is everyone just shellshocked?

I don’t know if “numb” is the word. I am stunned.

Even though I know the strategy is exactly “Shock and Awe,” and I see it coming, I am just finding myself more and more speechless.

I have been unable to turn away from reading about everything, and even have been watching the Sunday morning shows to see what the establishment is saying, and I am just at the saturation point where I have to turn away because I can’t handle it. It’s affecting my work, my free time, my well-being.

But I can’t quite turn away. I just need one more little drink.

My great fear is the American public eventually becomes so desensitized to the constant deluge of egregious acts coming from the Trump administration and the GOP that it eventually becomes conditioned to a new ‘normality’ where the people just shrug their shoulders in response to the ongoing fascism. Instead of resisting it, they just take comfort the fact that it could be worse…

“What? They’re moving Muslim Americans into internment camps? Well, at least they’re not shooting them. That’s something, right?”

His absence isn’t why I have been posting less. I’ve just been drawn to places with more activity because I’m in such a state.

I LIKE having a variety of viewpoints. I think most of us do. What I don’t like is trying to debate someone who has no understanding of how to argue. No recognition of fallacies, no ability to judge the weight of evidence. And insulting to everyone in the bargain while playing the victim card. That just gets old.

We have never seen anything like it. You know, I thought Reagan was the nadir, and then Bush II eclipsed him by an earth-shattering margin. Bush was so bad that there was literally article after article of people writing about historians’ perspective on whether or not Bush was the worse president of all time, and generally agreeing that, yes, he was.

And now THIS.

It’s like watching “Caligula.” You know…somebody actually MADE this film?

I just…there isn’t anything happening with this administration that doesn’t get its own section in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors.

Let’s extinguish the EPA. Let’s just dump toxins directly into open waterways. Let’s get rid of the Endangered Species Act. Let’s shut down the fucking National Park Service’s communication. Let’s delete all the documents on Climate Change, and gag NASA. Let’s put a donor in charge of wasting public education and diverting all the money to her family and their cronies. Let’s put a fascist loyalist in charge of the government’s legal arm. Let’s bar the Chairman of the Fucking Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence from the National security Council and put Steve Fucking Bannon there instead.d

OH

MY

GOD!!!!!!!!!

It goes on and on and on and on.

And that’s to say nothing about his complete denial of objective facts, his total made up bullshit. I mean…all politicians lie, but they usually use the standard issue dissembling, red herrings, card-stacking, straw man, post hoc, and so on.

This guy Just Makes Shit Up out of nothing, that everyone can see is completely made up out of nothing.

Meanwhile, all the Republicans are saying, “Yeah, this or that is really too much, but you know…I’m gonna just sit and wait for the tax cut.”

It’s fucking unbelievable.

And we are just starting….

Zooey wrote:

Let’s extinguish the EPA. Let’s just dump toxins directly into open waterways. Let’s get rid of the Endangered Species Act. Let’s shut down the fucking National Park Service’s communication. Let’s delete all the documents on Climate Change, and gag NASA. Let’s put a donor in charge of wasting public education and diverting all the money to her family and their cronies. Let’s put a fascist loyalist in charge of the government’s legal arm. Let’s bar the Chairman of the Fucking Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence from the National security Council and put Steve Fucking Bannon there instead.d

OH

MY

GOD!!!!!!!!!

It goes on and on and on and on.

And that’s to say nothing about his complete denial of objective facts, his total made up bullshit. I mean…all politicians lie, but they usually use the standard issue dissembling, red herrings, card-stacking, straw man, post hoc, and so on.

This guy Just Makes Shit Up out of nothing, that everyone can see is completely made up out of nothing.

Meanwhile, all the Republicans are saying, “Yeah, this or that is really too much, but you know…I’m gonna just sit and wait for the tax cut.”

It’s fucking unbelievable.

And we are just starting….

Well said, Zooey.

It pretty much captures the emotion that a lot of Americans feel about all of this. And it feels unfair because those Americans are carrying the emotional burden for the clueless bunch that put him there. And others–those who believe the things he says. They aren’t all “clueless” of course. Some of them just believe the same things.

There are people right now who actually feel good about all of this. Calling the news media the “enemy” makes them happy.

But that bubble will pop. And it will be too late to fix some of the disaster that’s coming. So they’ll never carry the guilt or burden of any of that. They’ll just blame Obama.

Not numb.

And I understand how the Trump voter came to be. What Mark Blythe was talking about is SO TRUE. The neoliberal damage from NAFTA was far more profound than many in either political sphere were willing to admit. It took Trump to tap into that. Not that I think he ever gave a damn about the actual people that were hurt, but he was the first to openly call bullshit on neoliberalism in a Presidential campaign. So, while you had Dems slam Trickle Down, and rightly so, you’d never had anyone so easily and quickly dispatch the moral and economic bankruptcy of neoliberalism.

And let’s not forget that a great many of his followers were told that he would “PIVOT” from his bombastic, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, etc ways after the election and pivot to being Presidential and run the country like a professional CEO…decisive, in control, appointing experienced people from outside Washington not beholden to the typical influences.

Well, many of us knew how much bullshit that was, but his voters BELIEVED it. Many still do.

So, I find myself seeing us at a crossroads.

We are at a crisis point where the President was elevated by Clinton with the help of a complicit MSM to the tune of $2B. We can’t forget that BEFORE Trump could become a target for the Russians, he was put out there…by Clinton, the DNC and the MSM. They were too clever by half figuring that they could essentially fix the election without having to actually fix it by simply drowning him in coverage and that Trump would kill his own campaign, but not until he’d wrecked the Republican field.

Except… he only got stronger… and the corporate soulless sellout fucks on the Dem side had no idea that people actually WERE paying attention to all their…inattention…and what the Dems had done that did actually hurt working people and the poor. And while it was unfortunate that the alternative was a completely malignant narcissistic shitbag, Trump hadn’t been at the epicenter of a system that had been openly and belligerently screwing them while lying to their face about that very screwing for decades. So, even for those who realized en toto who Trump was, they simply weren’t going to vote for the “screwing they knew” any more.

As for this crisis point, it’s what scares me.

The malignant narcissistic shitbag is truly a potential dictator and Bannon and Miller are really and truly running the Hitler playbook, right down to repeating his rallies after getting elected. I’m actually surprised Trump hasn’t uttered the word, Lugenpresse by mistake.

At this point, I think it’s 50/50 that the progressives and principled people among independents and conservatives rise up and actually impeach Trump and much of his Administration for the crimes already committed (too numerous to go into) which either allows for the ascension of Pence and the escalation of the Progressive movement or perhaps we even have a revote due to the unprecedented electoral intrusion OR… we’re sitting here after the 2018 elections knowing that there won’t be elections in 2020 because at some point Trump directly or through some agency will declare martial law.

I honestly don’t know which way it will go, but I think we’re are really on the brink of decades of fascism and I mean REAL, Nazi Germany level fascism.

But I’m not numb tho. I’ll go to as many rallies and protests as I can, advocate as much as I can online as I can and if it all goes south, I’ll question myself knowing I probably could have done 10x more.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by Mackeyser.

Mackeyser wrote:

It took Trump to tap into that. Not that I think he ever gave a damn about the actual people that were hurt, but he was the first to openly call bullshit on neoliberalism in a Presidential campaign. So, while you had Dems slam Trickle Down, and rightly so, you’d never had anyone so easily and quickly dispatch the moral and economic bankruptcy of neoliberalism.

Mac,

Can you elaborate on the above? From where I sit, I can’t remember a single moment in time when Trump ever went after neoliberal economics. In fact, he pushes the “hard” version, as opposed to the Dems’ “soft” version. John Quiggin, the Australian economist (Zombie Economics), talks about this distinction in general, and I think it’s useful.

From the start, Trump called for massive tax cuts for the rich; massive deregulation; massive privatization of public goods and services, even land. Those are the three pillars of neoliberalism. Throw in the forced austerity due to those massive tax cuts and you get the fourth.

Again, I don’t see a single moment from the campaign, the transition or his early weeks where he has ever mounted an attack on neoliberalism. Just “bad trade deals” without saying anything about what he’d replace them with or why. Well, at least nothing beyond “great trade deals” and “You’re gonna get so tired of winning, believe me!”

Thanks for asking. I’m not sure how I feel at this point. I have been constantly trying to sift through all the info and sort of mitigate what’s real, what’s propaganda twisted from reality, what’s true and what’s not true and then where I sit on every issue.

I do feel that perhaps the principle conservative-right message, fueled for decades by Limbaugh and his protégé’s such as Breitbart and including many but not necessarily all of the Fox news team, that the mainstream media’s message is sand has been a false narrative. To me this is one of the main building blocks for where we are politically and what we’ve become. They’ve been spewing this narrative for so long that it seems a majority of US citizens from all political persuasions think this is the absolute truth. This lie helped set up all the others in my mind.

I still believe that most of what the mainstream media reports about and opines on is not a false hood. They’re absolutely not perfect and some of it is hard to sit and listen to but it’s not necessarily false or even misleading. To me, it’s what they think they know to a large degree and sure, they want ratings. That’s their game.

sdram wrote:

Thanks for asking. I’m not sure how I feel at this point. I have been constantly trying to sift through all the info and sort of mitigate what’s real, what’s propaganda twisted from reality, what’s true and what’s not true and then where I sit on every issue.

I do feel that perhaps the principle conservative-right message, fueled for decades by Limbaugh and his protégé’s such as Breitbart and including many but not necessarily all of the Fox news team, that the mainstream media’s message is sand has been a false narrative. To me this is one of the main building blocks for where we are politically and what we’ve become. They’ve been spewing this narrative for so long that it seems a majority of US citizens from all political persuasions think this is the absolute truth. This lie helped set up all the others in my mind.

I still believe that most of what the mainstream media reports about and opines on is not a false hood. They’re absolutely not perfect and some of it is hard to sit and listen to but it’s not necessarily false or even misleading. To me, it’s what they think they know to a large degree and sure, they want ratings. That’s their game.

I think we are absolutely reaping the product of the dominant media narrative from the past 30 years or so. The media has become increasingly right wing, has in some branches just become propaganda arms of the Republican party, and have convinced a large number of people that the media is liberal, and the government is the root of all our problems. At best, the media has served as stenographers to power without doing any homework. Trump runs as an outsider to the government, and positions himself as an enemy of the press. That is absolutely the creation of the media itself.

Interestingly now, the media has decided to question everything this government says, and call them on their lies.

Should we survive the Trump administration with democracy still breathing, it will be interesting to see how long the media keeps up its questioning.

Mackeyser wrote:

Great thread, I’ll get back to ya, Billy. Migraining at the moment. Hard to make some of these points while not making it sound like I’m advocating for Trump in any way.

Cuz, yeah, that’s not happening. At all.

Mac,

Sorry to hear that, and I hope you feel better soon. If memory serves, you’ve had that issue for a long, long time.

Anyway, no worries. I don’t think you’re advocating for Trump. Just wanted to point out that I don’t really think Trump has ever made the case against neoliberalism. But these are just words, labels, etc. etc.

The bottom line for me is this: America has never had the chance to even try what it so desperately needs . . . . an egalitarian, democratic alternative to capitalism. Our masters make sure that’s never a possibility. And, to me, even “the left” plays into this when it talks about “neoliberalism.” As if, if we could just end its ravages, we’d be golden.

In reality, before neoliberalism arose (early 1970s), capitalism enslaved, exploited, alienated and oppressed billions of human beings, and it’s never, ever, not in its entire history, been remotely fair or moral in the distribution or allocation of goods, services, resources, income, access, etc. etc. There is just no historical period when capitalism could remotely be considered moral or just or fair — or “effective” for more than a small percentage of the population.

It’s long past time to kill it and change to a cooperative, democratic, egalitarian system. We need politicians and political parties brave enough to say this.

I am numb, with brief periods of internal rage. Mostly I am numb because I have worked in state and local government for more than 30 years, and nothing gets better at any level. The rhetoric is still there, the media bias is still there, the partisan infighting is still there. Many people do not trust their government but are loyal to their political faction or interest group. This country is fractured at all levels of government.

I have to admit, this is all surreal to me, too. And I lean right.

On the bright side, the market is going bonkers (which means I won’t be living in my kids basement anytime soon) and my daughter is getting married next month.

Yay!

Ozoneranger wrote:

Okay, Mack- I’m just not going there with the dictatorship talk. I’ve heard it all before on FB and completely dismiss such talk. About as likely as the Calexit movement.

Why? Because Trump really stands alone. He’s not the leader of any kind of movement that would overwhelm our democracy, like Hitler had in Wiemar Germany. On the contrary, the GOP- most of whom despise him- is just watching and waiting. To get what they want, then pounce when he really does something really egregious. So they ditch him, get Pence (not my favorite but has the experience to lead a government) and they look like the Good Guys.

I think that scenario is far more plausible. And I’m not the only one that’s arrived at this.

That’s pretty much the way I see it, too. That is…I don’t see the same kind of absolute dictatorship that we saw in Germany and Italy, and various 3rd world countries.

Hitler benefited from a highly destabilized and apprehensive society. While few people are happy, there aren’t that many that would throw themselves behind a dictator at the moment, either. There are warning signs, but the conditions aren’t quite right for all out totalitarianism. I do think, though, that he intends to expand voter suppression, and stack the deck even more in favor of the entrenched power elites, further weakening democracy. We could end up with a de facto one-party state with a new figurehead elected every four years. Some people would argue that that is what we already have, though I would still say that the majority of people are on board with the current system.

Congrats on your daughter’s marriage. Best wishes.