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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

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Big Tech disrupted disruption

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/08/permanent-overlords/#republicans-want-to-defund-the-police

Before "disruption" turned into a punchline, it was a genuinely exciting idea. Using technology, we could connect people to one another and allow them to collaborate, share, and cooperate to make great things happen.

It's easy (and valid) to dismiss the "disruption" of Uber, which "disrupted" taxis and transit by losing $31b worth of Saudi royal money in a bid to collapse the world's rival transportation system, while quietly promising its investors that it would someday have pricing power as a monopoly, and would attain profit through price-gouging and wage-theft.

Uber's disruption story was wreathed in bullshit: lies about the "independence" of its drivers, about the imminence of self-driving taxis, about the impact that replacing buses and subways with millions of circling, empty cars would have on traffic congestion. There were and are plenty of problems with traditional taxis and transit, but Uber magnified these problems, under cover of "disrupting" them away.

But there are other feats of high-tech disruption that were and are genuinely transformative – Wikipedia, GNU/Linux, RSS, and more. These disruptive technologies altered the balance of power between powerful institutions and the businesses, communities and individuals they dominated, in ways that have proven both beneficial and durable.

When we speak of commercial disruption today, we usually mean a tech company disrupting a non-tech company. Tinder disrupts singles bars. Netflix disrupts Blockbuster. Airbnb disrupts Marriott.

But the history of "disruption" features far more examples of tech companies disrupting other tech companies: DEC disrupts IBM. Netscape disrupts Microsoft. Google disrupts Yahoo. Nokia disrupts Kodak, sure – but then Apple disrupts Nokia. It's only natural that the businesses most vulnerable to digital disruption are other digital businesses.

And yet…disruption is nowhere to be seen when it comes to the tech sector itself. Five giant companies have been running the show for more than a decade. A couple of these companies (Apple, Microsoft) are Gen-Xers, having been born in the 70s, then there's a couple of Millennials (Amazon, Google), and that one Gen-Z kid (Facebook). Big Tech shows no sign of being disrupted, despite the continuous enshittification of their core products and services. How can this be? Has Big Tech disrupted disruption itself?

That's the contention of "Coopting Disruption," a new paper from two law profs: Mark Lemley (Stanford) and Matthew Wansley (Yeshiva U):

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4713845

The paper opens with a review of the literature on disruption. Big companies have some major advantages: they've got people and infrastructure they can leverage to bring new products to market more cheaply than startups. They've got existing relationships with suppliers, distributors and customers. People trust them.

Diversified, monopolistic companies are also able to capture "involuntary spillovers": when Google spends money on AI for image recognition, it can improve Google Photos, YouTube, Android, Search, Maps and many other products. A startup with just one product can't capitalize on these spillovers in the same way, so it doesn't have the same incentives to spend big on R&D.

Finally, big companies have access to cheap money. They get better credit terms from lenders, they can float bonds, they can tap the public markets, or just spend their own profits on R&D. They can also afford to take a long view, because they're not tied to VCs whose funds turn over every 5-10 years. Big companies get cheap money, play a long game, pay less to innovate and get more out of innovation.

But those advantages are swamped by the disadvantages of incumbency, all the various curses of bigness. Take Arrow's "replacement effect": new companies that compete with incumbents drive down the incumbents' prices and tempt their customers away. But an incumbent that buys a disruptive new company can just shut it down, and whittle down its ideas to "sustaining innovation" (small improvements to existing products), killing "disruptive innovation" (major changes that make the existing products obsolete).

Arrow's Replacement Effect also comes into play before a new product even exists. An incumbent that allows a rival to do R&D that would eventually disrupt its product is at risk; but if the incumbent buys this pre-product, R&D-heavy startup, it can turn the research to sustaining innovation and defund any disruptive innovation.

Arrow asks us to look at the innovation question from the point of view of the company as a whole. Clayton Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma" looks at the motivations of individual decision-makers in large, successful companies. These individuals don't want to disrupt their own business, because that will render some part of their own company obsolete (perhaps their own division!). They also don't want to radically change their customers' businesses, because those customers would also face negative effects from disruption.

A startup, by contrast, has no existing successful divisions and no giant customers to safeguard. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain from disruption. Where a large company has no way for individual employees to initiate major changes in corporate strategy, a startup has fewer hops between employees and management. What's more, a startup that rewards an employee's good idea with a stock-grant ties that employee's future finances to the outcome of that idea – while a giant corporation's stock bonuses are only incidentally tied to the ideas of any individual worker.

Big companies are where good ideas go to die. If a big company passes on its employees' cool, disruptive ideas, that's the end of the story for that idea. But even if 100 VCs pass on a startup's cool idea and only one VC funds it, the startup still gets to pursue that idea. In startup land, a good idea gets lots of chances – in a big company, it only gets one.

Given how innately disruptable tech companies are, given how hard it is for big companies to innovate, and given how little innovation we've gotten from Big Tech, how is it that the tech giants haven't been disrupted?

The authors propose a four-step program for the would-be Tech Baron hoping to defend their turf from disruption.

First, gather information about startups that might develop disruptive technologies and steer them away from competing with you, by investing in them or partnering with them.

Second, cut off any would-be competitor's supply of resources they need to develop a disruptive product that challenges your own.

Third, convince the government to pass regulations that big, established companies can comply with but that are business-killing challenges for small competitors.

Finally, buy up any company that resists your steering, succeeds despite your resource war, and escapes the compliance moats of regulation that favors incumbents.

Then: kill those companies.

The authors proceed to show that all four tactics are in play today. Big Tech companies operate their own VC funds, which means they get a look at every promising company in the field, even if they don't want to invest in them. Big Tech companies are also awash in money and their "rival" VCs know it, and so financial VCs and Big Tech collude to fund potential disruptors and then sell them to Big Tech companies as "aqui-hires" that see the disruption neutralized.

On resources, the authors focus on data, and how companies like Facebook have explicit policies of only permitting companies they don't see as potential disruptors to access Facebook data. They reproduce internal Facebook strategy memos that divide potential platform users into "existing competitors, possible future competitors, [or] developers that we have alignment with on business models." These categories allow Facebook to decide which companies are capable of developing disruptive products and which ones aren't. For example, Amazon – which doesn't compete with Facebook – is allowed to access FB data to target shoppers. But Messageme, a startup, was cut off from Facebook as soon as management perceived them as a future rival. Ironically – but unsurprisingly – Facebook spins these policies as pro-privacy, not anti-competitive.

These data policies cast a long shadow. They don't just block existing companies from accessing the data they need to pursue disruptive offerings – they also "send a message" to would-be founders and investors, letting them know that if they try to disrupt a tech giant, they will have their market oxygen cut off before they can draw breath. The only way to build a product that challenges Facebook is as Facebook's partner, under Facebook's direction, with Facebook's veto.

Next, regulation. Starting in 2019, Facebook started publishing full-page newspaper ads calling for regulation. Someone ghost-wrote a Washington Post op-ed under Zuckerberg's byline, arguing the case for more tech regulation. Google, Apple, OpenAI other tech giants have all (selectively) lobbied in favor of many regulations. These rules covered a lot of ground, but they all share a characteristic: complying with them requires huge amounts of money – money that giant tech companies can spare, but potential disruptors lack.

Finally, there's predatory acquisitions. Mark Zuckerberg, working without the benefit of a ghost writer (or in-house counsel to review his statements for actionable intent) has repeatedly confessed to buying companies like Instagram to ensure that they never grow to be competitors. As he told one colleague, "I remember your internal post about how Instagram was our threat and not Google+. You were basically right. The thing about startups though is you can often acquire them.”

All the tech giants are acquisition factories. Every successful Google product, almost without exception, is a product they bought from someone else. By contrast, Google's own internal products typically crash and burn, from G+ to Reader to Google Videos. Apple, meanwhile, buys 90 companies per year – Tim Apple brings home a new company for his shareholders more often than you bring home a bag of groceries for your family. All the Big Tech companies' AI offerings are acquisitions, and Apple has bought more AI companies than any of them.

Big Tech claims to be innovating, but it's really just operationalizing. Any company that threatens to disrupt a tech giant is bought, its products stripped of any really innovative features, and the residue is added to existing products as a "sustaining innovation" – a dot-release feature that has all the innovative disruption of rounding the corners on a new mobile phone.

The authors present three case-studies of tech companies using this four-point strategy to forestall disruption in AI, VR and self-driving cars. I'm not excited about any of these three categories, but it's clear that the tech giants are worried about them, and the authors make a devastating case for these disruptions being disrupted by Big Tech.

What do to about it? If we like (some) disruption, and if Big Tech is enshittifying at speed without facing dethroning-by-disruption, how do we get the dynamism and innovation that gave us the best of tech?

The authors make four suggestions.

First, revive the authorities under existing antitrust law to ban executives from Big Tech companies from serving on the boards of startups. More broadly, kill interlocking boards altogether. Remember, these powers already exist in the lawbooks, so accomplishing this goal means a change in enforcement priorities, not a new act of Congress or rulemaking. What's more, interlocking boards between competing companies are illegal per se, meaning there's no expensive, difficult fact-finding needed to demonstrate that two companies are breaking the law by sharing directors.

Next: create a nondiscrimination policy that requires the largest tech companies that share data with some unaffiliated companies to offer data on the same terms to other companies, except when they are direct competitors. They argue that this rule will keep tech giants from choking off disruptive technologies that make them obsolete (rather than competing with them).

On the subject of regulation and compliance moats, they have less concrete advice. They counsel lawmakers to greet tech giants' demands to be regulated with suspicion, to proceed with caution when they do regulate, and to shape regulation so that it doesn't limit market entry, by keeping in mind the disproportionate burdens regulations put on established giants and small new companies. This is all good advice, but it's more a set of principles than any kind of specific practice, test or procedure.

Finally, they call for increased scrutiny of mergers, including mergers between very large companies and small startups. They argue that existing law (Sec 2 of the Sherman Act and Sec 7 of the Clayton Act) both empower enforcers to block these acquisitions. They admit that the case-law on this is poor, but that just means that enforcers need to start making new case-law.

I like all of these suggestions! We're certainly enjoying a more activist set of regulators, who are more interested in Big Tech, than we've seen in generations.

But they are grossly under-resourced even without giving them additional duties. As Matt Stoller points out, "the DOJ's Antitrust Division has fewer people enforcing anti-monopoly laws in a $24 trillion economy than the Smithsonian Museum has security guards."

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/congressional-republicans-to-defund

What's more, Republicans are trying to slash their budgets even further. The American conservative movement has finally located a police force they're eager to defund: the corporate police who defend us all from predatory monopolies.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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thatsonemorbidcorvid · 10 months

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“By simply existing as women in public life, we have all become targets, stripped of our accomplishments, our intellect, and our activism and reduced to sex objects for the pleasure of millions of anonymous eyes.

Recently, a Google Alert informed me that I am the subject of deepfake pornography. I wasn’t shocked. For more than a year, I have been the target of a widespread online harassment campaign, and deepfake porn—whose creators, using artificial intelligence, generate explicit video clips that seem to show real people in sexual situations that never actually occurred—has become a prized weapon in the arsenal misogynists use to try to drive women out of public life. The only emotion I felt as I informed my lawyers about the latest violation of my privacy was a profound disappointment in the technology—and in the lawmakers and regulators who have offered no justice to people who appear in porn clips without their consent. Many commentators have been tying themselves in knots over the potential threats posed by artificial intelligence—deepfake videos that tip elections or start wars, job-destroying deployments of ChatGPT and other generative technologies. Yet policy makers have all but ignored an urgent AI problem that is already affecting many lives, including mine.

Last year, I resigned as head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, a policy-coordination body that the Biden administration let founder amid criticism mostly from the right. In subsequent months, at least three artificially generated videos that appear to show me engaging in sex acts were uploaded to websites specializing in deepfake porn. The images don’t look much like me; the generative-AI models that spat them out seem to have been trained on my official U.S. government portrait, taken when I was six months pregnant. Whoever created the videos likely used a free “face swap” tool, essentially pasting my photo onto an existing porn video. In some moments, the original performer’s mouth is visible while the deepfake Frankenstein moves and my face flickers. But these videos aren’t meant to be convincing—all of the websites and the individual videos they host are clearly labeled as fakes. Although they may provide cheap thrills for the viewer, their deeper purpose is to humiliate, shame, and objectify women, especially women who have the temerity to speak out. I am somewhat inured to this abuse, after researching and writing about it for years. But for other women, especially those in more conservative or patriarchal environments, appearing in a deepfake-porn video could be profoundly stigmatizing, even career- or life-threatening.

As if to underscore video makers’ compulsion to punish women who speak out, one of the videos to which Google alerted me depicts me with Hillary Clinton and Greta Thunberg. Because of their global celebrity, deepfakes of the former presidential candidate and the climate-change activist are far more numerous and more graphic than those of me. Users can also easily find deepfake-porn videos of the singer Taylor Swift, the actress Emma Watson, and the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly; Democratic officials such as Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; the Republicans Nikki Haley and Elise Stefanik; and countless other prominent women. By simply existing as women in public life, we have all become targets, stripped of our accomplishments, our intellect, and our activism and reduced to sex objects for the pleasure of millions of anonymous eyes.

Men, of course, are subject to this abuse far less frequently. In reporting this article, I searched the name Donald Trump on one prominent deepfake-porn website and turned up one video of the former president—and three entire pages of videos depicting his wife, Melania, and daughter Ivanka. A 2019 study from Sensity, a company that monitors synthetic media, estimated that more than 96 percent of deepfakes then in existence were nonconsensual pornography of women. The reasons for this disproportion are interconnected, and are both technical and motivational: The people making these videos are presumably heterosexual men who value their own gratification more than they value women’s personhood. And because AI systems are trained on an internet that abounds with images of women’s bodies, much of the nonconsensual porn that those systems generate is more believable than, say, computer-generated clips of cute animals playing would be.

As I looked into the provenance of the videos in which I appear—I’m a disinformation researcher, after all—I stumbled upon deepfake-porn forums where users are remarkably nonchalant about the invasion of privacy they are perpetrating. Some seem to believe that they have a right to distribute these images—that because they fed a publicly available photo of a woman into an application engineered to make pornography, they have created art or a legitimate work of parody. Others apparently think that simply by labeling their videos and images as fake, they can avoid any legal consequences for their actions. These purveyors assert that their videos are for entertainment and educational purposes only. But by using that description for videos of well-known women being “humiliated” or “pounded”—as the titles of some clips put it—these men reveal a lot about what they find pleasurable and informative.

Ironically, some creators who post in deepfake forums show great concern for their own safety and privacy—in one forum thread that I found, a man is ridiculed for having signed up with a face-swapping app that does not protect user data—but insist that the women they depict do not have those same rights, because they have chosen public career paths. The most chilling page I found lists women who are turning 18 this year; they are removed on their birthdays from “blacklists” that deepfake-forum hosts maintain so they don’t run afoul of laws against child pornography.

Effective laws are exactly what the victims of deepfake porn need. Several states—including Virginia and California—have outlawed the distribution of deepfake porn. But for victims living outside these jurisdictions or seeking justice against perpetrators based elsewhere, these laws have little effect. In my own case, finding out who created these videos is probably not worth the time and money. I could attempt to subpoena platforms for information about the users who uploaded the videos, but even if the sites had those details and shared them with me, if my abusers live out of state—or in a different country—there is little I could do to bring them to justice.

Representative Joseph Morelle of New York is attempting to reduce this jurisdictional loophole by reintroducing the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act, a proposed amendment to the 2022 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. Morelle’s bill would impose a nationwide ban on the distribution of deepfakes without the explicit consent of the people depicted in the image or video. The measure would also provide victims with somewhat easier recourse when they find themselves unwittingly starring in nonconsensual porn.

In the absence of strong federal legislation, the avenues available to me to mitigate the harm caused by the deepfakes of me are not all that encouraging. I can request that Google delist the web addresses of the videos in its search results and—though the legal basis for any demand would be shaky—have my attorneys ask online platforms to take down the videos altogether. But even if those websites comply, the likelihood that the videos will crop up somewhere else is extremely high. Women targeted by deepfake porn are caught in an exhausting, expensive, endless game of whack-a-troll.

The Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act won’t solve the deepfake problem; the internet is forever, and deepfake technology is only becoming more ubiquitous and its output more convincing. Yet especially because AI grows more powerful by the month, adapting the law to an emergent category of misogynistic abuse is all the more essential to protect women’s privacy and safety. As policy makers worry whether AI will destroy the world, I beg them: Let’s first stop the men who are using it to discredit and humiliate women.

Nina Jankowicz is a disinformation expert and the author of How to Be a Woman Online and How to Lose the Information War.

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silvermoon424 · 11 months

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Does anyone else get uncomfortable with liberal (and sometimes leftist) discussions about undocumented labor?

So many (well-intentioned) people are like “no one else will pick strawberries for $4 an hour with no benefits or breaks except illegal immigrants! They’re so important to our economy! Republicans don’t get that, they’re not stealing our jobs! Americans don’t want to do them!”

It just makes me feel really gross. NOBODY should be working for these insulting wages and in these deplorable conditions. But it’s okay, because those illegals are used to being treated like shit and someone has to keep the economy going?

I know these people are trying to argue against xenophobic Republicans but “have you considered how cheap their labor is and how companies get away with treating them like shit?” isn’t the leftist slam-dunk people think it is.

#illegal immigration #immigrants #immigration #leftism #capitalism #fuck capitalism

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ralfmaximus · 2 months

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Karla Jacinto Romero, the woman whose story Sen. Katie Britt appeared to have shared in the Republican response to the State of the Union last week, slammed the Alabama senator for inaccurately using her story to highlight Joe Biden’s immigration policies.

Republican Senator shares tragic sex crime story on national TV, saying it happened because of Biden's lax border policies

Tearfully recounts how when she visited the Texas border, this brave woman told her PERSONALLY how she was raped & beaten up to 12 times a day while held captive by Mexican drug lords in Texas

Journalist discovers it had nothing to do with Mexican drug lords

and occurred between 2004-2008

So not recently, like not even close

It happened during the George W. Bush administration

You know, George W Bush, the Democrat Republican president

who was running things at the time

also it happened in Mexico, not Texas

AND THEN THE ACTUAL WOMAN WHO SURVIVED THE ORDEAL COMES FORWARD and boy is she pissed about being used as a political prop

So to recap: this poor woman endures a horrible experience decades ago, but while no doubt still having nightmares & PTSD, has managed to put her life back together. AND THEN this absolute shitweasel of a MAGA Republican drags her story back into the spotlight, ON NATIONAL TV as a cheap attack on a political foe.

I'd be pissed too.

#us politics #maga

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cbk1000 · 3 months

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Not to keep belabouring this point, but as we are now in Election Year, this is your friendly reminder that I don't give a fuck what you think about Biden. I don't care how you feel about his administration's response to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. I don't care if you think he's too old, not progressive enough, etc. etc. etc.

The reality is that, unless something major changes, either Trump or Biden will be elected to the presidency in November. Our voting system is deeply flawed and deserving of criticism. But nothing magical is going to happen between now and November. There will absolutely, categorically, be no other viable choice, no third-party candidate, no perfect leftist wet dream that swoops in at the last minute to make you feel tingly in your moral purity. Unless one of them dies between now and then (and even if Biden does, guess what: the Dems aren't going to put up the Ideal Progressive as their candidate), you will get Biden, or you will get Trump. If you think you are Doing Something for the Palestinian cause by helping Trump to get elected--and that is what you are doing if you throw a tantrum and abstain from voting in a race that current polling indicates is going to be sphincter-clenching tight--I have a bridge to sell you very cheap.

However poorly you think Biden is doing, what do you think a second Trump term is going to do, domestically and abroad? Trump has consistently and regularly praised various dictators and authoritarian strongmen around the world. He admires them. He wants to be one of them. That is who we will have if Biden is not elected. You will actively harm not only vulnerable people in the U.S., but those outside this country who will be affected by the policies of Putin's biggest stan.

You need to hold your nose and vote. I am genuinely sorry that is the reality of our broken election system, but it IS the reality, and ignoring that will do far more harm than voting for Biden. Everywhere the Republicans hold power they are pushing anti-abortion legislation, they are banning books, they are trying to prevent teachers from talking about racism, they are denying trans people access to medical care. If you want to see that at the federal level, then go ahead, don't vote. And then shut your fucking whiny mouths about the Progressive Cause, because you don't even care enough about it to make the most basic effort to try and stop the people who are actively harming all those minority groups you only advocate for in online echo chambers where you think you can get a rimjob for being a good little progressive who uses all the right buzzwords.

#politics #trump's voters will show up #make sure you do too

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ebookporn · 23 days

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Because wire fraud and money laundering are now also book terms

Books have always played a role in politics as a way to get to know the candidate, outline their vision, and set the record straight after they have left office but political books can also be weaponized and not always in the way you might think. Recently Harper accidentally released metadata on a James Comer book called ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MONEY due to release on September 10th, strategic timing for a close election. Comer quickly denied he has a contract for a book but Harper wouldn’t have this data in their system if they weren’t already working on it. The ONIX feed is now been refed listed as UNTITLED by Anonymous. Shopping a book deal at the same time that he is leading the Biden impeachment probe, is obviously not a good look for Comer. Sure this is a way to throw chum the water and try and smear the other candidate but I live in Baltimore and another concern comes to mind. With a bankrupt Republican Party, it might be very important to watch just who is buying these books.

In 2019, just before Covid, Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and two counts of tax evasion in what has become known as BookGate. Pugh and her long-standing legislative and campaign adviser, Gary Brown fraudulently sold self-published Healthy Holly children's books to local nonprofit organizations in order to obtain more than $800,000 to fund her campaign and enrich herself. These were cheap and poorly written books riddled with errors and spelling mistakes. Holly, the main character’s name, was spelled differently throughout the series. Tens of thousands of books sold to organizations and intended to be distributed to children ended up piled in warehouses and were never delivered. They were however resold multiple times. Significantly more books were sold than were ever printed. But this wasn’t just about selling crappy kids books. The buyers didn't care, they bought anyway.

CNN reported that during BookGate the University of Maryland Medical Center spent $500,000 to fund the purchase of some 100,000 books from Pugh’s company, Healthy Holly LLC. The former mayor also received about $114,000 from healthcare provider Kaiser Permanente for some 20,000 books from 2015 to 2018 and an additional $80,000 from the public foundation Associated Black Charities, which said it bought some 10,000 copies of Pugh’s between 2011 and 2016. All of these groups worked with and lobbied the city.

Catherine Pugh was sentenced to 3 years in prison and ordered to pay $411,948 in restitution and to forfeit more than $600,000, including a property in Baltimore and nearly $18,000 from her campaign account.

Sound familiar? It is openly acknowledged that this is precisely what is going on with Donald Trump’s self-published bible. High-velocity sales of an objectively poor product are hard to hide and easier to subpoena and trace as people notice. Now if you can put a legitimate business between you and the questionable product all the better. We can see that with Trump’s media company now listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

In the post-Trump world, it is no longer just monitoring institutional sales and people trying to game the bestsellers lists. Trade Publishers and retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Barnes & Noble need to be extra careful and pay attention to just how and to whom these books are being sold lest they get caught up in an FBI investigation because wire fraud and money laundering are now also book terms.

~eP

#political books #money laundering #bookgate #book publishing #bookstores #retailers

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fuckyeahreligionpigeon · 2 years

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An open letter to white evangelicals: We’re done with you.

By North Carolina Pastor John Pavlovitz

Dear White Evangelicals,

I need to tell you something: People have had it with you. They’re done. They want nothing to do with you any longer, and here’s why: They see your hypocrisy, your inconsistency, your incredibly selective mercy, and your thinly veiled supremacy.

For eight years they watched you relentlessly demonize a Black President; a man faithfully married for 26 years; a doting father and husband without a hint of moral scandal or the slightest whiff of infidelity. They watched you deny his personal faith convictions, argue his birthplace, and assail his character—all without cause or evidence.

They saw you brandish Scriptures to malign him and use the laziest of racial stereotypes in criticizing him. And through it all, White Evangelicals—you never once suggested that God placed him where he was, you never publicly offered prayers for him and his family, you never welcomed him to your Christian Universities, you never gave him the benefit of the doubt in any instance, you never spoke of offering him forgiveness or mercy, your evangelists never publicly thanked God for his leadership, your pastors never took to the pulpit to offer solidarity with him, you never made any effort to affirm his humanity or show the love of Jesus to him in any quantifiable measure.

You violently opposed him at every single turn—without offering a single ounce of the grace you claim as the heart of your faith tradition. You jettisoned Jesus as you dispensed damnation on him.

And yet you give carte blanche to a white Republican man so riddled with depravity, so littered with extramarital affairs, so unapologetically vile, with such a vast resume of moral filth—that the mind boggles.

And the change in you is unmistakable. It has been an astonishing conversion to behold: a being born again.

With him, you suddenly find religion. With him, you’re now willing to offer full absolution. With him, all is forgiven without repentance or admission. With him, you’re suddenly able to see some invisible, deeply buried heart. With him, sin has become unimportant, and compassion no longer a requirement. With him, you see only Providence.

And White Evangelicals, all those people who have had it with you—they see it all clearly. They recognize the toxic source of your inconsistency.

They see that pigmentation and party are your sole deities. They see that you aren’t interested in perpetuating the love of God or emulating the heart of Jesus. They see that you aren’t burdened to love the least, or to be agents of compassion, or to care for your Muslim, gay, African, female, or poor neighbors as yourself.

They see that all you’re really interested in doing is making a God in your own ivory image and demanding that the world bow down to it. They recognize this all about white, Republican Jesus—not dark-skinned Jesus of Nazareth.

And I know you don’t realize it, but you’re digging your own grave these days; the grave of your very faith tradition.

Your willingness to align yourself with cruelty is a costly marriage. Yes, you’ve gained a Supreme Court seat, a few months with the Presidency as a mouthpiece, and the cheap high of temporary power—but you’ve lost a whole lot more.

You’ve lost an audience with millions of wise, decent, good-hearted, faithful people with eyes to see this ugliness. You’ve lost any moral high ground or spiritual authority with a generation. You’ve lost any semblance of Christlikeness. You’ve lost the plot. And most of all you’ve lost your soul.

I know it’s likely you’ll dismiss these words. The fact that you’ve even made your bed with such malevolence, shows how far gone you are and how insulated you are from the reality in front of you. But I had to at least try to reach you. It’s what Jesus would do.

#atheism #christianity #judaism #islam #catholicism #mormonism #baptist #jehovah witness #scientology #Religion

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suratan-zir · 7 months

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You know, as an American it pisses me off so much the way House republicans in particular are like "oh, we can't send aid to Ukraine because the American tax payers shouldn't have to pay for that", well you also cut SNAP and child tax credits, so it's not like we're getting that money either you kremlin stooges

Not to mention that most of that military aid is in the form of weapons that are already built, and we're just assigning a dollar amount to, but honestly we were gonna have to dispose of a lot of old systems anyway. Half this stuff has been like nearly free garbage disposal for us, while also making these old systems actually useful by letting Ukraine have them

On top of that these assholes are always crowing about freedom, but then you have a country actually literally fighting for freedom and no that's bad

Really damn frustrating and... I don't know, Americans who act like this piss me off cause it's like... not only are you being callous as hell, you're also just being dumb because apart from supporting Ukraine being the right thing, it's just in our own self interest. Ukraine winning and taking back all it's territory isn't only a must because no one should be invaded, it's a geopolitical win against a hostile foreign government and a win for the rules based order, which in turn deters China from attacking any of it's neighbors

Like it's good for us, but no, trump is in russia's pocket so by god all these people will climb in russia's pocket too!

Anyway, this obviously isn't as big a problem for me as for you. I'm safe over here in the US while Ukrainians are the ones actually suffering. It's just, I saw your post and... I don't know, I at least wanted to say something as someone in one of those countries you're talking about

Just wanted to say that I'm behind Ukraine as long as it takes, no appeasement, no half measures, I'm here till Ukraine liberates every inch of soil from russia... may not have much power as just some schmuck, but I'm still behind you no matter what

Slava Ukraini

Heroyam Slava

Luckily, there are also Americans like you who aren't buying into cheap kremlin-sponsored populist manipulations. The most important thing you can do is to remain a decent human being. I can only hope there are more Americans like you than the other type you describe. Thank you for this message, and you're not a schmuck! ❤️

#ask #war in ukraine

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southshoretides · 7 months

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Type of Guy Who Fears The Void

On the object level, I think this DeBoer piece correctly identifies a certain type of person (aging white man who self-consciously and showily hates all aging-white-guy pop culture in favor of trying to stay hip), but as the commenters implicitly/explicitly point out, that type of guy is concentrated among the east-coast-grad-educated-tastemaker-social-media-part-time-writer set, i.e. Freddie's milieu, which he often tricks himself into believing is the only milieu in the world. Go to any bar in the Midwest and poll the natives on BTS-vs-Pearl Jam and you'll get different results. (Freddie is of course interminably contrarian relative to whatever his local milieu is, and if fate had brought him to Kansas instead of Brooklyn, he'd be the most red-tribe-hating, pining-for-Brooklyn's-loving-embrace guy on the internet.)

But the meta level of "People recognize that the world naturally puts them in stereotypical boxes and either fight to escape that or wholeheartedly embrace it" is something I think about a lot. That first paragraph was all about different Types of Guy, and that's all it is these days, isn't it? Type of guy, type of guy, type of guy. A whole generation of internet-raised autists can pinpoint your political beliefs based on how you dress or what kind of car you drive. "Guy who makes youtube videos while driving his SUV and wearing wraparound sunglasses" is a different type of guy than "Guy who insists that Carly Rae Jepsen is the best songwriter of the 2010s" but they are politically and culturally opposite Types of Guy, even though there's no rule that says Democrats can't drive SUVs or Republicans can't like Carly Rae Jepsen. But the trend-lines are strong enough that people notice anyway.

@max1461 occasionally gripes about how quickly and thoughtlessly people transpose is-statements with ought-statements, or in other words, take objective factual data about something and try to force it into a prefab narrative. And it certainly is annoying, but to an extent it's like making fun of cavemen for thinking every rustle of grass is a tiger. That's what their environment is giving them, and it's what their brains adapt for. What our environment is giving us is an endless parade of people who eagerly and effusively promote their political and cultural opinions, and eagerly and effusively identify those opinions with such and such group, so no wonder it's so easy for even an amateur to unearth a Type of Guy. No wonder you can look at someone with a Roman-statue avatar and predict with reasonable accuracy his thoughts on young women who dye their hair. And I think this is something the internet makes worse, not better.

I think any objective accounting of the situation would have to conclude that it's easier to be an eccentric in 2023 than in 1993. The internet has allowed weird people to find each other, talk to each other, understand each other and themselves in a way that simply didn't exist before. At the very least, you don't get that "Am I the only human on earth who's like this?" feeling. And the cheap, Hallmark version of diversity/eccentricity is still a popular cultural value: those wall-hangings and birthday cards your aunt buys say "Be Yourself: Everyone Else is Taken", not "Yourself sucks, Be Someone Else." No one wants to be seen as the stodgy, bitter old fart. Part of it, I'm sure, is a cultural thing--Americans seem to obsess over individuality and being one's truest self more than others.

And yet...there's also this ambient sense that eccentricity-in-itself has been devalued in 2023 relative to 1993, at least in my circles. Everything from eccentric tastes in art ("What are you, some kind of hipster filmbro?"), sex ("Of course I'm sex-positive but weird creepy shit doesn't count!") or politics ("You don't really think that, you're just being edgy.") People who value weirdness and eccentricity for its own sake feel hemmed in by people who either openly see it as a threat to their own culture's local hegemony. A lot of the internet really does seem to live by the 'nail that sticks out gets hammered down' and sees that as a good thing. Seems paradoxical.

(For the record, I'm not laying the blame here at any particular subculture. Conservatives blather on about freedom and liberty and then say anyone who refuses to lick an HOA's balls is a dangerous subversive. Progressives say everyone is valid and beautiful and then plaster their spaces with various 'freaks DNI' equivalents, 'freak' status being determined by vibe-centric whisper campaigns. Liberals will Celebrate Diversity up to and no further than the point where it damages quarterly profits. No "name" group is immune to this, really, but certain subgroups are.)

A theory: the normie-weirdo ratio isn't particularly different than it used to be, but the way they interact is different. In the pre-internet days, the weirdos were well aware they were weird, and in having to navigate normie-land with psychological armor on, at least they might come to understand it somewhat. Now, for those who want it, there's an unending stream of validation and insistence that you're perfect the way you are. Without shading into the "can suffering be a good thing if it leads to change for the better?" argument, I think even people who are all-in on the answer being "no" have met at least one person defined by their self-actualization curdling into selfishness and narcissism, to the point where you can't understand how they function, in a way that is directly attributable to a having a stable of pseudonymous online enablers. That's a real phenomenon the way that "Shut up and repress, you freak" is a real phenomenon. They can both suck. They can even both suck in ways that make the other one worse.

The post-mainstream, pre-social-media 'Golden Age' of the internet was when it was basically a playground for weird people. Now everyone's on it by necessity, the weirdo-in-a-small-town dynamics are back, but now the whole world is the small town with the added "no one can ever really escape for good" dynamics of the internet tracking and recording and monetizing every aspect of human interaction.

The weirdos who are old enough to remember when the internet was their turf close ranks and start watching each other for the first signs of Turning Normie--itself something that's antithetical to actually following one's own star and drawing from whatever cultural tradition you find satisfying. The weirdos who aren't old enough grin and bear it because "you're constantly being judged by everyone" is just normal life for them. The stuff that's so popular that liking it puts you in the biggest box possible will benefit; stuff that was never gonna be popular under any circumstances will keep trucking. It's the cultural middle class, as usual, that suffers the most. Again, as I keep emphasizing, this cultural panopticon being both unending and global is unprecedented in human history.

I really think a lot of current cultural neuroses are due to this, although I can't really prove it and don't have the resources to research it. This sense of modern technology revealing to people how fundamentally uninteresting they are and rebelling against it explains a lot to me--the tendency of people to ideologically self-sort to narrower and narrower levels, the uncanny ability of observers to categorize even the relatively-novel versions of those self-sorts, the tendency of some people to just give up and openly embrace everything the hivemind says about them, "be yourself" as a zombified and omnipresent cultural meme when millions of people are struggling existentially with exactly that, every culture absorbing ambient victim-mentality and thinking they're the only right-living people in a world gone mad, the 'cultural class' getting deeper and deeper into objectively-adolescent pop-cultural obsessions and lashing out at the idea they should try something more challenging, the aging-out-of-relevance hipsters Freddie discusses being mortified by the idea of being perceived as exactly that.

The problem, for me at least, is that I understand there is a way out, and if anything it feels worse. I may be a bit younger than the type-case Freddie describes, and am not in an industry where I have to constantly prove my relevance to myself and others, but I am doing the opposite of aging gracefully. Instead of constantly trying to convince my social circle (I don't have a social circle) that having the political, cultural, and artistic preferences of a 21-year-old means I still am one at heart, I engage in the much-healthier practice of spending every waking moment fantasizing being 21 or 18 or, shit, even 14 again. I know nobody really likes getting older. I also think that if everyone was as obsessive and self-loathing about it as I am, society would cease to function. My regrets and pining are definitely unhealthy, obsessive and all-consuming, but I don't really talk about them because there's no way it ends other than "Yeah, that sucks."

But a lot of the people in Freddie's comment section are saying things like "Once I realized I was fundamentally unimportant and my opinions didn't really matter, I could get down to raising my kids/doing my job, which matters more than my feelings." And maybe ten years from now I'll be OK with that. Hell, maybe I'll actually have kids, unlikely as that sounds now. Right now that mindset sounds like a self-administered lobotomy. Maybe I'd be OK with it if I'd actually lived it up in my teens and twenties, tried to become an actual person and discovered what I like about myself, instead of just vaguely Following Rules and assuming there was a payoff to that. Maybe I'd accept that there comes a point in life where my destiny is to be a good parent/worker and that necessarily implies shaving off the hard bits of your personality. Or maybe even the people who were good at being young struggle with getting old. Maybe our cultural/technological moment is just making that a struggle for everyone. Guess I'll never know.

But as we creep closer to no one's parents, then no one's grandparents, remembering a world without the eternal and all-consuming Now of the internet, I suspect I won't be the only one aging with a complete lack of grace, and I suspect we as a culture are completely unprepared to deal with it.

#discourse #aging #culture #the internet

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agoodcartoon · 1 year

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Democrats see child migrants as human beings who deserve citizenship rights. Republicans see child migrants as cheap labor to be discarded.

- skeleton warrior

#benson

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missszena · 4 days

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I haven't been able to stop thinking about this since last night. I need to say something about it.

Last evening, at the time of writing this, I was almost killed in a high speed collision on the highway because of my mom's Trump stickers.

I'm unfortunately stuck living in a conservative household due to the fact I'm too broke to afford my own place. I'm a college student surviving off of cheap fast food and forced to hide most of my true beliefs and play along because if I don't then I'll be out on the streets. The one time I voiced my pro-palestine support I was cornered by my mom in my room who wouldn't leave me alone, shaming me and basically implying my jewish ancestors who fled from Poland to the US during the holocaust would be ashamed of me, and when I literally had to shove her out of my room to get her to leave me alone I overheard my grandmother downstairs implying I should be thrown out.

If I don't keep my head down and pretend I'm at least neutral on their conservative ideals I will lose my housing. I won't be able to afford my guinea pig's food and bedding or have a place to keep him. I won't be able to finish college since I wouldn't have steady internet.

Last night, two people followed my mother's car from the city on our drive home from a traveling museum exhibit while making various gestures and yelling their disapproval of Trump (though I couldn't hear it through the car windows I could see it). At first they were just being mildly irritating, preventing my mom from changing lanes by trapping her behind a slower car, and I was about to convince her to leave them alone since they weren't doing any harm.

That was until they attempted to run her off the highway.

They sped ahead of us right into the middle of the road then slammed on the breaks, giving her either the split second window to also hit the breaks or either swerve off the highway/into the slower driver, or collide with them if she wasn't fast enough. Thank every fucking god in the universe she was quick enough to hit the breaks and just barely miss running right into them at over 70 miles an hour.

I could have fucking died because these two people assumed I was also a Trump supporter.

I, a queer person unable to leave a conservative household, could have fucking DIED because I can't get away from my Trumpie family members and they're my only housing (my dad spends most his time out of state).

Please for the love of fucking gods do NOT assume someone's beliefs based on the people they're with. You don't know if that kid with the parent wearing a MAGA hat is someone genuinely being brainwashed into conservative ideals or is stuck in a household they can't get out of. You don't know if that teenager being dragged along to evangelical churches or brought to Trump rallies is there of their own free will or if they just have no choice in going. You don't know if that young adult in the car covered in republican stickers actually supports those ideals or if they're struggling to afford to survive and have no other choice but to put up with conservative bullshit to not end up homeless.

If something goes wrong, like it almost did that day, you could have very well hurt a closeted queer kid, a struggling ally, or turned a potential ally away from you by threatening their life and safety which gives their conservative friends or family "evidence" to point at and say LOOK AREN'T THE LEFT SO AWFUL??? AREN'T THESE PEOPLE THE WORST??? THIS IS WHY YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO US!!!

This is in no way me saying I support conservatives. I don't. But I support people who can't get away from them either due to their age or the fact its fucking impossible to buy your own house these days even if you aren't also trying to get through college.

Please don't make those assumptions. Please don't let them motivate you to almost seriously harm or nearly kill someone. You don't know who's in the passenger seat.

#important #psa #please read I know its long

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 8 months

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By Chauncey Devega

Donald Trump is a dictator in waiting. Like other dictators, he is threatening to put his "enemies" in prison – and to do even worse things to them. These are not idle threats or empty acts of ideation: Donald Trump is a violent man who is a proven enemy of democracy and freedom.

These threats of violence against his enemies are part of a much larger pattern of violent and dangerous behavior that is only growing worse as he faces criminal trials and the possibility of going to prison for hundreds of years.

In the most recent example, Donald Trump told Glenn Beck during an interview last week that he is going to put President Biden and other "enemies" in prison when he takes by the White House in 2025.

In a Sunday evening post on his Truth Social disinformation social media platform, Trump was even more explicit with his threats of violence and harm, threatening that he would treat Biden and the other "enemies" like they do in "banana republics":

“The Crooked Joe Biden Campaign has thrown so many Indictments and lawsuits against me that Republicans are already thinking about what we are going to do to Biden and the Communists when it's our turn. They have started a whole new Banana Republic way of thinking about political campaigns. So cheap and dirty, but that's where America is right now. Be careful what you wish for!”

In "banana republics" the enemies of the leader and the regime are usually imprisoned, tortured, executed, and face death squads and mass executions. Trump himself has publicly expressed his admiration for murderous dictators and autocrats such as Vladimir Putin and N. Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

The corporate news media — with MSNBC being a notable exception — as is their policy, mostly ignored Trump's most recent threats to kill and imprison President Joe Biden and the other "enemies" of the MAGA movement. Ignoring the danger will not make it disappear or otherwise go away; moreover, to ignore Trumpism and neofascism is to normalize them.

During an interview Saturday on MSNBC, Miles Taylor, who was a senior member of Trump's administration and author of the New York Times' "Anonymous" op-ed, warned that the ex-president's desires to imprison his "enemies" are not new:

“A number of folks who worked in the Trump administration with me and have since spoken out against the ex-president, we joke darkly about the fact that in a second term, a number of us will be in orange jumpsuits in Guantanamo Bay. I say that the comment is half facetious because Donald Trump actually did have a vision while I was in the administration to go use the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay to house political prisoners. And in that case what he wanted to do is use it to move people from the southern border to send a message and put them in the same place where people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, sits behind bars, and send a message. The only reason Donald Trump didn't start sending people to Gitmo is because he was convinced it would be too expensive, and the facility couldn't house the number of people he wanted to send there. That was the mindset of the man when he was President of the United States. You have seen him since double down on his intention to again use the justice system for political purposes, and specifically admitting that he would do so to go after his enemies. I think that's very chilling.”

In a recent conversation here at Salon, Taylor also issued this warning:

“If I were to bet on who is going to be the next president of the United States, I would put my money on Donald Trump. Obviously, that is the last thing I want to see happen. But if I had to make a bet today, despite the impeachments and the indictments, and the widespread opposition to him, I think he's likely to be the next President of the United States. That should be a five-alarm fire for our democracy. Our democracy right now is at very grave risk of going through a period of destruction, and in many ways it already has. … As the saying goes, 'Stalin was bad, but the little Stalins were a hell of a lot worse.' And that is what we would be seeing in a second Trump term. As bad as Donald Trump will be if he wins a second term, his lieutenants will likely be people who are even more evil than he is. That is going to be true of Trump's successors too because they will be following his authoritarian playbook to win the MAGA base.”

During a fake interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson two weeks ago, Trump engaged in obvious acts of mental projection and fantasy as he shared his fears of being assassinated by "the left", the Democrats, the "deep state" and other imagined enemies.

These lies are part of a right-wing disinformation campaign in service to the Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 presidential election and that it was stolen from him by Biden and the Democrats. No evidence exists to support such claims.

The reality: Law enforcement and other experts have repeatedly warned (and documented) that the greatest threat to the country's domestic safety is from right-wing extremism. One such right-wing terrorist, a neo-Nazi terrorist, murdered three black people at a Dollar General Store in Jacksonville, Florida two Saturdays ago.

The "enemies" that Trump and his next regime want to put in prison or worse, include not just President Biden, the Democratic Party's leadership, and the members of law enforcement who are prosecuting Trump for his crimes, but all people who he and the Republican fascists and MAGA movement deem to be "the enemy" and "un-American".

Here are some specific examples.

If you do not support Donald Trump and the Republican fascists and the MAGA movement (or are deemed insufficiently loyal) you will face prison or worse.

The American right-wing wing has been trained for decades by their news media and other political leaders and influentials to believe that Democrats, liberals, progressives, feminists and others who are not "real Americans" are to be eliminated and subjected to other genocidal violence.

If you are a black or brown person, a Muslim, Jewish, an atheist, not a White Christian, a members of the LGBTQIA+ community, believe in women's reproductive rights and freedoms, are deemed to be "Woke" or tainted by the "Critical Race Theory Mind Virus" or otherwise deemed to be the Other you will also be targeted by Trump's next regime and movement.

Dictators and other authoritarians expand the category of "the enemy" in response to political necessity and the whims, grievances, and others mercurial needs and impulses of the leader(s). This dynamic is even more powerful in a political personality cult such as Trumpism.

Even more so in personality cult such as Trumpism. No American, not even Trump's MAGA supporters and other Republican voters, will be safe from being put in prison or targeted for violence by the next Trump regime.

Trump and his advisers are actively creating the infrastructure for him to follow through on his plans to be a dictator when/if he retakes the White House in 2025. Trump's Agenda 47 is a plan to radically remake the presidency and American government (and American society) in service to his neo-fascist vision that includes such goals as ending birthright citizenship, criminalizing migrants and refugees, putting homeless people in camps, instituting national stop and frisk laws, restricting freedom of the press, ending academic freedom at the country's universities, colleges and other institutions of higher education, replacing quality public education that teaches critical thinking and the country's real history with a form of fascist "patriotic" indoctrination, ending environmental regulations, more gangster capitalism and power for the richest Americans and corporations, reversing the progress of the civil rights movement and the Black Freedom Struggle, taking away the rights of gays and lesbians and other queer people, further restricting women's civil and human rights, and ending US support for Ukraine.

Project 2025 is a strategy that has been developed by right-wing think tanks and interest groups such as the Heritage Foundation. The main focus of Project 2025 is to launch a blitzkrieg assault on the American government by ending career civil service and replacing it with Trump loyalists with the goal of eliminating any internal opposition to the Trump dictatorship. In essence, these Trump loyalists will place his vision above the Constitution and the rule of law.

Salon's Areeba Shah explains more:

“A network of conservative groups is gearing up for the potential reelection of Donald Trump, actively enlisting an "army" of Americans to come to Washington with a mission to disassemble the federal government and substitute it with a vision that aligns more closely with their own beliefs and ideas, according to The Associated Press.

Organized by the Heritage Foundation, the sweeping new initiative called Project 2025, offers a policy agenda, transition plan, a playbook for the first 180 days and a personnel database for the next GOP president to access from the very beginning to take control, reform, and eliminate what Republicans criticize as the "deep state" bureaucracy. Their plan includes the possibility of firing as many as 50,000 federal employees.

Democracy experts view Project 2025 as an authoritarian attempt to seize power by filling the federal government, including the Department of Justice and the FBI, with unwavering Trump supporters, which could potentially erode the country's system of checks and balances.

"The irony of course is that in the name of 'draining the swamp', it creates opportunities to make the federal government actually quite corrupt and turn the country into a more authoritarian kind of government," Matt Dallek, a professor at George Washington's Graduate School of Political Management, who studies the American right, told Salon.”

Those who remain in denial about the realities of Trump's plans to become a dictator and the country's worsening democracy crisis, would likely object to these warnings with foolish deflections such as Trump is just making "empty threats" and that he is "disorganized and not disciplined" and "the law would stop him" because "of American Exceptionalism" and "the institutions and the guardrails of democracy…"

Such voices have learned little, which seven years later is a choice, from the Age of Trump, the horrors it unleashed, and the system's failures that vomited it out.

By definition, fascists and other authoritarians such as Donald Trump and his fake populist MAGA movement do not care about the law or "institutions". The cry "that's illegal!" is one of the final things that many people in societies around the world have said when an authoritarian and their forces take power.

In addition, the last seven years have also highlighted how vulnerable and weak America's governing social and political institutions are to neofascism and other forms of authoritarianism and illiberalism. A second Trump regime, and the Republican Party and "conservative movement" more generally, have gained great experience with exploiting these vulnerabilities and are now trying to fully explode them – from both inside and outside the country's governing institutions.

The most foolish and dangerous example of wish-casting is the argument that "Trump can't win anyway" or that he will be in prison or disqualified under the 14th Amendment. Trump is a symbol and leader of a movement. The decades-long neofascist campaign to end multiracial pluralistic democracy will continue without him and will likely become even more effective and dangerous if a committed and disciplined ideologue in the mold of Ron DeSantis were to become its leader.

Or perhaps those members of the news media, political class, and among the general public who want to ignore or downplay Trump's escalating dictatorial threats would heed the warnings of former Republicans, the same people who helped to create the circumstances for Trump and the MAGA movement's rise to power?

As a group those Never-Trumpers and other pro-democracy voices from the "conservative" movement are sounding the alarm, almost screaming, that Donald Trump means everything that he says about becoming a dictator for life and getting revenge on those people who dare(d) to oppose him. Those same people are also warning, repeatedly, that Trump's chances of winning the 2024 Election are much higher than the mainstream news media and pundit class want to admit.

If Donald Trump was a private citizen and he was threatening his neighbors with violence and other harm, he would likely be put in jail or otherwise removed from society. But Donald Trump is not a regular person. He is a former president who commands the loyalty of tens of millions of people. When a person tells you who they are believe them. That wisdom and warning most certainly applies to Trump and his MAGAites and the other neofascists and members of the white right. Denial will not save you no matter how much you wish it would.

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