Veteran 60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley reported on Donald Trump’s efforts to strong-arm some of the country’s top law firms into doing his bidding on Sunday night’s episode of the embattled CBS newsmagazine.
Pelley’s segment pulled no punches in describing Trump’s efforts and reminding viewers that Trump is the “first felon” ever to sit in the Oval Office.
Pretty terrifying honestly.
I’m kind of astonished that even republicans can’t see anything wrong with everything happening. Like conservative ideals are one thing but dismantling the rule of law is a whole other thing.
I’ve lived in several countries and watched conservatives in all of them over half a century. Nothing I have seen has ever changed my view that conservatism is pathological selfishness disguised as a political philosophy. While other political movements agree on making life better for people in general but disagree on how to do it, conservatives indulge their personality disorder, call it politics, and demand to be taken as seriously as those who actually try.
And it’s so overwhelmingly male and (usually) white. Though that can sway depending on country. Seems they want to go back to owning slaves. And feel equality is oppression somehow.
Though there is a growing amount of white ladies now I want to see rot in prison.
The only reason why Trump’s approval rating has sunk a bit amongst conservatives is that tariffs are directly affecting them. As you said, they are selfishness incarnate.
Well said
Uh… What did you think conservatives stood for again? Conservatism has always been about putting wealth in the hands of the few and scapegoating vulnerable people to distract the masses; everything else is camouflage.
Capitalism is the entropy lottery, and the more you remove the graphite the more the reaction runs away toward total meltdown
Conservatism is the belief that we should ban pencils because how dare you limit my chances even a little before everything breaks
I don’t think the majority of conservatives actually want that.
They claim they don’t want that, but every single one of their positions feeds into one or both of these two results.
The majority of Republicans are fucking morons that have no idea what is going on in the world and have no desire to so long as they have identified which group they are supposed to hate.
They just want to hate the people who they fear
Because they’re fucking idiots who choose ignorance because thinking is difficult for them
I wish more people understood this. Fear drives them just hate is an easier emotion that they can handle.
Then why did 77 million Republicans vote for Trump and Republicans?
Because their propaganda game is laser focused and extremely well funded. Propaganda works. They convinced half the population that if you like guns and are a Christian you must vote red or the blues will take it all away. It’s almost that simple.
THIS should be the top comment. I’ve seen friends and family fall for the BS because it was perverse and they never bothered to actually check things out. Republicans have worked overtime propagandizing the population since Nixon. No lie was too outrageous, no dirty trick too vile and eliminating liberal voices was top on their agenda, all backed by big dirty money.
Sure, but that view makes it sound like they are helpless victims in all this. They have access to the internet just like we do. They fall for the propaganda despite all evidence to the contrary and I only see two possibilities that can explain that; they are stupid or they want all that hateful stuff to be true so badly that they choose to shut out everything else. Neither explanation makes them anything other than shitty, selfish people.
Let’s say you have this test. If a few people fail, you can blame them. If half of them fail, you have to blame the teacher or the curriculum
If when you do something to a population, then get consistent results statistically, it’s not fair to blame people for not being outliers
Also, a lot of people are in a bubble when they go online. Maybe they go to their favorite news site, maybe it originates from Facebook, Instagram, tik Tok, even reddit at this point.
Their Internet bubble isn’t the same as yours, and a handful of people are purposely manipulating what people see. They edit Trump’s speech and package it by explaining what he actually meant, and so when they hear “Trump said he’s not sure if he has to uphold the Constitution” they’ve already got it ready to go in their heads “oh, that was out of context, he meant his lawyers are interpreting the constitution”
If you still think like this after a first 4 years term in which Trump already showed his antidemocratic tendencies and another 4 years in which he only attacked his opposed political party doing nothing to find common ground with the other aisle in the interest of the common good, well, I don’t know how to tell you this but you are part of the problem as the 77 millions of people who voted for Trump in the last election.
If you’re unable to burst a bubble like the one surrounding the current GOP you shouldn’t be allowed to vote or express your ideas publicly. You don’t have the mental acuity necessary to form a coherent thought and you should be treated as such, until you prove yourself to have become better than whatever you are today.
It’s time to end this weak ass way to look at people who are actively supporting a fascist regime, stop justifying them and hold them accountable for their choices. Cut all contacts with them, work against them, antagonise them in any way you can. Stop pretending they are good people being lied to: they are bad people looking for someone who will lie to allow themselves to follow their worst instincts and then turn around when everything will be over saying “I was just following orders”
You can’t just write them all off. Some of them are just raving bigots and cultusts, fuck them. Let them the first step themselves, otherwise
Most of them were just lied to. Constantly, for all their lives. They don’t realize they’ve been lied to constantly, they don’t know to question it
They don’t have much interest in politics, because it’s long been the uni party fucking them over in different ways. Everything just gets worse, and they just want to live their lives
If anything, I think most people are leftists, they just don’t realize it yet. They just have to be woken up. They need to wake up to the lies, and they’re now woke. Most people can’t achieve that without a push, most people can’t even examine their own beliefs to that extent - they need someone to break things down for them and help think for them
You can be angry at them, but they’re angry too. We have to live with them. You can blame them, but that’s unproductive… We’re not going to kill them. They’re still going to exist. They’re still going to vote.
We can use them, their anger, their need for change. We offer what they don’t know they want. Winning is what matters
I understand how it happens and I agree that the people making and spreading the propaganda deserve more of the blame than those consuming it. However, I don’t think the consumers get a free pass. We (including myself because I understand that I am not immune to propaganda) all have the responsibility to view information critically and not let our biases and our environments distort our view of reality. In the cases where I fail to do so I am ultimately to blame for that. The same is true for all of us. Blaming manipulators lets people avoid taking responsibility for allowing themselves to be manipulated and that is not going to help us solve this problem.
I agree to a certain extent, but at the same time - what level of responsibility do we really have?
I’d say it’s virtuous to keep yourself educated, but it’s also virtuous to realize your limits and to recognize when you should trust others on things beyond you. No one can know everything, and being able to weigh conflicting accounts accurately is a rare skill
Humans naturally drift to a certain distance from their perceived community consensus. Like the Overton window, or the whole concept of “normalizing” things. Our beliefs are relative to our society
Propoganda hacks this. If you hear something uncontested frequently, you start to internalize it. It happens without actually processing the information. If people around you generally seem to hold an opinion, your opinion is relative to this - except with social media, algorithms purposefully distort what you are exposed to
It just doesn’t seem fair to blame people for not rising above their own nature
What would you say they want, then?
I do suspect there’s a pretty decent sized chunk who bought into that “Republicans are good for the economy” line of bullshit DECADES ago and have just spent the intervening time hell bent on not giving anything political even the tiniest iota of thought. These people still fucking suck, as that basically involves waking up every day and choosing to be a completely uninformed moron rather than spend 5 fucking seconds thinking about something they find uninteresting. So some are hateful bigots and some are just so fucking stupid it’s a minor miracle they’ve survived this long without someone to follow them around covering the outlets and safety pinning mittens to their sleeves. Fuck em both.
“I’ve been a conservative because I believe the Regan trickle down economics works.”
My old coworker. I literally said “my guy we’ve had fifty goddamn years to show that is complete bullshit. How many more decades do we need to try it for you to realize it doesn’t work?”
As you said, he just spent 0 time thinking about it.
But to be honest, it does work for him in a way… His parents were wealthy and so he has lived his life as a janitor and a doorman and will still be able to retire into a nice house with a ton of inheritance money…
Yeah, it trickles down from rich parents to their kids. That’s good enough for him I guess.
Yeah but you’re upset about the country falling apart. They got what they wanted, they’re “owning the libs” because we’re “so mad about Trump winning.” For a lot of them it’s that simple, they just want to see people upset, it’s fun to them.
A certain philosopher seems spot-on about the nature of our enemy.
They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The antisemites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.
If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.
[The anti-Semite attributes] all or part of his own misfortunes and those of his country to the presence of Jewish elements in the community, … proposes to remedy this state of affairs by depriving the Jews of certain of their rights, by keeping them out of certain economic and social activities, by expelling them from the country, by exterminating all of them …
It is not unusual for people to elect to live a life of passion rather than of reason. But ordinarily they love the objects of passion: women, glory, power, money. Since the anti-Semite has chosen hate, we are forced to conclude that it is the state of passion that he loves.
[The anti-Semite] fears every kind of solitariness… however small his stature, he takes every precaution to make it smaller, lest he stand out from the herd and find himself face to face with himself. He has made himself an anti-Semite because that is something one cannot be alone.
[The anti-Semite is afraid] of himself, of his own consciousness, of his own liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and the world – of everything except the Jews. [He is] a coward who does not want to admit his cowardice to himself.
Anti-Semitism, in short, is fear of the human condition. The anti-Semite is a man who wishes to be a pitiless stone, a furious torrent, a devastating thunderbolt – anything except a man.