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Previous Guy's fascinating fascism signals the end of democracy, maybe [1]

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Date: 2023-05-27

Trump may be a deadbeat Chad, among other things as the DoJ closes in. Yet mass delusions continue, with many hoping for further division among Trump and DeSantis followers.

x As an objective, dispassionate observer on the outside looking in, I would say that the Trump people have done a lot more damage to Team Desantis so far than the reverse. But it’s still early days. pic.twitter.com/CIu9Q0rDCw — Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 27, 2023

x If the Republicans nominate either Trump or DeSantis, anyone who doesn't vote for the Democratic nominee will be partly to blame for the end of democracy's last best hope. The United States has deep flaws, but fascism is infinitely worse. Nothing less than that is at stake here. https://t.co/bwHIzwewBf — Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) May 26, 2023

There are a whole lot of gaping holes in the Durham Report (my Twitter thread on the report is here; here’s a ThreadReader version). Here are eight of the most important things that Durham chose to leave out of his report on his four-year investigation. 4. The Trump Tower Moscow deal. In a footnote, Durham concedes there are things that the FBI later found that corroborated ties between Trump and Russia that weren’t known when the investigation was opened. The only example he provides, however, is the June 9, 2016 meeting in Trump Tower in New York. There were also at least some activities involving the Trump campaign and Russians that did not become public, and were not known to the FBI, until much later. For example, on June 9, 2016, senior representatives of the campaign met briefly with a private Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and others at the Trump Tower. Mueller Report at 110, 117. Veselnitskaya “had previously worked for the Russian government and maintained a relationship with that government throughout this period of time.” Id. at 110. The initial email to Donald Trump Jr. proposing the meeting said that the Crown prosecutor of Russia was offering to provide the campaign with documents and information that would incriminate Clinton. Id. The meeting at the Trump Tower only became public over a year later. Id. at 121. Durham leaves out many others — like Manafort sharing campaign strategy and Trump having Manafort order Roger Stone to reach out to WikiLeaks. But because Durham focuses closely on Dmitry Peskov’s role in the Steele dossier and a brief nod he makes towards Russian disinformation in it, Durham’s silence about Michael Cohen’s January 2016 conversation with Dmitry Peskov’s office asking for help on a Trump Tower Moscow deal, using sanctioned banks and a former GRU officer as broker, is the most damning. Olga Galkina and Charles Dolan’s ties to Peskov — an interminable focus of this report — are important especially because Peskov was the one person in Russian who undeniably knew that Cohen had made a secret call to Russia during the campaign that both he and Trump were lying to cover up. Yet Durham simply ignores that critical context. www.emptywheel.net/...

x Trump fans mistook an apparently satirical deepfake for a real video



First of all, it's funny



Second, it's horrifying. Imagine how easily they could be manipulated pic.twitter.com/jB7XmJu7yH — Dmitrij ✝️🐊🇺🇸🇮🇱🇺🇦🇰🇷 (@EUChristianDem) May 27, 2023

x Trump, of course, has the darkest view of human nature imaginable—everyone is a ruthless, selfish cheater operating in a lawless jungle, and the entire point of life is to screw the other guy before he screws you, @mtomasky writes.https://t.co/Dmu0QDG1q4 — The New Republic (@newrepublic) May 21, 2023 Ranking Donald Trump’s most alarming speeches would not be a task for the faint of heart. There’s January 6, 2021, for starters, when Trump, as sitting president, instructed his audience on the need to “fight like hell” so Mike Pence would do “the right thing.” It had all started with the speech of 2015, when he announced his candidacy, which deservedly became known as the “Mexican rapists” speech, but which was also a harangue against many manifestations, as he saw it, of American weakness (pitting U.S. leaders against Chinese leaders, he said, was like lining up “the New England Patriots and Tom Brady and have them play your high school football team”). There was his 2016 convention speech with the infamous sentence: “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” That was followed by the “American Carnage” inaugural address. And so many more—most recently the late March Waco rally, a matter to which we will return. Even in that crush of competition, though, the video the Trump campaign released on March 16 stands out. Future historians, I’m certain, will take special note of it. Trump normally rambles, contradicts himself, loses his place. But this text was taut and sinewy; his delivery unusually crisp. It was also the frankest and most chilling expression of his current worldview as he mounts his 2024 campaign, a worldview that even at his worst he hadn’t quite embraced—until now. [...] These Americans live in more places than you think, and more places than the media let on. If I told you the list of cities that have banned discrimination on the basis of gender identity, in both public and private employment, includes Boulder, Colorado, and Austin, Texas, you would yawn. But what if I noted that that list—of some 225 cities and counties—also includes Danville, Kentucky; and Whitefish, Montana; and Olivette, Missouri; and Montevallo, Alabama? Or if I mentioned that a town of five people in West Virginia, Thurmond, passed a ban on discrimination against LGBTQ individuals? The vote was unanimous. Back in 2015. [...] Most of these places are still red on presidential maps. And they’ll remain so, when given just two choices framed for them the way Fox News frames things. But these ordinances, and all those poll numbers I cited above, tell us something. A lot of people don’t fear this new America. They believe in some degree of tolerance. They accept, whether they know it or not, the liberal conception of human nature over the conservative one. And they reject Donald Trump’s account of who is harming America. Trump doesn’t understand how truly out of touch he sounds when he casts his wide-ranging aspersions on millions of Americans and threatens them with retribution. But then, he always blames America first. newrepublic.com/...

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/27/2170513/-Previous-Guy-s-fascinating-fascism-signals-the-end-of-democracy-maybe

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