If I were trying to blackpill you, I'd be telling you to do nothing at all because nothing matters anymore, which I didn't.
The rallies and displays of support that you saw were far more impressive than anything that Biden could scrape together, but these were people that form the core of Trump's base. That's a large base, but there are many millions of people outside of that core who don't follow the news that closely, and don't involve themselves in politics until election day arrives, and then they vote for whichever party they've historically supported. Look at the polls where Republicans are asked if the election was compromised. Somehow, there are still Republicans that say that it wasn't. They are the ones you need to convince to leave the GOP.
Taking over the GOP and turning its vast resources to our benefit sounds far easier than starting from scratch and hoping that we have historically unprecedented success as a modern 3rd party.
Look at what the far left (e.g. Occasional-Cortex, Omar, and Tlaib) is doing. They aren't starting a new party, they're trying to turn what used to be the party of JFK and Jim Webb into the party of "Democratic Socialism".
"I don't care if Democrats take control of every ***** part of this country" So instead of retaking the party, we're going to spend years fighting an uphill battle to build something new from scratch, and during that time we and our children will see even more abortion restrictions removed, more taxes, more "drag queen story hour", and more unnecessary wars. You're cool with that?
I might be the only one saying this but I'll do it any way.
You have to differentiate the scumbag politicians from the party that they currently control. The GOP is a party, and parties go through periodic realignments.
If you take control of the parties, then you get to determine how the party realigns. You get all of the perks that go with it - party infrastructure, internal organization, mobilization methods, funding, broad name recognition, and perhaps most importantly - a track record, which reassures people that you can win.
If you want to start a new party (and I'm sympathetic to that), then you will need to build all of these things mostly from scratch, you will need to do it very quickly, and you will need to do it with both sides of the uniparty actively working against you. You don't think they'll sink to using dirty tricks to keep your new party from growing? Do you think they'll allow your candidate to step on the debate stage if they have even an outside chance of winning? You will need to convince people to leave a party that can occasionally win for a party that has never won.
"But there are millions of us."
I know. But the same can be said for the Libertarian Party, and they've been around for almost half a century, and yet the best they can do is win a handful state congress races. Down ballot beneath Team Red and Team Blue, it's a desert of hopeless parties that all believe that they can be the one that destroys the two-party paradigm. Like it or not, Trump would not have won if he had somehow run as the Libertarian or Reform Party candidate in 2016. He used the GOP's vast resources.
"But Trump has 75 million people ready to go."
That's optimistic. The sad truth is that many of the people who voted for him are not politically engaged. That's not to say that they're ignorant or stupid, but it means that they are unlikely to follow you to your new party. At best, a new party would siphon off about 30 million voters from the GOP in 2024. That's no small feat, but it also guarantees that Harris gets another 4 years in office.
"But Trump would be leading this new party."
Great. And who else? Trump can't run or represent an entire party by himself, and not every Matt Gaetz or Paul Gosar will be willing to join a party and risk losing what little power they currently have. Trump is already in his 70s, and although his enthusiasm and energy might not suggest it, being the POTUS does a number on your health. What happens to the Patriot Party when he passes away? Who takes up the torch as the ideological leader, who runs for office, and how many will lose interest and float back to the GOP?
Let's try an analogy. The house we're sitting in is old and falling apart structurally, but the electrical and plumbing work are fine. Would you rather tear the entire thing down and spend months rebuilding it from scratch, or would you rather fix what you have, while keeping the intact electrical and plumbing work?
I'm not telling you to be content with what the GOP currently is, or to sit around and do nothing. Quite the opposite. We need to work triple-overtime to take back control of it from within. We should be forcing the Mitt Romneys and Liz Cheneys into political exile, not the other way around.
West Texas (Odessa/Midland) would be a decent place to start looking if you want to get a job connected to the oil fields, though that industry has many peaks and valleys. Property is scarce because so many people have moved in because of the oil boom, but you may have better luck if you're not looking for developed land.
North Texas (DFW) has seen a lot of growth since the 90s. More high-tech work to be found there. Property rates will generally be cheaper as you move north away from Dallas towards the suburbs and more rural areas (Sherman). If all you're looking for is a place to park a trailer, then west of Forth Worth towards Abilene will have lots of land.
East Texas (Tyler/Longview) I'm not very familiar with. It's more rural and suburban, without being as remote as the panhandle (Amarillo). Not sure what the job situation is like there, but I imagine that property rates are reasonable.
Probably because he doesn't know who they are. The fact that he has never liked playing the media's game is hardly evidence that he was giving secret signals of approval to Q.
I mean, when has Trump ever been afraid to speak his mind? If he supported Q, he would've outright said so.
The Q movement is not helpful. For everything that demands a thorough look, Q has a nasty habit of muddying the waters.
Instead of demanding investigations into "The Finders" (a real child abuse ring from the 80s or so) and their connections to the CIA, we're here waiting for the nebulous "Plan" to bear fruit. The time spent brainstorming about how a vague Tweet was actually a covert signal or how the latest setback was actually a brilliant 4D Chess pawn sacrifice was time not spent understanding the playing field or actually affecting change.
Wait, what's that? You've never heard of The Finders? That's okay, neither has anyone else.
https://vault.fbi.gov/the-finders
We know that the government is full of creeps and people who deserve life in prison without parole. But it doesn't matter if Q is some kind of double-reverse psyop to maintain disinformation, or just a bunch of earnest but overzealous boomers who are too willing to bite down on every unsubstantiated theory that floats their way. We don't need distractions. We don't need to brow beat the rank and file Q-types who are merely misguided, but we also shouldn't put up with "trust the plan" nonsense any more.
All of those things mattered. The early Arizona call was one of the first big signs that something was wrong, and it helped set the media narrative that Biden was "winning". Once the news outlets were calling races early, that became the go-to line for leftists, spineless Republicans, and those irritating Twitter "fact checks".
"Biden won! The AP said so!"
And we've been fighting that "no evidence!" narrative ever since.
You should care about Arizona, for multiple reasons. Calling it early when the margin was so close was effectively telling everyone in line to give up and go home.
Also in 2018, the Democrats pulled almost the exact same steal to get Sinema into a Senate seat. Arizona was the trial run for 2020, and the Dems doubled down on the fraud.
If it were my money and only my money, I'd agree without question, but we're talking about everyone's money, so to speak.
What exactly is the accelerationist "plan"? Because if we stick with the Vegas analogy, the worst case scenario isn't going bankrupt and simply leaving the thief with nothing to take, it's drowning yourself in gambling debts and getting a knock on your door because the mob wants their money.
By that, I mean the system that emerges post-collapse could mean starvation and warlord-ism for your family and their descendants.
The paradigm isn't the same for any of the situations. Peaceful reunification of the Korean Peninsula under a stable, liberty-minded government is far more likely than the peaceful reunification of China + Taiwan under a similarly stable, liberty-minded government.
We were able to negotiate with North Korea from a position of strength, because they really don't have much that they can use against us. Their missiles have about ad much guidance as a bottle rocket, and they do not have any kind of economic dominance. They talk big about invading South Korea, which is supposed to be their ace in the hole, but it would absolutely devastate them in the long run if they tried. Deep down, they probably know that they can't. We can negotiate with them on our terms because they have minimal leverage and no chance of becoming a superpower.
As for the Soviets, they gradually moved away from Stalinism whereas China has never really had the same kind of reappraisal of Mao. Sure, they've heavily corporatized their economy, but the extreme authoritarianism has never subsided, and viven the technology available, the surveillance state is probably even worse than the USSR. That gradual move away from Stalin to Gorbachev made diplomacy far more possible. But moving from Mao to Xi can hardly be called an improvement, just a different flavor of awful.
The Soviets were also on a downward trend for decades (especially after Chernobyl) whereas China has not shown a clear indicator that it's going to collapse in the same way any time soon. I'd say that the CCP has learned from its powerful authoritarian cousins (Germany, USSR) that certain forms of confrontation don't work on the US, which is why they're attempting to undermine us with money rather than bullets.
In fact, we're in many ways responsible for that. We've sponsored the rise of China and the gradual corruption of our industries, because we mistakenly believed that we could democratize them with capitalism. That needs to stop yesterday, China's legitimacy should not be promoted any further, and we need to decouple. If we recognize Taiwan's status as the rightful government, which I believe we should, we would not be able to maintain any real relations with Beijing anyway.
But if I'm being honest, another reason why I want to end relations with Beijing now is because it would be a massive middle finger to Biden. "I did the right thing by reopening relations with the regime that doesn't treat its people like cattle. Have fun sorting it out with your overlords in Beijing, you demented old fossil."
They won't have to wait long. As I understand it, the most advantageous time to launch a naval invasion across the Taiwan Strait would be around March to May, due to weather and ocean currents.
Trump's parting gift (other than a mass-declassification of everything the CIA has been up to) should be to immediately recognize Taiwan as the legitimate government, and cut off diplomatic relations with Beijing, effective immediately.
I agree. Many candidates will want to unseat her, which is both a good and bad thing. She will be very easy to defeat, but we need to make sure that we rally around a single MAGA-type challenger quickly, so that the anti-Cheney candidates don't crowd the room and dilute the vote.
It would be a shame if Cheney walked away with a primary win with 20% of the vote, with a dozen other candidates finishing around 10% or so. She only needs a plurality.
Team Blue will happily accept a disaffected pseudo-Republican if it means they can expand their slim majority in the House. They decried Bush Jr, McCain, and then Romney as Super Turbo Hitlers, but once they became anti-Trump, many Dems developed a strange new respect for them.
As for her not winning as a Democrat in Wyoming, I agree, but after voting to impeach Trump anyway, it's obvious that Cheney has no idea how popular Trump is or how unpopular she is among Wyomingites. She's not playing with even half of a deck.
They won't care. As long as their Amazon Prime deliveries aren't interrupted, as long as they get their quota of 5 Marvel movies every year, and as long as they get occasional vacuous statements from corporations about having a national conversation on racism, they'll be happy.
Well, not "happy" in the truest sense of the word. More like "unconcerned".
She'll switch parties before she resigns. Team Blue will welcome her with open arms, conveniently forgetting that her dear old dad was one of the key architects of the Iraq War.
Sure, she'd get crushed in a reelection bid if she switched, but she's very unlikely to resign.
I guess it's kind of late in this case, but for everyone else:
Do NOT speak with the cops. Invoke your right not to self-incriminate. Lawyer up, especially if you do believe that they have room to manufacture dirt on you (e.g. you were at a rally or you've spoken with unsympathetic people about doing so).
Look, a part of me is totally ready to believe that Trump has one last card to play, but that's becoming a smaller and smaller part of me.
If he has a trump card to play (pun intended), then he should've and probably would've played it by now.
I'm not telling you this because I want you to go swallow a bottle of blackpills, I'm telling you this because it's almost certainly the reality. Trump's hand is probably empty - not because he's given up, but because our system is broken and other avenues have been such utter disappointments (looking at you, John Roberts).
What precisely does Lin Wood know, and from whom or where is he getting the unshakeable idea that Trump is about to slap the Reverse Uno Card on the table? There is no time left. I don't want to see any "The Plan is still in motion" remarks after January 20. And before anyone asks if I'm calling Lin Wood a liar, I'm not. He could be mistaken, or he could be getting bad info.
Roberts doesn't have to do anything, and he won't. Biden's last remaining brain cell could break, and he could declare that anyone traveling on anything other than a tricycle must be punished with a 50 year prison sentence. Roberts would sit there and say nothing.
Battletoads: Whereabouts unknown. According to rumors, was last spotted at a local GameStop. Store employees have been resistant to questioning.