ryan cooper: I suppose no surprise in a fascist movement, but wild that *this guy* is their heroic ubermensch, and the crisis worthy of destroying 250 years of democracy is ... uh, some historically meager immigration and trans people drinking a beer?

this is 100 percent right. the SCOTUS decision here is part of Project 2025, it is preemptively helping Trump consolidate his dictatorship crookedtimber.org/2024/07/02/s...

Supreme Court Rules Hitler Immune from Prosecution for Burning Down Reichstag, Seizing Absolute Powercrookedtimber.org If the current Supreme Court had held comparable office in Weimar Germany, that is, its opinion in Trump v. United States would have rendered the judgment in this post’s headline. Never mind …

I sort of wrote about this last week, but SCOTUS does seem to see Trump as a schmittian sovereign

I suppose no surprise in a fascist movement, but wild that *this guy* is their heroic ubermensch, and the crisis worthy of destroying 250 years of democracy is ... uh, some historically meager immigration and trans people drinking a beer?

it's the 2020 protests. i think they fundamentally broke conservatives.

And the Obama administration

Yeah, I have to agree, it all goes back to Obama. That they elected (and nearly worship) the main Birther is not a coincidence. Electing a black man broke them.

Obama is a black man who advanced through American political and educational institutions through talent and hard work, all the way to the top, and the conservative project is to make sure that never happens again.

Well said

Everything they _claim_ to want from their supposed meritocracy

And it won’t. They won.

Agreed 👍 sadly

Obama's ascent definitely turned the screw, but I'm far from the first person to point out that it goes back further. Bush v Gore feels more like the beginning of the judicial end for me. Rule breaking, conservative rulings have gotten more common in the last year or so, but not more serious.

Maybe so. I feel like a lot of permission and cover was given to awful people (and states) to act awfully when Roberts gutted the Voting Rights Act by (iirc) cynically pointing to Obama’s election as proof that it was no longer necessary.

Some random woman I walked by the other day was ranting in public to her friend about how "they" have ruined our country. She was absolutely convinced that Obama is secretly running the federal government and is responsible for it.

Trump’s reaction to the Obama admin broke Conservatives. They were already teetering, but birtherism nonsense really played into GOP racism.

The 2020 protests coming after two months of not being able to go to Applebee's or the barber. Truly the weakest possible people

It's not even an exaggeration to say that a lot of these people view a minor and/or temporary inconvenience as being equal to the Holocaust because some of them are insane enough to make that argument out loud. Where people can hear them.

Sometimes they’re even a WA state legislature rep and state GOP chair like Jim Walsh LD19 here.

The pandemic did a lot to reveal people's weak sense of community and lack of individual purpose or self-concept. As soon as they couldn't go shopping or eat out and had to reflect on their actual role in society, they completely lost their minds.

It’s always seemed to me that the titanic hit the iceberg when Obama was elected, but it was the threat of a *woman* president that was the snap in half and sink moment. Everything after that was confirming priors that women and POC needed to be resubjugated.

You are right, I agree with this wholeheartedly. 💔

The SCOTUS judges aren't young–there are some longstanding issues at play here too (they're still angered by the near impeachments of Nixon & Reagan):

We talk about how old Dem officials are but the Republican judges are all old enough to remember this (esp. Reagan). This is a longstanding humiliation, not something new or specific to Trump. They believe checks on GOP presidents are inherently wrong, and they finally got the chance to codify that.

I do think this is true, with an assist from #metoo. And it dragged in a whole lot of centrists, who when push came to shove, decided reactionary terror was better than DEI training.

Speaking of centrists, 9% of Democrats nationwide voted for Trump instead of Hillary n 2016. Those cretins have a lot to answer for.

A lot of enabling from the center due to loathing of the left got us to this point.

conservatives were really mad when protesters burned that precinct in Minneapolis and the police didn't gun them all down in the street

At the time, more Americans approved of the burning of that precinct than approved of either Trump or Biden.

There’s an excellent case to be made that that was the tipping point. Cotton’s “give them no quarter” op-ed still makes me shudder

Meanwhile, my up close and personal memory of the 2020 protests is of the couple in my Quaker meeting who started a Black Lives Matter protest in their retirement home, and of others from my Quaker meeting joining them on the street outside the retirement home. MAGA, OTOH, imagined non-stop violence

Quakers are good.

The combination of seeing multiracial youth on the streets fighting cops...and public health officials suggesting you might not want to go to Outback Steakhouse for a few weeks

American Conservatism has always been fundamentally mind-breaking IMHO. It's basically a movement of people who want to be the sole inheritors of the Founding Fathers' legacy whilst also seeing said Founders as terrorists who went against the will of God with this whole "Democracy" tosh.

romney losing broke them imo

I saw some people I knew post the most unhinged things about Obama being reelected, so this tracks

Even Hillary used coded racist language when she ran against Obama.

I'm curious why you frame it that way. I mean, it was the same event, but from my perspective it seems like Romney losing wasn't as much the issue as the fact a Black man with an unfamiliar name, and who ran as a progressive, won.

obama’s name wasn’t unfamiliar in 2012 since he was the president. but romney was their special little boy and the fact that they still rant - 12 years later - about how mean obama was to him tells you a lot

Oh, yeah, "unfamiliar" was probably too much of a euphemism on my part. I meant that he has a name that reads as 'foreign' or 'other' for a huge segment of the US population, including those who see that as a good thing as well as those who see it as bad.

I think when Obama was first elected centrist republicans were not as furious about it as they would be slightly after. In part because many of them thought that electing a black man would mean the end of racism (more specifically, the end of anyone ever talking about it).

They expected he’d be inaugurated and then black people would not care ever again. Problem solved. But then they saw the inauguration and how black people were inspired and proud and so was the world (the Nobel Peace Prize) and then they got angry and the Birther stuff started getting loud.

The 2012 election was a weird pivot point and provided the first glimpses of the "Obama-Trump voter". I mean, Indiana went for Obama by two points in '08 but ever since the only counties that have voted Dem have been Indy, Gary, and the three college counties.

It was 2012 so it was a thousand years ago but it was the first time GOP media narratives began to diverge from reality. They "unskewed the polls" months before election, and people hoped at the time the reality correction would "break the fever." It didn't, it got worse.

"...the first time GOP media narratives began to diverge from reality." Oh, bless your heart.

Obama made fun of Trump and I don’t know if you remember this. He had the audacity to be black while doing it. Now,I’m not saying the entire GOP is racist…I’m writing it.

I think “the border crisis” and a bleak future for conservatives demographically speaking, loomed large in this decision. It’s primarily about maintaining white supremacy.

I honestly don't think they could tolerate a multi-generational, multi-racial coalition working together. They can't have us all *agreeing* with one another, bc that's a more serious challenge to their power.

I think it's a lot about what they see on Netflix and the like, and the fact that actual right wing programming is not at all entertaining. Maga's empty. They can't entertain. They can only enflame so as to occupy time. Like Braindead Megaphone. They have no actual joy to share nor artistic chops.

I remember telling my extremely "conservative" dad about the letters we were getting at work from our residents about that, and the reaction he had seemed so over-the-top at the time, he surprised me with the vitriol. The idea someone else would care about black folks made him angry.

They still talk about Minneapolis like it burned to the ground

Seattle too

The "Dems are an extreme threat" perspective has so much rhetorical overkill behind it, but the immunity rulings are predicated on the premise that the party they so dislike is too mature to abuse it. Democratic/liberal moderation is built into the ruling.

Just got a “survey” from my rep about some nonsense he’s proposing about preventing “dangerous road obstructions” (protests in streets)…so, yes, they’re still really freaked out about that. (And they still (blindly) don’t understand who and what, in all that, did the most harm.)

Obama being elected was way bigger than the 2020 protests in terms of breaking their brains. Conservatives were carrying around pocket constitutions and throwing rallies for 8 straight years

Post