Wow. I like your newsletter, always look forward to the read when it comes out a few times per week. I don't know what kind of online conversations you're subjected to outside of this substack, but I hope today's missive got that out of your system. Maybe just don't engage them? Let your writing speak for itself and don't rise to the bait if people are trolling you?
The piece earlier this week was one of the largest viewed ones ever, but it definitely received a LOT of blowback. My inbox was overflowing with negative trolls. Tomorrow's weekly recap is going to contain some examples of what I've been receiving this week.
Is it out of my system? We'll see. I will say that the nice messages and encouraging thoughts by readers like you have REALLY been appreciated this week. Thanks for reading and offering your thoughts.
I think Trumps Gaza plan was deliberately insane to shake the Middle East out of 70+ years of the same old same old. Now I read that Egypt and Qater are working very hard on an alternative. And that seems like progress. Repeating the ‘pour money on the Palestinians’ process makes 0 sense to me.
THAT is how Trump works. He throws out the insane idea to get people to think out of the box and start a conversation. Once you know that, you take everything he says with a grain of salt and a little humor. Then you watch the chips fall.
There are three executive orders (EO’s) that Trump has signed that are worthy of support by everyone across the moderate political spectrum
The first of these EO’s recognizes that open borders are politically unacceptable and that the age of mass migration is over. Importing millions of people who will work for next to nothing just to be here destroys the wages of working class Americans and drives up housing costs when we can't house our own citizens. People cannot overpopulate their home country and just expect to move to greener pastures. There are no more green pastures. They need to voluntarily reduce their own country's population to an environmentally sustainable level, stay home and work there to improve their living conditions.
His second important EO addresses the insanity of gender identity which denies the reality of human sexuality and results in men invading women’s sports, restrooms, locker rooms and prisons. Women need and are entitled to privacy from men. Even more diabolical is the mutilation of innocent children (many who would grow up gay) in pursuit of the impossible because you can’t change your birth sex.
Finally his EO that corrects the craziness of DEI which discriminates against whites, Asians and men in attempting to cure past discrimination against others is absolutely the correct approach. Who could believe that creating a new privileged class and a new discriminated against class would provide a solution to the problem? Not to mention that it’s clearly unconstitutional.
It would well serve both Democrats and independents to get behind these changes even as they choose to vigorously oppose other aspects of his agenda.
People who are transgender are not insane. They are people whose gender identity does not match their sex assigned at birth. I am transgender, transitioned from male to female in 2007, and have run a successful business ever since. Which I wouldn’t have been able to do if I were suffering from “insanity,” to use your term. If you want to know why people compare Trump to Nazis, this demonizing of a small minority group is one of the reasons why. The Nazi play book involved demonizing Jews, sexual minorities, and Roma people, and blaming them for society’s problems. Trump is demonizing brown-skinned immigrants and transgender people, trying to convince people that it is those “others” who are causing society’s problems. If you don’t want to be compared to Nazis, stop acting like Nazis.
Joanie: Although I believe that a man who thinks he is a woman does suffer from a mental illness because his belief denies biological reality I don’t want to deny him any rights. I think he should have all of the same rights that I have as a man. Most people would agree that you and I being men are among the most privileged individuals in the world. We just can’t compete against women in most sports because that would be unfair and we can’t enter their restrooms, locker rooms and prisons because that would deny them the privacy they deserve. You are just like me.
I have a surgically constructed vagina, complete with labia and clitoris. I have breasts that developed as a result of years of estrogen therapy. I have no mental illness because I am quite aware that my assigned sex at birth was male and that I used to have a penis. I do not deny biological reality because I understand that there is a biological basis for gender identity. See below. I do not experience male privilege because the people I encounter in my daily life do not see me as a man. If you think I should use male locker rooms even though I have breasts and a vagina, I can conclude only that you either have an extreme hatred of transgender people and want to be cruel to us, or you are a pervert who wants to see my breasts and vagina. Finally, although I am past the age of athletic competition, for years my hormone levels have been essentially the same as any cis-gender woman, so I have no athletic advantage. The idea that I am just like you is the funniest idea of all the ideas you expressed.
Joanie: You’ve convinced me. After all you’ve gone through I am willing to make an exception for you. I am more concerned about the “women” Ricky Gervais mentioned in his famous routine, the ones with cocks. Do you agree that my granddaughter should not have to shower with the ones with cocks?
What Trump is doing appears pretty similar to what Orban did in Hungary. I wasn’t aware of so many saying it was a coup by Musk, just that it was a coup. The comparison with Hitler points out Hitler took over through legal means, not that Trump is going to set up concentration camps. The Democrats argued with fact and just got lied about and shouted down: they lost. So are they meant to just do the same thing? People are losing their livelihoods, Putin is about to be given whatever he wants, Canada has been brutally insulted, people have resigned out of a sense of duty to stand up for American values: yet you say don’t protest too much?
It looks like a total horror and completely abnormal. If Republicans don’t like embellishment (actually lies more than anything else) then how did they ever vote for Trump in the first place?
My reaction as well. So full of idiocy and bullshit, basically a long whine based on a straw man fallacy plus guilt by association, oversimplification & false equivalency for starters. Pointless and more annoying than the phenomenon being whined about.
If people voted against their own self interest and elected an Actual Fucking Fascist because they conflate a few loud moths they find hyperbolic to "all liberals" they are more stupid than even the most exaggerated so-called "liberals" called them.
This is basically admitting that they are the "snowflakes."
So here’s my issue with these kinds of articles that have honestly become a dime a dozen… what’s your solution? I don’t necessarily disagree with the sentiment but I hear a lot of complaining (which is ironic because you’re complaining about others complaining) but I see no solutions except… sit down and shut up? I was born and raised and live in a a rust belt welfare county in Ohio, blue turned red over the past decade. Myself and others in our town have spent the past decade exhausting ourselves in conversations with our peers trying to rationalize with them and “meet them where they’re at” over their politics and to what end?? You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink and I’m fucking exhausted trying to get the horse to drink so yeah, maybe I’ll yell and scream and exaggerate because the horse won’t fucking listen. So again, tell me what I’m supposed to do? Not “liberals” not “the party” not some vague idea or internet trolls… me, a singular person.
I’m a liberal who’s more worried than the author is, but from a strategic standpoint, I’ve come to some of the same conclusions about what works and what doesn’t.
There’s a liberal commentator named Luke Beasley who made a point similar to one of the author’s: describing Trump’s actions as-is can be *more* shocking to people than speaking about him in alarming terms. If you call Trump a fascist or protest without a specific message, it becomes a debate about the definition of fascism and makes Trump’s actions seem less extreme to many people. That’s just how human nature works.
To demonstrate the lesson in practice, Beasley went on a pro-Trump podcast where the hosts kept trying to bring the discussion back to a debate about the label fascism. Beasley didn’t entertain it. Instead, Beasley said he would not discuss labels, and he focused on specific actions. He pinned the hosts down into revealing that they unequivocally support Trump’s actions on Jan 6. There are many moderates who would find that admission more disturbing than hearing a Trump fan predictably say that he doesn’t think Trump is a fascist.
“Trump is a fascist” is less effective than:
“After campaigning on it for months, Trump pardoned Jan 6 rioters who beat and tased cops and called for hanging Trump’s own former VP, Mike Pence, because Pence wouldn’t go along with Trump’s plan to overturn the election. JD Vance claimed days before that Trump wouldn’t do that, but you can’t trust what he says, apparently. After all, Vance did say after he was caught fabricating stories about Haitian TPS migrants eating their neighbors’ cats that he’s all for “making up stories” to get the American people’s attention.”
“In the aftermath of American citizens’ homes being burned down by the LA wildfires, Trump said he would withhold disaster aid to California until they pass a Voter ID law, which won’t help to rebuild a single home. Doesn’t he claim to be for helping all Americans?”
“Trump’s admin is barring the Associated Press news organization from press conferences because they won’t commit to saying “Gulf of America.” What does that have to do with getting prices down?”
Hey man, I really appreciated your reply and honestly I felt it was more constructive than the original post. I get it, I understand the change in strategy and as I said in my original comment I didn’t necessarily disagree with the sentiment expressed I had more of an issue with how it was expressed… but I guess it did grab my attention and generate discussion which is useful. Admittedly it’s difficult for me to read these articles and not feel like there’s a subtle (or maybe obviously aggressive) shift in responsibility and blame from those that voted for him to those that didn’t and that’s a game I’m tired of playing. Besides that, I gotta ask.. so, when ARE we allowed to call it a coup? When ARE we allowed to invoke hitler/nazi similarities? Again, I get it… if ya wanna win ya gotta be willing to play the game but what do you do when it’s not a game anymore?
I appreciate your replies too. I felt similarly about how it was expressed. The Trump era has really driven home for me how different we human beings can be philosophically and psychologically.
Anyone out there with any reasonable ‘solutions’ isn’t being heard because of exactly what this post is talking about: because real workable solutions require everyone involved to acknowledge what’s really happening and not some hysterical hyperbolic version. Kinda the point of this post imo.
Reasonable solutions are ultimately subjective. At some point “rational” logic and discourse becomes denialism at worst and defense for the status quo at best. So I’ll ask again, where is the line? Who gets to decide what’s really happening? When does a coup become a coup? And I’m asking that genuinely, not as a snarky attack. In this postmodern “fake news” world where truth has become subjective… who decides what’s “really happening” as you say
The solution is to have Democratic candidates who sound as smart as Democrat doorknockers talk them up to be.
Biden was a career mediocrity and an intellectual lightweight. Harris was staggeringly dumb and uninformed. Since Trump was inaugurated the Democrats have been parading one geriatric after another to shout at the cameras, reminding the public that Joe Biden had a lot of company at the senior care facility known as Capitol Hill.
People have noticed this lack of intellect and lack of energy and the NYT articles and CBS spectacles can’t disguise that.
Basically, a party of geriatrics and HR ladies who get tongue baths from media harpies is difficult to like.
I know it’s hard to find a Bill Clinton or Obama, but there have got to be some Democrats in their 40s who can engage the public effectively and be taken seriously when discussing serious issues.
I appreciate your articles . A friend once described knee-jerk liberals as blue MAGA and that rings true about your angry commenters. I must admit I have taken to calling Trump Shitler, though.
Interesting take on Trump’s Gaza plan. I don’t see how it does not amount to ethnic cleansing? He has said he wants to remove the Palestinian people from the land, put them in refugee camps, and not let them back in. From Brittanica: “ethnic cleansing, the attempt to create ethnically homogeneous geographic areas through the deportation or forcible displacement of persons belonging to particular ethnic groups.” The only argument against Trump’s plan being ethnic cleansing is that he doesn’t necessarily want to create an ethnically homogenous area? He just wants the Palestinians out and for America to take over the land. What am I missing? How is this not a plan to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip?
Interesting perspective. You agree more with liberal democracy than conservative autocracy, just not how they say it?
Consider the spinning and amplification of your concerns by Trump and right wing media as opposed to what Obama and Biden have actually said and done. Can you objectively say the problem of how it's said comes from Democrats?
I generally believe in your own belief in “purple”. There is not much of a middle anymore. However, what’s missing from your analysis of Musk is the destruction of the families of fired fed workers. Some will lose their homes. They have a right to scream. I’ll continue to read your purple musings but will hope for a bit more of an empathetic understanding. That is a purple principle I support.
Nobody protests when private sector workers get laid off. FAANG fired tens of thousands of workers over the last two years. Nobody, I mean nobody, from the public sector called in favors with media and got all the attention swung into private sector workers, there were no protests, nothing. All of a sudden you reduce some recent hiring classes of Feds, you trim those in a probationary period, and people act like it’s a genocide. THIS is what he’s talking about.
The only one here calling it genocide is you dude. Your comment fully plays into Tim Hs… complete lack of empathy or my god I’ll even take sympathy at this point? Federal government is not private industry and it’s an ignorant viewpoint to hold those two industries in equivalence. There was something I once heard about “two wrongs….” But can remember what it is. Weak argument, always has been always will be.
Federal government is a service and it’s a major source of waste. If the employees there are supposedly so good, they will find new jobs. If, as most of us suspect, it’s a jobs program for midwits with too many degrees, they’ll learn the hard way.
A service yes, but to who? Cmon man, do you really mean to its workers????? Or to the general public that rely on services that cannot be capitalized on by the private sector? Like so many you’ve been brainwashed into believing you don’t directly or even indirectly benefit from the public services that the federal workforce provides and willfully ignore the waste that exists in federal government as contracts with private industry. You’re painting with broad strokes here thinking every career service employee was given “charity” when lots went into service to… provide services? “Midwits with too many degrees” you’re obviously someone that not only wants to criticize the system, which I can at least understand, but you go a step beyond and want to punish people with higher education and federal employees in general as if this is their fault and they deserve this… and that’s what I can not get in board with.
So that’s your argument then? You’ve figured out I’m a federal employee and so that discredits all the points I’ve made? Okay well then you’re right, as a midwit government parasite making peanuts to protect rural lands from natural disasters as a public service I’ll leave and find employment with a private firefighting contractor that was just awarded *checks notes* 40million dollars of government grants. You win man, good luck out there.
It’s not only probationary employees. It’s completely random. We will all be impacted: less safe food, less protection from disease (btw Newsweek is reporting another Wihan virus), far fewer IRS workers, an increase in farmers losing their farms since Trump cut funding for programs that bought crops from American farmers. FAANG workers typically have cs skills that will get them another job. What about the NIH scientists who were only a few years away from a cure for Alzheimer’s? Fired. This is why people with brains and hearts are upset.
Wow. I like your newsletter, always look forward to the read when it comes out a few times per week. I don't know what kind of online conversations you're subjected to outside of this substack, but I hope today's missive got that out of your system. Maybe just don't engage them? Let your writing speak for itself and don't rise to the bait if people are trolling you?
Thanks Steve, I appreciate that.
The piece earlier this week was one of the largest viewed ones ever, but it definitely received a LOT of blowback. My inbox was overflowing with negative trolls. Tomorrow's weekly recap is going to contain some examples of what I've been receiving this week.
Is it out of my system? We'll see. I will say that the nice messages and encouraging thoughts by readers like you have REALLY been appreciated this week. Thanks for reading and offering your thoughts.
PA
I think Trumps Gaza plan was deliberately insane to shake the Middle East out of 70+ years of the same old same old. Now I read that Egypt and Qater are working very hard on an alternative. And that seems like progress. Repeating the ‘pour money on the Palestinians’ process makes 0 sense to me.
THAT is how Trump works. He throws out the insane idea to get people to think out of the box and start a conversation. Once you know that, you take everything he says with a grain of salt and a little humor. Then you watch the chips fall.
And for you (too) few moderates out there:
There are three executive orders (EO’s) that Trump has signed that are worthy of support by everyone across the moderate political spectrum
The first of these EO’s recognizes that open borders are politically unacceptable and that the age of mass migration is over. Importing millions of people who will work for next to nothing just to be here destroys the wages of working class Americans and drives up housing costs when we can't house our own citizens. People cannot overpopulate their home country and just expect to move to greener pastures. There are no more green pastures. They need to voluntarily reduce their own country's population to an environmentally sustainable level, stay home and work there to improve their living conditions.
His second important EO addresses the insanity of gender identity which denies the reality of human sexuality and results in men invading women’s sports, restrooms, locker rooms and prisons. Women need and are entitled to privacy from men. Even more diabolical is the mutilation of innocent children (many who would grow up gay) in pursuit of the impossible because you can’t change your birth sex.
Finally his EO that corrects the craziness of DEI which discriminates against whites, Asians and men in attempting to cure past discrimination against others is absolutely the correct approach. Who could believe that creating a new privileged class and a new discriminated against class would provide a solution to the problem? Not to mention that it’s clearly unconstitutional.
It would well serve both Democrats and independents to get behind these changes even as they choose to vigorously oppose other aspects of his agenda.
People who are transgender are not insane. They are people whose gender identity does not match their sex assigned at birth. I am transgender, transitioned from male to female in 2007, and have run a successful business ever since. Which I wouldn’t have been able to do if I were suffering from “insanity,” to use your term. If you want to know why people compare Trump to Nazis, this demonizing of a small minority group is one of the reasons why. The Nazi play book involved demonizing Jews, sexual minorities, and Roma people, and blaming them for society’s problems. Trump is demonizing brown-skinned immigrants and transgender people, trying to convince people that it is those “others” who are causing society’s problems. If you don’t want to be compared to Nazis, stop acting like Nazis.
Joanie: Although I believe that a man who thinks he is a woman does suffer from a mental illness because his belief denies biological reality I don’t want to deny him any rights. I think he should have all of the same rights that I have as a man. Most people would agree that you and I being men are among the most privileged individuals in the world. We just can’t compete against women in most sports because that would be unfair and we can’t enter their restrooms, locker rooms and prisons because that would deny them the privacy they deserve. You are just like me.
I have a surgically constructed vagina, complete with labia and clitoris. I have breasts that developed as a result of years of estrogen therapy. I have no mental illness because I am quite aware that my assigned sex at birth was male and that I used to have a penis. I do not deny biological reality because I understand that there is a biological basis for gender identity. See below. I do not experience male privilege because the people I encounter in my daily life do not see me as a man. If you think I should use male locker rooms even though I have breasts and a vagina, I can conclude only that you either have an extreme hatred of transgender people and want to be cruel to us, or you are a pervert who wants to see my breasts and vagina. Finally, although I am past the age of athletic competition, for years my hormone levels have been essentially the same as any cis-gender woman, so I have no athletic advantage. The idea that I am just like you is the funniest idea of all the ideas you expressed.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RgMiyp5bwrg&pp=ygUrdmVyb25pY2EgZHJhbnR6IHRoZSBnZW5kZXIgYmluYXJ5IGFuZCBsZ2J0aQ%3D%3D
Joanie: You’ve convinced me. After all you’ve gone through I am willing to make an exception for you. I am more concerned about the “women” Ricky Gervais mentioned in his famous routine, the ones with cocks. Do you agree that my granddaughter should not have to shower with the ones with cocks?
I think that transgender woman who have penises should be discreet, and I think 99% of them are.
So banning the 1% who are not discreet and flaunt their dicks in women’s faces is no problem.
What Trump is doing appears pretty similar to what Orban did in Hungary. I wasn’t aware of so many saying it was a coup by Musk, just that it was a coup. The comparison with Hitler points out Hitler took over through legal means, not that Trump is going to set up concentration camps. The Democrats argued with fact and just got lied about and shouted down: they lost. So are they meant to just do the same thing? People are losing their livelihoods, Putin is about to be given whatever he wants, Canada has been brutally insulted, people have resigned out of a sense of duty to stand up for American values: yet you say don’t protest too much?
It looks like a total horror and completely abnormal. If Republicans don’t like embellishment (actually lies more than anything else) then how did they ever vote for Trump in the first place?
Dear Purple America…Fuck you!
My reaction as well. So full of idiocy and bullshit, basically a long whine based on a straw man fallacy plus guilt by association, oversimplification & false equivalency for starters. Pointless and more annoying than the phenomenon being whined about.
If people voted against their own self interest and elected an Actual Fucking Fascist because they conflate a few loud moths they find hyperbolic to "all liberals" they are more stupid than even the most exaggerated so-called "liberals" called them.
This is basically admitting that they are the "snowflakes."
So here’s my issue with these kinds of articles that have honestly become a dime a dozen… what’s your solution? I don’t necessarily disagree with the sentiment but I hear a lot of complaining (which is ironic because you’re complaining about others complaining) but I see no solutions except… sit down and shut up? I was born and raised and live in a a rust belt welfare county in Ohio, blue turned red over the past decade. Myself and others in our town have spent the past decade exhausting ourselves in conversations with our peers trying to rationalize with them and “meet them where they’re at” over their politics and to what end?? You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink and I’m fucking exhausted trying to get the horse to drink so yeah, maybe I’ll yell and scream and exaggerate because the horse won’t fucking listen. So again, tell me what I’m supposed to do? Not “liberals” not “the party” not some vague idea or internet trolls… me, a singular person.
I’m a liberal who’s more worried than the author is, but from a strategic standpoint, I’ve come to some of the same conclusions about what works and what doesn’t.
There’s a liberal commentator named Luke Beasley who made a point similar to one of the author’s: describing Trump’s actions as-is can be *more* shocking to people than speaking about him in alarming terms. If you call Trump a fascist or protest without a specific message, it becomes a debate about the definition of fascism and makes Trump’s actions seem less extreme to many people. That’s just how human nature works.
To demonstrate the lesson in practice, Beasley went on a pro-Trump podcast where the hosts kept trying to bring the discussion back to a debate about the label fascism. Beasley didn’t entertain it. Instead, Beasley said he would not discuss labels, and he focused on specific actions. He pinned the hosts down into revealing that they unequivocally support Trump’s actions on Jan 6. There are many moderates who would find that admission more disturbing than hearing a Trump fan predictably say that he doesn’t think Trump is a fascist.
“Trump is a fascist” is less effective than:
“After campaigning on it for months, Trump pardoned Jan 6 rioters who beat and tased cops and called for hanging Trump’s own former VP, Mike Pence, because Pence wouldn’t go along with Trump’s plan to overturn the election. JD Vance claimed days before that Trump wouldn’t do that, but you can’t trust what he says, apparently. After all, Vance did say after he was caught fabricating stories about Haitian TPS migrants eating their neighbors’ cats that he’s all for “making up stories” to get the American people’s attention.”
“In the aftermath of American citizens’ homes being burned down by the LA wildfires, Trump said he would withhold disaster aid to California until they pass a Voter ID law, which won’t help to rebuild a single home. Doesn’t he claim to be for helping all Americans?”
“Trump’s admin is barring the Associated Press news organization from press conferences because they won’t commit to saying “Gulf of America.” What does that have to do with getting prices down?”
Hey man, I really appreciated your reply and honestly I felt it was more constructive than the original post. I get it, I understand the change in strategy and as I said in my original comment I didn’t necessarily disagree with the sentiment expressed I had more of an issue with how it was expressed… but I guess it did grab my attention and generate discussion which is useful. Admittedly it’s difficult for me to read these articles and not feel like there’s a subtle (or maybe obviously aggressive) shift in responsibility and blame from those that voted for him to those that didn’t and that’s a game I’m tired of playing. Besides that, I gotta ask.. so, when ARE we allowed to call it a coup? When ARE we allowed to invoke hitler/nazi similarities? Again, I get it… if ya wanna win ya gotta be willing to play the game but what do you do when it’s not a game anymore?
I appreciate your replies too. I felt similarly about how it was expressed. The Trump era has really driven home for me how different we human beings can be philosophically and psychologically.
Anyone out there with any reasonable ‘solutions’ isn’t being heard because of exactly what this post is talking about: because real workable solutions require everyone involved to acknowledge what’s really happening and not some hysterical hyperbolic version. Kinda the point of this post imo.
Reasonable solutions are ultimately subjective. At some point “rational” logic and discourse becomes denialism at worst and defense for the status quo at best. So I’ll ask again, where is the line? Who gets to decide what’s really happening? When does a coup become a coup? And I’m asking that genuinely, not as a snarky attack. In this postmodern “fake news” world where truth has become subjective… who decides what’s “really happening” as you say
Tower of Babel
The solution is to have Democratic candidates who sound as smart as Democrat doorknockers talk them up to be.
Biden was a career mediocrity and an intellectual lightweight. Harris was staggeringly dumb and uninformed. Since Trump was inaugurated the Democrats have been parading one geriatric after another to shout at the cameras, reminding the public that Joe Biden had a lot of company at the senior care facility known as Capitol Hill.
People have noticed this lack of intellect and lack of energy and the NYT articles and CBS spectacles can’t disguise that.
Basically, a party of geriatrics and HR ladies who get tongue baths from media harpies is difficult to like.
I know it’s hard to find a Bill Clinton or Obama, but there have got to be some Democrats in their 40s who can engage the public effectively and be taken seriously when discussing serious issues.
Maybe more Fetterman and less Schumer.
I appreciate your articles . A friend once described knee-jerk liberals as blue MAGA and that rings true about your angry commenters. I must admit I have taken to calling Trump Shitler, though.
Interesting take on Trump’s Gaza plan. I don’t see how it does not amount to ethnic cleansing? He has said he wants to remove the Palestinian people from the land, put them in refugee camps, and not let them back in. From Brittanica: “ethnic cleansing, the attempt to create ethnically homogeneous geographic areas through the deportation or forcible displacement of persons belonging to particular ethnic groups.” The only argument against Trump’s plan being ethnic cleansing is that he doesn’t necessarily want to create an ethnically homogenous area? He just wants the Palestinians out and for America to take over the land. What am I missing? How is this not a plan to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip?
The lady doth protest too much
Interesting perspective. You agree more with liberal democracy than conservative autocracy, just not how they say it?
Consider the spinning and amplification of your concerns by Trump and right wing media as opposed to what Obama and Biden have actually said and done. Can you objectively say the problem of how it's said comes from Democrats?
What does “bludgeon them to death with ennui” mean? Is ennui the word you meant to use there?
I generally believe in your own belief in “purple”. There is not much of a middle anymore. However, what’s missing from your analysis of Musk is the destruction of the families of fired fed workers. Some will lose their homes. They have a right to scream. I’ll continue to read your purple musings but will hope for a bit more of an empathetic understanding. That is a purple principle I support.
Nobody protests when private sector workers get laid off. FAANG fired tens of thousands of workers over the last two years. Nobody, I mean nobody, from the public sector called in favors with media and got all the attention swung into private sector workers, there were no protests, nothing. All of a sudden you reduce some recent hiring classes of Feds, you trim those in a probationary period, and people act like it’s a genocide. THIS is what he’s talking about.
The only one here calling it genocide is you dude. Your comment fully plays into Tim Hs… complete lack of empathy or my god I’ll even take sympathy at this point? Federal government is not private industry and it’s an ignorant viewpoint to hold those two industries in equivalence. There was something I once heard about “two wrongs….” But can remember what it is. Weak argument, always has been always will be.
Typical of “what aboutism”
Federal government is a service and it’s a major source of waste. If the employees there are supposedly so good, they will find new jobs. If, as most of us suspect, it’s a jobs program for midwits with too many degrees, they’ll learn the hard way.
A service yes, but to who? Cmon man, do you really mean to its workers????? Or to the general public that rely on services that cannot be capitalized on by the private sector? Like so many you’ve been brainwashed into believing you don’t directly or even indirectly benefit from the public services that the federal workforce provides and willfully ignore the waste that exists in federal government as contracts with private industry. You’re painting with broad strokes here thinking every career service employee was given “charity” when lots went into service to… provide services? “Midwits with too many degrees” you’re obviously someone that not only wants to criticize the system, which I can at least understand, but you go a step beyond and want to punish people with higher education and federal employees in general as if this is their fault and they deserve this… and that’s what I can not get in board with.
How much do you make in your employment with the Federal Government?
So that’s your argument then? You’ve figured out I’m a federal employee and so that discredits all the points I’ve made? Okay well then you’re right, as a midwit government parasite making peanuts to protect rural lands from natural disasters as a public service I’ll leave and find employment with a private firefighting contractor that was just awarded *checks notes* 40million dollars of government grants. You win man, good luck out there.
It’s not only probationary employees. It’s completely random. We will all be impacted: less safe food, less protection from disease (btw Newsweek is reporting another Wihan virus), far fewer IRS workers, an increase in farmers losing their farms since Trump cut funding for programs that bought crops from American farmers. FAANG workers typically have cs skills that will get them another job. What about the NIH scientists who were only a few years away from a cure for Alzheimer’s? Fired. This is why people with brains and hearts are upset.
If someone is a 'few year's away' from a cure for Alz, go to Merck or Pfizer and sell it to them.
Oh man, stopping farm subsidies is so bad...
No wait, that's a good thing.