Trump wants his supporters to die for him.

This story has been posted to Daily Kos where you can read comments.

UPDATE:

Trump wants his supporters to die for him. He wants them to fight for his cause, but in reality his cause is him (or Him). Are they really ready to take a bullet for the person they consider a demigod (here’s a Google search for Trump and Jesus painting) and who they believe had the election stollen from him and think is the legitimate president?

I saw the article (shown right): “Biden speech denouncing Trump, 'MAGA ideology' sparks threats, calls for violence” in Yahoo!News this morning. Here are a few excerpts:

• Site Intelligence Group, which tracks online extremism activity, issued several threat alerts detailing calls for violence in response to Biden’s speech. The potential threats were posted in online forums tied to the Proud Boys, neo-Nazis and other extremist groups.
• “Users on several far-right and ultranationalist venues made violent threats against President Joe Biden following his speech addressing political extremism on September 1, 2022,” said one of the alerts. “Users advocated for Biden to be murdered and predicted violence if he continues speaking about the topic.”
• During Biden's speech, four current U.S. domestic counterterrorism officials told Yahoo News they were concerned the president’s words would further divide the nation and lead to increased threats against government and law enforcement officials.

 The following New York Times guest OpEd prompted me to think about whether Trump's cult threatening violent civil war if he is indicted would be willing to die for him. If the Jan. 6 insurrectionist they knew they would risk getting shot if they breached the Capitol barriers would there even have been an assault on the building? How many of Trump's cultists would really engage in the violent civil war they threaten if they knew they had a serious chance of being killed or wounded?

Artem Chekhisis the author of this guest essay in The NY Times Opinion section. He wrote

 “Absolute Zero,” an account of his time on the front line in the Donbas, and is currently a volunteer patrolling the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

Here are excerpts:

This is another kind of war (than the war in the Donbas where he served on the front lines for almost a year in 2015-16), and the losses are, without exaggeration, catastrophic. We no longer know the names of all the dead: There are dozens of them every day. Ukrainians constantly mourn those lost; there are rows of closed coffins in the central squares of relatively calm cities across the country. Closed coffins are the terrible reality of this cruel, bloody and seemingly endless war.

I too have my dead. In the course of the conflict, I’ve learned of the deaths of various friends and acquaintances, people I had worked with or people I’d never met in person but with whom I maintained friendships on social networks. Not all these people were professional soldiers, but many could not help but take up arms when Russia invaded Ukraine.

I read obituaries on Facebook every day. I see familiar names and think that these people should continue writing reports and books, working in scientific institutes, treating animals, teaching students, raising children, baking bread and selling air-conditioners. Instead they go to the front, get wounded, develop severe PTSD and die.

He concludes:

To quote Kurt Vonnegut, even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death. But encounters with death could be very different. We want to believe that we and our beloved ones, the modern people of the 21st century, no longer have to die from medieval barbaric torture, epidemics or detention in concentration camps. That’s part of what we’re fighting for, the right not only to a dignified life but also to a dignified death.

Let us, the people of Ukraine, wish ourselves a good death — in our own beds, for example, when the time comes. And not when a Russian missile hits our house at dawn.

This is my posted comment:

Thank you for your poignant and powerful essay. I wish it could be read by Russian soldiers dragooned into their army and being fed lies that they are liberating Ukraine and will be greeted as heroes.

I also think about members of the Trump cult here threatening a violent civil war if their messiah is indicted and wonder if they would be willing to lay their lives down for him. My sense is that only a tiny minority of them would be willing to die for him.

There's a saying here, all hat and no cowboy, which means that someone is all talk and no action. I think it applies to most of these people.

Since posting the comment above I read this:

This article noted that Trump posted this on his TruthSocial private Twitter-like website:

What Trump means by sacrificing everything he is obviously exhorting his supporters to give up their lives for him. 

RawStory also noted the following:

Trump also shared another post demonizing President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and other top Democrats as enemies to the nation.

"Your enemy is not in Russia," the meme said.

I think the man with Russia under his name is George Soros.

What Trump is saying here is that we have nothing to worry about as far as Russia goes. They are not our enemy according to Trump. By extension he is saying we shouldn't be paying attention to, let alone be concerned about, the thousands of Ukrainians that are being killed. If Democrats are enemies of the nation then Trump is as much as admonishing his supporters to be what he considers patriots and take up arms against them and to be willing to die to stop them.

Had I seen all of this when I posted my comment I would have elaborated on it. 

Ukrainians taking up arms to fight the Russians aren't willing to give up their lives for Volodymyr Zelenskyy, they are ready to make the ultimate sacrifice for the freedom of their country. President Zelenskyy doesn't entreat Ukrainians to risk their lives and limbs fighting the Russian invaders. He doesn't have to.

I seriously doubt that the vast majority of members of the Trump cult clamoring for a violent civil war if Trump is indicted would actually be willing to die for the cause. In fact, if those who invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6th knew they would risk being fired on and possibly killed or wounded I doubt many of them would have breached the barriers. 

The majority of the Jan. 6th mob weren't mentally ill the way most people who have tried to break into the White House have been. If the Capitol was protected the way the White House is with the Secret Service protecting it ready to use lethal force to protect those they are charged with the mission of keeping them safe I think Jan. 6th would have been a large  raucous crowd chanting slogans behind the barriers. No officers would have been injured and  no bike racks would have been knocked over. 

What if the rioters at the Capitol faced what peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors faced when they demonstrated in from of the Lincoln Memorial in June, 2021?

If one of the insurrectionists tried to go beyond the police line and was shot dead I suspect that most of the crowd who saw this would have turned and run in the opposite direction. 

In some states home owners can simply shoot anyone, armed or not, who breaks into their homes, in others they have to flee if they can.  If armed Trump cultists think of trying to break into a building, any building whether one housing a government office or not, I wonder if they would do this if they knew the police would shoot them. Do they think their Trumpian whiteness would protect them from the police who they with considerable justification think support their cause?

Addendum:

Here's a related column in The Washington Post. The title pretty much sums it up.

Excerpts:

Then, on Sunday, Trump acolyte Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) didn’t bother with the disingenuous niceties. He went straight to the threat. “Most Republicans, including me, believe when it comes to Trump, there is no law. It’s all about getting him,” Graham said on Fox News, citing the decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for having classified information on her private email servers. “And I’ll say this: If there’s a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information after the Clinton debacle … there’ll be riots in the streets.”

The Post's View: Lindsey Graham’s prediction of riots reads more like a threat

Lest you missed his point, Graham said the phrase twice — and then Trump reposted his comments on his social media platform. A retired Air Force lawyer and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Graham said nothing to convey dismay over the prospect of violence; to the contrary, his clear meaning was that outrage would be justified.

Ruth Marcus concludes:

The Justice Department’s Principles of Federal Prosecution lay out the considerations: “Where the law and the facts create a sound, prosecutable case,” prosecutors are told, “the likelihood of an acquittal due to unpopularity of some aspect of the prosecution or because of the overwhelming popularity of the defendant or his/her cause is not a factor prohibiting prosecution.”

A sound, prosecutable case. That’s the test — not intimations of mayhem from Trump and his allies only too happy to summon the mob, once again, to his defense.

 
Then there's this:

and this:

It could be argued that some of the QAnon believers are delusional but whether or not they are clinically delusional, or suffer from paranoid schizophrenia, can't be determined. It's possible a few of them hear command hallucinations, voices telling them they have to take up a firearm and join a mob. They might not consider, or even care, that they could be shot if they tried to engage in a violent protest where they went against law enforcement or National Guard with orders to shoot those who refuse orders to disperse.

Daily Kos should have an opinion section

Why I advocate for Opinion to be in its own section on Daily Kos

 I've posted over 1,400 stories on the liberal website Daily Kos so it caught my attention when the site was referred to in a Washington Post article:

Republicans are increasingly sharing misinformation, research finds - subscription)

You can read a summary of the story without a subscription on RawStory here.

Here's a part, in the last sentence below, that I was interested in:

Measuring misinformation on social media is complicated. With billions of posts per day on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, it would be impossible to examine each one for misinformation. Instead, to approximate the level of misinformation shared by political candidates, we relied on NewsGuard, a nonpartisan organization that provides trust ratings for news sources online.

NewsGuard uses several point-based criteria to assess a site’s credibility and transparency, giving each site a score from 0 to 100 based on how well it adheres to those standards. NewsGuard considers those rated at 60 and above, which include such sources as The Washington Post, New York Times and CNN, to be reliable news sites. It considers those rated under 60, which include Breitbart and Daily Kos, to be unreliable.

I was curious about this and found an exchange with Steve Brill from NewsGuard and the Daily Kos founder here.

Comparing Breitbart with Daily Kos is absurd. The former promotes nothing but lies and distortions from the far right including outright conspiracy theories. Kos is a mixed bag as a website because it has two types of articles, those by members of the staff, often reporting straight news, and those by community members. This later group is a mix of stories about news generally with excerpts from other publications and sometimes, but not always, with the opinion of the diarist included. The other group of community diarist stories are those that are mostly original ideas and thoughts and sometimes offering information about subjects like Trump's psychopathology which I have written about.

The assortment of news and opinion on Daily Kos enriches the website, but I think it can be confusing and seem like a hodgepodge.

I propose a change to the way Daily Kos is setup to clearly differentiate pure opinion and original information essays from posts from contributors which share news stories. I'd like to see Kos have an opinion section the way The New York Times and The Washington Post does.  The Times and Post opinion sections include essays by staff columnists and guest contributors. There are also satirical columns some of which make me wonder why I ever try to write satire. Dana Milbank and Alexandra Petri, both Washington Post columnists, often mix in biting satirical pieces with their straight opinion columns.

 (Click images of Aug. 29 websites from the Times and Post below to enlarge to see how their opinion columns appear.)

On Daily Kos original writing with sometime unique perspectives on issues compete for readers with hot topics in the news. Those who post stories just referencing a news story with several excerpts provide a unique and valuable forum for discussion among the readers of Daily Kos many of whom are familiar with each other. Typically an article or column on The NY Times and Washington Post can have between 1000 and 3000 comments. Stories on the same or other subjects on Daily Kos will have between 100 and 300 comments and they will include frequent commenters whose names often are familiar to regular Kos readers. On Kos stories, whether by staff or community members, one comment can have numerous replies. Unlike on websites like the Times and Post, on Kos the author of an article often adds their own comment and replies to other commenters.

The only other high readership progressive website I know of where you can post comments is RawStory (and it's sister site AlterNet)  and frequently they have between 200 and 1000 comments to an article. I find RawStory to be a useful site to follow breaking news on because it is updated frequently, often not long after stories are published or covered elsewhere. For example they will often publish a story about a topic discussed on Morning Joe an hour or so after it is aired.

They have summaries of articles from sites like The Wall Street Journal which I don't have subscription to. Wiki says says it is hyper-partisan and quotes a source saying it is junk news. It may be very progressive but I hardly consider it to be junk news. Because they do this is is more than an aggregate news site like Google News or YaHoo News.

I don't see Daily Kos as being able to do this at least not with the staff they have, nor do I think they should. Kos is unique among website, at least among progressive websites (I don't follow right-wing site) in that it has a large community of diary writers and commenters. It is unabashedly progressive but I don't find a bias when they report on the news.

If someone wants to follow the political news shortly after a story breaks from a progressive perspective, I recommend RawStory. They not only cover stories form the mainstream media, they also cover news items on websites like Vice News, Axios, and Buzzfeed. These three website offer a potpourri of stories some of which are trivial, but sometimes they do investigative reporting and beat out the major media with stories.  Google News and YaHoo News seem to post articles from more of the mainstream media.

I have a friend who follows news on a Facebook feed but don't know how this is done so I can't recommend or not recommend it.

So, back to having a discrete Opinion section on Daily Kos

If only for simplicity I advocate for those who post Community "dairies" (as they are often called) should be able to post them to an opinion section. That way those who want to use Daily Kos as their primary or a secondary news source can easily find those articles, and those interested in pure opinion pieces often with original perspectives and sometimes with attempts are satire and snark can easily find them. I would include diaries about personal experiences (like one about surviving Covid) and the much beloved Pootie diaries which are about Kos pets. This would by no means denigrate such diaries but lets face it they aren't news, but they chronicle way that our pets are vital in so many of our lives. 

Since regular denizens of Daily Kos are often referred to with each other as Kossacks we could have a separate section called Kossacks and Kospets.

It could look something like this  (image below) with the author having the choice as to where their diary would appear. I selected a few example form March 29 which I thought could be considered as presenting an original slant on the subject the author was writing about. Of course the diarist would decide where their story would go.

Another way the US is divided: states that allow corporal punishment in schools

Readers: Please check the sidebar to see numerous other stories. They have many photo essays from trips around Portland, Oregon documenting beautiful scenery and reviewing many unique restaurants many of which are off the beaten path. You can click any photo to enlarge it. Unfortunately the sidebar has no easy reference titles to you have to click more or less at random to see the stories. For the most recent blog story click on the top of the right column.

 Here's my "about me" May 2018 biographical page.

 I'm taking some time off from posting on Daily Kos so I plan to write some of my thoughts about politics here and also post them on my public Facebook page. For a long period I didn't post any political stories on this blog.

Click image to enlarge

I watched an MSNBC story about how many schools allow and use corporal punishment and they flashed a map on the screen but I couldn't grab my iPhone to take a photo so I found a map online. It didn't surprise me how this map reflected the divisions in our country between the hard-right states and the more moderate to left and progressive states.

When I looked for some articles I found this from a few days ago:

On almost every measure of beliefs about matters effecting how people live their lives that touches even remotely on the extreme agenda of the right-wing form abortion to teaching about the role of racism in our history to anything having to do with LGBTQ+ issues, the country is divided like shown in this map. A few years ago terms like WOKE and CRT weren't even in the political lexicon. 

Now we have this new map that would like like a map of the old Confederacy.

Below: legend for map

Now if you compare the two maps you see how if we consider the map including states that allow corporal punishment to have many more beliefs and values in common with the Confederacy we may conclude that  in some ways the South has made major gains in their attempt to win the Civil War.

Note how Kansas, Colorado,Wyoming, and Idaho stick up west and north with Idaho abutting my state of Oregon.

With strict anti-abortion law now enacted or about to go into effect in Idaho, Oregon is gearing up by opening Planned Parenthood clinics in towns near the border. Unfortunately eastern Oregon is very conservative and residents along the Idaho border are to happy with this. For example:

In Oregon-Idaho border town, planned abortion clinic receives little welcome from locals

In our own way here in Oregon we are fighting our own civl way against the resurgent Confederacy.

For the first time since I moved to Oregon from progressive Massachusetts about 10 years ago I am very anxious about the outcome of of race for governor and several other positions. See: 

If Oregon independent governor candidate Betsy Johnson wins it may be a disaster for progressives