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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.
As I said downthread, as someone in deep red country the conversations I hear have an underlying apprehension of violence that rises by the day including today. I don't believe in their hearts these people want violence, but as the right is the political alignment predicted by having superior-to-average faculties at assessing danger, I think even if only intuitively they understand and greatly fear how swiftly we approach violence as the only way out. Blessed are the meek, blessed are those who know when to draw the sword. If and when it happens, it will be the right and only time.
The thought of this as being what stops Trump is many things, all of them wrong. There's not one person in this country who has decided this is the moment to hop off the fence, "Okay, now I won't vote for the man." Farcical. There will be topical complaining from RINOs, the establishment-GOP will continue searching, as they surely have since 2016, at finding a way to keep him out, and in November Trump will be on the ballot and receive 100 million votes. This conviction completes the ascendance of the man as the idea of the total rejection of the establishment. The establishment understands this, and is thus why they attack him with a wholly unparalleled ferocity; it is exactly the same reason those who land on the turbo-normie-left-side-of-bell-curve-meme support him. They don't have to think and wordswordswords, they viscerally understand power against power.
People try to contextualize what's happening in so many irrelevant details, ignore the minutiae. It has never been about vice, it has never been about ambiguous business dealings, it has never been about brashness, candor and honesty. Politicians as a category are the least ethical humans in this country, why would they care about any of this? It is about a man who refused to kneel when demanded by seated power and has risen to threaten their entire existence. This conviction heralds the imminent arrival of the pivotal figure of American history. It doesn't have to be Trump, but where we are in the reverberations of history is no earlier than the election of Buchanan.
That's exactly what a number of Alaskan Republican voters did when Ted Stevens was railroaded, so I don't see why I shouldn't expect at least some of them to do the same with respect to Trump. After all, "Taking the high road" is the only thing that separates us from them, you see. We're the party of Law and Order, and only a Leftist would vote for a felon, so therefore anyone who votes for a felon has ceased to be One Of Us and has become The Enemy. Better to lose while keeping your Sacred Values than to damn your immortal soul to eternal hellfire for a mere election.
Donald Trump is the idol of a cult of personality bewitching a third of the country, whose every utterance compels the leaders of the free world ever more openly to complete madness, running against a backdrop of reignited multipolar geopolitical conflicts, collapsing middle-class living standards, allegedly stolen elections and entrapped so-called insurrectionists, unbridled millions invading undefended US borders, schools erasing children's concept of gender, worldwide lockdowns, and mandatory population-wide experimental injections.
Ted Stevens is "series of tubes" guy.
Ted Stevens did not trigger existential crisis in a low-stakes, functionally-irrelevant, 90% Republican-voting state, therefore disenfranchising a third of the country by holding show trials for the most polarizing man in American history will provoke no more than eyerolls from the median Republican voter, because the median Republican voter is a holier-than-thou asshole who will cut off his nose to spite his face? Have you just emerged from a coma? The non-RINO Christian Right is framing this "mere election" as the final turnaround on the highway to the Downfall of Western Civilization. Despite all his character flaws, Donald Trump is not immanentizing the eschaton. He is an avatar of all of the insults suffered at the hands of the Elite, and with every sling cast upon him, it becomes clearer what lawlessness they will embrace to render him powerless, and how trivially they could trample over people like us who don't have a billion dollars and a TV show and buildings with our names on them. When the alternative is writing a blank cheque to godless, lawless evil, it turns out God will forgive you a vote for a felon; man's laws are not God's laws, render unto Caesar, etc.
Nobody stood up for Ted Stevens, because Ted Stevens was a nobody who stood for nothing. Trump is the last man standing. And if they bring him down, and the only ones left are sneering subservient RINO elite wannabees and a lawless brigade that makes its living destroying the lives and livelihoods of middle class Americans on principle... Well, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.
Sometimes, like right now, I get the strangest urge to create a sure-selling T shirt.
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