Wenzdaz Wandering Political Thoughts

Wenzda finds me in a cheerful mood after reading some news.

Slop is the word of the year. The slop and state of the U.S. reminds me of the early Nazi efforts, back in the early 1930s. The German Nationalist party was still calling themselves socialists while attacking unions and communists, trying to get a grip on the population’s support. That grip finally came when the economic situation became dire. With employment hemorrhaging, unemployment rising, industry and trade faltering, prices rising, affordability decreasing, and shortages increasingly common, the NAZIs finally gained control. Patient and duplicitous, they were in it for the long haul.

This does remind me of now. Trump is a front. A distraction. His antics, nonsensical babble, tirades, and failing health give cover. His regime’s Project 2025 players feverishly work on making things worse behind the scenes. They push tariffs on Trump in the name of returning industry and economic power to the U.S. They’re bright enough to know that it’s really raising prices, reducing trade, decreasing tax revenues, while increasing the deficit.

This is all about manipulating the economy, which lets them manipulate consumers, which permits manipulation of voters. This is about making voters angry, desperate, and distrustful of the government, the media, and everyone else. This is about setting the stage for the next phase of their takeover.

They easily lie to Trump about what’s going on. They keep him in a bubble and feed him fake numbers. Trump, being the restless, self-centered, low-information guy who he is, easily swallows their lies. He wants and needs to believe it’s working because to combat his insecurity and the secret despair of how inferior he is. Information about his falling poll numbers is fed to him. He’s reminded that this is former President Biden‘s fault. That it’s fake news. That increases Trump’s frenzy and increases his distraction.

It’s well-established that when Trump gets more distracted and frenzied, he doesn’t calm down. He doesn’t step back to think. He spins up the crazy. Lying and cheating made him a ‘successful’ businessman. Spinning up the crazy got him a ‘reality’ show. Becoming crazier, and more openly hateful and sexist — telling it like it is — won him elections. Tacitly encouraged by his handlers, he’ll spin up to dangerously unstable levels.

Meanwhile, the Project 2025 folks will smile or look away. Let Trump go off and destroy himself. Go ahead, take down the GOP. Most Republican elected officials lack principles. They just want to remain in office. That keeps them relevant only in the minds of voters who don’t pay attention. Voters with short memories, little understanding of history, and less interest in thinking about it. They don’t want to think of themselves as dupes.

Trump’s handlers aren’t too concerned about the midterm elections or even 2028 POTUS elections. They give less than a fuck about the GOP and any ‘vision’ they might put forward. No, let them talk and strut. Just as we know who they are, so do the creators of Project 2025.

This is the long game. The serious right wingers, once called Neocons until that became tarnished and flailed, started their destabilization efforts in the United States long ago. Remember PNAC? PNAC wasn’t a failure. It did the job needed and was put to bed. Project 2025 is another step after PNAC and the Foreign Policy Initiative.

This is just the middle segment of the long game. They don’t have the right leader for the next phase. Not yet. They know it’s not JD Vance. Like Trump, Vance is easily manipulated, bent, and controlled. Like Trump, Vance is greedy and vain. But Vance lacks Trump’s charisma and oversized personality. He doesn’t lie and bloviate with Trump’s charm. Vance looks, smells, acts, and sounds like a snake oil hawker.

No, they need someone else. It wasn’t going to be Charlie Kirk. He was just riding on Trump’s coattails. Somewhere out there is Project 2025’s next leader to destroy the U.S.’s democratic republic and replace it with a white Christian fascist state run by oligarchs and true believers.

That leader could be a woman, a woman with charisma and charm, who can smile while lying and get everyone to laugh along with them, a woman who hates other women, who desires power because she’s morally bankrupt and needs attention to fill the many holes in her spirit. Basically, a female Trump.

Such a woman could speak to other woman and convince them that she should be the first female POTUS. She would deny Project 2025 — just as Trump did — and vow to restore the United States. She’ll fix the economy and restore dignity to the office and return rights to Americans. Then, in office, she’ll fill her cabinet with a new version of MAGA sycophants and play from a new edition of the latest update to Project 2025. Because remember, Project 2025 was written for now, the middle segment of their long con, to take advantage of POTUS 47’s availability and his staunch base.

The next phase is out there, waiting to be written and put in place. Unless we can do something about that AI slop and the disastrous Trump Effect on the United States being fostered by the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025.

And that must begin now.

No kings? Hell, no crazies. No NAZIs.

No slop.

Monday’s Political Thoughts

As September bows and moves out of the limelight, the NY Times announces in an editorial that they support Kamala Harris for President in 2024.

Part of me shrugged. It’s considered a liberal paper; many will dismiss its opinion. Another voice in me said, “No, this is good. It will help the Undecided make a choice.” Maybe, I replied. Easier understanding my cats’ meows than it is to follow the Undecided’s reasoning sometimes.

The NY Times invoked some of the Undecided’s reasoning. Kamala Harris is not being specific enough in her plans and policies, they complain.

Trump supporters will pull out the pieces of good the paper cites for Trump and say, “See? Even that librul rag says Trump was good.”

In particular, he broke decades of Washington consensus and led both parties to wrestle with the downsides of globalization, unrestrained trade and China’s rise. His criminal-justice reform efforts were well placed, his focus on Covid vaccine development paid off, and his decision to use an emergency public health measure to turn away migrants at the border was the right call at the start of the pandemic”. 

They’ll dismiss where the NYT opines, “Yet even when the former president’s overall aim may have had merit, his operational incompetence, his mercurial temperament and his outright recklessness often led to bad outcomes. Mr. Trump’s tariffs cost Americans billions of dollars. His attacks on China have ratcheted up military tensions with America’s strongest rival and a nuclear superpower. His handling of the Covid crisis contributed to historic declines in confidence in public health, and to the loss of many lives. His overreach on immigration policies, such as his executive order on family separation, was widely denounced as inhumane and often ineffective.”

The NY Times then continues to tear Trump a new editorial asshole over his many failures.

Trump supporters will disagree about those.

In the end, it’s a recommendation and much of it is about how Trump is unfit to be President. As the Times announced in 2016.

And even back then, someone demanded in the comments to the Times 2016 recommendation, “But why should someone vote for Clinton? Simply because she’s “not Trump?” She flipflops more than most politicians (just in the last year or so: Keystone pipeline, TPP, gay marriage). She’s consistent only on one thing: She never met a Middle East war she didn’t like, a Middle East war that she thinks the US should steer clear of — and yet her supporters have the audacity to insist that Trump would be more “dangerous.” If Clinton were President right now, we’d probably have ground troops in Libya and Syria, and maybe even the Ukraine. How that qualifies her as the “peace” candidate escapes me.”

For many, the dilemma remains strangely unchanged despite the history of Trump’s relentless lying, criminal convictions, flipflopping, weird and bizarre statements and behavior, and Project 2025.

And that’s the problem we still face as a nation.

The Twitter Response

A few days ago, Twitter informed me they’d blocked me because I tweeted a fact-check article that said the story being shared on social media about mail-in ballots being found in a California landfill is false. I challenged them because I disagreed with their decison.

Here is the exact headline I used, as copied from the offending tweet:

Viral Image Falsely Claims To Show Unopened 2020 Mail-In Ballots In A California Dumpster

I didn’t link this headline to any article in this post. If you want, you can copy that headline and search for it, as I did. I found articles that came up, confirming what I had tweeted was true in USA Today, MSN, Checkyourfact.com, and other places, including my original source, mediabiasfactcheck.com.

Twitter doesn’t agree. They say that I violated their guidelines. Here’s their copied response from the email.


 Hello, 

Thank you for your patience as we reviewed your appeal request for account, @mwseidel1, regarding the following: 

Our support team has determined that a violation did take place, and therefore we will not overturn our decision. 

You will not be able to access Twitter through your account due to violations of the Twitter Rules, specifically our rules around:

In order to restore account functionality, you can resolve the violations by logging into your account and completing the on-screen instructions. 

Thanks,

Twitter

The Twitter mediocrity, sorry, bureaucracy, has made their decision. You can tell by the details included in their form letter that it was tediously thorough. They cited the violation — oh, wait, no, they didn’t.

Well, that doesn’t matter. They did cite the rule that I violated, so that I may look it up and learn my lesson from this incident, as I couldn’t find it when I checked their rules and guidelines before. The relevant rule is:

Well, they left that blank, too.

Surely, then, Twitter’s decision strikes me as a thorough, totally impartial, fair, and intelligent decision. Yes, that’s snark. They obviously did nothing of the kind and revealed how little their standards mean, as they couldn’t be bothered with citing anything. I’m too much of a peasant account for that.

In view of this response of theirs, I thought about my response. Should I waste more time fighting it? No, just delete it and go on. Sadly, Twitter’s decision is about the norm for customer service and modern organizations: damn capricious and with little thought.

I do keep in mind, however, that others who retweeted what Trump said often have their accounts locked for using Trump’s exact words, while Trump’s original tweet is just labeled with a mild warning.

As always, Twitter — like other organizations — speaks to power with one standard, and sneers at people like me, truly the mark of a wonderful corporate citizen and a worthwhile part of the social landscape. Sorry, more snark. Just couldn’t be helped. Their response just asks for it.

Cheers

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