What's Pelosi's excuse going to be for not investigating the forced hysterectomies?
"It's very sad that a US federal agency was engaged in crimes against humanity reminiscent of those conducted by Nazi doctors, but our committee schedules are full until the election"?
"I'm sorry, I'd love to investigate the brutal medical torture being conducted by DHS. But it's going to be hard to call the secretary as a witness, seeing how he's illegally serving.
Also, we're really busy! We have to pass a continuing resolution, to fund DHS."
In hindsight, everyone condemns Abu Ghraib, they condemn Guantanamo, they talk about the Tuskegee experiments and Buck v. Bell as dark chapters in history to never be repeated.
And then it happens again - or worse! - and those same people say "We need to focus on the election."
This is exactly what I'm talking about. "Yes, it does seem important to investigate whether Mengelian human experimentation is happening at ICE. But the US House of Representatives only has 50 days"
Do people think think the US House is equivalent to a homeowners' association or something?
It's a massive, powerful institution with hundreds of members! Faced with allegations of crimes against humanity, it has the institutional capacity to respond quickly!
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Dems can demand a rollback of the Supreme Court ICE racial profiling case. It’s a trivial legislative fix. It poses little political risk to them. It protects 68 million people from state persecution. It protects basic constitutional values. No government funding without this.
This is a bare-minimum demand, something any decent person concerned about ICE’s campaign of terror against Latinos should support. There is no reason - none - to leave in place a dangerous rule that allows masked men to brutalize innocent workers for the crime of being brown.
We probably can’t make Democrats fight for our entire wishlist of protections against Trump, to their discredit. But this is narrow. This is simple. We can insist that they make this one clear demand.
Been reading Hitler's rise. So many entities - business, right-wing parties, unions - struck deals with the Nazis after he became chancellor, where he promised to preserve elements of the old system. Then months later he invariably broke them and jailed or killed those people.
Hitler never won sweeping majorities - he secured total power by convincing everyone else that they were better off accommodating his regime rather than resisting the Nazis' nonstop defiance of the law. But once they acquiesced on the law not mattering, he could just kill them.
It never seemed to occur to the many opponents of a Hitler dictatorship - which included everyone from the huge Social Democratic left to many far-right Nationalists - that he was playing by different rules, and that his words and deals meant nothing and would protect nothing.
There were two fundamental problems with the Minneapolis city convention yesterday. First, you had a lot of technical and procedural issues that led to the convention doing essentially no business for the first eleven hours and fifteen minutes, except one confusing ballot.
That ballot was a mess because many people could not tell whether or not their vote counted and received no confirmation of having voted, and despite being an electronic ballot, took hours to resolve and announce.
The results of that ballot suggested that an endorsement was possible but by no means inevitable, and certainly didn’t suggest a huge 2/3s majority for any candidate, which is what would be necessary to throw the rules out and race forward.
I am increasingly convinced that the thing that has driven politics insane is the growing ability of people to find ways to validate their beliefs, no matter how incorrect and irrational. It started in right-wing media but has become central to all political discussion.
Anyone can believe whatever they like and for the most part will never be confronted or challenged. Instead they’re likely to be funneled into or self-select into a social environment where those views are supported, treated as obvious, new facts are invented to support them.
You are encouraged to lie to yourself and endless resources will be provided to ensure that you can. Challenging other people’s false beliefs is deemed elitist. As a result everyone’s politics ends up mirroring whatever assumptions or resentments are lurking in their heart.
It’s clear that if the Holocaust happened today in America huge swaths of MAGA would describe it as “based,” say “this is what we voted for,” and do the “oh are you gonna cry, lib?” routine.
There’s zero reason their gleeful celebration of brutal deportations wouldn’t extend to actual extermination. The psychological mechanism is identical: they tell themselves morals are for suckers and empathy is for losers, so immortality and cruelty become a proactive good.
It’s the politics of sadism - hurting people for pleasure. Do we truly believe that they’d draw the line at killing? Frankly they’ve ALREADY killed and didn’t care at all.
The craziest thing that is actually true is that a relatively small group of very literal Nazis has completely seized control of the US government
They have accomplished by building a tight-knit community in the dark corners of the internet, then establishing a lot of influence over the inner circle of MAGA, especially Musk and Vance
Musk empowered them massively by taking over Twitter and then removing almost all restrictions on them, while promoting many of their most notable figures. Musk seems extremely taken with them personally and spends a lot of time trying to impress them