturned.

There is, of course, no legal or factual basis backing up any of this.

Lindell’s bizarre theory is that all Team Trump needs is a shred of proof of election fraud to overturn the entire election.

‘this Was A Scam’: In Recorded Call Trump Pushed Official To Overturn Georgia Vote

It’s worth noting that, even without Georgia, Trump won 13 states where slavery had once been legal and these states provided nearly 70% of his Electoral College votes.

The move to the right, and the focus on the South, have been the route to renewed success for Republicans again and again.

It was there Trump began his big rally strategy nearly six years ago. It was there he would emerge as the clear front-runner for the nomination in 2016 by winning South Carolina’s primary, dominating among the staunchest conservatives in that legendary bastion of Southern independence.

So it seemed more than appropriate that South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham would be the first Republican senator summoned to confer with Trump about the party’s plans after the impeachment trial ended. And appropriate that the meeting took place at Mar-a-Lago, in Florida, where Trump has relocated his legal residence and political operation.

If Trump is to rise again, it will once again be as a born-again conservative and an adopted son of the South. And if the next Republican is not Trump, nearly all the top contenders to succeed him are from states with at least one college football team in the Southeastern Conference.

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Trump Blasts Mcconnell And His Leadership In Lengthy Response To Recent Criticism

Where will the party turn in its hour of crisis? If the past is any guide, it will turn in two directions: to the right, and to the South. These have been the wellsprings of strength and support that have brought the party back from the brink in recent decades.

That was the strategy that led to Richard Nixon’s elections as president in 1968 and 1972, and it was still working for Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

Solidifying the South and energizing conservatives were also crucial factors in the Republican tsunami of 1994, when the GOP surged to majorities in Congress and in statehouses. That hamstrung the remainder of Bill Clinton’s presidency and presaged the election of Republican George W. Bush in 2000.

It was a lesson not lost on Trump. While not even a Republican until late in life, he started his primary campaign billboarding the party’s most conservative positions on taxes, trade, immigration and abortion. And the first of his rallies to draw a crowd in the tens of thousands was in a football stadium in Mobile, Ala., two months after he declared his candidacy in the summer of 2015.

Whether the next standard-bearer for the GOP is Trump himself or someone else, there is little doubt the playbook will be the same.

Low points, then turnarounds

Perhaps the most discouraging of these for the GOP was Johnson’s tidal wave, which carried in the biggest majorities Democrats in Congress had enjoyed since the heyday of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.

Why Do Republicans Still Back Trump The Answer Is Simple: Attitude And Gratitude

Scott Jennings | Los Angeles Times

Why do Republicans stick with Donald Trump?

It’s a question I’m asked again and again by Democrats, “Never Trumpers”, and journalists. But the answer is simple.   Attitude and Gratitude.

For years, Republican voters wanted someone — anyone — to come along and do two things: Stick it to the Clintons and punch back against the media-Democratic Party alliance that fires on every Republican brave enough to stick a head out of the foxhole.

If you attended any GOP fundraiser or grassroots event between 2000 and 2016 — and I went to hundreds — you heard this sentiment over and over. And over. And over.

The secret sauce is Trump’s continued deliverance of an attitude for which Republicans thirsted for years.

For Republicans, it seemed like those awful Clintons got to play by a different set of rules than the rest of us. And they always seemed so smug about it. Many had tried and failed to oppose them. The first Bush and Bob Dole, decent men and dedicated public servants, were steamrolled by the Clintons in ’90s.

Sure, we had George W. Bush after Clinton was termed out, and Obama managed to knock Hillary down a peg in 2008. But she still wound up Secretary of State while Bill traveled the world, racking up speaking fees and foundation tributes that would embarrass Croesus himself. Damn those Clintons.

The natural conclusion of this pent-up anger finally boiled over in 2016!

Have Expressed Reluctance Or Misgivings But Havent Openly Dropped Their Backing

Paul Ryan and John Boehner, the former speakers of the House: Both have expressed their dislike of the president, but have not said whom they will support in November.

John Kelly, a former chief of staff to the president: Mr. Kelly has not said whom he plans to vote for, but did say he wished “we had some additional choices.”

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska: She has said that she’s grappling with whether to support Mr. Trump in November. She told reporters on Capitol Hill in June: “I am struggling with it. I have struggled with it for a long time.”

She said: “I think right now, as we are all struggling to find ways to express the words that need to be expressed appropriately, questions about who I’m going to vote for or not going to vote for, I think, are distracting at the moment. I know people might think that’s a dodge, but I think there are important conversations that we need to have as an American people among ourselves about where we are right now.”

Mark Sanford, a former congressman and governor of South Carolina: Mr. Sanford briefly challenged the president in this cycle’s Republican primary, and said last year that he would support Mr. Trump if the president won the nomination .

That has since changed.

“He’s treading on very thin ice,” Mr. Sanford said in June, worrying that the president is threatening the stability of the country.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

Republicans Still Orbiting Trump Dark Star Fail To Derail Bidens First 100 Days

Trump continues to exert a massive gravitational pull on the party while the president forges ahead with ambitious agenda

Last modified on Tue 27 Apr 2021 07.01 BST

For Democrats it has been a hundred days of sweeping legislation, barrier-breaking appointments and daring to dream big. For Republicans, a hundred days in the political wilderness.

The party that just four years ago controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress now finds itself shut out of power and struggling to find its feet. As Joe Biden forges ahead with ambitions to shift the political paradigm, Republicans still have a Donald Trump problem.

The former US president remains the unofficial leader of the party and exerts a massive gravitational pull on its senators, representatives, governors and state parties. Obsessed with “culture wars” and voter fraud, the Trump distortion field has made it difficult for Republicans to move on.

“Trump is like a fire,” said Ed Rogers, a political consultant and a veteran of the Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush administrations. “Too close and you get burned. Too far away, you’re out in the cold. So the party spends a lot of time talking about the fire, managing the fire, orbiting the fire. It takes a lot of energy out of the party.”

It’s a lot easier to grift on people’s fears of other people and prey on their concerns about culture wars that really don’t exist

Trump is still sucking all of the oxygen out of the room for Republicans

‘combative Tribal Angry’: Newt Gingrich Set The Stage For Trump Journalist Says

All these factors combined to produce a windfall for Republicans all over the country in the midterms of 1994, but it was a watershed election in the South. For more than a century after Reconstruction, Democrats had held a majority of the governorships and of the Senate and House seats in the South. Even as the region became accustomed to voting Republican for president, this pattern had held at the statewide and congressional levels.

But in November 1994, in a single day, the majority of Southern governorships, Senate seats and House seats shifted to the Republicans. That majority has held ever since, with more legislative seats and local offices shifting to the GOP as well. The South is now the home base of the Republican Party.

The 2020 aftermath

No wonder that in contesting the results in six swing states he lost, Trump seems to have worked hardest on Georgia. If he had won there, he still would have lost the Electoral College decisively. But as the third most populous Southern state, and the only Southern state to change its choice from 2016, it clearly held special significance.

Arizona Election Official Reacts To ‘check Your Six’ Threat From Republican

There was an exchange Thursday between Fox News’ John Roberts and Texas Rep. Kevin Brady that is remarkably telling about just how lost the Republican Party is at the moment.

Roberts: “President Donald Trump says the ‘Big Lie’ was the results of the 2020 election. Liz Cheney says, no, the ‘Big Lie’ was suggesting that the 2020 election was stolen. Between the two of them, who is right?”Brady: “I’ll leave that dispute to them.”alreadyhe is retiring

In each episode of his weekly YouTube show, Chris Cillizza will delve a little deeper into the surreal world of politics. Click to subscribe!

The Point: Political courage is in short supply among Republican elected officials these days. Very short supply.

Why Has No Trump Ally Faced Consequences For Trying To Overturn An Election

His solution is to insist that he won. To do this, he and his allies have devised an elaborate alternate reality in which he won the election but it was stolen from him through voter fraud.

Similarly, how does a would-be authoritarian retain power after having been ousted from office? Trump figured that one out, too: remain relevant by retaining control over the Republican Party. His election lies are a big part of this strategy, as well. It becomes self-fulfilling. The more people there are who believe the election was stolen, the more real it feels to Trump and the more he hammers the point home in speeches and blog posts.

List Of Republicans Who Opposed The Donald Trump 2020 Presidential Campaign

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This is a list of Republicans and conservatives who opposed the re-election of incumbent Donald Trump, the 2020 Republican Party nominee for President of the United States. Among them are former Republicans who left the party in 2016 or later due to their opposition to Trump, those who held office as a Republican, Republicans who endorsed a different candidate, and Republican presidential primary election candidates that announced opposition to Trump as the presumptive nominee. Over 70 former senior Republican national security officials and 61 additional senior officials have also signed onto a statement declaring, “We are profoundly concerned about our nation’s security and standing in the world under the leadership of Donald Trump. The President has demonstrated that he is dangerously unfit to serve another term.”

A group of former senior U.S. government officials and conservatives—including from the Reagan, Bush 41, Bush 43, and Trump administrations have formed The Republican Political Alliance for Integrity and Reform to, “focus on a return to principles-based governing in the post-Trump era.”

A third group of Republicans, Republican Voters Against Trump was launched in May 2020 has collected over 500 testimonials opposing Donald Trump.

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Such an embrace of insanity creates a cycle in which the Republican Party sheds itself of nonbelievers, finds ways to keep the true believers angry and engaged and unhinges itself even more thoroughly from reality and becomes, arguably, increasingly dangerous. The result is that conspiracy theorists like Mike Lindell have somehow become influential, despite their very clear record of belligerent gibberish. And Trump, as he has been for five-plus years now, remains at the center of the Republican Party as it veers deeper into a made-up reality.

Related:

On Trump Approval Asking Why Reveals Differences By Education Within Gop

Many pollsters, including our team here at SurveyMonkey, track President Trump’s approval rating, which has fallen to an all-time low. We wanted to delve deeper—to ask respondents not just whether they approve or disapprove of the job Donald Trump is doing as president, but why.

We did this in the simplest way possible: by immediately following our question on presidential approval with the open-ended question “Why?” This way, we can get explanations in respondents’ own words as to how they feel about our current Commander in Chief.

Republican Approvers: “Kept Promises” —  Republican Disapprovers: “Childish”

In SurveyMonkey’s most recent Trump approval update, 59% of people said they disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president.

What’s making these Republicans frustrated enough to split with their own party? To find out, we used structural topic modeling to explore how different groups of people explained their various reasons for approving or disapproving of President Trump. Structural topic modeling is a machine learning technique that discovers themes or “topics” within a large collection of responses, then predicts the prevalence of these topics according to certain respondent characteristics .

The graph below presents the differences in prevalence of various topics mentioned in response to our “Why?” follow-up, comparing responses among Republicans by whether they approve or disapprove of Trump’s performance as president .

Most Republicans Still Believe 2020 Election Was Stolen From Trump Poll

May opinion poll finds that 53% of Republicans believe Trump is the ‘true president’ compared with 3% of Democrats

Last modified on Fri 4 Jun 2021 19.39 BST

A majority of Republicans still believe Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election and blame his loss to Joe Biden on baseless claims of illegal voting, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll.

The 17-19 May national poll found that 53% of Republicans believe Trump, their party’s nominee, is the “true president” now, compared with 3% of Democrats and 25% of all Americans.

About one-quarter of adults falsely believe the 3 November election was tainted by illegal voting, including 56% of Republicans, according to the poll. The figures were roughly the same in a poll that ran from 13-17 November which found that 28% of all Americans and 59% of Republicans felt that way.

Biden, a Democrat, won by more than 7m votes. Dozens of courts rejected Trump’s challenges to the results, but Trump and his supporters have persisted in pushing baseless conspiracy theories on conservative news outlets.

US federal and state officials have said repeatedly they have no evidence that votes were compromised or altered during the presidential election, rejecting the unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud advanced by Trump and many of his supporters. Voter fraud is extremely rare in the US.

Reuters contributed to this report

Why Does Donald Trump Still Seem To Hold Sway Over The Republican Party

Why — after leading the Republican Party during a period when it lost its majority in the US House of Representatives and the Senate and its power in the White House — does former president Donald Trump still seem to hold the Grand Old Party of Lincoln and Reagan in his thrall?

For US politics watchers, who on the weekend watched on as 43 Republican senators voted to acquit Trump of an act of reckless incitement played out in front of the cameras, that is the $64,000 question.

Or rather, it’s the 74,222,593-vote question.

That is the record number of Americans who voted for Donald Trump last November — more than has been cast for any previous president. Unfortunately for them, an even greater number — 81,281,502 — voted for his rival, now-President Joe Biden.

As much as anything else, those numbers sum up the quandary Republicans find themselves in.

They have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, and only remain competitive because older white voters, who tend to be more likely to support conservative candidates, also tend to vote in greater numbers in a non-compulsory electoral system.

Those same voters are also the most likely to cast a ballot in next year’s house and senate primaries, and the next midterm elections in November 2022 — which will again determine who holds power in congress. They are the voters who initially flocked to Donald Trump.

The Night In 1968 When A Nation Watched An American Presidency Crumble

When this fistful of five states defected, it was a stunner. They had resisted Republicans even when the Democrats nominated Northern liberals like Illinois’ Adlai Stevenson and Kennedy , who was not only a New Englander but a Catholic.

Before that they had stuck with the Democrats even in the party’s worst drubbings of the century, although some had left the fold for third-party attractions such as segregationist Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who left the Democrats for a time to form the States Rights Party in 1948.

This shift in Southern sensibilities in the 1960s was linked to the national Democrats’ embrace of the civil rights movement, the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and then to the creation of Medicare and other “Great Society” programs in 1965.

To be sure, there were other factors buoying what had been the “party of Lincoln” in Dixie, including the arrival of affluent Northern retirees and of industries lured by the lower cost of labor.

But the salient issue was race. As Republican strategist Kevin Phillips expressed it to New York Times reporter James Boyd in 1970: “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.”

“The Southern Strategy”

Why Do Republicans Continue To Support Trump Despite Years Of Scandal

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It was late September last year when a whistleblower complaint revealed that President Trump had tried to force the Ukrainian government to investigate Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Within moments the scandal captured headlines. What followed was months of back and forth as Republicans supported the president while the Democrats used their political capital to get him impeached.

But this was not the first time  – or the last time – the president was caught in the middle of a scandal. Since the impeachment trial that followed the Ukraine incident, episodes from The New York Times uncovering unsavory details from President Trump’s tax returns, to his questionable dismissal of multiple Inspectors General, to his refusal to clearly condemn white supremacists have all sparked widespread media attention and partisan fighting in 2020. 

Although with his polls dropping, some Republicans may finally be distancing themselves from the President, the question has been regularly asked the past four years: why do the Republicans continue to support the President despite these troubling charges being leveled at him? And, what is it that the Democrats stand to gain from repeated allegations?

 In addition to demonstrating how polarization accelerates scandals, the paper also found that: 

Republicans Fear That Trump Has Set The Party Back By A Generation

Republican leaders and operatives have been expressing concerns recently about the fact that Donald Trump has drive away plenty of talented lawmakers and would-be Republicans because of his behavior. They now fear that his antics have set the Party back a generation, and this has now become a “generation of lost talent” for Republicans. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains why they feel this way and why its a scary thought, even for those who despise the GOP.

Transcript:

*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Politico in recent weeks has spoken to more than 20 lawmakers, ex-lawmakers, top advisors, aids, and all sorts of other members of the Republican party, where they have all said the same thing. And that thing is that they’re terrified that Donald Trump has chased away what they call a generation of talent from the Republican Party. Here’s what they’re talking about. During the Trump years, we saw a record number of Republicans, including plenty of younger Republicans who could have had, you know, 10, 20, maybe even more years to keep running for office. Right. They were, they were in their prime. To be honest, Paul Ryan is one of those people, and I’m not saying we want any of those people in office, trust me. But these were people who had no reason to resign other than they understood the toxicity of Donald Trump, didn’t want any part of it. So there’s a lot of lost talent right there.

Republicans Fear Trump Will Lead To A Lost Generation Of Talent

The 45th president has brought new voices and voters to the party, but he’s driven them out too. Insiders fear the repercussions.

06/01/2021 04:30 AM EDT

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As Donald Trump ponders another presidential bid, top Republicans have grown fearful about what they’re calling the party’s “lost generation.”

In conversations with more than 20 lawmakers, ex-lawmakers, top advisers and aides, a common concern has emerged — that a host of national and statewide Republicans are either leaving office or may not choose to pursue it for fear that they can’t survive politically in the current GOP. The worry, these Republicans say, is that the party is embracing personality over policy, and that it is short sighted to align with Trump, who lost the general election and continues to alienate a large swath of the voting public with his grievances and false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Trump has driven sitting GOP lawmakers and political aspirants into early retirements ever since he burst onto the scene. But there was hope that things would change after his election loss. Instead, his influence on the GOP appears to be as solid as ever and the impact of those early shockwaves remain visible. When asked, for instance, if he feared the 45th president was causing a talent drain from the GOP ranks, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — perhaps inadvertently — offered a personal demonstration of the case.

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