It would not be surprising to see a strong connection between sundown towns, the Klan, Republican voter turnout, and Trump. The use of and cheerleading for violence and the threat of violence is just cooked in to their main dish.
The site you mention seems to have a substantial group of well-knowns, who do an effective job of controlling the narrative. Anything with a tiny scent of “there is trouble ahead”, “extremism is building way beyond a blip”, gets interpreted as overly reactionary, hair on fire, the sky is falling, etc. And what gets put forward is - “the really smart people have it under control”, “our institutions are completely adequate”, “all we need to do is win this one”.
My take is the DOJ is packed with fascists and cowards. The SCOTUS is solidly fascist and without a MAJOR intervention, they can and likely WILL enable unthinkable cruelties. Already have!
It would be interesting to find out the membership numbers of the big name militia groups like PB and the 3%s in these sundown towns. Unless some outfit like Mother Jones or ProPublica does the digging, we won’t know because the FBI, in my opinion, is compromised.
If Trump is getting prepared to come up short on the actual vote count, they could be adding heat to the pot. These sundown towns will be good hotspots. If the big news stations call the election a win for Harris, Nov 6 might really be a kick off for some eye opening and reckoning.
Interestingly, you seem to share the outlook of speakthetruth101, which is that Trump is visiting these towns to "rally the troops." He may be doing that; but all that I'm advancing here is that he's reactivating bonds to the Republican Party so as to drive voting behavior. He wants to get re-elected so that he can stay out of prison. It's his only real hope.
While the Three Percenters and/or Proud Boys may rush to Trump's beck and call given the clear signal, this prospect in general is fraught with danger for Trump as he no longer has his hands on the levers of presidential power. January 6th, 2021, he possessed the power to impose martial law (one of the options drawn up by his insurrection architects -- see Phil Waldron). It's harder to perform a coup from the outside looking in. Autogolpes are much easier to pull off.
But, should Trump lose and should he attempt to raise his ragtag army, such nodes as these sundown towns and other relics of segregation past would serve as hotspots, just as you say. Here's hoping that the times in which we live do not grow so interesting!
I hope he gets beat in a landslide, CONCEDES, and his followers surprise us by being disappointed but just accept it peacefully. I hate thinking that we might have militias starting up with their own version of 1776. But I do think that is a possibility. And if things really start popping off, I have little confidence in law enforcement agencies being reliable. I could be making all the wrong assumptions. I think Trump might just be stupid enough to instigate violence just so he can get media attention. If I were him and had his financial resources, I would be working on stashing money off shore and then getting to a country with no extradition treaty. Texas might work. :)
To me, this is a redux of Reagan speaking in the “Mississippi Burning” town or the pilgrimage Republican candidates take to Bob Jones University. It’s not good, obviously, but not surprising. Both parties ultimately care more about what reactionaries think about them than progressives, it’s just that one is more explicit about it. If one digs into the history of any town, city, or state in this country, you’re going to run into extreme racial violence, be it institutional or a pattern of acts committed by individuals or groups. I don’t think that Johnstown, PA has a more shameful racial history than most other places, so much as they codified what might have otherwise been an unwritten law.
I genuinely don’t see how anyone who considers themselves to be even the slightest bit progressive can put their faith in the FBI or the DOJ. The FBI exists to get rid of civil rights leaders, environmentalists, and indigenous activists, not white supremacists and their ilk. I can remember in the past how ever so often the FBI or some other agency would issue a warning about far-right terrorism, Republicans would complain, and then the offending agency would apologize for besmirching their good name. That’s not the system failing, that’s the system acting exactly like it’s supposed to. I would be willing to bet that the FBI spends more time monitoring Quaker meeting houses than these right wing militia groups. They can excuse armed right-wing terrorism, but they draw the line at peace and simplicity!
Trump is a draft dodging coward who denigrates all veterans and openly called for the death penalty in the case of the Central Park Five back in the day. They were innocent. I can't wait for the “Sundown” of this malignant narcissist’s so called celebrity.
It’s rather unlikely that it’s mere coincidence. I checked all of Trump’s stops for this campaign season, and until Harris got into the race, only two of the venues were in sundown towns.
I have several theories why the race is still competitive for Trump, many of which go back to him stirring up bigotries — but maybe that’s small-ball. Maybe I need to go back and really re-examine intersections. Those of us on the left are versed in intersectionality of lived experience and identity — Trump has intersections of interests, which confer influence; and they interlock, thus resisting degradation.
Harris was starting from behind in key demographics. She had moderately high unfavorables. So I’m not surprised that she hasn’t pulled away. She’s gotten a great boost from the convention and she has momentum. But we have two months until Election Day. She has to keep Trump off-balance that entire time to ensure he doesn’t regain his footing.
I think Trump is competitive for the same reason that he’s always been competitive; partisan politics are a team sport for Republicans, no less than Democrats, so many will vote for Trump simply because he’s the GOP candidate. True “never Trumpers” are about as common as unicorns, and their main complaint about him is aesthetics (ie he’s crass and doesn’t follow norms), rather than a substantial disagreement about policy positions. Maybe someone else can correct me, but it seems like total wipeouts are relatively rare during presidential elections. It generally comes down to a relative handful of votes in certain states.
Of course, part of that is the fact that the Republican Party — much more so than the Democratic Party, at least in recent years — has valued power as a main goal. In that sense, the team objective is not any one policy but “make it so that we can do anything we want.” Trump is an avatar for the GOP in that regard, because he on the individual level is all about amassing all he can for himself. He’s a lodestar.
I think there really are “never Trumpers” — goodness, we certainly heard about them over the course of these last eight years. But, as you pointed out somewhat obliquely in one of your previous comments, the Democratic Party is beginning to become a repository for these disaffected conservatives (witness the pining for GWB’s endorsement, which, you know, you want to talk about unicorns!). A person on that other site said that he worries about the Democratic Party being hollowed out and basically turned into the new conservative party. I think that is real and proximate danger. In the meantime, I think folks feel that it needs to be all hands on deck.
Thank you for your reply. A key part of politics is obtaining power and then using them to achieve particular goals. It consistently appears as if Democrats don’t know what to do with power (at least, not when their opponents are Republicans), and/or they prefer to use it to punch left, rather than change things for the better. The Democratic Convention was instructional in that regard, in that a slew of Republicans were invited to speak, while pro-Palestinian delegates were banned from the stage. If Republicans represent an existential threat to “our democracy,” as the campaign ads claim, why they getting airtime at the other party’s convention? Even if one claims that the speakers are “the good ones,” what message are they trying to send to the liberal progressives who are still trying to work in an electoral framework? They’re begging for crumbs at the door, while Republicans get invited in for a feast.
I’ve said many times that the Democratic Party is already a conservative party, since they want to preserve the status quo. The conservatism has grown more acute, now that they’ve embraced law enforcement and the military industrial complex in a way that would have been odd even in the GWB era. If true “never Trumpers” are becoming Democrat-curious, that only reinforces the view that Democrats are better at conservatism than Republicans.
It’s easy for neocons to jump ship from Republicans to Democrats, because they’re not social conservatives and don’t get distracted by culture war rhetoric. From the beginning of neoconservatism in the 1960s, the movement has always been moderately socially liberal. They don’t care if you want an abortion, if you want to get a gay or interracial marriage, if minorities want to buy or rent in majority white neighborhoods or anything like that (think of the rift between GWB and Dick Cheney on gay marriage). They would say that the mild reforms of the mid-twentieth century indicates the greatness of America and how minorities can succeed. Neocons are focused on world domination, which sounds like hyperbole, but it’s really not. The Wolfowitz Doctrine that was formulated after the collapse of the Soviet Union basically states that the goal of US foreign policy is perpetual hegemony and no other country will be allowed to be a competitor. Not the EU bloc, not Japan, not China, not Russia. Once you realize that this is the default for our foreign policy, the last thirty-odd years make a lot more sense. All of this is to say that it’s really not a flex for the Democrats that William Kristol, who wrote some of the most delusional commentary about the Iraq War, decided to change party affiliation.
I don’t think it will be that bad, though I do expect Trump to break the N barrier. I hadn’t given much thought to my plans for the event, but upon reflection I’ll probably wait until I can read a transcript first — after the debate airs — then watch the replay soon thereafter. Just to get some distance from whatever happens, right from the start.
I think Trump will slur Harris on live television, in front of millions. I don’t have any hard evidence why I feel this is so. I think he might very well do this because it would be so shocking that people will talk about nothing else for days, which is just what he wants. He wants to take up all of the oxygen, and that would certainly be one way to do so.
It’d be the racist cherry on top if he did such a vile act. His minions in the media, especially supporting cast members like Matt Walsh (who has put forth some amazingly racist material in his bid to tear down Harris), have been itching to use the N-bomb openly. If Trump were to do so in such a public fashion, they would feel free to do the same, the Band-Aid being ripped off, as it were.
You are an idiot. You have become disassociated with reality because of your hatred for a politician. You really believe trump is suddenly going to become a racist and start throwing the N word around? Are you that much of a fucking inbecile.
If you take even a casual look at trumps history you will see that he has never been a racist he has always been fair toward all ethnic groups, and the DNC has been lying to you because lies are all they have anymore.
.FORMER sundown towns. When did that stop, 60 years ago? This charge is as ridiculous as someone damning the Democrats for holding their convention in Chicago because the Haymarket riot happened there, or in New York because black people were lynched in 1863.
Maybe he is going to towns that don’t get a lot of attention because he does well in areas that the government has abandoned and with people the government would just as soon see dead aka white people.
You contradict yourself right off the bat. Felonies are felonies. By definition, they are not misdemeanors.
Trump is a felon. But, beyond that, he is inherently criminal. He has a criminal mind. More than that, he’s psychopathic, according to the actual psychological definition of the term. That in addition to his hypomania and narcissism.
So, I’m not sure why you popped up with this refutation of his felonies, of which a jury of his peers convicted him. I don’t recall anyone bringing them up. But rest assured that in this case it’s just that the law finally caught up with him.
Again, I do ask that respect be displayed here. If you continue to rhetorically defecate as a matter of course, I clearly cannot stop you from your choice of words, but I can control parameters here so that I don’t have to be exposed to your logorrhea. Please, control yourself.
And here's the thing: You will be tempted to go off somewhere and trumpet the fact that you got kicked off a page where the author swore that she venerated the right to free expression and so forth.
What you will neglect to admit is that you intentionally disrespected the host of that space, even when the host asked you to refrain from your blatant display of disrespect.
You chose to engage in this behavior. You meant not only to provoke, which I tolerated at first, but to demean and derogate, which I will not tolerate.
You would not allow someone to barge into your home and pop a squat on your kitchen floor while berating you, and in fact telling you to eat it. You simply wouldn't. Neither will I. Best to you in your future endeavors.
It would not be surprising to see a strong connection between sundown towns, the Klan, Republican voter turnout, and Trump. The use of and cheerleading for violence and the threat of violence is just cooked in to their main dish.
The site you mention seems to have a substantial group of well-knowns, who do an effective job of controlling the narrative. Anything with a tiny scent of “there is trouble ahead”, “extremism is building way beyond a blip”, gets interpreted as overly reactionary, hair on fire, the sky is falling, etc. And what gets put forward is - “the really smart people have it under control”, “our institutions are completely adequate”, “all we need to do is win this one”.
My take is the DOJ is packed with fascists and cowards. The SCOTUS is solidly fascist and without a MAJOR intervention, they can and likely WILL enable unthinkable cruelties. Already have!
It would be interesting to find out the membership numbers of the big name militia groups like PB and the 3%s in these sundown towns. Unless some outfit like Mother Jones or ProPublica does the digging, we won’t know because the FBI, in my opinion, is compromised.
If Trump is getting prepared to come up short on the actual vote count, they could be adding heat to the pot. These sundown towns will be good hotspots. If the big news stations call the election a win for Harris, Nov 6 might really be a kick off for some eye opening and reckoning.
Interestingly, you seem to share the outlook of speakthetruth101, which is that Trump is visiting these towns to "rally the troops." He may be doing that; but all that I'm advancing here is that he's reactivating bonds to the Republican Party so as to drive voting behavior. He wants to get re-elected so that he can stay out of prison. It's his only real hope.
While the Three Percenters and/or Proud Boys may rush to Trump's beck and call given the clear signal, this prospect in general is fraught with danger for Trump as he no longer has his hands on the levers of presidential power. January 6th, 2021, he possessed the power to impose martial law (one of the options drawn up by his insurrection architects -- see Phil Waldron). It's harder to perform a coup from the outside looking in. Autogolpes are much easier to pull off.
But, should Trump lose and should he attempt to raise his ragtag army, such nodes as these sundown towns and other relics of segregation past would serve as hotspots, just as you say. Here's hoping that the times in which we live do not grow so interesting!
I hope he gets beat in a landslide, CONCEDES, and his followers surprise us by being disappointed but just accept it peacefully. I hate thinking that we might have militias starting up with their own version of 1776. But I do think that is a possibility. And if things really start popping off, I have little confidence in law enforcement agencies being reliable. I could be making all the wrong assumptions. I think Trump might just be stupid enough to instigate violence just so he can get media attention. If I were him and had his financial resources, I would be working on stashing money off shore and then getting to a country with no extradition treaty. Texas might work. :)
To me, this is a redux of Reagan speaking in the “Mississippi Burning” town or the pilgrimage Republican candidates take to Bob Jones University. It’s not good, obviously, but not surprising. Both parties ultimately care more about what reactionaries think about them than progressives, it’s just that one is more explicit about it. If one digs into the history of any town, city, or state in this country, you’re going to run into extreme racial violence, be it institutional or a pattern of acts committed by individuals or groups. I don’t think that Johnstown, PA has a more shameful racial history than most other places, so much as they codified what might have otherwise been an unwritten law.
I genuinely don’t see how anyone who considers themselves to be even the slightest bit progressive can put their faith in the FBI or the DOJ. The FBI exists to get rid of civil rights leaders, environmentalists, and indigenous activists, not white supremacists and their ilk. I can remember in the past how ever so often the FBI or some other agency would issue a warning about far-right terrorism, Republicans would complain, and then the offending agency would apologize for besmirching their good name. That’s not the system failing, that’s the system acting exactly like it’s supposed to. I would be willing to bet that the FBI spends more time monitoring Quaker meeting houses than these right wing militia groups. They can excuse armed right-wing terrorism, but they draw the line at peace and simplicity!
Trump is a draft dodging coward who denigrates all veterans and openly called for the death penalty in the case of the Central Park Five back in the day. They were innocent. I can't wait for the “Sundown” of this malignant narcissist’s so called celebrity.
Clearly intentional. Truly sad to think that this race is so close. If Kamala dared break with AIPAC et al, she'd have it in the bag, perhaps...
It’s rather unlikely that it’s mere coincidence. I checked all of Trump’s stops for this campaign season, and until Harris got into the race, only two of the venues were in sundown towns.
I have several theories why the race is still competitive for Trump, many of which go back to him stirring up bigotries — but maybe that’s small-ball. Maybe I need to go back and really re-examine intersections. Those of us on the left are versed in intersectionality of lived experience and identity — Trump has intersections of interests, which confer influence; and they interlock, thus resisting degradation.
Harris was starting from behind in key demographics. She had moderately high unfavorables. So I’m not surprised that she hasn’t pulled away. She’s gotten a great boost from the convention and she has momentum. But we have two months until Election Day. She has to keep Trump off-balance that entire time to ensure he doesn’t regain his footing.
I think Trump is competitive for the same reason that he’s always been competitive; partisan politics are a team sport for Republicans, no less than Democrats, so many will vote for Trump simply because he’s the GOP candidate. True “never Trumpers” are about as common as unicorns, and their main complaint about him is aesthetics (ie he’s crass and doesn’t follow norms), rather than a substantial disagreement about policy positions. Maybe someone else can correct me, but it seems like total wipeouts are relatively rare during presidential elections. It generally comes down to a relative handful of votes in certain states.
Of course, part of that is the fact that the Republican Party — much more so than the Democratic Party, at least in recent years — has valued power as a main goal. In that sense, the team objective is not any one policy but “make it so that we can do anything we want.” Trump is an avatar for the GOP in that regard, because he on the individual level is all about amassing all he can for himself. He’s a lodestar.
I think there really are “never Trumpers” — goodness, we certainly heard about them over the course of these last eight years. But, as you pointed out somewhat obliquely in one of your previous comments, the Democratic Party is beginning to become a repository for these disaffected conservatives (witness the pining for GWB’s endorsement, which, you know, you want to talk about unicorns!). A person on that other site said that he worries about the Democratic Party being hollowed out and basically turned into the new conservative party. I think that is real and proximate danger. In the meantime, I think folks feel that it needs to be all hands on deck.
Thank you for your reply. A key part of politics is obtaining power and then using them to achieve particular goals. It consistently appears as if Democrats don’t know what to do with power (at least, not when their opponents are Republicans), and/or they prefer to use it to punch left, rather than change things for the better. The Democratic Convention was instructional in that regard, in that a slew of Republicans were invited to speak, while pro-Palestinian delegates were banned from the stage. If Republicans represent an existential threat to “our democracy,” as the campaign ads claim, why they getting airtime at the other party’s convention? Even if one claims that the speakers are “the good ones,” what message are they trying to send to the liberal progressives who are still trying to work in an electoral framework? They’re begging for crumbs at the door, while Republicans get invited in for a feast.
I’ve said many times that the Democratic Party is already a conservative party, since they want to preserve the status quo. The conservatism has grown more acute, now that they’ve embraced law enforcement and the military industrial complex in a way that would have been odd even in the GWB era. If true “never Trumpers” are becoming Democrat-curious, that only reinforces the view that Democrats are better at conservatism than Republicans.
It’s easy for neocons to jump ship from Republicans to Democrats, because they’re not social conservatives and don’t get distracted by culture war rhetoric. From the beginning of neoconservatism in the 1960s, the movement has always been moderately socially liberal. They don’t care if you want an abortion, if you want to get a gay or interracial marriage, if minorities want to buy or rent in majority white neighborhoods or anything like that (think of the rift between GWB and Dick Cheney on gay marriage). They would say that the mild reforms of the mid-twentieth century indicates the greatness of America and how minorities can succeed. Neocons are focused on world domination, which sounds like hyperbole, but it’s really not. The Wolfowitz Doctrine that was formulated after the collapse of the Soviet Union basically states that the goal of US foreign policy is perpetual hegemony and no other country will be allowed to be a competitor. Not the EU bloc, not Japan, not China, not Russia. Once you realize that this is the default for our foreign policy, the last thirty-odd years make a lot more sense. All of this is to say that it’s really not a flex for the Democrats that William Kristol, who wrote some of the most delusional commentary about the Iraq War, decided to change party affiliation.
Absolutely. Don't think I can bear to watch this debate either.
I don’t think it will be that bad, though I do expect Trump to break the N barrier. I hadn’t given much thought to my plans for the event, but upon reflection I’ll probably wait until I can read a transcript first — after the debate airs — then watch the replay soon thereafter. Just to get some distance from whatever happens, right from the start.
That sounds like good plan.
The N barrier?
I think Trump will slur Harris on live television, in front of millions. I don’t have any hard evidence why I feel this is so. I think he might very well do this because it would be so shocking that people will talk about nothing else for days, which is just what he wants. He wants to take up all of the oxygen, and that would certainly be one way to do so.
It’d be the racist cherry on top if he did such a vile act. His minions in the media, especially supporting cast members like Matt Walsh (who has put forth some amazingly racist material in his bid to tear down Harris), have been itching to use the N-bomb openly. If Trump were to do so in such a public fashion, they would feel free to do the same, the Band-Aid being ripped off, as it were.
I hope I am mistaken.
I can't imagine him doing that publically. I read he uses it in private frequently. We'll see.
You are an idiot. You have become disassociated with reality because of your hatred for a politician. You really believe trump is suddenly going to become a racist and start throwing the N word around? Are you that much of a fucking inbecile.
If you take even a casual look at trumps history you will see that he has never been a racist he has always been fair toward all ethnic groups, and the DNC has been lying to you because lies are all they have anymore.
.FORMER sundown towns. When did that stop, 60 years ago? This charge is as ridiculous as someone damning the Democrats for holding their convention in Chicago because the Haymarket riot happened there, or in New York because black people were lynched in 1863.
You're reaching into fantasyland.
What, exactly, do you think I am arguing here? (Me personally, not speakthetruth101, who is not here to defend his point.)
Whatever it fucking takes to get America back
Maybe he is going to towns that don’t get a lot of attention because he does well in areas that the government has abandoned and with people the government would just as soon see dead aka white people.
The second the election is over, all this fake ass “34 felony counts of a misdemeanor accounting error” bullshit will completely vanish.
You contradict yourself right off the bat. Felonies are felonies. By definition, they are not misdemeanors.
Trump is a felon. But, beyond that, he is inherently criminal. He has a criminal mind. More than that, he’s psychopathic, according to the actual psychological definition of the term. That in addition to his hypomania and narcissism.
So, I’m not sure why you popped up with this refutation of his felonies, of which a jury of his peers convicted him. I don’t recall anyone bringing them up. But rest assured that in this case it’s just that the law finally caught up with him.
Trump is manifestly unfit for office.
TDS nut job. Goodbye
Again, I do ask that respect be displayed here. If you continue to rhetorically defecate as a matter of course, I clearly cannot stop you from your choice of words, but I can control parameters here so that I don’t have to be exposed to your logorrhea. Please, control yourself.
I asked nicely.
And here's the thing: You will be tempted to go off somewhere and trumpet the fact that you got kicked off a page where the author swore that she venerated the right to free expression and so forth.
What you will neglect to admit is that you intentionally disrespected the host of that space, even when the host asked you to refrain from your blatant display of disrespect.
You chose to engage in this behavior. You meant not only to provoke, which I tolerated at first, but to demean and derogate, which I will not tolerate.
You would not allow someone to barge into your home and pop a squat on your kitchen floor while berating you, and in fact telling you to eat it. You simply wouldn't. Neither will I. Best to you in your future endeavors.