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Idiocracy is just a side-gig in the GOP economy "Let's get right to the violence" [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-07-08

The more internal division within the GOP the better. As long as they continue disregarding conventional wisdom and expert opinion, especially with the fringe beliefs and ignorance. OTOH the most dangerous thing for the US would be to have ChatGPT now write all of their speeches.

J. Michael Luttig could not have put it better: “It’s finally time for [Republicans] to put the country before their party and pull back from the brink — for the good of the party, as well as the nation. If not now, then they must forever hold their peace.” The former president’s behavior may have invited charges, but the Republicans’ spineless support for the past two years convinced Mr. Trump of his political immortality, giving him the assurance that he could purloin some of the nation’s most sensitive national security secrets upon leaving the White House — and preposterously insist that they were his to do with as he wished — all without facing political consequences. Indeed, their fawning support since the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol has given Mr. Trump every reason to believe that he can ride these charges and any others not just to the Republican nomination, but also to the White House in 2024. In a word, the Republicans are as responsible as Mr. Trump for this month’s indictment — and will be as responsible for any indictment and prosecution of him for Jan. 6. One would think that, for a party that has prided itself for caring about the Constitution and the rule of law, this would stir some measure of self-reflection among party officials and even voters about their abiding support for the former president. Surely before barreling headlong into the 2024 presidential election season, more Republicans would realize it is time to come to the reckoning with Mr. Trump that they have vainly hoped and naïvely believed would never be necessary. www.nytimes.com/…

​In this innovative work, a distinguished historian, trained in psychoanalysis, unravels the riddle of Nixon's singularly opaque political personality. Neither a political biography, nor a clinical psychoanalysis, at the time of its initial publication, In Search of Nixon launched a new genre of scholarship; the "psycho-historical inquiry." Authors argue that the President's mental health was affecting the mental health of the people of the United States and that he places the country at grave risk of involving it in a war, and of undermining democracy itself due to his dangerous pathology.[4] Consequently, the authors claim, Trump's presidency represents an emergency which not only allows, but requires psychiatrists in the United States to raise alarms. While it has been repeatedly claimed that they have broken the American Psychiatric Association's Goldwater rule– which states that it is unethical for psychiatrists to give professional opinions about public figures without examining them in person[5] –the authors maintain that pointing out danger and calling for an evaluation is different from diagnosis. They have criticized the American Psychiatric Association for changing professional norms and standards, stating that it is dangerous to turn reasonable ethical guidelines into a gag rule under political pressure.[6][7] en.wikipedia.org/...

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x The QAnon movie “Sound of Freedom” is based on fake stories told by child-trafficking grifter @TimBallard who went on @FoxNews to spread Wayfair conspiracies.



He says a “pedophile network” trafficking children from Ukraine to POLAND, has the “same agenda as the woke left.”



This… https://t.co/AnHgTlxMbp pic.twitter.com/MUX0t3HdkH — Jim Stewartson, Anti-disinfo activist 🇺🇸🇺🇦💙 (@jimstewartson) July 8, 2023

x But think about that: It suggests how shallow the roots are of a particular kind of religious belief that is less a belief system than an expression of social identity. (If your replacement for Christian worship is a Trump rally, maybe church-going wasn't about Christ.) /2 — Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 8, 2023

holy fucking shit, the party that wasted millions on 33 Benghazi investigations and came up with nothing is suddenly very concerned about how much the Trump prosecution is costing. cry me a fucking river, you performative-nonsense buffoons. it's not my fault that your guy is a shitty criminal x holy fucking shit, the party that wasted millions on 33 Benghazi investigations and came up with nothing is suddenly very concerned about how much the Trump prosecution is costing. cry me a fucking river, you performative-nonsense buffoons. it's not my fault that your guy is a… — Jeff Tiedrich (@itsJeffTiedrich) July 8, 2023

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a crank. His views are a mishmash of right-wing fantasies mixed with remnants of the progressive he once was: Bitcoin boosterism, anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, assertions that Prozac causes mass shootings, opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine, but also favorable mention for single-payer health care. But for his last name, nobody would be paying him any attention — and despite that last name, he has zero chance of winning the Democratic presidential nomination. Yet now that Ron DeSantis’s campaign (slogan: “woke woke immigrants woke woke”) seems to be on the skids, Kennedy is suddenly getting support from some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley. Jack Dorsey, who founded Twitter, has endorsed him, while some other prominent tech figures have been holding fund-raisers on his behalf. Elon Musk, who is in the process of destroying what Dorsey built, hosted him for a Twitter Spaces event. So what does all this tell us about the role of technology billionaires in modern American political life? The other day I wrote about how a number of tech bros have become recession and inflation truthers, insisting that the improving economic news is fake. (I neglected to mention Dorsey’s 2021 declaration that hyperinflation was “happening.” How’s that going?) What the Silicon Valley Kennedy boomlet shows is that this is actually part of a broader phenomenon. What seems to attract some technology types to R.F.K. Jr. is his contrarianism — his disregard for conventional wisdom and expert opinion. So before I get into the tech-bro specific aspects of this weird political moment, let me say a few things about being contrarian. One sad but true fact of life is that most of the time conventional wisdom and expert opinion are right; yet there can be big personal and social payoffs to finding the places where they’re wrong. The trick to achieving these payoffs is to balance on the knife edge between excessive skepticism of unorthodoxy and excessive credulity. www.nytimes.com/... x Why tech bros are attracted to cranks and conspiracy theorists https://t.co/L5jmywev3v — Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) July 7, 2023

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/8/2179925/-Idiocracy-is-just-a-side-gig-in-the-GOP-economy

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