In honor of Joe Biden becoming the 46th President™ of the United States, I’m going to publish some of Donald Julio Trump’s greatest/worst tweets. I would post some of Biden’s greatest tweets, but he literally has no good tweets. His account just consists of empty platitudes that some unpaid intern tweets out on his behalf in order to meet a Tweet Quota™. This is the case with all former U.S. presidents, except Trump, whose twitter feed was an absolute train wreck until he was banned.
I archived a lot of his greatest hits throughout the last few years, so here are a few of the most ridiculous and/or entertaining ones. Let’s start with some old school bangers, circa 2011-2013:
It always amazed me when liberal wine aunts were aghast when Trump said ridiculous or mean things while he was in office. It’s like, yeah, most people who voted for him were perfectly aware of that. Just because you couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to who was running in your own elections doesn’t mean the rest of society didn’t either. Being a douche was a part of his whole brand. It was a selling point for a lot of people.
He also had a sense of humor, albeit brash, that was constantly downplayed by his most hysterical of detractors, assumedly because they couldn’t bring themselves to humanize him in any way. There were numerous running jokes that he kept going, including these wig tweets:
He even did a whole series of holiday-themed ‘haters and losers” tweets, which I personally found funny. I like the commitment it takes keep a stupid joke running for years. I too enjoy keeping jokes™ going for way too long.
Here he is quote tweeting and agreeing with himself like a normal person would do:
Here he is not understanding how global warming and/or weather works:
Here he is beefing with Nancy Pelosi:
And here he is ragging on Elizabeth Warren:
He apparently wasn’t a big fan of Don Lemon or John Bolton:
Here’s a few more random hate-tweets:
A few rare instances of Trump being humble:
Trump gracefully accepting the 2016 election results:
And finally, the “schlonged” tweet:
You will be missed on twitter, sweet orange Prince. Now nobody will know your varied and nuanced opinions on topics such as Don Lemon and various soft drinks. Twitter just became a darker place. RIP.
Guess who just got unpersoned on the internet? No, not Smash Mouth™. Nope, not that short dude with no neck from that reality show. Definitely not Scott Bakula either. Give up? This guy:
The oligarchy of U.S. tech companies met up in their secret bunker and decided to give ole’ Trumpy the boot. Sorry big guy. No more beefing with celebrities and calling your political opponents dumb losers for the time being.
Some people are big mad at Trump being exiled, while some are ecstatic. Most seem to be a bit delusional as to the actual reason he was given the boot. Tech companies always give some bullshit explanation about “T.O.S. (Term of Service) violations”, but this isn’t the reality of the situation.
Here it is:
Yeah.. no. No, they didn’t ban Trump to “save democracy”, but it’s absolutely adorable that you actually think that. You probably believe in witchcraft too, so I’m not gonna hold you to too high of a standard here “moonmagic66”.
This isn’t about safety or Terms of Service violations. It’s not about saving anything other than the company itself. It’s about P.R. and corporate optics. It’s bad P.R. for these sites to not ban Trump. Not getting rid of him would lead to them getting hurt the only place it matters to them. Their wallets.
Peep this Jpeg:
Now how exactly are Pinterest™ and TikTok™ saving democracy by banning Trump? Was he going to upload a quiche recipe and film a K-Pop dance video? How about Spotify™? Are they preventing Trump from dropping a hot new mixtape? He doesn’t even use any of those platforms. None of them mattered. These are just empty gestures.
These companies don’t do things like banning high profile people out of some sort of virtuous gesture. They do so to stave off bad P.R. The middle-aged housewives who use Pinterest™ to post eleventy billion photos of their cats aren’t going to stage a mutiny against the company now. “Yay! My favorite social media platform banned someone who probably wasn’t even aware it existed! Democracy is saved!”.
The only two platforms the fella used on that list are Facebook™ and Twitter™. I’ve never seen his Facebook™ page, and it looks like I’ll never get to now, but I’m assured that it did in fact exist. I wonder if he used it to post any dank memes. His Twitter™ account is for sure gone though.
Ah, yes. Look there. It appears that Trump violated the “Twitter Rules™”, whatever those actually are. Unfortunately not even Twitter™ knows what their own damn rules are. Seriously. Twitter™ is an absolute shit-hole of a site, and I’m not being facetious either. I’m on it all the time to research these posts and I need to take a shower afterwards. Here’s a list of things you can find on Twitter™ at this very moment that somehow don’t violate their arbitrary and barely enforced “Twitter Rules™”:
– Child Porn – Death Threats – Virulent Homophobia – Pro-Genocide Propaganda – Blatant Racism – And Many Other Hits!
Yes, child porn. When I first heard the rumblings that there was a bit of a child porn problem on Twitter™, I initially though it was hyperbole, or some conspiracy theory. But alas, there are so many accounts peddling the stuff that people have started accounts whose sole purpose is to highlight the offending accounts so their followers can mass report them. These illicit accounts continue to stay up until enough people complain and Twitter™ finally deletes them, only for more to immediately pop up. Great system you got there, Twitter™
this account was eventually banned
Let’s also tackle the pro-genocide propaganda, shall we? That certainly sounds like something that should be in violation of the “Twitter Rules™”.
You read that right. A Chinese government account pushing propaganda that a “study” was done showing Uygur women were actually happier now that they’ve had their state-sanctioned sterilization. The “eradicating extremism” alludes to where the government rounded up all the Muslims and put them into re-education camps to make them less Muslim-y. Soon they’ll be way less Muslim-y, because they can’t reproduce. And Twitter™ apparently had no problem with this content.
That is, until enough people complained and the post was removed. The account is still there posting all kinds of delicious propaganda, but that single post was removed. This only happened because enough people reported it, not because Twitter™ saw a problem with it to begin with. Do you see how this whole “it’s a P.R. thing, not T.O.S. thing” works?
People have been complaining to Twitter™ to ban Trump for the better part of the last four years. There were petitions and all those other pointless trivialities people like to sign because they think that’s how the world works. Dude’s been violating their T.O.S. constantly for the last four years. Was the 67th time the one that finally did it?
If he had ended up winning a second term, you can bet your sweet cheeks there’s no chance he would have been banned. He was entirely too good for engagement on their platform. None of that really matters now, because he was down to his last 2 weeks in office. Twitter™ really has nothing to lose at this point.
I know it must come as a shock that corporations do things for personal benefit and not for the greater good. This next revelation will probably come as a shock too, so you might want to sit down. Ok… you know how all those companies change their logos for pride month? That’s just a P.R. move too. Can you believe it?
Same as when they black out their social media over a death. It’s purely performative. Do you honestly think Nike™ cares if a black dude gets shot by the police? Nike™ doesn’t even care enough about human life to not use kids as slave labor. If you do happen to have a reputation for using slave labor, it’s certainly good P.R. to hop on the latest social cause band wagons though. Unfortunately this tactic seems to actually work.
Hey there Black Community. Times got ya down? Don’t worry, *checks notes* Gushers™ brand fruity childhood diabetes fruit snacks has your back. What exactly they’ve done beyond virtue signalling to earn empty likes and grow their social media presence is anyone’s guess. But at least they’ve put in the minimal amount of effort possible to acknowledge a problem, and that’s what really counts.
it’s not just 3rd tier childhood fruit snacks getting in on the action. The Banks™ and Oil™ companies are all in on the action now too.
Good to see that you guys could take time off foreclosing on people’s houses and dumping oil on baby seal’s faces to make a statement about something that doesn’t affect you. Regardless of who ends up in the White House, you’re just going to bribe them to be allowed to continue doing shitty things anyway, but thank you for the sentiment. I’ll sleep safer tonight knowing that the Banks™ continue to be a voice of morality in our society.
This trend where corporations create twitter accounts to try to meme and get political is so embarrassing. Just sell me your cancer and stop trying to be relatable. We all know what you’re here for, and it isn’t to make a change, or join the discourse.
Ben and Jerry’s™ ice cream is consistently one of the worst cases of this. They type out 9-page political diatribes every time something in U.S. politics happens. At this point, they’re essentially just a political account that occasionally tweets out something about their actual products. They post these feel-good, boilerplate statements so that their pre-diabetic Northeastern housewife audience can pat themselves on the back for being “progressive” while gorging down another pint of I’m With Her Kale Quinoa Explosion.
The two guys who founded the company literally have nothing to do with it anymore. Unilever™ has owned it since 2000, and has actively gone out of their way to keep the whole “socially conscience” vibe going, despite Unilever being about as socially conscience as Exxon. The account is probably run by someone in a marketing department in Malaysia somewhere. The housewives don’t need to know this though. Just keep shoveling ice cream in their direction.
At least Steak-Umm™ is honest about it’s intentions:
So maybe stop attributing political benevolence to what corporations do. They literally don’t care until they are forced to for some reason, and that reason is usually monetary. Tech corporations shouldn’t be applauded for blatantly ignoring their own T.O.S., even if they occasionally make a good call in banning someone. They’re corporations, not people, and should be held accountable and held to some sort of standard in how they operate.
Most importantly, why is nobody concerned about this:
Twitter™ and Facebook™ just tanked an entire grifter industry. These people have bills to pay and mouths to feed. Now they’re going to have to go get real jobs, and that is an injustice. Won’t somebody think of these fine folks? The least Twitter™ could do is create a TrumpBot that procedurally generates Trump tweets so these people can continue tweeting hysterically in the mentions and selling #resist shirts to conspiratorial soccer moms. It’s the least they could do.
Happy Holidays, everyone. Hope everyone had a good time out there. Let’s hop back on social media and see what’s going on in the world, and OH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING.
Is 1776 commencing again? Are they shooting a Michael Bay movie? What’s going on here?
Is this an Assassin’s Creed re-enactment? Are you guys doing parkour? There’s stairs over there to the right. Why don’t you just take those instead. There are easier ways to get up there. You guys are going to get hurt doing that. Stop it.
Did they release a new Fallout game? Those ps5 graphics are looking pretty damn good. The fur on that Davy Crockett hats almost looks lifelike. Which side quest is this?
What are you doing sir? Where did you get that? That doesn’t belong to you. Put that back this instance. Stop playing around, man. You’re gonna get in big trouble.
So it seems a bunch of people who were convinced we’re dealing with a stolen election decided to storm the Capitol building to “save Democracy” because they’ve seen Braveheart™ one too many times. Noble intentions perhaps, but misguided and a bit on the problematic side.
To start with, the election wasn’t stolen. More people simply showed up to vote for the not-Trump guy. There was an increased eligible voter turnout of 7-10% in 2020 as compared to 2016. Here’s that pew poll showing that 56% of Biden voters were holding their noses and voting for the progressive with the pro-segregation past simply because they hated Trump that much:
A lot of people disliked the guy. The election was extremely close, but acting like it was a no-contest blow-out, and that it’s infeasible he could have possibly lost is ridiculous. Just because he claims he lost, doesn’t mean an entire election was illegitimate.
Given how Trump has acted the last month, the fears of the people voting against him weren’t entirely unfounded. He really hasn’t handled the entire affair very gracefully, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. His refusal to accept defeat no doubt had an effect on what transpired in Washington yesterday. He eventually got blocked on twitter and facebook after a day-long tirade of screaming “rigged election”:
Now there are all sorts of conspiracy theories all over social media about the event. A lot of the left is convinced that the police were in on this, and “let it happen”, while a lot of the right is convinced that these people were actually Antifa in MAGA disguises. Not only that, but a lot of the right is also now agreeing with the left that the police let Trump supporters in, seemingly because it changes the narrative against the Trump folks. Being inside the Capitol building can’t be a crime if they were just let in. It’s all so very ridiculous, but so par for the course at this point.
If anything, it seems the government buildings were a little too underprotected, given that a major event was happening in D.C. at the time, which isn’t a great look for government competency.
Evidently Trump had a “Save America Rally” at the Ellipse park just south of the White House. After that, a bunch of the crowd traveled the roughly mile and a half over to the Capitol Building to do whatever it was they were attempting to accomplish.
To be fair, I’m sure nobody was expecting anyone to storm the Capitol since it literally hasn’t happened in over two hundred years:
Nobody had ever flown planes into the Twin Towers until that happened as well, so there really isn’t a good excuse for the unpreparedness. You can guarantee they’re gonna be spending more tax dollars on defense now, so that $750 billion is about to go up. Maybe the White House will get some new automated turrets installed. Finally, something that benefits the people.
I’ve been seeing this kind of cognitive bias hot take a lot as well:
The old “if x group did this it would be different” narrative that people absolutely love falling back on, regardless of how detached from reality it actually is.
First off, the FBI is already aggressively pursuing anybody involved, which should be an easy task, given how many people were filming the whole ordeal.
DC Metro Police are on the hunt as well, and also offering $1,000 rewards for info about those involved with breaching the Capitol building.
There were also probably more Starbucks™ establishments destroyed during the 2020 rioting than any other type of building, making that tweet above a bit ironic. I don’t recall anyone particularly caring too much about the coffee establishments, let alone the police, who probably had better things to do that that time. Or maybe they didn’t. Who knows.
Oh yeah. There’s also this:
In another instance of irony, an executive order that increased penalties for the destruction of government property, and was aimed at people destroying statues during the riots last year, is gonna end up burning anyone who destroyed anything in the Capitol building.
Sec. 2. Policy. (a) It is the policy of the United States to prosecute to the fullest extent permitted under Federal law, and as appropriate, any person or any entity that destroys, damages, vandalizes, or desecrates a monument, memorial, or statue within the United States or otherwise vandalizes government property. The desire of the Congress to protect Federal property is clearly reflected in section 1361 of title 18, United States Code, which authorizes a penalty of up to 10 years’ imprisonment for the willful injury of Federal property.
These people are gonna be in bigger trouble than if they had destroyed a Starbucks™, something people literally did and received misdemeanors and probation for.
The silver lining in all this, is that it will no doubt lead to a bunch of draconian Government overreach. We’re now going to have the NSA scrubbing through grandma’s facebook account and putting a gun to Apple’s head to let them see all the personal pictures on your phone. It’s for the governments your safety though, so don’t worry about it. So, thanks for that folks. Good work.
note: this article was written on 11/27/20 and auto-uploaded
So it looks like Trump is on his way out. The people I feel for the most with this exchange of power are the battalion of grifters who got rich off doing nothing other than being anti-Trump. How are they going to make a living now?
I agree with the guy with the Totoro avatar. Trump was a boon for grifters. Numerous people and organizations watched their stars rise by hanging out in Trump’s mentions on twitter, and yelling into the void like coked-up children.
People like the Krassenstein brothers: two himbos with the combined IQ of two six-year-olds stacked on top of each other under a trench coat. Ed and Brian unintentionally provided hours of entertainment with their absolutely special-needs level hot takes on Trump and politics. Unfortunately, they both got the boot off Twitter for running fake accounts, but not before amassing over 1.6 million followers between the both of them. They liked to comment on either other’s posts in a completely naturally and not at all forced manner like so:
I’ll also miss Eugene Gu, the fake doctor pretending to be a real doctor, who spends 12 hours a day obsessively yelling at Trump on twitter. You know, stuff actual doctors have the time to do. He’s gained half a million followers by replying to every single Trump tweet approximately 10 seconds after they’re posted. You know, stuff an actual doctor would totally do. Here he is writing a novel to Trump over a meme he posted last year:
Next up is Jeff Tiedrich. He’s a bit of a mystery wrapped in an enigma. He also might legitimately have an undiagnosed mental disorder. Literally all the guy does is whine about Trump on twitter, and it’s netted him over 600k followers in 2 years. He’s also suckered 100 people into paying him actual monthly donations on Patreon to whine about Trump. The grift is real. He’s going to have a really hard time making a living when Biden is in office. I hope he invested that money wisely. Here he is making the same old corny joke sixteen times, because his followers are evidently all children and never stop finding it funny:
Last but not least is The Lincoln Project™, one of the most magnificent grifts that was ever grifted in the history of grifts. It’s a PAC started by a bunch of George W Bush and John McCain cronies with the intention of surfing the #Resistance wave to untold fortunes. Their shtick is being anti-Trump to goad largely Democrat voters to donate to them. It’s working wonderfully by the way. They have 2.7 million followers on twitter and have pulled in about $60 million this year alone.
Most of the people involved are level-headed enough to have scrubbed their social media of anything that might give the grift away, except Rick Wilson. Rick is the loose cannon of the bunch. The guy has a history of saying incendiary things that he curbed (mostly) once he started his grift aimed at Democrats. Here’s a super cut of some of his greatest hits:
He doesn’t shit all over Obama and Biden since the Lincoln Project started. Anyone wanna venture a guess why that is? Here’s some of his other hits:
Those are some quality tweets, Rick. The last one is from Ben Howe, who used to be the Lincoln Project’s video editor until someone dug up the above tweet and he was canned for obvious P.R. reasons. He has me blocked on twitter for some reason, even though I’ve never interacted with him. I guess being blocked is better than being shot in the face though, right Ben?
Let’s see how this grift survives now that Trump is out of office. We might need to start a go-fund-me for a few of these folks once they’re out of work in a month.
Congrats everybody. We successfully electioned. Well, as successful as one can election in the U.S. I suppose.
It appears as though the 2020 election was essentially a flip of the 2016 election:
It’s important to keep in mind that this isn’t exactly a landslide. Far from it. This election came down to a few close races in a few states. There was only a 0.3% difference between the candidate’s total votes in Arizona, a 0.7% difference in Wisconsin, and a 0.2% difference in Georgia. These 3 states alone accounted for 37 electoral votes. All three ultimately went blue, but with such tiny margins (only 12k votes in Georgia), they could have easily gone red.
This win was essentially a 3 pointer at the buzzer. It was a close call, just like in the sports ball games. Trump wasn’t taking it all that well that his team was losing however:
Twitter even rolled out a special new fact check notification to plaster all over his tweets. That was very nice of twitter.
He also sent out some crazy emails that make me bummed that I wasn’t on his mailing list. I feel like I was missing out on some great entertainment in my inbox these last few weeks:
So how did we get here? How could “Literally Hitler” have come so close to winning another election? Put on your tinfoil hat and hear me out.
How did we go from a whole-ass lineup of potential Dem candidates, many of whom were quite popular, to ending up with a guy who already had a long terrible government record, and a gal who dropped out of the running last year after polling at single digit approval ratings? It happened completely organically of course.
Just joking.
When people rally behind candidates that aren’t endorsed by the establishment, said establishment will always find a way to torpedo those candidates. Tulsi Gabbard started to overtake Kamala Harris in the polls in October of last year. This is coincidentally also around the time Hillary Clinton (the establishment) started to field rumors that Tulsi was a “Russian asset”:
The “I’m With Her” types can still be found all over social media to this day calling anyone and everyone a Russian asset:
Well, if someone as honest and uncorrupt as Hillary Clinton said it, it obviously has to be true Jeanne. Your misnaming of Tulsi also really drives home the point that you obviously follow politics and aren’t merely regurgitating stuff you’ve heard from potentially dubious sources. You can go back to healing yourself with crystals and checking your horoscope, Jeanne. Thanks for your input on this matter.
Kamala Harris eventually dropped out in early December 2019, and Gabbard followed suit in March of 2020.
What about Andrew Yang? He was a fairly popular candidate. They got to him too, unfortunately. This is where we have to face the unpopular-for-some-people truth that the mainstream media is also part of the establishment, i.e. those who hold the power to shape our elections.
This great website details the countless incidents between March 2019, and February 2020 wherein completely impartial, unbiased media outlets such as MSNBC and CNN constantly left Yang out of debate graphics and polling charts, listed his name wrong, and even used a completely different Asian guy in graphics of him:
Once or twice could be misconstrued as honest mistakes, but these incidents occurred over 50 times in the lead-up to the election. We’re on to you, the media.
Bernie Sanders had a huge following leading up to the 2016 election, and he too was unceremoniously disposed of by the establishment. Unfortunately, I wasn’t archiving all this at the time, but you can find stuff like this all around the internet of 2016:
This article refers to emails released via WikiLeaks showing that Debbie Wasserman Schultz, then head of the DNC, favored Hillary Clinton, acted on her behalf, and actively attempted to undermine the Sanders campaign. She subsequently resigned from the position, only to immediately be hired by Hillary:
Schultz was also Clinton’s campaign co-chair during her 2008 run for President, prior to ending up as the head of the DNC. I can’t help but feel there are quite a few conflicts of interest going on in this scenario. And people have the gall to believe U.S. politics is full of corruption. The nerve.
Let’s go back to 2012 now.
Anybody remember that year’s rising star who got royally screwed by the establishment? Anybody remember Ron Paul?
Here he is topping all kinds of polls, prior to being unceremoniously unpersoned by the powers that be. Why did this happen? Because he was vehemently small-government and anti-war. The establishment wants more government power and more war. When he was doing a little too well, the media decided to refuse to acknowledge his existence on television, which predictably hurt his campaign. The Daily Show did a great segment on this back in 2011 that you can find on YouTube under: (John Stewart) Media vs Ron Paul
This literally happens every election cycle. It’ll happen in 2024 too. There will be some candidate or candidates who get popular, only to be blacklisted by the media and slandered by establishment politicians. People will buy into it, and we’ll end up with a nice wholesome establishment warmonger yet again.
Here are some random charts showing media coverage of candidates for the 2012 race and the 2020 race:
The less coverage the media gives a candidate, on average the worse they tend to do. If a candidate is gaining in the polls, the media can merely cease covering them and this will reduce their poll numbers. Conversely, more coverage can positively affect the polls. Notice in the second chart that the media chose to give Harris the second most coverage despite the fact that she never polled beyond single digits. Now she is Vice President. Surely, this is just a coincidence.
Finally, here is a former MSNBC producer highlighting some of the behind-the-scenes working of the major news outlets:
So, yes, the media absolutely has a hand in gate-keeping who does and doesn’t end up in the lead in our U.S. elections, which is going to need to change if we want to have actual fair, Democratic elections in the future.
Taking all this into account, Biden was potentially destined to be the candidate going back as far as June of last year. All these debates might just be one big dog and pony show, giving people the illusion that they are participating in Democracy, when the only choice they actually have is voting between whatever final red or blue candidate is handed to them.
Having said that, it does no good to prop up a candidate unless people are willing to show up and vote for said pre-selected candidate. How do you get people to vote for your potentially unpopular, pre-selected candidate? There is an answer for that too.
You have to actively make the alternative look as bad as humanly possible. This is where we end up with the “lesser of two evils” scenario within U.S. politics. If your candidate is shitty, just make the other guy look even shittier. People will predictably vote for the smaller turd nugget.
It’s at this point we have the media attempting to convince people that Trump is a fascist, and literally Hitler for the better part of the last year and a half. Both of these assertions are ridiculous to anyone who has any grasp of history. The average American has little grasp of history, so this tactic is actually quite effective unfortunately.
They pulled this with Bush 2 back when he was in office. He was deemed a fascist, war-monger, anti-Christ for eight years, until he was replaced by his future pal Obama, who ended up having a very similar record on everything that was supposed to be bad during Bush administration. Now they are best friends and play Fortnite™ together on the weekends.
There are people who are still surprised when they see countless pictures of the Bushes and Obamas hanging out. “How can Michelle hug a war criminal?”, the enlightened one will usually ask. Because she’s married to Obama, sir and or ma’am. Do you think her husband was building playgrounds for 8 years in the middle east?
Having said that, at least Obama ran on a good platform that was in direct opposition to the negative that occurred during the Bush administration. It’s just a shame that he didn’t actually carry through with any of it.
Biden simply ran on the platform of “At least I’m not Trump”. His only selling point seemed to be that Trump handled Covid bad, and he somehow wouldn’t have. Trump did handle Covid bad. Biden would have handled Covid bad as well, so this is a ridiculous platform to run on.
Let me introduce you to the H1N1 virus of 2009, aka the Swine Flu. Biden was vice president during this time. If you notice in the diagram above, the U.S. is a black color. That color represents the countries that got hit hardest by this virus. The U.S. managed this virus somewhat poorly as you can see. The U.S. has a rather long history of managing viruses rather poorly, regardless of which party is in the White House. Believing that Biden is a Christ figure who would have lessened our current virus burden by much is a stretch. The way we manage viruses needs to be reassessed, independent of political party.
Far too many people are under the impression that the two big parties in the U.S. are diametrically opposed to each other. The old good guy and bad guy trope. The truth is that they tend to share more of their platforms than they differ. Neither is terribly anti-war, neither is doing a bang up job on education, both love big money and corporations, and neither seems to really care about the drug addiction and homelessness problems. This is how I tend to see it:
In this masterful artwork, you can see a great divide between the two parties on the left. On the right, you can see a great overlap between the two parties. A lot of people vote like the image on the left is a reality, when perhaps things are a little bit closer to the image on the right. Biden isn’t even in office yet, and there are already disappointing realities being unleashed on a near daily basis. These probably aren’t representative of the change people were hoping for:
Biden is already picking some real winners. He probably won’t have the same revolving-door cabinet of weirdos that Trump went through, but things aren’t looking all that progressive thus far. It’s still establishment, but it’ll be a kinder, gentler establishment.
Luckily, we can sleep soundly knowing the mainstream media outlets are about to take a giant four year nap. It’ll only be right wing or smaller left-leaning outlets who are going to report on all the bad things coming our way from this point on. Meanwhile, the Democrat-leaning mainstream is going to be doing this non-stop:
Thank goodness Trump is finally gone so we can get back to doing journalism about dogs, psychics, and socks. You know, the hard-hitting stuff. Make sure you don’t hold anyone to task for following through on campaign promises now. It’s not like that’s your job or anything.
This happened for eight years during the Obama administration, which is why people still think that everything bad that exists only started happening approximately four years ago some how. You have popular sentiments like this:
Thank god those cages that Obama and future president Biden built are going to poof out of existence now that Trump is gone. Not to be too hyperbolic, but this is kind of like re-electing Hitler to dismantle Auschwitz. Even Snopes isn’t going out of their way to run interference for this unfortunate fact:
When it comes down to it, perhaps we’re still stuck in traffic, but we’ve merely switched lanes. We’re still not getting anywhere soon, but the view will be slightly different for a bit.
You all ready for the 2020 elections? This is the big one, friends. This will decide whether we have 4 more years of authoritarian dystopia, or 4 years of a slightly different authoritarian dystopia. Get out there and vote. Huge stakes. Some of the biggest stakes. I’ve heard people talking, very smart people, and they’re saying these stakes are big. Huge even.
Which color of corporatist, war monger kool-aid do you want to chug? You want that fruit punch, or the baja blast? Both will give you diabetes, but the baja blast gives you a kinder, gentler, sweeter form of diabetes. Some people don’t mind the diabetes, as long as the diabetes is civil and soft spoken while it eats their leg away.
I’m already seeing the same goofy-ass predictions on social media that occurred in 2016. People posting their convoluted forecasts that seem to defy all logic and convey a complete lack of touch with reality. Here are a few:
These aren’t the worst, but I forgot to save the worst at the time I saw them, so these will have to do. For anyone who needs a refresher on how monumentally wrong the media and pundits were in 2016, here’s a small sample:
I think the reason these folks are so terrible at predicting elections is that they tend to have a very one-dimensional view of reality. They all live in the same area, surrounded by people who think and act exactly like they do. There’s very little diversity of thought, or life experience in these circles. If everyone you know says Hillary Clinton is going to win, what reason do you have to think otherwise? Just about everyone in my gated community is voting Democrat, so they’re obviously going to win, right? To be fair this goes the other direction too. There are no doubt plenty of people who can’t fathom an outcome where Biden wins this current election. The difference is that these people usually aren’t employed by the major media companies followed by millions of people.
Hillary was pretty damn sure she had that election in the bag as well though:
The fact of the matter is that this election will be close, just like the 2016 elections were. Anyone not living in a complete bubble would agree I should hope. The media lives in a bubble, which is why they are constantly wrong.
Anybody remember right before Joker came out in theaters, when the media desperately tried to create a false narrative that people were going to be influenced by the main character and shoot up theaters? The internet remembers:
This of course, never panned out. The media never got their sensational bloodbath(s) to write further articles about while raking in those outrage clicks and making ad revenue hand over fist. Poor media. I feel sorry for them. 😢
Sensationalism gets views. It’s why people who aren’t even in the media insist on typing out stupid shit like this and posting it on social media:
This is beyond asinine. It was probably also posted merely to get clicks and draw traffic to this weirdo’s account, but there are people who actually believe these conspiracies.
Anyone remember prior to the 2016 elections when the media also incorrectly predicted that Trump supporters would riot if he lost the election? This magazine cover remembers:
Turns out they almost hit the mark here. What they got wrong however, was that it was Hillary that lost, and her followers were the ones doing the things depicted in this image. This is projection at its finest. It’s also why you should take media predictions with a grain of salt, if not ignore them completely. It’s usually just outrage porn to capitalize on people’s fears and sell more copies.
Another thing to ignore are those ridiculous “This person/group/pet has predicted the election results before” nonsense. You can stumble into this distinction via pure chance. Let’s say on a given year 10,000 pundits, organizations or whatever make a prediction between 2 candidates. With a simple coin toss guess, roughly 5,000 will guess correctly. Four years later, of those 5,000, half will guess correctly on a coin toss prediction. After 12 years, 1250 were right. After 16 years, 625 were correct. 20 years later (5 elections) 312.5 were correct. By this time, those that guessed wrong the first year, but correct every successive year have a 4 election, 16 year streak, and so on.
The number of people/farm animals/inanimate objects that might have guessed 4,5,6 elections correctly is going to be rather huge, and thus inconsequential. We’re talking a 1 in 2 chance of being correct on any given year in a two-party system. This is like the astrology of vote predictions. Meaningless, but entertaining perhaps.
Everyone should just remain calm and realize that regardless of who wins, nothing substantive will change. You still won’t get affordable healthcare, the government will continue finding ways to spy on you and strip you of your rights, and your taxes will continue funding wars overseas that you have no say in. There is a silver lining though:
That is true progress. We are truly blessed to live in this progressive era.
Before I head out, I have some actual good news for real though. Turns out the Patriot Act expired last June:
This is the same Patriot Act that bad president Bush initially passed, and good president Obama kept renewing after getting elected on a platform condemning it. Every time it’s about to expire, the government votes to keep it around, but only after adding new dystopian amendments that consistently ignore Constitutional rights. Trump had initially backed the Act, until he suspected it had been used against him by the previous administration, at which point he unpredictably started to see it as a problem.
It’s important to reiterate that Democrats and Republicans have both consistently backed this Act. This means there’s a good chance the next Democrat or Republican elected after Trump will attempt to push the bill, or a similar bill through again. So if Trump does end up with a second term, at least there will be one upside: four years of slightly less government spying.
A few days ago Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a lawsuit filed against her by Joey Saladino. Mr. Saladino is of course better known as “Joey Salads” of staged youtube pranks fame. He’s produced such hits as: “PUNCHING FRIENDS FOR MONEY *prank*”, “N-WORD PRANK (GONE WRONG), and perennial favorite “ABDUCTING CHILD IN FRONT OF DAD (Social Experiment)”.
The lawsuit was filed due to Mr. Saladino being blocked by Ocasio-Cortez on twitter. I can’t find exactly what it is he tweeted that resulted in his block, but ultimately it doesn’t matter, as Ocasio-Cortez is legally in the wrong here regardless. She could have used twitter’s mute function, but blocking other users from seeing her tweets is currently illegal, as per the recent ruling against Donald Trump.
From a New York times article dated July 9th, 2019: The First Amendment prohibits an official who uses a social media account for government purposes from excluding people from an “otherwise open online dialogue” because they say things that the official finds objectionable, Judge Parker wrote.
What this means, is that since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez uses her @AOC account to discuss government matters, she cannot block people from that account. She also has an account (@RepAOC) that seems to serve as more of an “official account”, yet that one has a mere 45 tweets posted as of this writing, whereas her primary account has tweeted 8510 times. Perhaps she figured that only her “official” account was beholden to these rules, but Trump also has a primary account and an official account (@realDonaldTrump and @POTUS), and the ruling barred him from blocking people on either.
I think part of the bigger problem here is that the U.S. is electing a few too many insecure narcissists, who end up treating their government positions more as beneficial social-media venues than an actual jobs. They’re more interested in amassing likes and engaging in “clap-backs” than actually accomplishing anything of substance with the positions they were elected into.
This narcissism tends to involve getting rid of anyone who might criticize them in a public forum, potentially making them look bad. If you’ve effectively blocked everyone who disagrees with you, and only keep the people around who shower you with praise, you develop this erroneous delusion that everything you say is “right” and that everyone agrees with you. This is effectively what happens in communist regimes and dictatorships. If you send everyone to the gulags who opposes you, soon enough you’re left surrounded by only people who agree with you and “adore” you. This is why we have the First Amendment in the U.S. No government official or leader should be above criticism.
Another part of the problem is that prior to social media, government officials tended to just mind their business, and actually do their jobs. It was rare for the populace to know much about members of the House or Senate, other than those who represented their own state or region. Now, every member is trying to become a social media star, and with that, we are now privy to the less savory sides of these people. Politicians getting into pointless arguments, saying generally stupid things, and supporting terrible causes for social brownie points have all become the norm.
Trump and Ocasio-Cortez are two of the worst on twitter, so it comes as no surprise that they receive the most blow-back and end up blocking people in fits of thin-skinned rage. Between Trump’s constant name-calling and mud-slinging at people he dislikes, and Ocasio-Cortez’s incessant back-and-forths with people who so much as question the inaccuracies she regularly spews, it’s quite the shit-show. I have a folder on my computer that I screenshot and save dumb tweets to, and Trump and Ocasio-Cortez are by far the MVPs of said folder. They should star in a buddy cop film together.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens with this lawsuit and all the copycat lawsuits that inevitably happen in its wake. There’s quite a few other members of Congress who are guilty of having a heavy ban finger on social media. Politicians are probably going to have to start learning how to use that mute button.
I’m not sure where this phrase originated, but whoever uttered it first must have seen GoFundMe coming from a mile away.
The site provides a good way for people who actually need assistance to get help with stuff like medical bills, but it’s also a great way for financially irresponsible weenies to blow their hard earned money by making already rich people even richer. I guess sometimes sticking it to the liberals/conservatives is far more important than paying one’s own bills, saving for the kid’s college, etc.
Below are some of the absolute worst GoFundMe campaigns that have shown up recently.
Michael Cohen
In the last month, people have donated $176,573 to Michael Cohen. Mr. Cohen was formerly Trump’s lawyer, until Trump fired him in the wake of the Stormy Daniels fiasco, at which point the lefties suddenly started to (predictably) love him. Mr. Cohen isn’t the hero here however, despite the GoFundMe’s dubious claim that “Michael decided to put his family and his country first. Now Michael needs your financial help”.
Michael is exactly the type of scumbag that liberals usually rally against and insist that we either “eat” or hold to paying their “fair share”. My how quickly those values get pushed to the wayside when tribalism and partisan politics enter the picture.
Let us do a little research into Michael Cohen.
He has a net worth of somewhere between 20 and 100 million dollars, though it’s hard to pinpoint his actual net worth because of all the shady deals he’s been involved in. He flips real estate and has sold buildings for tens of millions of dollars at a time to unknown buyers. He also used to represent people who would rent vehicles and crash them to defraud insurance companies. Whoopsies.
Then there are the seven tax warrants filed against him in 2017 due to unpaid taxes to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. There are also the five counts of tax evasion from 2012 to 2016 he pleaded guilty to, totally 1.5 million that he will end up needing to pay the IRS. People are willing giving their money to help this guy out, by the way.
He’s the quintessential scumbag lawyer, which is probably why Trump was drawn to him. Trump himself has a long history of shady business dealings and tax evasion. Birds of a feather, after all.
Peter Strzok
Old Petey here was formerly an agent with the FBI. He’s notable for having worked on the high-profile investigations into Hillary Clinton’s misuse of private email servers, and whether or not Trump colluded with Russia leading up to the 2016 US Presidential election. He’s also the recipient of roughly $450,000 through crowdfunding.
Peter was fired over a supposed conflict of interest regarding how fit he was to perform his job. E-mail exchanges were released wherein he made statements like: “No he won’t. We’ll stop him”, in regards to Trump potentially winning the upcoming election. An election that involved both Clinton and Trump, one of whom he had investigated, and one whom he would go on to investigate.
It’s obviously fine to have personal political opinions, but this definitely represented a conflict of interest in his handling of his job. The FBI is supposed to be a non-partisan entity, free of affiliation with any political party. You can’t objectively investigate someone while simultaneous wanting to “stop them” in some manner. Any affiliation makes one unfit to work within this capacity for the FBI. Strzok was unfit to do the job he was being paid taxpayer money to perform.
But because he was fired by Trump, people were willing to start throwing their money at a guy whose salary they were already paying in tax dollars to the tune of 6 figures a year. Never mind the fact that had he professed to “stop” Obama, he most likely would have been fired during the last administration instead. Orange man bad, therefore I give my credit card info to GoFundMe.
He also just so happened to use his personal email account to send confidential FBI documents while investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server for sending classified documents. The guy who was investigating a crime was guilty of that very same crime. Keep up the great work, FBI!
Andrew McCabe
Here we have another wealthy government worker racking in those big bucks from people looking to spite the Orange Emperor. He’s also another guy who worked for the non-partisan FBI, while having numerous conflicts of interest within his personal life. Glen Greenwald wrote a detailed article on theintercept.com chronicling many of them.
The biggest perhaps was his having been part of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server misuse a mere three months after his wife had actively run as a Democratic candidate for the Virginia State Senate. Evidently this wasn’t considered a conflict of interest because he was taken off the Clinton investigation while his wife ran for political office, only to resume oversight after his wife’s run was unsuccessful. How this wasn’t considered a conflict of interest is confounding.
This was like Dick Cheney stepping down as chairman and CEO of Halliburton prior to becoming Vice President, while still remaining a stock holder in the company as it raked in record profits from overseas contracts that resulted from decisions he made as Vice President. Technicalities and loopholes don’t exclude things from being obvious conflicts of interest.
Even though McCabe was legally in the right, and was more than likely at least partially fired due to some spite on Trumps part, the fact remains that he made over $500,000 in donations. This despite the fact that had made over $150,000 a year in taxpayer-funded salary as an FBI agent, and had a net worth of over 10 million dollars.
People that complain about how much money CEOs make and constantly rage against the 1%, who then turn around and willingly donate money to millionaires, are operating on a level of buffoonery that I can’t even comprehend.
Stormy Daniels
Of all the GoFundMe campaigns listed here, this is perhaps the scummiest one yet.
Stormy Daniels is a porn star who had an affair with Donald Trump in 2006. In 2016, just prior to the Presidential election, she was offered $130,000 to sign a nondisclosure agreement pertaining to the affair. She signed the NDA and took the $130,000.
She literally hadn’t even made it a month after signing the NDA before she started telling third parties about the affair and subsequently attempting to capitalize on this hot gossip by selling her story to numerous publications. Ultimately, she couldn’t profit off these opportunities due to that pesky NDA she has signed.
Fast forward to early 2018. By this point, Stormy Daniels had no doubt realized just how lucrative a business venture sticking it to Trump could be (see the above GoFundMe campaigns). She decided to violate the NDA she willingly signed yet again, and proceeded to file a lawsuit claiming that the NDA wasn’t valid because Trump hadn’t signed it. The problem is, she had taken the $130k (which she could have turned down), and both parties signatures aren’t always needed in certain cases and jurisdictions. Regardless, her acceptance of the money implied that she had agreed to a contract that she was now breaking.
Unfortunately, Mrs Daniels didn’t exactly have great council on the matter, otherwise she would have had it explained to her that the risk of litigation didn’t exactly work out in her favor here. Turns out she had managed to bag Michael Avenatti as a lawyer, who is such a comically over-the-top narcissist and opportunist, that he makes Trump look like a rather humble, down-to-Earth guy by comparison. The guy spent most of his tenure as her lawyer making countless t.v. appearances, grandstanding, and getting into arguments with people on twitter. It’s not surprising that he wasn’t a competent enough lawyer to actually win this dubious case, and Trump ultimately won out.
It all worked out well for Stormy though, as she bagged roughly $600,000 from well-intentioned simpletons, and now gets to gleefully disregard that irksome NDA, as she peddles her upcoming book and becomes a media darling for the remainder of her 15 minutes. She’ll end up needing to pay Trump to the tune of $250k-300k however, but her net gain from this whole stunt will be more than that initial $130,000, so I’m sure she’ll sleep well at night.
Brett Kavanaugh/Christine Blasey Ford
I’ll avoid going into the specifics of this train-wreck of a legal case, but on the surface what it represented was just another case like countless others involving an accusation/denial of assault/harassment between two parties.
What it turned into however, was an opportunity for the narcissists of the world to showboat all over social media, pontificating on a trial that very few of them actively followed, let alone knew a fraction of the details to. It became yet another platform for people to grandstand about how virtuous they were, in all their partisan-driven, tribalistic glory.
The fact of the matter is that neither of the individuals involved in this case gave a particularly water-tight case. Perhaps this was to be expected, given that the events had transpired over 30 years ago. Testimonies were full of contradictions and many of the accusations turned out to be categorically false. A few of the witnesses were deemed to be outright unreliable, or admitted to complete fabrications. In any other non-politicized case, no rational individual would have continued to back such a flimsy court case, and we all would have moved on.
Nobody fielding their opinions about this case on facebook has any inkling about what events transpired between these two. It’s beyond arrogant to think you could possibly know. If you had a strong opinion either way, it’s more than likely because you were merely wrapped up in your own politically-driven bias, fueled on by those around you. The facts didn’t provide a conclusive answer in either direction.
Regardless of how the hearing started, it eventually devolved into a politically motivated dog and pony show, because this is evidently the state of U.S. politics now. This was evidenced by that fact that as the case rapidly fell apart, the goalpost was moved to questioning Kavanaugh’s temperament and fitness to be a judge, neither of which seemed to be an issue for most prior to this circus of a hearing, and neither of which were relevant to the actual trial. I don’t care whether Kavanaugh is a Supreme Court judge or not, but politically motivated, agenda driven hit jobs are gross, regardless of who they target. Mob mentality is disgusting and destructive.
So of course two GoFundMe campaigns were created. The Kavanaugh fundraiser bringing in nearly $550,000, and the Ford fundraisers (there were two) brought in about $210,000 and $630,000.
As you can probably guess, neither of the recipients of all this money are in desperate need of it. Kavanaugh has the lowest net worth of anyone on this list at roughly $1 million, but will be making $250,000 a year in the Supreme Court. Ford has a net worth of millions, and her lawyer was working pro-bono.
Sorry about you, starving kids in Africa. Maybe you should have been millionaires who either vehemently hated or loved Trump, then maybe we would have showered you with millions of dollars you didn’t even need, merely to own those evil [insert political party here].
