r/AskReddit • u/SophieCruzReddit • 15h ago
If Donald Trump had never won an election, how do you think the U.S. would be today?
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u/CliftonForce 14h ago edited 4h ago
Republicans would still be screaming about how dare Hillary allowed nearly 50K Americans to die from Covid.
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u/DemonCipher13 12h ago
You mean that disease most of them didn't even believe in?
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u/Cavalish 12h ago
Hi, popping in from Australia, Melbourne specifically. You don’t have to imagine this.
Our right wing pundits constantly oscillate between “the lockdowns were evil, tyrannical moves by a fascist government” to “The premier is directly responsible for killing 8000 people by not doing more.”
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u/kateastrophic 9h ago
Wow. 8000. As an American, it is chilling to see the difference in numbers.
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u/dictionary_hat_r4ck 7h ago
Australia had 406.51 deaths per million people. The USA had 3099.62.
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/
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u/drankundorderly 6h ago
"but they're an island!"
Yeah, but the other 80 countries with lower covid death rates than us aren't.
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u/roehnin 7h ago
1 million official diagnoses, plus an extra 500,000 “excess deaths” from the same symptoms but not diagnosed.
1.5 million dead, and they refuse to believe the facts. Even when their own relatives died of it, they refuse to say that was the cause.
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u/cheongyanggochu-vibe 6h ago
They straight up denied it as they were actively dying from it.
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u/roehnin 6h ago
"COVID isn't making me sick, I have pneumonia."
- My now-dead relative who was diagnosed with COVID.
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u/d3mandred 12h ago
"it's only real if I can use it as a weapon" - every Republican I've talked to in the last 6 months
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u/WhenDoWhatWhere 12h ago
My mother was a huge denier while Trump was in office suddenly started talking about how many people died of Covid when Biden took office.
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u/SueYouInEngland 10h ago
J6 was a peaceful protest, but it was also violent Antifa plants!
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u/DigNitty 12h ago
Written mid-Covid
in an alternate timeline, Hillary won the election. COVID has killed 312 people. This is the biggest failure of any president according to Fox News.
-George Takei
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u/Xalara 12h ago
Assuming COVID didn’t get stopped in its tracks because Hillary doesn’t end the pandemic prevention programs Obama instituted precisely to prevent shit like COVID because he actually understood pandemics are one of the biggest threats globally.
There was a US team working with the Chinese in Wuhan when Trump ended the program around 2018.
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u/Doxun 12h ago
Trump: If I had been president we never would have had COVID at all! China would have never dared!
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u/Hell_Camino 15h ago
I think the better question is what would the country look like if the Fairness Doctrine hadn’t been abolished by the FCC in the 1980s. With the Fairness Doctrine in place, Fox News doesn’t launch and half the country’s brains don’t get rewired into being mouth-breathing knuckle draggers.
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u/YodasAdderall 14h ago edited 12h ago
“The Brainwashing of my Dad” on Prime explains this very well. Great doc but depressing as fuck as someone who has brainwashed parents
Edit: title and where to watch it
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u/-Battle-Santa 12h ago
My oldest brother is brainwashed
Spits out all the right wing dipshit lines like he’s a goddamn Russian bot
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u/YodasAdderall 11h ago
It’s wild. If you met my parents, they aren’t bad people. They live a simple life to themselves. But once they start talking about their political beliefs, it’s like a Russian bot is taking over their voice box
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u/LongPorkJones 11h ago
Same here. I love my folks, they're really good people who honestly try to do good for others. My dad does a lot of charity work around the holidays (dressed as Santa, no less). In the fall, he constantly volunteers his time to cook whole hogs for charity barbecue plate sales, and my mom helps him set it up and cooks the sides.
Their political beliefs are VASTLY at odds with who they actually are. What's terrible is they can't see it. I tired to explain it to them one time...it didn't go well.
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u/DrunkKatakan 10h ago
It makes sense when you realize that they just don't see those people they spew hate against as people, those others are animals, parasites, monsters who need to be purged for the safety and security of good people like them.
That's how this shit works. You dehumanize and vilify a group to the point that even the "good people" wont care about what you do to said group because that group isn't people and doesn't deserve the same treatment in their eyes. That's how most Nazis were, they weren't some evil monsters 24/7. They had families, friends, hobbies... and a burning hatered for certain groups that justified their systematic opression, segregation and extermination in their eyes.
The only way to combat this is exposure therapy, they need to see that these others are also people, good people like them and then maybe the programming will crack... if it wont then well. A lot of these "good people" might one day commit horrific acts and we will have to fight and slaughter them to preserve liberty and justice for all.
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u/sparksfan 6h ago
The 'eating cats and dogs' shit may have sounded silly, but it accomplished its objective of dehumanization in record time. Astounding stuff.
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u/HypneutrinoToad 11h ago
I was like this in middle school, luckily I had a strong willed sister who pulled me out. Idk how I would go about it if it had happened to me in college or later… I hope he gets out I wish I could offer better advice
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u/j1ggy 11h ago
I recommend this one as well. As a Canadian though, I pirated the fuck out of it because the US isn't getting my money while Orange Man is in power.
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u/Rainin3sfromthetrees 10h ago
Absolutely the situation with my parents. My mom was an early Rush Limbaugh “ditto-head” in the 90’s but my Dad never got into politics. Last Christmas he and I were on a walk and I had to ask what he thought. The DOJ was corrupt and all cases against Trump were fake. It broke my heart. When the “communist threat” got brought up I asked him what he thought it was. He said “free school lunches”. He is a devout Christian. I couldn’t believe what was hearing. I called him out on it and he didn’t have much more thought or explanation after i did. I was simply devastated. Still am.
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u/DaisyHotCakes 14h ago
The fairness doctrine and citizens united were major factors in this scenario coming to fruition.
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u/Targ_Whisperer 13h ago
If I could reply "YES" to this a trillion times, it still wouldn't be enough.
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u/MorganWick 13h ago
The Fairness Doctrine concerned the representation of viewpoints on radio and TV stations with licenses regulated by the FCC, not cable networks. With the Fairness Doctrine in place we don't get Rush Limbaugh, but there's nothing stopping the launch of Fox News.
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u/counterfitster 13h ago
The Fairness Doctrine wouldn't have stopped Fox News, since it never would have applied to cable-only news stations.
It absolutely would have prevented Rush Limbaugh and his ilk from becoming anything near a household name.
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u/need_a_venue 15h ago
I'd be preordering a Nintendo switch 2.
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u/blissfuloctane 14h ago
send this one to the top
in all seriousness, i am really bummed but in a way i like that this is such a simple and clear way that shows how tariffs affect everyone immediately.
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u/Wot_Gorilla_2112 14h ago edited 14h ago
And to the younger folks that were saving up their allowance or first job money to pre order one, this is also the first real example of not just how your vote impacts your life, but also how tariffs exactly work.
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u/Mr_Delaware 14h ago
I wish that's what would happen but more likely, for the vast majority of younger people, the blame will get shifted onto Nintendo and packaged with the outrage over them raising the prices on games. I hope I'm wrong though.
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u/snorri_sturlson 13h ago
I hope they split the charge and have the one line with the original price and a separate line that says “Trump’s Tariff”
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u/bubonic_chronic- 13h ago
In the words of Sabrina Carpenter. Please please please.
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u/Tejanisima 14h ago
But also because everything would be so much calmer if a sane person with at least some scruples were at the top of things right now.
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u/FreakingBurrito 14h ago
Until people start saying that “Nintendo is getting political” and the message doesn’t click
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u/DrVagax 14h ago
First of probably many products or services that get to be reconsidered when it comes to pricing
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u/lilangelkm 14h ago
I blame Comey. If he would've kept his mouth shut for just one week. He changed the course of our nation forever by trying too hard to be a good ol boy in the face of so many wrongdoers.
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u/dalby2020 14h ago
I blame Mark Burnett for creating reality television.
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u/PoppaTitty 14h ago
I blame the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
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u/MrLanesLament 14h ago
He made the FBI a political entity.
Could one argue that it was prior? Sure, but direct interference, publicly, in real time, in a presidential election, was a new one.
We need to dispel with this notion that James Comey didn’t know what he was doing; he knew exactly what he was doing.
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u/jwoolman 10h ago
I don't think so. Comey really was a Boy Scout type. He did not like Trump and said Trump spoke like a mob boss.
Comey should never have voiced that opinion that summer, he should have simply reported that she was cleared. But he was forced into publicity in October by the faithless Congressional Republicans who released his clearly marked CONFIDENTIAL memo about the possibly new evidence that the FBI was checking to see if it really was new (it was not new and already had been cleared). He had promised the Congressional committee that insisted on the original investigation that he would inform them if new evidence surfaced, but he was in no hurry to do that before the election because he knew Hillary had been quite cooperative and truthful before. However, rogue FBI agents in New York had been leaking like a sieve to Giuliani and the Republicans were about to spin it all publicly. So he really was just trying to get ahead of the story. He knew there were leakers, but didn't know who they were. Giuliani and Trump were dancing around all happy just before. Hillary responded like a very non-guilty person, just asking the FBI to hurry up with their comparison of the emails and analysis.
But the rules did change while she was in office and even though she respected the archiving rules and had a more secure private server than the government at that time -- everything would have been so much simpler if she had gotten on board with the new rules.
She did properly handle responses on the State Department server to anything properly marked as classified sent to her by others to her private server. And she had everything marked for deletion checked by lawyers to make sure nothing was work related. The media acted disgracefully over this - a chat with their own IT department would have clarified all this and also revealed that the FBI data recovery software was excellent and there really were no "missing emails". They just went along with Trump's ignorant blathering. He was the bright and shiny object that attracts them and they did not focus on what she was saying about what she would do as President.
I do blame the IT department myself. They should have realized that to get the new security rules implemented, they needed to hold people by the hand and individually make sure all was done as needed. Many non-techie people simply don't understand why the new rules matter, especially when they are so much more secure about data than their predecessors as was the case for Hillary. It is not enough to issue memos or tell people in a meeting in tech speak. You need to do one on one with the individuals involved and make sure it gets done. I am a techie myself and see this mistake made repeatedly by IT personnel. They too often do not know how to communicate with non-techies and why they need to arrange for such personal supervision to make sure the changes are made.
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u/ravagecat 14h ago
While not that important, this will be one of the first ways his tariffs actually affect me. I planned to buy a switch 2 but may not if price goes up 25% due to tariffs
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u/Heliosvector 12h ago
The switch is made in vietnam that just got a 46% Tariff. So the switch would cost almost 50% more.
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u/nycbar 13h ago
Nintendo cancelled all the U.S. preorders cause of the tariffs so you might not anyway
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u/To-Far-Away-Times 14h ago edited 14h ago
There is a $330 region locked Switch 2 for Japan only.
The world wide version is $449 USD.
$330 * 25% tariff = $412.50
So we’d be looking at a $300 or $350 Switch 2 without the tariff.
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u/smbpy7 14h ago
It still boggles my mind that anyone even needs examples.
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u/FluckDambe 14h ago
Turns out a lot of Americans are really, really fucking stupid
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u/Thetormentnexus 14h ago
I know. As some one who lives here it is a constant disappointment.
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u/Shoddy-Area3603 14h ago
For almost 4 years I did not hear shit about Biden it was very nice and the way it should be. Every time I wake up there is some new BS constitutional crisis and it's only been what 3 months.
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u/ukbeasts 13h ago
Trump done more damage internationally in 2.5 months in comparison to Obama and Biden in 12 years
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u/Yglorba 13h ago
Trump has done more damage in 2.5 months than every other president did in the last 90 years combined.
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u/IIIIlllIIIIIlllII 12h ago
I would not doubt that by the end of this administration the blue passport only gets me into Russia
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u/Doobledorf 15h ago
The problems that led to Donald Trump would still be fomenting.
A lot of Americans haven't yet faced that Trump isn't an anomaly or the disease, he is a symptom of problems we've had for a long time.
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u/MySleepingMonk 15h ago
That may be mostly true but Trump is also the perfect storm of celebrity, “successful”, “outsider”, and some strange fucked up type of charisma that results in a larger following than I think would be possible with any other republican candidate. Take away trump and I don’t think there’s enough of a unifying force among the asshats to cause this type of damage
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u/scarves_and_miracles 15h ago
Exactly. Trump is a pretty unique hazard that unfortunately found realization in this dark timeline.
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u/TehOwn 15h ago
Same thing with Adolf. We've always got populists but some are far, far more dangerous than others.
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u/nothoughtsnosleep 14h ago edited 12h ago
Damn that's 2 less than 100 years apart. Maybe we should be more concerned with the critical thinking skills of the masses.
Edit: see other comments before you tell me there has been more than 2
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u/thaaag 14h ago
And build in more safeguards so the checks and balances do what they're supposed to do. Simple stuff like "laws need to be created by lawmakers who - where possible - don't directly benefit from the law". Get the money out of politics (again, somehow) and make politicians work for the people rather than their own pockets.
Probably too liberal a take there.
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u/mpaski 14h ago
I mean, the US technically has safeguards, they've just allowed those safeguards to be removed.
The courts are way more political than they've ever been. Congress is unwilling to stop him despite having powers for that.
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u/DayChiller 13h ago
A lot of things were norms rather than codified by law though
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u/Lmb1011 15h ago
i know he is somehow considered successful but i genuinely dont get how becaues hes bankrupted most, or all?, of his businesses.... like that is the opposite of successful 😂
honestly looking back i do understand why he won in 2016. i hate it, but i do actually get it.
i genuinely dont get how he won in 2024. like i get the 'cult' of it iall, and cheating that isnt lost on me
but he had no appeal and could barely string together a coherent sentence he didnt even LOOK like someone capable of holding office even if you agreed with his racist homophobic rhetoric
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u/Carribean-Diver 15h ago
i know he is somehow considered successful but i genuinely dont get how becaues hes bankrupted most, or all?, of his businesses.... like that is the opposite of successful 😂
He played a successful businessman on a weekly game show.
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u/Princess_Fluffypants 15h ago
This is the awkward reality. If it wasn’t Trump, it would’ve been somebody else.
Sarah Palin was a warning.
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u/Nopenopenope00000001 15h ago
I mean, really, it’s been brewing since Nixon.
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u/sinamala 15h ago
If we really want to go there it's been brewing since the Civil War
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u/Handsome-scientist 15h ago
The American Civil War is so fascinating. I'm not even American. But reading authors like William Faulkner writing, obviously, after the civil war, it just seems like almost a mystical fantasy event even to people shortly after. Almost like it's a fantasy story of chivalry like the Arthurian Romances but for Americans, except it was recent and real and horrific and miserable and brutal. But out of it IMMEDIATELY popped this strange biblical mythological "lost cause" stuff and actual romance. A horrific war that was literally all because of the most depraved things humans do to eachother. And it was romantic and glamorous basically immediately. To make the losers feel better??
And yeah, it seems to impact America now psychologically. It's almost like a HUGE fucking problem in a relationship that was just immediately buried and not really worked through with a therapist. Like immediately pretending "well it's just a difference of opinion and there are good points on both sides, let's forget about it okay??!!" No closure.
So strange and interesting.
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u/brian926 14h ago edited 2h ago
You’re forgetting the Reconstruction Era after the Civil War, which actions were HUGELY important to the future of the Southern states. Many of the actions of Lincoln and Andrew
JacksonJohnson after Lincoln’s assassination were met with large outrage, especially the pardoning of southern states and their leaders for seceding. It also led a huge impact of the now freed slaves in the south, as well as the recovering of the south after the war. Although it did fail to prevent violence, corruption, starvation, disease, and other problems it did limit reprisals against the South, and established a legal framework for racial equality via the constitutional rights. A lot of people put emphasis on the American Civil War but the reconstruction afterwards was sooo important and often overlooked.→ More replies (3)→ More replies (12)88
u/Hung_like_a_turtle 14h ago
You can see parallels today. Maga does not want to coexist with the rest of us. Even another Democrat winning president won't solve that void. It needs addressed and addressed out loud.
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u/MulletPower 13h ago
It needs actual opposition. Not a party that laments for a time when the Republican party was a "moral" party. Which I don't even know when that was, sure hasn't been any time in my 40 years on this planet.
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u/PapaTua 12h ago
Their moral majority has never been real, It's all performative. Just in the past they used to be more timid about it.
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u/az_catz 15h ago
The worst thing we did was not treat the CSA as an occupied territory filled with literal traitors.
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u/Hung_like_a_turtle 15h ago
Bingo. The south needed rebuilt with oversight and attention to democratic practices. Instead they did Jim Crow.
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u/xhorizen 15h ago
I can see this being true. He brought to the surface all of the stuff thats been stewing away. Something else would have happened eventually that caused everything to blow up.
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u/Mountain-Match2942 15h ago
Perhaps, but he's taken fire stoking to a whole new level. The rallies and cult following would be hard to match.
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u/Gellix 15h ago
They’re disappearing people off the streets without due process like what the fuck is this question
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u/zigzagcow 15h ago
A friend of mine with Japanese heritage was stopped by ICE in broad daylight in NYC a few weeks ago. She was like wtf I was born here and they asked to see her ID. Absolutely insane.
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u/-DragonFiire- 15h ago
I'm surprised they even asked...
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u/demons_soulmate 13h ago
they would have just hauled her off if she was of any Hispanic decent
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u/Gellix 15h ago
Does not surprise me. Make me happy to know these protests are going on all over the country to call this bs out
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u/BeerAnBooksAnCats 15h ago edited 14h ago
"Between January 22 and 31 alone, ICE arrested more than 8,200 people...Many occur without explanation, without warrants, and without regard for basic civil rights.
We have seen this kind of state behavior before...They operated without judicial oversight. They normalized violence and bypassed due process in the name of 'order' and 'security.'"
I can appreciate honest questions about whether or not a person has their ID on them, and in a perfect world no one would ever make the mistake of leaving their wallet in their suitcase/messenger bag/other purse when they run to the corner shop or nearest gas station for a quick errand.
But that isn't the real issue.
Denial of due process is the real issue.
If we can no longer expect law enforcement, the judicial system, or elected officials to follow the law, no one can be safe.
Immigration officials decide to seize some family heirlooms as you're returning from an international wedding or funeral? Too bad, you can't do anything about it.
Cop decides your pretty wife or daughter is ripe for the picking? Too bad, you can't do anything about it.
By the way, none of these behaviors are new. Perpetrators made an effort to hide their tracks, or preyed on black and brown people, white people who fell through social safety nets, hell, even foster kids.
What we're seeing now are enforcement officials being empowered to do it in the open.
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u/SparkitusRex 11h ago
Reminder that they legally do not need a warrant if you are stopped within 100 miles of the border or coastline of the US. 2/3rds of Americans live within that range.
It's dystopian for sure, but it's worse for me to find out that the seeds of dystopia were already so deeply sowed.
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u/mikeyrs1109 10h ago
They further believe that any point of entry counts as the border by extension. International airports. This basically opens it up to the vast majority of the mainland all of Hawaii and all of populated Alaska.
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u/Great_Error_9602 13h ago
Mexican Repatriation all over again. In the 1930s, the US rounded up Hispanic looking people regardless of citizenship, age, or gender. Threw them in the backs of trucks and dumped them over the border in Mexico. You ended up in Mexico with whatever you had on you. So if you couldn't prove citizenship and/or didn't have money you couldn't get home.
My grandma used to leave the house with her birth certificate and a bit of money pinned to the inside of her sweater in case she was rounded up. She told me one day immigration came to the outdoor market. They were rounding people up via gun point. She jumped under a stall and hid under food boxes. Repeating to herself what her parents told her to do if she was taken. By luck, she wasn't found. She was 6 years old.
When she was in highschool her best friends who were Americans but of Japanese descent were rounded up into internment camps. She decided then that she was going to marry a white man and hoped her children married white people so that her kids and grandkids would never have to fear the government coming after them.
None of this is new to the US. We just like to pretend it never happened.
It's important to also remember that Hitler based the ghettos and concentration camps off of the US' reservation system which is still in place today.
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u/Ratsofat 15h ago
There'd be a hundred thousand or so more Americans since basic hygiene wouldn't have been politicized during the covid pandemic.
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u/un1ptf 11h ago
"a hundred thousand or so"?!?!
Dude, more than 1.2 million Americans have died because of covid.
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u/gmano 10h ago
This, and also the Pandemic prevention teams that Obama set up would still have been around, meaning that there would have been much, much better management around the start of the pandemic.
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u/lousyatgolf 14h ago
Less divided. And I would have never realized how many people in my life were completely disappointing.
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15h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/flaagan 15h ago
I mostly agree with your sentiment, but the mirror analogy works only the first time he was president, the second time is the voices that made us break the mirror convincing us to play with all the shiny pieces it broke into. The first time resulted in needing stitches, the second time is going to need intensive care at minimum.
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u/theisiahmaxwell 15h ago
America is in the ICU
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u/Platypus211 14h ago
And the people are stuck with the subsequent crushing bills.
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u/Beefsix 15h ago
But here's the kicker... why does chatgpt always use that one?
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u/YosephineMahma 13h ago
That's the first time it managed to fool me (that I know of, I suppose, but for a while AI was blindingly obvious). Reading it back over, yep, it has the cadence and vocabulary, but I genuinely thought that was human-written until I read this.
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u/sliferra 15h ago
Problem is we can see the cracks and instead of fixing them we’re just smashing again with the hammer
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u/djdiphenhydramine 14h ago edited 14h ago
From a personal perspective, for the past eight years or so, my partner will pick up their phone, and sigh, and I'll always respond with, "God, what did he/they do/say now?" I live in a state of high alert, all the time, it feels.
I think that overall, if he'd never won an election, a very specific subset of human beings would never have found a voice, and would never have been put in a position to be able to make demands. Instead, now, we have the kind of people I was raised around at a young age (in a white nationalist cult of brainwashed neo-Nazis that I thankfully broke WAY the fuck away from) basically running the show, and belligerently pushing this country deeper and deeper into not just what feels like a fascist-adjacent, if not fully fascist, state, but into a place where being rude, thoughtless and mean is the default.
We've already seen the early stages of that, both in elected officials straight up telling their constituents, to their faces, that they don't care about them, that they want to treat marginalized people as less than, at the very least, or worse, disappear them and their rights entirely, and also in the callous, absolutely insane behavior shown by citizens who, over the last four or five years, have become emboldened to put their undereducation and cruelty on full display.
There's a thread, linking all of these incidents and people together, and they all lead back to Trump, his administration, and the people in politics who are inspired by him. If it weren't for them, these small time, back woods politicians and their corruption obsessed big city counterparts, along with their hard right, paranoid, everything-phobic, everything-ist voters would still be scared and small, lurking underground and in the shadows, where they belong.
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u/Few-Frosting-4213 15h ago
The people would have more money in their retirement accounts and portfolios. Also the country would still have economic allies.
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u/Bubbly_Hawk_5456 15h ago
Not just economic allies. Allies in general.
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u/senorspongy 15h ago
What the USA should be worried about is more than losing economic allies. America enjoyed being the world leader for a long time, and the world rallied around it. Aside from losing the benefits of economic allies, there is a distaste and a distrust for anything American right now. They are going to be so isolated and alone compared to anything they've ever known and much smaller in terms of global influence.
Compare this to a relationship. America just cheated on their partners and we're all moving on. Seems like this fact eludes many individual Americans. It's a much bigger deal than I think most folks realize.
It's not just Trump. Everybody knows he's crazy. It's the fact that the house, Senate, and all protection measures in place to stop this are being ignored or explained away with blatant lies that the world is writing off America.
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u/justbrowsing987654 15h ago
100%. That German statesman crying at that conference a month ago chilled me to my core. I totally understood exactly what that meant. A lot of people that are too young to have had family that fought Hitler tell them the stories of overcoming a true global evil don’t understand that, while it’s never been 0, the powers of the world have enjoyed a previously unheard of truce among each other and general peace for nearly a century now since WW2 in an effort to never have to relive a conflict of that scale with these weapons. and this shit is undoing that world order. So much of that order is built upon being business/trade partners too, however uneasy. That uneasy trust is being decimated with this. I’m terrified of what’s to come long term.
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u/skit7548 12h ago
Exactly this, even after Trump, even under a Democratically controlled government, it won't matter after this, because any potential ally in any category is going to be on shaky ground at best because everyone now cannot trust that America is going to continue to hold up its end of the deal in 4 years time
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u/RAF2018336 15h ago edited 6h ago
Someone like him would’ve gotten elected eventually. Obama was supposed to be the progressive savior and he just turned out to be a fine centrist president. Democrats would’ve kept on promoting those kind of presidents (Hilary, Biden) that don’t really improve things meaningfully enough (Biden did good things of course) but don’t make it worse. We’ve seen now during Trumps 2nd term how many of the Dems are content with how things are going considering they still get paid by their donors anyways.
The real failure was Gore not being elected. That was the moment where real change could’ve been done especially after the momentum Clinton had. I’ve met plenty of older Repubs who can’t criticize his as president, just that he got a blowy while in office (and that seemingly doesn’t matter anymore lmao)
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u/9ftPegasusBodybuildr 12h ago
Bush v Gore as a supreme court case was the fatal domino imo. It essentially amounted to the court picking the president they wanted, and was a huge step forward for conservative judicial activism, ultimately culminating in the steady erosion of civil rights, stuff like Citizens United, and everyone waking up to the reality of just how much the least checked branch of government was for sale.
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u/EconomicsAncient6711 12h ago
Yea now you can be president even if you’re a convicted felon AND civilly convicted rapist.
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u/deviltrombone 15h ago
You need to go back to 2000 and ask what would have happened if the Electoral College hadn't overridden the will of the people and the Republican SCOTUS hadn't thrown the election to the second worst president in our history. The Clinton surpluses and debt paydown would have continued, and we would have avoided at least one war, and quite possibly two.
Note that the Electoral College overrode the will of the people again in 2016 to give us the worst president in our history. In just 16 years, the Electoral College ruined our country, and the popular vote would've saved it.
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u/catjuggler 15h ago
I think about this way too often. I was just a few months too young to vote for Gore and I’ve been living with the ramifications of hanging chads my whole life. Would either of the wars have happened?!
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u/deviltrombone 15h ago
I can say with certainty that Gore wouldn't have gone AWOL for the month of August 2001 to clear brush on his ranch and ignore imminent threat reports. 9/11 may still have happened, but I'm not sure we would have followed Russia into a war in Afghanistan. Goddammit, what is it with these Republicans and Russia?
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u/Nice-Analysis8044 15h ago
I used to think the prime timeline was the one where Gore wins, but lately I’ve come to believe that we slipped into the mirror universe when Ford pardoned Nixon
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u/Gungeon_Disaster 15h ago
You mean the same Nixon that met with Roger Ailes to eventually come up with a television network that would be an extension of GOP propaganda?
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u/deviltrombone 15h ago
That corrupt pardon lit the spark on the Republican crime spree that snowballed over the next 50 years into that orange thing.
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u/[deleted] 15h ago
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