Living in a country where 25% like, love, or worship Donald Trump

 By Hal Brown, MSW

This was on Morning Joe:

 

Click above to enlarge

Mika Brzezinski said of Trump, "Republican senators want him to stay away from the races in 2024 following losses by his hand-picked candidates during the last cycle. If his legal issues don't take him off the ballot, maybe his poll numbers will; a new survey shows he is losing support rapidly, dropping like a rock."

Willie Geist said "25 percent -- you're dipping into being a fringe political candidate. 25 percent is a terrible number if you're trying to win a general election again."

It is gratifying to see that Trump's most recent poll ratings have shown his favorability ratings have dropped to 25%.  The pundits on "Morning Joe" are saying this means his chances of winning a general election are slim. 

Still, living in a country where one quarter of the population like, love, or worship Donald Trump is dismaying. If you're reading this, with the exception on a few pro-Trumpers who like to troll the comments section of my blogs, you may be troubled that if you go into a restaurant where the diners are representative of the sentiments of the country and there are four tables around you one of them will be occupied by people who may want to have you deported or worse.

It doesn't matter to me that some of these people are ill-informed (i.e. low information voters), have lower than average IQ's, are gullible, may be clinically paranoid, and/or have been unable to or not inclined to master critical thinking skills. They may have been brainwashed. They may have had unmet needs met by affiliation and acceptance by a group of like-minded Trump supporters. 

They may revel in being MAGA or now ULTRA-MAGA. Perhaps they felt like outsiders previously and now they feel like insiders.

They wear the symbols and fly the flags proudly. Some of them, after years without a social identity, may find they finally feel they belong.

As much as I may understand what motivates these people what matters to me is that if you add all these people together they support a man who if he became president again would turn the county into a near-dictatorship. It would be an authoritarian state where only the favored minority of white citizens would enjoy living in America, so beautiful for halcyon skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties above the enameled plain where good people are crowned with brotherhood. You know, the country described here.

I supposed this all depends on what it means to say someone is a good person. There are those among the 25% who consider themselves to be good despite that some of them condone violence against us. These people may think I am a bad and not worthy of being an American. Very possibly they also think you're an unworthy bad person as well.

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A tale of two judges: who deserves the title of Judge Dreadful

 By Hal Brown

Has anybody wondered whether Clarence Thomas is jealous of a hitherto before obscure federal judge in Texas? The Supreme Court justice known for being reticent to say much of anything during litigation has rarely given interviews. This isn't to say he doesn't enjoy publicity. He has managed to elevate himself to being the most well-known Supreme Court justice.

The notion that he wants to avoid publicity is belied by the fact that he hasn't reined in his wife whose activities have shined a bright light on him. 

I believe he loves the spotlight. I think he is so arrogant that he doesn't care whether there are dark shadows around the spotlight. For Clarence, at least until now, all publicity is good publicity. While liberals demonize him he has become a hero to the far right significantly because he is the object of intense progressive scorn.

The current so-called scandal won't hurt Clarence's reputation with those who admire him. After all, these are the same people who worship at the foot of their golden idol Donald Trump and in their weird "Lifestyle of the Rich and Famous" manner they enjoy observing the opulent life he leads. 

Now along comes this upstart judge with a name most people would be hard pressed to spell.

How dare he hog the headlines?

Meanwhile, another judge few people outside of the state of Washington, Thomas O. Rice (left), has earned a laurel wreath for both smarts and heroism for making a conflicting ruling, thus making it quite likely that the case will fast-track to the Supreme Court. Ironically, once in the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas will be faced with either going along with Judge Kacsmaryk or contradicting his ruling.

Addendum:

For those who, like me, only knew the name Judge Dredd, this is from Wikipedia:

Judge Joseph Dredd is a fictional character created by writer John Wagnerand artist Carlos Ezquerra. He first appeared in the second issue of 2000 AD(1977), which is a British weekly anthology comic. He is the magazine's longest-running character. He also appears in a number of film and video game adaptations.

Judge Dredd is a law enforcement and judicial officer in the dystopian future city of Mega-City One, which covers most of the east coast of North America. He is a "street judge", empowered to summarily arrest, convict, sentence, and execute criminals.

In Great Britain, the character of Dredd and his name are sometimes invoked in discussions of police states, authoritarianism, and the rule of law.^[2] Over the years, Judge Dredd has been hailed as one of the best satires of American and British culture with an uncanny trend to predict upcoming trends and events such as mass surveillance, the rise of populist leaders, and the COVID-19 pandemic.^[3] In 2011, IGN ranked Judge Dredd 35th among the top 100 comic book heroes of all time.^[4]

Judge Dredd made his live-action debut in 1995 in Judge Dredd, portrayed by Sylvester Stallone. Later, he was portrayed by Karl Urban in the 2012 adaptation Dredd. In audio dramas by Big Finish Productions, Dredd is voiced by Toby Longworth.

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ProPublica got the first scoop then The Washingtonian put NAZI icing on the Clarence and Crow karma cake

 By Hal Brown

Alternate title and illustration:

ProPublica got the first scoop then The Washingtonian put the NAZI cherry on the Clarence and Crow ice cream sundae.

Below, image illustrating positive or good karma.

Copyrighted to Himalayan Academy Publications, Kapaa, Kauai, Hawaii. Licensed for Wikipedia under Creative Commons 

This is the source article to read:

Clarence Thomas’s Billionaire Benefactor Collects Hitler Artifacts

Harlan Crow also reportedly has a garden full of dictator statues. 

WRITTEN BY SYLVIE MCNAMARA 

 | PUBLISHED ON APRIL 7, 2023

.....................................................

Karma is a belief from Indian religions which has come into common usage and interpreted as meaning an action and reaction arising from behavior. It often means that if we show goodness, we will reap goodness. This is similar to the idea of paying it forward. In the politics of the day it is frequently used to mean that if one does bad things this will come back to affect someone negatively in the future, whether in this life, or for believers, in a reincarnated life. The phrase "karma bites" has become a meme and often shown in images as someone being bitten in the ass by a dog or in other phrases (web search).

Karma images are all over the Internet:

The first website I looked at this morning was HuffPost  to see what they featured as their featured story. I never expected, of all things, to find NAZI news related, albeit indirectly, to Clarence Thomas. (upper left below). 

ProPublica got the scoop about Clarence Thomas and his availing himself of the "hospitality" of his billionaire bestie.  

This is a story that according to a reporter from ProPublica now on MSNBC the magazine had been working on for month. It qualifies as a real scoop since within hours of being published it was being reported on widely.

This comes from from The Washingtonian. It isn't about Thomas running afoul of the law. It is something that, to put it mildly, makes what he did look worse than tawdry. He not only was close friends with a far-right billionaire, he was friends with a collector of NAZI memorabilia.

Katie Phang, on MSNBC, just called it a bizarre collection of NAZI memorabilia. This strikes me as a mild word to use. "Extremely troubling" would be more appropriate. 

All of the articles about Harlan Crow's NAZI collection cite the article in The Washingtonian and include excerpts so this is the primary source to read.

This Google News search provides links to some of the other articles.

Click above to enlarge image

This is my snarky satirical blog from yesterday. Had I known about this I might have added a flag to the illustration.

Comment fromBen Kalom:

Clarence Thomas...

Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm.....

Take a deep sigh. Breathe in, breathe out.

Here's something from The Duty to Warn) FB group keeps referencing from George Lakoff, concerning authoritarians. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_father_model

For anyone who reads my ridiculous comments (ridiculous in that I even try to make a difference), you'll understand I am a product of a strict father-and-mother family system - - - -

THAT FAILED!!!

It failed to regiment and force-fit a person (actually three persons) into pre-determined molds and shape them to be who they simply were not.

Strict parenting is "monkey-see-monkey-do." Authoritative parenting adopts varying styles, sets safety limits, acts like a grown-up for when being a grown-up is required, doesn't assume that kids can make brilliant decisions for themselves, provides, nurtures, encourages, and involves children and youth in activities and pursuits.

If your kid is a sponge and picks up on everything around them, the stimuli work and they'll learn more.

If you have a radish, then you'll get a radish.

Some people are not capable of learning. They migrate toward Berger's self-sovereign personality and learning type.

More on Justice Thomas in another comment...

Here's another little piece to add in: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Thomas

This is basically undigestible dross about Thomas. Is he interesting? Perhaps. Is he a learned person? Okay, I'll bite. It sure looks like it on paper. Has he set his anchor points such that he's no longer the kid from Pin Point Georgia, and his massive self has adapted to a very cushy lifesyle of catering to lovely white folk who have their token "boy?" Oh, you bet he has. Big time. He'd like to forget all of that hardship. Who wouldn't?

What of his first wife, Kathy Ambush? What of his son, Jamal? Nothing about any of that... swept under the rug.

He's a Catholic? GMAFB!!

First of all, the Catholic dogma he absorbed growing up and as a young adult didn't stop him from getting divorced.
It didn't stop him from being a weirdo with Anita Hill.
It hasn't tempered him in any way about his Antonin Scalia carbon copy views of everything conservative, a system that keeps a partition between the few wealthy folk and nearly everyone else.

Conservatism is about being a new-found form of royalty. Donald pretty much stripped the veil from that cloudy reality. He just wants to be king of a small country named Duh-Mericah, where his subjects are all stupid, uneducated, difficult, agitated, and they swallow his every thought hook, line and sinker.

Clarence is just another "StepinFetchit" idiotype, espousing the cause of "if you can't beat 'em, join em."

He sure did find hisself a good ol' boy (Harlan Crow) who loves his “house {N-word;expletive}.” The guy also loves his Nazi stuff, maybe he's just a collector, maybe he's into the bullshitty mystic cultish nonsense that Hitlerites seem to go for.

He is certainly not educating people about the dangers of fascism. Crow could care less. He’s just another rich person, who uses the system to build a pile of money, roll about in it, and Crow just doesn’t care about anything that Thomas should be emphatic about.

Thomas is just another guy who got lucky, got aligned in the right way, and now needs to disappear into the slithery fabric of American life.

He’s not that poor child from Pin Point GA who probably had ideals.

Maybe it is time for him to step away, go enjoy his friendships, for as long as they’ll keep him around, go discover how little Ginny wants to have anything to do with him once he is no longer able to manifest her weirdo stuff.

Like I offered in the earlier comment - - -

I came from a system that failed to shape me into a specific mold.

I did not reject that mold outright; I found a way to use the notions of that molding to sculpt a self that is not decadent.
When I see prominent people failing to break out and cease the “can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” groupthink, which is exactly where Clarence Thomas is right now, I advocate for their abdication of the seat of power.

He needs to find out for sure that he’s no longer useful to them, and become useful to himself, as the person he once was.
Antonin Scalia’s comrade is now just another humbug, wannabee lapdog for a bunch of folks who are disgustingly weird and perverse.

Time for another SCOTUS seat to open up…

Addendum:

About ProPublica (Wikipedia) 

ProPublica (/proʊˈpʌblɪkə/^[2]), legally Pro Publica, Inc., is a nonprofit organization based in New York City. In 2010, it became the first online news source to win a Pulitzer Prize, for a piece^[3] written by one of its journalists^[4][5] and published in The New York Times Magazine^[6] as well as on ProPublica.org.^[7] ProPublica states that its investigations are conducted by its staff of full-time investigative reporters, and the resulting stories are distributed to news partners for publication or broadcast. In some cases, reporters from both ProPublica and its partners work together on a story. ProPublica has partnered with more than 90 different news organizations, and it has won six Pulitzer Prizes.^[8]

About The Washingtonian (Wikipedia)

Washingtonian is a monthly magazine distributed in the Washington, D.C. area. It was founded in 1965 by Laughlin Phillips and Robert J. Myers. The magazine describes itself as "The Magazine Washington Lives By".^[2] The magazine's core focuses are local feature journalism, guide book–style articles, real estate, and politics.

Blogs are also posted on Booksie and Medium.

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