Kinda brilliant to disguise malware as a captcha, though. I won’t be surprised.
Oh this one cuts.
I spent a lot of my childhood in Arizona, and we did field trips in school to ‘ghost towns’ (e: the old west towns), Montezuma’s Castle (back when you could actually walk through it before vandals ruined it for everyone), and Pueblo ruins with indigenous living history reenactors.
I never even saw a modern gun in person until I was 16. It just wasn’t a thing. And yet we managed to survive.
His niece, Mary Trump, knows him well and is a licensed clinical psychologist. She’s spoken and written extensively on his mental disorders (normally a psychologist won’t do that publicly, but she’s said he’s such a danger to the nation, she feels she has no choice).
She’s well worth reading and listening to.
This is the inevitable outcome of the combination of the proliferation of guns in the US + the over-the-top fearmongering of certain high-profile personalities (specifically on the right). It was never going to end any other way.
Scare people into thinking everyone is out to get them and tell them they have to arm themselves, and you get tragedies like this: the guy that shot a teenaged girl through his front door when she was looking for help. This kid shot in the face looking for a place to take pictures.
People like Tucker Carlson and all similar scaremongers (too many to name) are partly to blame for this. I’m old enough to remember the red scare, where average people thought communists were hiding in every suburban neighbourhood, and also the satanic panic – this is all that but on steroids.
Everyone isn’t out to get you. They never were. But people are becoming millionaires by riling people into killing each other *for no reason *, and unlike back then, now everyone is armed and convinced to shoot first like every place is the fucking OK Corral.
e: and to add a layer of irony, yes, Wild West high-noon shootouts are the same kind of myth-sayings as boiling frogs – pretty much all old west towns required you to surrender your guns to the sheriff on entry. Things were actually safer back then.
Calling it now:
Since there’s not enough time left for him to recover from this brutal ego bruise, I predict he’ll only do rallies from now on, or appearances on far-right media, because he’ll retreat to his snowglobe for reassurance for a while. He’ll avoid addressing Kamala directly, but he’ll ramp up his own network and rile up his mob. His team will struggle to rein him in, and some appearances might be cancelled.
e: once he gets tired of being reassured, he’ll double-down on the unhinged scale
Many other comments here have a share in the reasons, but a huge reason is he’s looking at more state and federal charges, and more lawsuits (which haven’t going well for him).
He NEEDS to run and WIN so he can make all these cases go away for good.
With public figures, the bar to meet slander/libel includes that it must have been done with ‘actual malice’ – not anything different about which words were used.
Private figures must show that the defendant acted "negligently.“
Public figures must show that the defendant acted with "actual malice."
The bar for bringing such a case is even higher for public figures than private people, but it’s still not about the word ‘lie’ vs ‘untruth’.
If you’re aware of a single case where synonyms like that mattered, I’d love to know.
The law doesn’t make that distinction, though. ‘Untruth’, falsely claimed’, and ‘lied’ are all the same under the law. The only thing those laws care about is whether your words were true. If I call you a liar in a headline and I can prove you actually lied, you have no case.
Weasel words don’t protect them from lawsuits, it’s just another part of the degradation of journalism and the fact that whitewashing and softening their language gets them more clicks & eyeballs, because it’s less likely to offend people who disagree.
This reeks of IN MINECRAFT, though, and we all know how mentally unstable and trigger-happy some in his cult are. This will almost certainly lead to death threats against her, if not actual plots.
e: not saying it isn’t clickbait, it totally is
Uhh…
… …
He can’t live forever. That’s all I’ve got.
There’s a bridge near me with scuff marks on the underside like that. I’ve driven under and briefly wondered about the stories behind each one, and now your post makes me want to investigate further.