US 2024 Presidential Election

[Silvanus]

Hardly. She makes it quite clear that the Democrats have only themselves to blame for people turning away from them. And frankly it's a strange thing for you to insist otherwise.

I'm not really insisting anything of the sort; the main responsibility for this does indeed rest with the Democrats and their refusal to stop supplying Israel with lethal assistance.

This specific question isn't one of whom is to blame for what. It's what the impact is, which campaigns suffer most from it, and how this effects the election outcome. Stein is clear. Third party support costs the Dems, relative to the Republicans.

I'm not concerned about what preening liberals think.

Similarly, I'm not concerned what posturing tankies think.

But you predicated your question on an assumption about how other people think, so I responded. And considering what a tiny number of people actually vote for Stein, I have better insight into those people than you.

It is only inconsistent with what you think. So the foolish contradiction, as you call it, can only be yours.

The contradictions you've identified... exist only if we accept assumptions you made, and with which I don't agree. So, uhrm, transparently not.

 

[tippy2k2]

My dude. Tippy has been voteshaming since at least 2016. It's the person I learnt it from

Tippy also needs to understand that they are willing to throw people lives away just so they can pretend they has a clear conscious.

I don't care if he vote Dems or not. It won't cure the problem. It does not matter if you vote or not, you should not have a clear conscious. Pretending otherwise is just lying to yourself

Edit: I don't have a clear conscious because I half voted for Albanese who has done some thing to try and stop Israel but not nearly enough

Just because you've given up doesn't mean I have to

If you can't hold Democrats accountable for genocide, you're never gonna be willing to hold them accountable for anything. "The Other Side will do it too!!!" doesn't magically absolve Democrats of doing it.

 

[hanselthecaretaker2]

It's been found in multiple studies run by both Republican and Democrat leaning institutions that intentional voter fraud is exceedingly rare. Very few people are stupid enough to risk prison time to get a particular candidate elected. It's a complete nonissue.

The Myth of Voter Fraud

Extensive research reveals that fraud is very rare. Yet repeated, false allegations of fraud can make it harder for millions of eligible Americans to participate in elections.

www.brennancenter.org

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2103619118

Opinion | The deep ironies in the GOP's war on 'voter fraud'

How many Republicans will get caught committing voter fraud before the GOP stops pointing fingers?

www.msnbc.com

Nice thought, but I’d take it with a big grain of salt seeing as how being in this country illegally is also a crime that our current government turns a blind eye to because our broken
economic policy *depends* on it, and further supports with taxpayer money.

https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/117257/witnesses/HHRG-118-BU00-Wstate-KirchnerJ-20240508.pdf

It’s impractical and unsustainable for it to be the U.S.’s responsibility to take care of everyone who decides to come herewhen we can’t even take care of our own citizens. We’ve learned nothing from what’s happened in many European countries over the last decade, and there’s only so much the media can spin or sweep so much under the rug before they have to start admitting it’s a problem.


^
Sorry dude but you asked for this, so what’s your plan to fix it?



@seb2549 7 months ago (edited)
I am sorry but as a refugee myself i want to say that there should be no room for illegally crossing borders at all. In my case my parents applied from third country and waited for processing by Canada; USA and Australia. That included two interviews in the respective embassies and yes a health exam. It took almost a year. But that was the process and we were happy to do our small little part by following the process. Illegitimate/illegal border crossings bump legitimate asylum seekers who play by the rules down the processing que just because some people feel they are not going to play by the rules. Coming to Canada or any other country you may seek asylum in is a privilege not a right some people seem to think it is. Play by the rules, wait your turn, and yes that means being accepted or rejected based on the assessment of your specific case. Accepting those that keep violating rules and look for shortcuts literally teaches everyone else bad habits, because why would you play by the rules if that results in you being ignored and overlooked while illegal migrants get rewarded? On top of it. this fuels the human trafficking business. It makes no sense whatsoever on any humanitarian grounds to keep doing the same thing and expect different result. That is a definition of insanity .



I’m well aware the U.S.’s own history makes it somewhat hypocritical, seeing as we originally came here to escape religious persecution, then proceeded to steel native land, subjugating them to horrible conditions, etc. but ask people today how much they’d generally be willing to accept somehow reverting society back to another’s terms and we’d have our answer as to why the ball keeps rolling along collecting shit.

Whatever “advanced” intelligence human beings possess sure has created its fair share of other problems.

 

[tippy2k2]

Scouts honor guys, THIS time it is actually the most important election of our lifetime! We have to defeat The Republicans no matter what compromise you have to make to justify voting for Democrats cause this time it is too important to risk. Don't you worry though, next time I'm sure we'll be able to fight for change and actually vote our values!

 

[tippy2k2]

 

[XsjadoBlayde]

Bannon not the most comforting human to endure

Molly Redden, reporter covering national politics at ProPublica, and Andy Kroll, reporter covering voting, elections, & democracy at ProPublica, discuss their piece of reporting entitled “Put Them in Trauma”: Inside a Key MAGA Leader’s Plans for a New Trump Agenda.

Check out Molly & Andy's piece here: https://www.propublica.org/article/vi...

Follow Molly on Twitter here: https://x.com/mtredden
Follow Andy on Twitter here: https://x.com/AndyKroll

https://www.house.gov/representatives...
https://www.senate.gov/senators/senat...

“Put Them in Trauma”: Inside a Key MAGA Leader’s Plans for a New Trump Agenda

Private videos reveal Trump adviser Russ Vought’s “shadow” plans for using the military on protesters, defunding the EPA and villainizing civil servants.

www.propublica.org

“Put Them in Trauma”: Inside a Key MAGA Leader’s Plans for a New Trump Agenda

by Molly Redden and Andy Kroll, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey, DocumentedOct. 28, 5 a.m. EDT


Reporting Highlights

• “In Trauma”: A key Trump adviser says a Trump administration will seek to make civil servants miserable in their jobs.
• Military: In private speeches, he laid out plans to use armed forces to quell any domestic “riots.”
• 1776 and 1860: He likened the country’s moment to those fractious periods in American history.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

A key ally to former President Donald Trump detailed plans to deploy the military in response to domestic unrest, defund the Environmental Protection Agency and put career civil servants “in trauma” in a series of previously unreported speeches that provide a sweeping vision for a second Trump term.

In private speeches delivered in 2023 and 2024, Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, described his work crafting legal justifications so that military leaders or government lawyers would not stop Trump’s executive actions.

He said the plans are a response to a “Marxist takeover” of the country; likened the moment to 1776 and 1860, when the country was at war or on the brink of it; and said the timing of Trump’s candidacy was a “gift of God.”

“Their Entire Apparatus Is Exposed to Our Strategy”
Credit:Obtained by ProPublica and Documented

ProPublica and Documented obtained videos of the two speeches Vought delivered during events for the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank led by Vought. The think tank’s employees or fellows include Jeffrey Clark, the former senior Justice Department lawyer who aided Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election result; Ken Cuccinelli, a former acting deputy secretary in the Department of Homeland Security under Trump; and Mark Paoletta, a former senior budget official in the Trump administration. Other Trump allies such as former White House adviser Steve Bannon and U.S. Reps. Chip Roy and Scott Perry either spoke at the conferences or appeared on promotional materials for the events.

Vought does not hide his agenda or shy away from using extreme rhetoric in public. But the apocalyptic tone and hard-line policy prescriptions in the two private speeches go further than his earlier pronouncements. As OMB director, Vought sought to use Trump’s 2020 “Schedule F” executive order to strip away job protections for nonpartisan government workers. But he has never spoken in such pointed terms about demoralizing federal workers to the point that they don’t want to do their jobs. He has spoken in broad terms about undercutting independent agencies but never spelled out sweeping plans to defund the EPA and other federal agencies.


Vought’s plans track closely with Trump’s campaign rhetoric about using the military against domestic protesters or what Trump has called the “enemy within.” Trump’s desire to use the military on U.S. soil recently prompted his longest-serving chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, to speak out, saying Trump “certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”

Other policies mentioned by Vought dovetail with Trump’s plans, such as embracing a wartime footing on the southern border and rolling back transgender rights. Agenda 47, the campaign’s policy blueprint, calls for revoking President Joe Biden’s order expanding gender-affirming care for transgender people; Vought uses even more extreme language, decrying the “transgender sewage that’s being pumped into our schools and institutions” and referring to gender-affirming care as “chemical castration.”

Since leaving government, Vought has reportedly remained a close ally of the former president. Speaking in July to undercover journalists posing as relatives of a potential donor, Vought said Trump had “blessed” the Center for Renewing America and was “very supportive of what we do,” CNN reported.

Vought did not respond to requests for comment.

"Since the Fall of 2023, President Trump’s campaign made it clear that only President Trump and the campaign, and NOT any other organization or former staff, represent policies for the second term,” Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said in a statement. She did not directly address Vought’s statements.

Karoline Leavitt, his campaign’s national press secretary, added there have been no discussions on who would serve in a second Trump administration.

In addition to running his think tank, Vought was the policy director of the Republican National Committee’s official platform committee ahead of the nominating convention. He’s also an architect of Project 2025, the controversial coalition effort mapping out how a second Trump administration can quickly eliminate obstacles to rolling out a hard-right policy agenda.

As ProPublica and Documented reported, Project 2025 has launched a massive program to recruit, vet and train thousands of people to “be ready on day one” to serve in a future conservative administration. (Trump has repeatedly criticized Project 2025, and his top aides have said the effort has no connection to the official campaign despite the dozens of former Trump aides and advisers who contributed to Project 2025.)

Vought is widely expected to take a high-level government role if Trump wins a second term. His name has even been mentioned as a potential White House chief of staff. The videos obtained by ProPublica and Documented offer an unfiltered look at Vought’s worldview, his plans for a Trump administration and his fusing of MAGA ideology and Christian nationalism.


A Shadow Government in Waiting

In his 2024 speech, Vought said he was spending the majority of his time helping lead Project 2025 and drafting an agenda for a future Trump presidency. “We have detailed agency plans,” he said. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”

Vought laid out how his think tank is crafting the legal rationale for invoking the Insurrection Act, a law that gives the president broad power to use the military for domestic law enforcement. The Washington Post previously reported the issue was at the top of the Center for Renewing America’s priorities.

“We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say, ‘That’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do,’” he said. Vought held up the summer 2020 unrest following George Floyd’s murder as an example of when Trump ought to have had the ability to deploy the armed forces but was stymied.

Vought’s preparations for a future Trump administration involve building a “shadow” Office of Legal Counsel, he told the gathered supporters in May 2023. That office, part of the Justice Department, advises the president on the scope of their powers. Vought made clear he wants the office to help Trump steamroll the kind of internal opposition he faced in his first term.

“We’re Trying to Build a Shadow Office of Legal Counsel”
Credit:Obtained by ProPublica and Documented

Historically, the OLC has operated with a degree of independence. “If, all of a sudden, the office is full of a bunch of loyalists whose only job is to rubber-stamp the White House’s latest policy directive, whose only goal is to justify the ends by whatever means, that would be quite dangerous,” said an attorney who worked in the office under a previous Republican administration and requested anonymity to speak freely.

Another priority, according to Vought, was to “defund” certain independent federal agencies and demonize career civil servants, which include scientists and subject matter experts. Project 2025’s plan to revive Schedule F, an attempt to make it easier to fire a large swath of government workers who currently have civil service protections, aligns with Vought’s vision.

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

“We want to put them in trauma.”


“We Want the Bureaucrats to Be Traumatically Affected”
Credit:Obtained by ProPublica and Documented

Vought also revealed the extent of the Center for Renewing America’s role in whipping up right-wing panic ahead of the 2022 midterms over an increase in asylum-seekers crossing at the U.S.-Mexico border.


In February 2022, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich released a legal opinion claiming the state was under “invasion” by violent cartels and could invoke war powers to deploy National Guard troops to its southern border. The legally dubious “invasion” theory became a potent Republican talking point.

Vought said in the 2023 speech that he and Cuccinelli, the former top Homeland Security official for Trump, personally lobbied Brnovich on the effort. “We said, ‘Look, you can write your own opinion, but here’s a draft opinion of what this should look like,’” Vought said.

The nonpartisan watchdog group American Oversight later obtained an email in which Vought pitched the “invasion” framework to Brnovich.

Brnovich wrote in an email to ProPublica that he recalled multiple discussions with Cuccinelli about border security. But he added that “the invasion opinion was the result of a formal request from a member of the Arizona legislature. And I can assure you it was drafted and written by hard working attorneys (including myself) in our office.”

In the event Trump loses, Vought called for Republican leaders of states such as Florida and Texas to “create red-state sanctuaries” by “kicking out all the feds as much as they possibly can.”


“Nothing Short of a Quiet Revolution”

The two speeches delivered by Vought, taken together, offer an unvarnished look at the animating ideology and political worldview of a key figure in the MAGA movement.

Over the last century, Vought said, the U.S. has “experienced nothing short of a quiet revolution” and abandoned what he saw as the true meaning and force of the Constitution. The country today, he argued, was a “post-constitutional regime,” one that no longer adhered to the separation of powers among the three branches of government as laid out by the framers.

He lamented that the conservative right and the nation writ large had become “too secular” and “too globalist.” He urged his allies to join his mission to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.”

And in one of his most dramatic flourishes, he likened the 2024 election to moments in America’s history when the country was facing all-out war.

“We are here in the year of 2024, a year that very well [could] — and I believe it will — rival 1776 and 1860 for the complexity and the uncertainty of the forces arrayed against us,” Vought told his audience, referring to years when the colonies declared independence from Britain and the first state seceded over President Abraham Lincoln’s election. “God put us here for such a time as this.”

Vought said that independent agencies and unelected bureaucrats and experts wield far too much power while the traditional legislative process is a sham. He extended that critique to agencies like the Department of Justice and the Federal Reserve, whose independence from the White House had long been protected by both political parties.

“The left in the U.S. doesn’t want an energetic president with the power to motivate the executive branch to the will of the American people consistent with the laws of the country,” he said in the 2024 speech. “They don’t want a vibrant Congress where great questions are debated and decided in front of the American people. They don’t want empowered members. They want discouraged and bored backbenchers.”



He added, “The all-empowered career expert like Tony Fauci is their model, wielding power behind the curtains.” Fauci was one of the top public health experts under Trump at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and a key figure in coordinating the national response.

What sets Vought apart from most of his fellow conservative activists is that he accuses powerful organizations on the right of being complicit in the current system of government, singling out the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, the conservative and libertarian legal network co-chaired by activist Leonard Leo. The society is widely seen as an instrumental force in cultivating young conservative lawyers and building a bench of future judges whose embrace of legal theories like originalism and textualism have led to decisions overturning abortion rights, environmental protections and social welfare policies.

Yet in his 2024 speech, Vought accused the Federalist Society and “originalist judges” of being a part of the problem, perpetuating the “post-constitutional structure” that Vought lamented by not ruling more aggressively to weaken or dismantle independent regulatory agencies that Vought and his allies view as illegitimate or unconstitutional.

It was “like being in a contract quietly revoked two decades ago, in which one party didn’t tell the other,” he said. “At some point, reality needs to set in. Instead, we have the vaunted so-called Federalist Society and originalist judges acting as a Praetorian Guard for this post-constitutional structure.”

Echoing Trump’s rhetoric, Vought implicitly endorsed the false claim of a stolen 2020 election and likened the media’s debunkings of that claim to Chinese Communist propaganda.

“In the aftermath of the election, we had all these people going around saying, ‘Well, I don’t see any evidence of voter fraud. The media’s not giving enough [of] a compelling case,’” he said. “Well, that compelling case has emerged. But does a Christian in China ask and come away saying, ‘You know, there’s no persecution, because I haven’t read about it in the state regime press?’ No, they don’t.”

Vought referred to the people detained for alleged crimes committed on Jan. 6, 2021, as “political prisoners” and defended the lawyers Jeffrey Clark and John Eastman, who have both faced criminal charges for their role in Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Federal law enforcement agencies, he added, “are keeping political opponents in jail, and I think we need to be honest about that.”

The left, Vought continued, has the ultimate goal of ending representative democracy altogether. “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country,” he said, “in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus, and they have aimed it at us. And they are going to continue to aim it until they no longer have to win elections.”

When Democrats called Trump an “existential threat to democracy,” they were not merely calling for his defeat at the ballot box, he said, but were using “coded language the national security state uses overseas when they are overthrowing other governments” to discourage the military from putting down anti-Trump protests should he win.

“They’re making Trump out to be a would-be dictator or an authoritarian,” he said. “So they’re actively working now to ensure, on a number of levels, that the military will perceive this as dictatorial and therefore not respond to any orders to quell any violence.”

Trump, Vought insisted, has the credibility and the track record to defeat the “Marxist” left and bring about the changes that Vought and his MAGA allies seek. In his view, the Democratic Party’s agenda and its “quiet revolution” could be stopped only by a “radical constitutionalist,” someone in the mold of Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. For Vought, no one was in a better position to fill that role than Trump.

“We have in Donald Trump a man who is so uniquely positioned to serve this role, a man whose own interests perfectly align with the interests of the country,” Vought said. “He has seen what it has done to him, and he has seen what they are trying to do to the country.

“That,” he added, “is nothing more than a gift of God.”

 

[tippy2k2]

and just for fun, one last sign tap before the election when people chastise third party voters cause I might as well stir the pot one more time



Gotta defeat those evil Republicans at all cost but also make sure they get a seat at the table because it's very important to have Republicans in your tent

 

[Schadrach]

And how are they identifying non-citizens?

Supposedly much (but not all) of the list comes from people who marked that they are not a citizen on their DMV paperwork but were incorrectly registered to vote anyways.

Except how will people know they've been impacted? Are they going to be told that they were removed from the voter rolls and need to re-register to vote?

At least in my state when you go to vote they check you against the voter roll. Since VA offers same day registration, if you found out they removed you from the rolls at the polls, you could register then and there and proceed to vote. Why I described it as an "inconvenience".