remember that time he harassed the family of a Gold Star winner who was killed in Iraq?

The first miserable term

The closest thing to it is how he always - ALWAYS - makes his most-loyal followers and supporters look like total dipshits.

I'm always saying this! He is vice personified, and his status as the hero/messiah of the modern conservative movement represents the culmination of a cultural movement away from valuing virtue

Even Putin wants Russians educated and vaccinated.

And yet Christie couldn’t be bothered to say anything against Trump in the run up to the ‘24 election despite Trump nearly killing him and having already run a primary campaign that almost talked about this dangerous Trump is.

He was the first candidate to endorse him! He did debate prep for him in 2020 where Trump didn’t tell him he had Covid and Christie nearly died!

Replace “Donald Trump” with “the American electorate” and you’re almost there. He’s just a symptom.

It's doesn't really seem like a virtue when it's a skill mobsters have in abundance. Which makes me think he used to be better at this in the 90s.

And his supporters know this, hence why they accuse others of "virtue signaling" They think virtue can't possibly exist in a genuine way

This is what I’m always saying. All of Trumps supporters (and American conservatives in general) have always seen virtue as an act. They all believe that each of us is just as craven as they are, just better at masking it.

I mean, he's Prince Joffrey, just in a hideous old man suit.

trump doesn’t believe even - despite the title of his book - in making self interested deals. a deal is only a tactical pretext to screwing you over

Rape literally colors his entire world. A deal is a deal if they non consensually ‘agree’ to it its all zero sum

His trade "deals" are really one-way extortion operations. Trade deals used to mean both sides believe they benefit. Trump destroyed that.

his rottenness is not just congenital, it is primal

He is a cartoon used car salesman who believes the only fair deal is one that fucks his clients over.

macintyre has entered the chat

Just like his supporters and their vile party. 🤷🏼‍♀️

I think it says a lot about conservatism where they chose a man with literally zero virtue whatsoever as their avatar and lord.

They can fill him (project on him) with whatever they need. I saw a document about General Franco and he was literally the dullest person in the room. And yet. He was in charge for 4 decades

Especially after decades of calling themselves the moral majority.

The real shit here is that there is nothing that's happened in the past 8 months that would be considered "conservative". Fascist? Reactionary? Sure. But what EXACTLY have they conserved? Fuck all. They've wrecking balled America into being unrecognisable.

the whole "conservative" label is misleading. The first "conservatives" were liberals who didnt like french revolutionaries killing aristocrats and split. So what conservatism "conserves" is aristocracy, which is to say authoritarianism. It's always been a reaction against democracy and liberty.

I disagree. In THAT instance it was conserving the aristocracy. Because that was the status quo. It is typically "top down" government, but there are also fiscal and social dimensions to conservatism. At any rate, if conservatives are anti-revolutionary, I can't see them supporting [vague gesture].

*shrug* That's the history of the movement, and the declared goal of Thiel and his cronies(including the VP). And of course Republicans are treating Trump as a king. Republicans werent always "conservatives" of course, but Id argue theyve thorough Europeanized at this point.

I don't fully get your last few words, but you've raised some interesting points. I just think allowing those who would orchestrate a reactionary coup to call themselves "conservative" was a mistake. 1/2

But I stand by this: Fascists aren't conservatives. They're Fascists. Rolling back 3 decades of Roe v Wade isn't preserving the status quo. Erasing POC war heroes from websites and museums isn't either. Nor is trashing the constitution. 2/2

youre right about Roe and the vandalism of our history. What Im suggesting is that "preserving the status quo" is not what conservatism is about, or ever was. I know that's how conservatism has presented itself within democracies, but that's bc it knew ppl wouldnt knowingly vote to end democracy.

Right. So you're saying "conservatives" court new conservatives by pretending to appeal to the values those uninitiated hold. Law and order. Small government. Individual rights. Preserving the status quo. But if new conservatives didn't believe in those things, they wouldn't need to pretend. 1/

It's resistant to new voices because they aren't a feature of the status quo, as opposed to actively and massively regressing freedoms and rights that have been norms for decades. Or trashing institutional norms like bipartisanship. So this isn't conservative government. Not by a long shot.

Couldn’t agree more! Reagan must be spinning in his grave.

Reagan was one of the people who led to this present moment.

The conservative itch to defend Reagan, when the man was a liar, kinda groomer, intellectually lazy, dumb, and obviously amoral (neshoba county fair!?!?) is the exact reason they got here. They are unwilling to hold their own to account and now we have Trump.

Not just conservatives I see way too many liberals saying this kind of stuff. Just no knowledge of just how evil the Republican party and its leaders have been for decades.

There have been two (2) good Republican presidents and one of them was roasted alive historically because of what he tried to do.

One of them got shot in the back of the head at a theatre.

Ike warned of military industrial complex

And did nothing but exacerbate it. Eisenhower was a bad president who is remembered fondly because he had a competent Congress.

Yuuuup. bsky.app/profile/dasd...

Reagan was denounced as a communist lackey by the John Birch Society.

The John Birch Society was so rabidly libertarian that they'd consider anyone who wants a state to existing in any recognizable form to be a communist.

"A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions tell me that's true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not." Straight up liar.

Probably the best example of how ignorant the Neocons were to what they were building. Reagan, like Nixon, baldly lied to the American public over and over again. So I don't have any sympathy for men like Nichols or Frum when it comes to how they feel.

Frum and Nichols were key architects of all of this current disaster.

Apparently, Nixon would be considered liberal today.

Real shit is that it was all always bullshit. A coalition of cults that wed racism, misogyny, and slavery to religion so they could parade their bigotry around as supremacy with a cheap sticker reading “morals” on it.

Right. But that's not conservative. That's regressive. They conned the whole USA into confusing the two. Conservative literally means conserving the status quo (as opposed to progressive or reactionary, which both represent movement left and right, respectively).

true, but its a testament to how craven and hideous the GOP is now that theyd probably earn the rebuke of their sto. ronnie

And the gop whores

Yes, I'm sure an avowed white supremacist and non-churchgoing faux-Christian who slashed taxes for the rich, screwed over working people every chance he got, ignored a pandemic, stoked racist fears over crime, and only got elected because he was a celebrity would be horrified by Donald Trump.

Reagan was one of them, make no mistake

The (corporate) “conservative” project has been going on since 1920 and has reached its peak with the apotheosis of The CEO (as you say, their avatar and lord).

And that he hasn't screwed them over. I don't know if they have something on him, or they've been so obsequious that he has no desire to screw them over. It's so, so strange. I'd love to read a history of this period written 50 years from now, after people are dead and the documents come out.

Part of the reason we had no effective response was the flight from moral judgement by 20th century historians - before them history was full of vicious tyrants and crowned imbeciles unsparingly depicted as such and so it was not hard to recognise one and to know what had to be done to defeat them.

LITERALLY *ANY* VIRTUE

Worshipping Mammon isn't a virtue? Hmm idk seems like you might need to be investigated for anti-American thought

Remember when the debate moderator asked Hillary to say something nice about Trump? I still don’t know what I would have said

“Uh, he loves his daughter more than a father should.”

Off-point, but it's amazing that Donald f'ing Trump will criticize someone else's hair LOL.