That’s his method. It’s what his whole career is built on.
I’m a name. Pay me to put my name on your effort. You won’t believe how much you’ll make.
A strategy summarized by the phrase, “And they let you.”
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So yet another example of someone complying in advance with a fascist. How did that work out for Columbia University and the various law firms who surrendered without fighting?
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With all due respects, I’m pretty sure you are wrong. Suffering tends to lead people into finding answers in all the wrong places. It could be drink or it could be drugs or it could be some quasi religious sect, or political propaganda. Mind you, many of them are already there and that’s why they can’t think straight.
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Pretty puny God that has to be invited in.
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Sorry to skip to the bottom, been a busy morning.
This pertains to Josh’s post about the Wolff interviews of the big PedoFile and how it pertains to the current discussion of the PedoFiles today.
" But then MH comes up with a link and it turns out the Daily Beast actually had a lot of this from Wolff and actually snippets of the audio tapes themselves. That came out just a few days before the 2024 election. Then I heard from TPM Reader JW about a podcast Wolff was doing at the time that went into the same stuff. (Okay, so part of my theory or reason for caution is out, I guess. ) From what I can tell, all of this was sort of lost in the mad rush of the final days before the election and sort of became moot after it. In the standard way, the campaign said it was fake news and “election interference” and that was kind of it."
===
For all the people I have been reading on TPM who have said the PedoFiles is just a lot of hot air with no substantiation and that X, Y, or Z person/org would have acted on this if there was any real ‘THERE’ there.
Well, that line quoted above says it all. Just like nobody will address climate change, or putting banksters in jail circa 2010, or Rooskie collusion, the attack on and ransacking of our Capitol…as a nation there are some of these HUGE issues that we just will not deal with. We just can’t convince enough presidents, or judges, or media giants, or 2/3 govt. branches to agree to take our medicine at the appropriate time. There are small flares that pop up - and one or two big players who are willing; but never enough at the same time.
It is just plain disgusting and heartbreaking to watch, as the quoted piece above, the problem just gets booted around, then lost in the rush, then fell thru the cracks, and then mooted because some other vast criminal enterprise is roiling and shaking everything to it’s core.
Yes, there is ‘THERE’ there.
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He’s covered all of his bases by being on every side of this issue, like he always does. I’m just not so sure MAGAs are going to let him get away with that this time. And, like it or not and I don’t, the news media seems to take their cues from MAGA these days. That’s why it’s blown up the way it has. MAGA is angry and disillusioned.
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Trump: “God is once again welcome in our public square.”
The square is now located down the hall, past the ballroom, where the girls undress.
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It became mute because of the a-sassy-nation drama.
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Actually it’s in the President’s bathroom along with a lot of copies of Penthouse, Hustler, Playboy…
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Lies and bad faith
I don’t think that it is at all clear that the Epstein thing won’t blow over without doing Trump much damage, as so many prior scandals have. This scandal though, might have got past his Teflon. My belief that this might be true is based on the difference between telling lies and speaking in bad faith.
Trump gets away with an amazing amount of lies and BS, which I will not for this purpose distinguish from lies. The definition of lie here is, a claim that is at variance with the true state of things. He succeeds at telling lies about public policy because the true state of things that matter at all in public policy is not at all easy and straightforward. Only people paying more attention to public policy than most of us can afford to do, can spot with any sort of reliability, even pretty egregious lies about public policy, so Trump’s lies get a free pass with everybody who is at all likely to vote for him (the rest of us were never going to believe him no matter what comes out of his mouth), because of this difficulty comparing fact and fiction.
To the contrary, Trump is unique among politicians in convincing large swaths of the electorate that he is the only honest man in politics. He does this by avoiding obvious bad faith in talking to the electorate. In this he distinguishes himself from conventional politicians – and Ds tend to have far and away the most conventional of politicians – by just saying what he thinks, pure unvarnished id with not a trace of superego concern for nuance and balance.
Of course any and all ideas and proposals about public policy need to be nuanced and balanced to fit the inherent complexity of public policy matters. However, conventional politicians inevitably also tend to throw in at least a bit of blurring and balancing in order to avoid alienating any voters at all likely to even consider voting for them. This tossing in of nuance and balance is much more easily seen as bad faith, because it doesn’t require any knowledge or experience of reality to compare the ideas and proposals to. All it needs is a comparison of one thing a politician is saying with other things he is saying. We Ds are about 100% for securing our borders against free immigration, but we also are for not putting kids in cages, or otherwise treating the undocumented inhumanely. We go further and tend to be for a pathway to legal status. It used to be a pathway to citizenship, but we abandoned that a while ago. Well, you don’t have to have any experience or knowledge of immigration issues to see that Ds speak with bad faith. Being less than ruthless with the undocumented has clearly failed to secure our borders. Trump seems honest and forthright in contrast.
This is all by way of getting to the point that on this topic of the Epstein files, Trump is resorting to nuance and balance, and his base has been trained to see that as bad faith. Of course the AG has more important matters to attend to. The problem for Trump is that this perfectly valid point is so convenient for him.
For once, Trump may actually not be telling lies. Maybe the Epstein files don’t really exist, or don’t reveal anything of any importance. Even if they do reveal embarrassing – perhaps even criminal – facts about himself or prominent MAGAts, surely he and they have done far worse and escaped consequences. The problem for Trump here is that he is left talking out both sides of his mouth, equivocating, balancing and nuancing the shit out of a topic that a few months ago he promoted as a clear cut categorical issue. He should have just denied and lied as per his usual, but instead is trying to make a tactical argument, that his side should agree to pretend there is nothing here for the sake of the greater good. He is asking his followers to do the denying and lying, and it is not clear to me that this departure from his winning formula will work.
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It’s good to see an administration so aggressively eliminating antisemitism from social discourse.
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Nosfergodtu?
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Which is why one has to allow these kinds of MAGA folks to reach a personal conversion moment. Reaching out and ‘splaining’ to them just feeds their bias and resentment.
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Nah. He’s waiting for the Random Capitalization Bee where’s he sure to be the champion. I really Think he’s a A shoo-in.
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That might be the convenient excuse for that episode.
This can has been kicked down the road many times. The guy who helped bury the first round of court cases got a cabinet position in Chump I. Acosta was the name, I believe.
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These Wolf/Epstein interviews could have saved us all a hell of a lot of trouble, perhaps, if they were thrown out on X or whatever (oh noes! Social media won’t pay me what a publisher with balls will so I’ll just hold on to them - the nation be damned and keep those maggots from threatening me! ) so this guy ain’t no hero even if he has the goods.
Proof or get the fuck out. Do it now or fuck right on off.
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How we got here is a topic I often have thought about because I have relatives in the MAGA. Basically, no they are not bad people in their everyday lives. So I just wonder how do they get “there”.
Bottom line, there are several parts I have identified 1) most people cannot/don’t spend that much time following political issues, so they don’t remember what happened last week much less 2 years ago and forget 10 years. History for sure has been lost. 2) A lot of politics starts locally, and we as a nation do not have very good media resources, generally, at the local level 3) There are many conduits of disinformation, more so than ever, and many players interested in leveraging this to their advantage. 4) Generally, most people will not spend the time to process issues carefully. They really are not policy types and are even farther removed from political theory. 5) People often have influences from their local neighbors and culture. That is, they really do not think for themselves as much as they think they do. 6) People do not trust media, but even more over, cannot identify a good media source from a propaganda site often because of the issues already cited above.
Bottom line, US citizens are entrenched in an environment where is not even close to a fair fight.
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Grok is only returning the favor after what Elon did to it last week…
Never turn your back on an AI scorned…
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