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Breaking news. It looks like the jury convicted Donald Trump in the "hush money" case.
This verdict will likely galvanize voters come November – leading to record turnout among Republicans. I might even vote for the old rascal myself as I view this lawfare as both morally wrong and deeply destabilizing.
To make a prediction closer to home, we're now certain to cross 1000 posts on the weekly thread.
My only real take on this is that I wish Republican politicians talking about Trump's civil liberties had the same energy for the rest of us.
"He was convicted on the testimony of a felon! Who only turned on him for a plea deal!" Cry me a river dickhead. This is a routine dance across the country in courtrooms from coast to coast. When a normal citizen's defense attorney tries that, the prosecutor gets up and gives the same line about "I wish I had nicer witnesses, but the defendant hangs out with felons, so felons are the people who know what happened." Every damn day. Trump has a very limited ability to gain credibility by accusing his lawyer he chose of being a slimeball.
Prosecutorial overreach has impacted thousands of Americans, where's this energy for them? Where was Mike Johnson when Aaron Swartz was hounded to death? When Assange was pinned on bullshit charges? When our prisons were filling up with people who plead down to felonies when cops lied about having witnesses, and prosecutors told them to take this deal or risk dying in prison?
Don't take your political movement that's spent decades building a state with the power to imprison citizens on a whim, and get all shocked Pikachu when one of your oxes gets gored.
Yeah, the plain fact is that most of them don't care about civil liberties in a broad and principled way. They're not classical liberals or libertarians. They're conservatives. They're the kind of people who think that the government should be able to put me in a cage for putting recreational drugs in my body. A significant minority of them would probably institute peacetime conscription if they could because they like the idea of how being in the army transforms young men. In other words, they are social engineers, their primarily goal isn't individual liberty, it is to shape society on a large scale into their vision of it. It's just that their vision is different from the vision of leftist social engineers.
I think they just have ideals but when facts meet reality of having a lot of people who can’t function in society change their views.
I don’t think a white nationalists would have problems running on libertarianism in a society that is all European. This is a big reason why the right doesn’t want immigrants because they can’t function in the society this nation was founded on.
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