Mods: can you install a temporary blockage whenever someone clicks a link off-site? Some kind of popup that says, "You are now leaving TheDonald.Win" or something similar. That would give people a second chance to decide whether they really want to click that link or not. Tons of sites have it, including youtube, and for fuddy-duddies like me it is useful to let us think twice.
It's literally coming to my mind every day now, that quote from Rush Limbaugh: "Whatever the democrats accuse you of doing, they're doing it themselves."
They really are a cult. You're not dealing with thinking people - NPC meme is real. They're a brainwashed cult.
When you struggle, that's a sign of progress.
It's like exercise: if everything is easy, then you're not doing enough. But when you do 50 situps and that 51st one burns, that's a sign you're right against the edge. Go a little further than you think you can, and then the next time you exercise, you'll do 51 just fine, but it'll be the 55th that burns. And so forth.
Same thing with our moral or fallen nature; if life is easy, there's not enough introspection or attempt at spiritual growth. Find the place where there's a struggle, and go a little further than you think you can. God will help you. Incrementally, you become a better person and more like Him. Over a few years, progress is exponential. I used to be in the hole myself. 5+ years of progress, I'm a new person, you can be too. Much recommend: C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity.
Add a little popup and delay, similar to plenty of social media sites, that says something like "you're now leaving the Donald..." which will slow people down if they accidentally click a link. This gives the chance for people to rethink for a second.
Ultimately, you do you, and I understand the frustration, I endure this sort of nonsense myself day in day out... but the leftist nonsense in college is also potentially useful, depending on one's attitude and the use one makes of it.
Research by Jonathan Haidt shows that the right understands the left far more than vice versa. This is because we on the right are constantly given leftist narratives, but the left almost never encounters right-wing narratives (which are few and far between anyway). When the left does encounter "what the right thinks," it's almost never from an actual right wing person (or at least one who can explain himself fully), it's a series of lies concocted by a fellow leftist.
I used to be bothered by political sewage spewed by professors and students... until I realized that they were basically handing me opposition research.
These people are nutters. They know less about you than you do them. And if you treat them like living memes, suddenly it all becomes funny. I was in classrooms the day after the 2016 election... undercover... it was good times. Some of my funniest memories seeing their sad faces and projections about the end of the world. It's like watching a really dry and dark humored comedy sketch. Live entertainment.
College is a perfect place to learn the critical thinking and rhetorical and persuasive skills that you will use later in life; learn despite them, through them. When leftists do nonsense like this, do what you're doing here; think of counters, and try to understand what the underlying (non-)logic is. There are patterns to leftist thought. They're not rational patterns, but they're there. The more you know them, the bigger your advantage is out in the real world against them. Art of War: know thy enemy. What works against them, and what doesn't? This is the perfect place to learn.
Best of luck, college pede.
HILARIOUS. :D
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I just don't think he'd be sweating in the third panel. That implies that in reality he's for protecting children... when some of these people's behavior via "Cuties" scandal really seems to prove the opposite.
That really sucks, pede. Sorry things aren't going well up there, keep your head up. MAGA will prevail. It's going to be a tough road but worth fighting for.
Yet the fact that nobody is running against Murkowski... that's a bad sign, too. You would think that her seat would be weak, if we could just kick her out with a primary challenger who isn't a mess. But if nobody sane is willing to try it, that probably means something's up. Murkowski is probably really formidable. Again, maybe POTUS or some other big player needs to challenge her (support her primary opponent?). Palin is literally the only Alaskan I know who has the name recognition for it probably. I wonder if the local Alaskans could convince her... maybe start a letter writing campaign begging her to run? Anything is possible.
It just would be awesome if we could get one of those major RINOs out within the next 2 years. If not Murkowski, then one of the others. Romney, Rubio, Collins... just one of them, and be totally disgraced. Might send a message to them. Maybe a pipe dream, maybe not. Either way would clean up a bad actor.
Murkowski is up for re-election in 2022, I believe. So there would be some time to organize. Up to the locals to decide and act. Sucks, but that's the case everywhere. Are there places where anti-Murkowski Repubs can congregate and plan? What's the local Repub party machine like? Pedes might try making connections there, volunteering, writing letters, etc. Run for the school board, etc. The long game is the real game that everyone's playing. Murkowski is only 63. That's maybe 2 more decades of her in the Senate. If she's out in 10 years instead of 20, that would be a victory. Even if she pulls a McCain and only death gets her out of that seat, if pedes have been filling the lower ranks of the Alaskan Repub party in the meantime, that increases the chances her replacement will be a pede. (Holds true for every state, not just Alaska, of course.) Hang tight and fight, everybody.
There are a few Repubs who are doing better work than the others. Cruz has turned around. And Tom Cotton is usually good. Rand Paul is so principled that half the time he's a pokemon hurting itself in its confusion; but at least most of his principles are sound, even if he's inflexible about how to reach for them. Some others.
But yeah... the RINOs are more numerous and worse. McCain had to die to get him out of office. Romney is a pimple on the face of our country. Rubio, Murkowski, Collins, they're backstabbers. Lindsey Graham is nothing but a pretender. And as for Paul Ryan... that big-eared ape cost us the entire first half of Trump's presidency. The Repubs were handed a mandate from the public on a silver platter and Ryan deliberately ruined it. A pox on him.
Even McConnell is a fluke... the only thing he's good for, it seems, is getting in judges. That's nothing to sneeze at, given that the dems' strategy often involves legislating from the bench. But even with the House held by dems, the Senate could be doing more. If McConnell screws up this SC judge... hoo. Let that be the one and only thing he is remembered for: "McConnell, who only had one job..."
Trump is holding the line, and God willing he will hold it for 4 more years. But the problem is, there's no clear succession after that. I'm sure the establishment thinks that things will go back to normal. They're going to find out how wrong they are. It's a question of how badly they will damage the party to learn, though. We need to purge the Repubs and make it clear that this is our party, always has been, get with MAGA or head north to Canada. Hear us roar, you RINO roaches.
We need Sarah Palin to run against her. If not her, I'm stumped as to who... because it needs to be someone with a big enough name recognition... the problem is, the lefties of the state will vote for Murkowski. Add to that Murkowski's name recognition among the right, and the moderates, and Murkowski wins. Repeatedly.
Murkowski is a bigger threat than we think just offhand. Who wants a backstabbing RINO - no red-blooded MAGA voter, right? But a while back, she actually lost in the Repub primary in Alaska, but then ran a write-in campaign. And won - with a write-in campaign. That's almost unheard of. So something serious is going on in terms of support for her. She's not the average RINO.
I think the effort of getting rid of her is probably a heck of a lot more than we expect, simply because of that. Not saying that it can't be done. Just saying that it's going to be a mountain instead of a molehill, because the normal option (primarying the RINO) has already been tried and failed.
Maybe POTUS himself can help - Trump's personal intervention. Because she really is a serious thorn - has been for years and years. Alaska is a red state, she should not be in there. She's blocking a serious MAGA representative by holding that seat as a moderate lefty. And of course votes against us in the really major times. Getting her out would be a big MAGA victory.
My favorite recent rant on this subject comes from conservative fantasy author Larry Correia:
https://monsterhunternation.com/2020/06/04/where-are-all-you-gun-owners-now/
Yeah, this is TD.win, everything is meme and good old shitposting fun....
But serious talk: this is elder abuse.
Biden isn't "there" anymore. Wouldn't surprise me if the campaign right now is literally killing him. Those around him, including but especially his family, should be absolutely ashamed of themselves. Why isn't there anyone looking out for Joe as a person? What kind of horrible family members does he have...?
Oh, wait. His son is Hunter. Nevermind. When your kid snorts cocaine, bangs his dead brother's wife and then cheats on her with a hooker... well. You get what you get. Lesson: don't raise your son to be like Hunter.
This is crazy... because he has to explain this. "If you attack the cops, you deserve whatever you get..." Like, really? This needs to be said out loud? And the reporter seems dumbfounded, like he's never heard any of this before, like this is all beyond the pale. Yet even a few months ago nobody would have batted an eye. (Also, +1 for wondering why BLM is communist... when they've literally said that they are.)
What obvious and simple things do we need to explain to liberals next?
"Law enforcement is around to protect us from criminals." "People who commit crimes are bad people." "If you attack people, especially cops, they will defend themselves and you deserve what you get." "The sun rises in the east and sets in the west." "Water is wet."
Not to butt into this conversation, but there are two points here:
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The United States would not be able to have been founded by Muslims or Pagans. Jews, debatable. A country called "USA" could have been founded by those groups, but it would not have been anything like the country we have now. The underlying principles found in the Constitution and wider founding documents are Christian. "All men are created equal" = Christian concept. Aristotle talks of people being born slaves vs. masters. That's the pagan POV. We just don't recognize that these concepts are deeply Christian because we live inside a culture still so saturated by Christian norms that we don't see how weird they are compared to history. Sort of like "fish don't realize they're wet." (If you're interested in the topic of how Christian thought transformed the west, I recommend Tom Holland's book Dominion. Holland is an atheist writing on how Christianity was different from its natal cultures of Rome, Greece, and Persia.)
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Separation of church and state is actually a Christian value. It has been since the beginning of the religion. All other religions (except one; Buddhism) were founded in conjunction with a governing state, including Judaism. As a result they tend to work best when in political control of their countries (Judaism, again debatable). By contrast, Christianity was founded by a carpenter who was at odds with a Jewish state under Roman rule. Jesus was not an earthy king; the NT goes out of its way to highlight this, even having Christ state, "My kingdom is not of this world." Jesus's phrase, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's" basically inaugurates the separation of church and state. Romans certainly didn't have that - Julius Caesar was "Pontifex Maximus," or the highest priest. (Oh, and he was also the state god. So there was that.)
This is a complicated issue throughout history but that much is apparent at the start. One of the major problems in the Middle Ages was that church authorities (Pope, Bishops, Monasteries) were sometimes given political power in the vacuum of secular authorities, and kept it; this was seen as not quite kosher and as a source of (or evidence of) corruption in the Catholic church in general, because they were supposed to be focused on the Heavenly kingdom, not an earthly one. Note also that most of Europe still lived outside the bounds of direct church rule (Pope has the Vatican/Rome, which varied in size and actual political power), so they were de facto separate in church and state. This is actually where the word "secular" enters our language from, a Latin term for non-church authorities, used by the church to describe them in the Middle Ages.
Over time the kings gradually tried to co-opt church authority (divine right propaganda, etc.), and vice versa. But the turning point in England came when Henry VIII realized he didn't need to listen to the Pope, and decided to make his own church. From that point, the English king became the religious leader (still is head of the Anglican church). This broke the tentative alliance/rivals dichotomy of church and state, and caused a whole bunch of (new and old) problems. Charles I even got his head hacked off by Protestants who were a little heavy on the whole church vs. state thing (he tried to tell them how to worship... they said no, hands off our churches). The Founding Fathers took a look at all this not so distant from them history... and said hey, hands off our churches. They then made the 1st Amendment, the specific verbiage of which shows that their priority was government control over churches, but also works a little bit both ways (churches can't use government to wage war on each other).
So the Constitution actually returns us to the origin point of Christianity, which is the separation of church and state. Interestingly, perhaps because this is how Christianity was founded, the church tends to flourish more in such circumstances than when it is in government power (we can see this happening all over the world right now, actually). So yeah... there should definitely be a separation of church and state, if we're claiming to be a Christian country.
Can you be? Sure. There's people who support lower taxes, less illegals, etc., who are not for banning abortion. Trump has been remarkably little talk and little walk on this issue, which might be intentional as there are lots of fish to fry.
Bigger question is: should you be? Answer is no. Abortion is evil.
In my experience people who are pro-abortion don't actually know all that much about the topic. They just have heard some arguments about "muh my body my choice" and that it's a clump of cells. But if you show them an actual footage of abortion, they change their minds. Might need to work up to it, because it really is disgusting and horrifying. When people see horror, true horror, they shut down. But if they're prepped for it, then they might actually listen. The movie "Unplanned" works well. Especially if they are Christians. Not that graphic.
Trick I use: ask them if they have a strong opinion on abortion (do so in a neutral way, because if they tell you their opinion is pro that will reinforce it in their minds, you want to open their minds instead). When they say yes, give a brief rhetorical statement that "since you have an opinion, you must know a lot about the topic..." and then ask, "When does the fetus begin to feel pain?" Chances are, if this is an honest conversation (don't lecture; converse), they'll be stumped. They'll try to guess. Then you reveal it was a trick question because the answer is actually that nobody knows. Isn't that interesting, you have an opinion without knowing any actual data about the subject? Where does your opinion come from, anyway? Then they question themselves, and might go out and start looking at contradicting data from their assumptions.
They might not get 100% of the way there, maybe not soon, maybe not ever. But they might get to the point of saying, "I am tentatively for abortion, with insert extreme limitations here." Or they might say, "I agree, Roe v. Wade should be overturned, because it should belong to the states." (Which, you might point out for now, is really what would happen. Overturning Roe would not actually ban abortion. It would just put it to the states, so that the people in the states could decide. If they're already heading down MAGA road, maybe this will be enough to keep them on that side, when otherwise they might turn around.)
The big trick is to try this question session on something less disruptive first. Find some issue they care less about (tax policy, illegal immigration, reviving the mammoth, whatever) that will work to make them question the assumption that they believe X policy because they're smart logical informed people (everyone believes this about themselves and it's rarely true). Get them into the habit of asking, "Hey, why do I believe X?" And then looking up some information. I've had success on animal testing; lots of people against it, then they went to look at data, said Oh no people really are dying and this really does help them, and boom, changed mind. Once this becomes habit, the dominoes start falling.
Lesson to learn: redpilling is a process. Often when someone is redpilled, it comes in stages. Don't assume someone who agrees with MAGA on X is going to agree on Y. Most people probably will adopt a "team" mentality and be won over to the majority of positions on their new "team." But it can be a process in certain issues if they strongly believed in them, because they'll cling to those more, they're foundational to identity. Look at how Tim Pool fights so hard to continue being called a "liberal," for example. Like, dude, it's just a word, and you're voting Trump, and you're 2/3rds in our camp policy wise anyway - heck, pro 2A now. But he cares a lot about the word used to describe him. That's his stumbling block. Abortion might be your lady friends' stumbling block. Do what you can to make it easier for them to navigate around it but be patient. They're literally having to rewire parts of their brain in order to truly MAGA. If they get 50%, 80%, 90% of the way there, it's a miracle.
Final tip: have these conversations one on one, with maybe MAGA-supporting GF for your backup. If you try it in groups, they will reinforce each others' lingering leftism because the left is at heart herd mentality.
Australia rescued many of our men over in the Pacific theatre during the big war. Our alliance is older than any of us have been alive. I have hope for the Aussies, I think they can take their country back.