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Thread: Conservative Policy and the Trump Presidency

On the last full day of the Trump administration, I think it's useful to examine why he accomplished so little legislatively. TLDR version: American conservatism has almost no policy program.

 The most important thing to know about conservative politicking is that people do not vote FOR Republicans, they vote AGAINST Democrats.

The GOP is dominated by a minority of far-right activists and wealthy donors who have views that their own voters don't support.
American conservatism is premised on the twin ideas that the New Deal & Great Society were immoral and that God himself created America and that we should honor this creation by establishing full Christian supremacism in which LGBT people, atheists, and Muslims have fewer rights.
Because God created America, this means that conservatives believe in essentially no domestic policy of any kind. If it wasn't literally in the Constitution, then the feds shouldn't be doing it is their opinion.

This is not, however, how things used to be in the GOP.
For much of its history, American conservatism was a sort of intellectual parasite on the Republican party which was run by a mix of moderates and liberals. They actually had domestic policies. Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon had many policies that actually helped America.
Over time, however, conservative activists, whose domestic policy was to have no policies began to displace and "cancel" the moderates in Congress and elsewhere. This process is detailed by @RuleandRuin https://t.co/kOxRHics63
Once the Cold War ended, the conservative parasite began consuming the brain of its Republican Party host. The process accelerated with the emergence of the Tea Party and the vice presidential nomination of Sarah Palin.
Donald Trump's victory marked the definitive death of Republican intellectualism. Conservative intellectual parasitism had fully consumed it.

Next, with Trump's encouragement, it began trying to consume the brains of marginally attached Republicans and other low-info citizens.
I talked about right-wing epistemology and intellectual history in detail with @willwilkinson on his latest podcast episode which you can listen to here: https://t.co/SrUYkG65eY
When Trump came into office, because the American right had become so completely intellectually vacant, he actually could not fill many top-level executive positions. There simply were not enough people who had domestic policy experience or even ideas about policy.
Let me modulate that a bit to say that there actually are conservative policy thinkers but because they focus on achieving conservative values rather than adhering to the right's minimalistic view of government, they had no influence or cachet in the Trump WH.
Despite having total control of the lawmaking branches of government, Trump and his conservative allies were not able to pass any major domestic policy laws except for the one thing on which they all agreed: giving tax breaks to wealthy people.
So while Trump/the right have no affirmative agenda, their negative agenda has been an astounding success: coarsening politics, dismantling regulations on corporations, reducing oversight of law enforcement, and appointing judges who will rule against regulations and programs.
And of course, the biggest "achievement" of Trump has been to poison the minds of millions of Americans into believing pathetic lies about fraudulent elections, imaginary pedophiles, and a nefarious "Deep State" that somehow hates Republicans but never can actually stop them.
The Big Lie campaign against Biden's legitimate victory will not die easily. And it will continue to radicalize conservatives long after Trump is evicted.

This is why it's so extremely critical that media, businesses, and educators publicly reject these toxic lies.
There is still hope for many people who have only recently been bitten by right-wing intellectual parasitism. Here's my working list of some steps that can be taken to make our country healthier: https://t.co/5RAUT1mywE
Thanks for reading down to the end. If you liked it, please share the first post. I hope you'll follow me as well if you are not already. Cheers!
PS: There is a very small subset of ultra-ideologues on the right who actually loved Trump's incompetence such as Grover Norquist

To them, a dolt who ruins things is their fantasy because he makes it easier for the public to hate government like they do. https://t.co/hhVg8KjExc
PPS: The policy & politicking nihilism of the U.S. right has effectively made it so that the GOP became motivated solely by will to power. But now that it has no power, all that's left is a violent thanatos instinct.

Thread for those interested: https://t.co/wztIp5PZUz

More from Matthew Sheffield

Matthew Sheffield
Matthew Sheffield
@mattsheffield
As a former conservative activist and journalist, it has been so frustrating to see my former compatriots spreading wild and unchecked claims about "voter fraud." @jacknicas of the NYT took a deep look at claims of "dead" people in Michigan voting. Link in next tweet.

While examining claims made by right-wing activists who are not credible individuals is a thankless task which elite media editors despise, this is vital and important work in this age of fake news. Here's the link:

As the co-creator of NewsBusters, the most prominent anti-media website, I was part of a decades-long tradition of complaining about media elites being "unfair" to conservative views. There is still much to that argument, but eventually I saw that I was missing context.

What I did not realize until I began expanding my work into creating actual media and reporting institutions such as the Washington Examiner (I was the founding online editor) was that U.S. conservatives do not understand the purpose of journalism.

This became evident to me as I saw that conservative-dominated media outlets were MUCH more biased than outlets run by liberals. The latter had flaws that arose from a lack of diversities (note plural) but they operated mostly in good faith. That's not how the former operated.
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Matthew Sheffield
Matthew Sheffield
@mattsheffield
Thread: Rush Limbaugh and the conservative Id

On the day of his passing, it's worth doing a brief retrospective on how Rush Limbaugh's personal life almost perfectly paralleled American conservatism...

One thing that's not commonly known about Rush Limbaugh is that he began his career in sports, doing sales for the Kansas City Royals baseball team. That's significant because much of the tribalism and dumbed-down rhetoric in American TV news directly came from sports media.

Television journalism in its earliest days was a fantastic product with real investigative reporting, no filibustering live interviews, and no soundbites. This began changing in the 1970s when ABC Sports president Roone Arledge was put in charge of ABC News.

Limbaugh tried to be a conventional FM deejay but kept getting fired because his personality was too abrasive. After working with the Royals, he began a small political talk show for a Sacremento station. The Reagan repeal of the Fairness Doctrine made his show possible.

Rush Limbaugh's Sacramento show started in 1984 (he replaced Morton Downey Jr) and after 5 years, he was picked up by ABC Radio which was trying to copy some of the sensationalism that ABC News television had started. It was a perfect fit.
SOCIETY
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Matthew Sheffield
Matthew Sheffield
@mattsheffield
This Parler user explains it quite well here. Because of yet more security flaws at Parler, it's now possible for all that "free speech" to be shared and archived with the world, even if the posters tried to erase their not-at-all innocent videos and GPS data.


In slightly more technical terms, it seems as though Parler never closed some of their developer-friendly security holes (sort of the programming equivalent of game cheat codes made by devs) and as a result, their anyone with the right knowledge could have admin access.

Parler never actually deleted anything its users posted. And, stupidly, they also kept it accessible to admin users.

This meant that anyone with admin access could still download it.

Once Parler's two factor authentication feature was disabled, because it was designed for developer convenience rather than security, anyone with the knowledge could become an administrator. And that's how Parler just got owned.

People have been downloading the raw videos, photos, and text posts by the gigabyte and archiving it for later public distribution.

All that perfect, totally harmless free speech will still be searchable, even now that Amazon locked out Parler from its servers.
SOCIETY
Matthew Sheffield
Matthew Sheffield
@mattsheffield
For the past 6 years, I & a few other journalists have been trying to get the mainstream press and political elites realize the major danger posed by the radical right. Unfortunately, moderate and liberal elites deluded themselves into thinking that conservatism wasn't a cult.

There is no secretly powerful "Republican establishment" that will fix things. There are thugs, deluded people, and there are quislings. There is no one else in the GOP. Instead of focusing on the radical right's danger, editors wanted stories about Trump tweets.

Instead of calling out the dangerous radicalism of the GOP, television debate shows and opinion pages invited the enablers of fascism to speak and write about how we all needed to give powerful insane people the benefit of the doubt.

Unlike Trump, who walled off the White House months ago into a fortress, Nancy Pelosi did not take the terrorist threat seriously enough to demand better security. She has the budget and the authority and did nothing similar. Now, fascists are on the floor of Congress.

Of course, it is Trump who bears the responsibility for this but the Capitol Police have totally disgraced themselves by not fortifying the building the way that the Secret Service did to the WH.

This is the view of numerous congressional staffers of both parties.
JOURNALISM
Matthew Sheffield
Matthew Sheffield
@mattsheffield
Conservatives love to complain that everyone is against them: professors, journalists, intelligence officers, social media companies, and so on.

I used to as well until I considered that maybe having problems with everyone else isn't their fault, it's yours.

I was reminded of that realization when I read this important NYT article about how Facebook keeps weakening news source quality controls because conservative content gets disproportionately effected by them.

Unfortunately, this great piece of reporting by @MikeIsaac, @sheeraf, & @kevinroose didn't mention the greatest challenge in AI news signal processing: Humans can barely separate conservative & far-right content. Which means computers can't either.

This techno-semiotic conundrum originates from the fact that in the US, because there is no moderate conservative tradition, the gravitational center of the right is far removed from the political center.

More plainly, this means that almost all the energy and organizing on the right exists on the far right.

This is not the case on the US left where there is a strong moderate tradition capable of organization and force projection. Ask Bernie Sanders if you disbelieve.
POLITICS

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Mr_Scorpio
Mr_Scorpio
@Mr_Scorpio
Here’s the thing, Trump & his lawyers aren’t really trying to overturn the results of the election. They know that they don’t have a path to victory. These lawsuits were all supposed to fail, all of the fillings were intentionally sloppy and unsustainable, the “proof” is garbage

Guilani’s entire shtick, along with Powell’s utterly fabricated explanations are only meant to distract. The only people convinced by their so called evidence are Trump cultists who want to be fooled. They’re so ignorant that they have no idea just how ignorant they actually are.

The court cases have all failed because they were meant to fail. Because Trump’s people all know their evidence was fabricated and all the witnesses far from credible. Given the sheer level of incompetence Trump’s legal team has shown so far, their failures are intentional.

So, instead of trying to actually overturn the results of the general election, what are these people up to? The answer is two-fold: One. The attempts, rhetoric and ultimate failures are meant to shed doubt on the overall electoral process and to cast doubt on the legitimacy...

Of a Biden/Harris presidential term. Trump and his lawyers have used racially charged accusations to discredit the legitimacy of Black voters. Given that Trump earned votes in the same process that they’re trying to discredit, it’s systematic racism, hypocrisy and cynicism...
TRUMP
Murray \U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8
Murray 🇺🇸...
@Rothbard1776
BREAKING: On the @intheMatrixxx podcast with @PatrickByrne - Byrne states that President Trump WANTED TO MOVE FORWARD with @SidneyPowell1 as WH Special Counsel last Friday [Dec. 18th] and that he was authorizing her to be given a security clearance. Noted that Pat Cipollene was

2/ working to talk him out of it. When she called Mark Meadows the next day in an effort to begin setting up an office at the WH, she was rebuffed. She then replied that she would at least need a badge to be able to go back and forth, which was ALSO rebuffed. She then went to the

3/ WH on Monday [Dec. 21st] “and they essentially kicked her out and she wasn’t allowed to see the President”.

If this account is accurate [and the President’s own WH Counsel/Team are deliberately defying + scuttling his wishes], this sounds like it could be a massive problem.

4/ I know that there aren’t many [if any] lawyers in the entire United States that I would trust more to fight for the truth and justice than @SidneyPowell1. I am confident that she always has the best interests of the United States and Rule of Law in mind with ANY actions that

5/ she chooses to take, and has the integrity to let the chips fall where they may, even if that means that she discovers insufficient evidence of fraud to prove that President Trump was the rightful victor. No matter the reality of what is occurring behind closed doors, I know
TRUMP
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Texan
Texan
@Texan_21C
Enough! Reporters doing it again. Both-sidesing. U enable Trump's propaganda by doing this

Reporter's both-sides question:

"What was your role in what happened at the Capitol?

Proper question:

"Are you going to take responsibility for your role in inciting insurrection?"


The press enabled the storming of the Capitol because they never held GOP accountable for pushing #TheBigLie that election was stolen

I have been yelling about this for months. Starting here where @TerryMoran got it right

But after press returned to form


Not long after Nov 4th press started both-sidesing again. Question Republicans were asked over & over was:

"Do u think Biden won?"

This enabled the coup

The proper question at minimum:

"Why are u enabling this charade? Why are u spreading


After repeatedly yelling that press wasn't demanding answers of GOP for spreading #TheBigLie I hoped this political violence on Dec 10th would finally get press to demand answers. But no. They continued to both-sides


I noted how impotent the American press was acting by treating #TheBigLie as credible. The press is supposed to hold people in power accountable, but beside @TerryMoran on election night, they by and large
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The More You Know
The More You Know
@Nixit1Wills
First off; “We The People” need those who have sworn an oath to protect Us and the constitution to read this article...NOW, not tomorrow! We are at war for this country! @USMarshalsHQ @USMC @usairforce @USArmy @SpaceForceDoD

We know so much more than this. Since 2015, Donald J Trump running for Office of the President has thrown a wrench in the plans that very bad traitors had for us. For decades, elected officials have infiltrated ideological people into ALL aspects of OUR agencies to do their

bidding! The cia, nsc, doj, fbi, cdc, nsa, just to name a few, have perpetrated a series of lies to “frame” Donald Trump before during and now after his presidency! Google; Pelosi, “Wrap up smear”! ALL of which was knowingly false just to stop DJT from getting in their way!

You and I both know this absolutely was a coordinated effort which proves conspiracy! The media as well is not just bought, they have proven time and again by their own reporting, foreknowledge of many of the falsehoods. These evil ppl have pulled out ALL the stops to what they

won’t do! With this new (false) administration, they are telling Us, up is down, black is white, and left is right, and if you don’t STFU and obey, we will send you to re-education camps. This is NOT a Dems v Reps operation, as we have proof that there are only a handful from
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Stop saying "it's not censorship if it's not the government"; Trump's swamp gators find corporate refuge; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/7JMcAbaULj

#Pluralistic

1/


Monday night, I'll be helping William Gibson launch the paperback edition of his novel AGENCY at a Strand Bookstore videoconference. Come say hi!

https://t.co/k3fvBdqOK0

2/


Stop saying "it's not censorship if it's not the government": I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition.

https://t.co/7I0MpCTez5

3/


Trump's swamp gators find corporate refuge: The Swamped project.

https://t.co/MUJyIOr2iw

4/


#15yrsago A-Hole bill would make a secret technology into the law of the land https://t.co/57bJaM1Byr

#15yrsago Hollywood’s MP loses the election — hit the road, Sam! https://t.co/12ssYpV46B

#15yrsago How William Gibson discovered science fiction https://t.co/MYR0go37nW

5/
TRUMP

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The UN just voted to condemn Israel 9 times, and the rest of the world 0.

View the resolutions and voting results here:

The resolution titled "The occupied Syrian Golan," which condemns Israel for "repressive measures" against Syrian citizens in the Golan Heights, was adopted by a vote of 151 - 2 - 14.

Israel and the U.S. voted 'No' https://t.co/HoO7oz0dwr


The resolution titled "Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinian people..." was adopted by a vote of 153 - 6 - 9.

Australia, Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and the U.S. voted 'No' https://t.co/1Ntpi7Vqab


The resolution titled "Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the occupied Syrian Golan" was adopted by a vote of 153 – 5 – 10.

Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and the U.S. voted 'No'
https://t.co/REumYgyRuF


The resolution titled "Applicability of the Geneva Convention... to the
Occupied Palestinian Territory..." was adopted by a vote of 154 - 5 - 8.

Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and the U.S. voted 'No'
https://t.co/xDAeS9K1kW
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1/ Here’s a list of conversational frameworks I’ve picked up that have been helpful.

Please add your own.

2/ The Magic Question: "What would need to be true for you


3/ On evaluating where someone’s head is at regarding a topic they are being wishy-washy about or delaying.

“Gun to the head—what would you decide now?”

“Fast forward 6 months after your sabbatical--how would you decide: what criteria is most important to you?”

4/ Other Q’s re: decisions:

“Putting aside a list of pros/cons, what’s the *one* reason you’re doing this?” “Why is that the most important reason?”

“What’s end-game here?”

“What does success look like in a world where you pick that path?”

5/ When listening, after empathizing, and wanting to help them make their own decisions without imposing your world view:

“What would the best version of yourself do”?
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신념의사나이...
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What does Gold- Backed mean?
The Chinese Elders have been accumulating gold for hundreds of years. They are gold-rich. Some of their gold was loaned to the Central Banking System so that it could fund the rebuilding of Europe after the many war-torn years from World Wars I and II

BTW they never returned it but used it to start their financial empire to enslave humanity. This is the Central Bank Banking System./2

Maybe this is why one of the conditions to use their gold for the QFS is the demise and full disclosure of the Central Bank banking system before the RV can take place./3

The Elders have caves of hidden gold and are now using it to gold-back the currencies in the QFS for every country in the world. It is important to understand that the QFS and the money it is about to release is all brand-new currency./4

It was designed by the Alliance to fund the new financial system that will reset all Currencies of the world to Gold-Backed currency./5
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Vibhu Vashisth
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THE UNTOLD TALE OF THE LESSER KNOWN WARRIORS:JOGRAJ GURJAR & RAMPYARI GURJAR AND HOW DID THEY DEFEAT THE CRUELEST ISLAMIC INVADER, TIMUR LANG.

Timur Lang, was the founder of Timurid Empire. He was born in April 1336 CE, somewhere in central asia.


During his reign, he conquered Persia, Egypt, Central Asia and emerged as the most powerful and heinous ruler. He was a religious fanatic like the rest of the Islamic invaders who tried to invade India.

Timur Lang decided to invade India in 1398 as he heard about India's splendid wealth and had a desire to conquer India which his ancestor Genghis Khan couldn't do.


After Firoz Shah's demise in1388, Delhi Sultanate was in a state of political turmoil.During this time, Timur sent his grandson Pir Mohammad to attack Indian front. He invaded Multan&was able to defeat Iqbal Khan's brother but when he met with resistance,he asked help from Timur.


Iqbal Khan secured his hold on Delhi under Muhammad Tughluq after Firoz Shah died.
Timur provided the required back-up to his grandson with 100000 men approx. Timur sacked and plundered all the cities coming in his way &later in October 1398 reunited with his grandson.
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Kolaru Pathigam-Thevaram hymn composed by ThiruGnana Sambandar- #Thread

In Tamil Kol means planets,Aru means cut- set of songs in Kolaru Pathigam addresses all Navagrahas& last 2 lines of every song with end a plea to Bhagwan Shiva to reduce/erase the ill effects of Navagrahas


கோளறு பதிகம் - This pathigam was sung by Thirugnana Sambandar at Thirumaraikadu Kshetram -Vedaranyam,Tamilnadu

Thirugnana Sambandar & Appar(Thirunavukkarasar) travelled together to various Shiva Alayam to spread shivam & bhakti among people.They both reached Thirumaraikadu.


Thirumaraikadu(Vedaranyam) -
Appar & Sambandar were asked to enter the temple through side entrance.The main door was locked by Vedas many years ago.Appar&Sambandar sang devotional hymns praising Shiva, after which the gates opened & closed.After which main door opened for all.


After darshan of Bhagwan Shiva at Thirumaraikkadu,Sambandar received a message to travel to Madurai.
During that time, Samanam was on the rise in the Pandya Kingdom.The Pandya King converted to Samanam.The Queen Mangaiyarkkarasi was a staunch Shiva devotee and was upset.

Kularchirai Nayanar ,Chief Minister of Pandya kingdom was in agony by the turn of events.Queen requested Kulachirai Nayanar to escort Thiru gnana Sambandar to Madurai.Kularchirai Nayanar met Thiru gnana Sambandar at Thirumaraikkadu & requested him to visit Madurai.
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