I was speaking my mind, old boy tried to come at me like I was making so big change or mission statement when I clearly wasn’t.

and i was speaking my mind, whats your point

The way republicans are too p**** to address any trump tweets is both hilarious and infuriating

this isnt really just an american thing, its not like the US is the sole place with open restaurants, hotels, etc. rn, in fact most of the country is still more or equally closed compared to most of europe

The fact that the Trump Administration tried to reverse DACA when I got family who came to the US as small children makes me so mad. You wanna deport good people who been in the USA since they were 3 years old for what??

They’re taking white jobs from white ppl

im gonna be real with you guys, i have a feeling whoever comes from the GOP next in 2024 is going to make trump look like AOC lol

i lowkey feel like cotton is going to run and likely be the nominee, he has insane popularity in the GOP and a ton of PR. don't know who would run besides like, him and probably Cruz again

Trump really a pro wrestler

On the assumption that Trump loses 2020 I would think the exact opposite will occur. The GOP will wanna distance itself and skew more left.

The GOP isn’t going to move left in the traditional sense. You have two splits within the GOP; libertarians and paleoconservatives (and corporate-owned neocons separately too, but we’ll disregard that for now). The more libertarian streak runs more akin to people like Gaetz; level of social conservative but okay with stuff like gay marriage, and wanting to break up monopolies over individual freedoms, also stalling surveillance bills for similar reasons. The more paleoconservative part of the GOP is increasingly popular though - this being people like Hawley & Cotton; think people who take Tucker Carlson‘s monologues to the heart. To a degree they are more left than the historical GOP - they aren’t married to liberal capitalism as an ideology and aren’t trying to maintain it arbitrarily. However, this growing wing of the GOP is far more ideologically centered. To them it’s not just about roe v wade or about gay marriage. It’s about forcibly winning what they see as a global culture war, and about restoring “purpose” to the GOP, which they believe has become a party without meaning because of liberalization.

That's fair

I guess I meant more from the perspective of what would be their best chance of gaining back public support and in turn power.

But I'm far less informed on the internal machinations of the GOP than you, and ultimately of course it will come down to that.

yeah, I def get what you mean, no worries. there's definitely a large chunk of GOP who want more traditionally left economics (i.e. increased social safety nets - look how popular Yang's UBI was with Republicans; probably moreso than Democrats). However, a larger part of the GOP is more hyper-focused on "culture" now; especially among right-wing pundits. They basically just view the last 60 years as one loss after another culturally for social conservatives and more or less view it as an actual war. Cotton's op-ed about gunning down protestors may have shocked NYT readers, but it's legitimately what a large percentage of the GOP voterbase not only wanted, but were legitimately angry at trump for not doing

Yeah for sure, you're right, definitely potential to swing either way.

It's definitely going to be interesting to see. I do think a lot of the current GOP's older base cares a lot more about infringements onto their 'culture' (LGBTQ people, immigrants and minorities) than they do about economic issues, and are definitely more open to traditionally left-wing economic policies.

However, the large donors/corporate interests and a lot of the people who drive what actually gets done from the Republican Party at a national level care a lot more about economic deregulation and tax cuts than they do about any social issue, if they care about those at all. Abortion, gun rights, immigration are ultimately just tools to those people to get their economic goals.

I can definitely see a huge split in the GOP in the next few years if Trump loses. You'll have the traditional neocons and paleoconservatives vs a lot of the Tea Partiers and Trumpists. You can already see Trump starting to shy away from Fox News and start citing more extreme media outlets like OAN

Yeah, definitely. People forget back in the early 1900s paleoconservatives had closer alliances (in America) with the hard-left than they did with liberals. Given current contexts, I partially wonder if that type of rhetoric is going to make a comeback.

imo the future of the GOP - as far as younger generations go - is probably more with people like Saagar Enjeti. The corporatized part of the RNC is becoming increasingly vestigial as even the core base of the party moves away from corporate news & thinktanks. Places like OAN, Breitbart, and InfoWars are increasingly more popular than Fox News, and decentralized right-wing pundits (people like Mike Cernovich or Jack Posobiec) basically have more influence than actual newscasters thanks to social media.

The GOP will definitely swing (somewhat) left on economics one way or another because it's getting to the point actual voters barely give a s*** about most economic situations, they're lazer-focused on cultural issues and all of their media has started to shift to parading that stuff around. While the anti-centralized economy libertarians will always exist, imo their influence is going to continue to wane as monopolies contradicting libertarian tenets ("i'm a libertarian, but twitter is going too far censoring..." type people) continues to grow.

I definitely agree I see a split in the GOP but even with that split I still would probably foresee a relatively big overlap on a lot of their major platform issues. The rhetoric of Tucker Carlson is almost certainly the future of the GOP

This press briefings so wild bro. They just reckless with the propaganda. Kayleigh McEnany like a villain character in sci-fi movie about cyborg Nazis.

You guys know that leaked conversation from a while back where Paul Ryan says "there's 2 people I think Putin pays; trump and rohrabacher"

Well I didn't realize there's a lot more transcript out there. Ryan literally acknowledges what Russia has been doing across the world, yet he stepped down and retired in silence while all of this happens

If anyone here is interested, I HIGHLY recommend researching the propaganda tactics and ideologies Russia has been employing for the last several years. It's incredibly fascinating and we have this whole s*** mapped out for us as to what's going to happen. Yet it won't matter enough to make a difference because of how masterful they are at It

Paul Manafort's job was literally to infiltrate Ukranian politics and split the country from the inside with divisiveness and corruption. Then their puppet president fled to Russia once the people were fed up with him

Its very worrying and not just isolated to US politics. The UK is currently subject to the same influence. No doubt oligarchs have heavily entrenched themselves within many of our 'democracies'. Greed and power is all it takes for a lot of our politicians to sell out on their ethics and country. Meanwhile anti-intellectualism and the volatility of the media prevents the majority of people giving it the necessary attention. I don't expect this trend to come to an end anytime soon unfortunately, it's no surprise how many right-wing populist regimes have been established in recent years.

That's the thing; they're doing this to the world superpowers like US and UK and, even according to Paul Ryan, moving all through the globe to do the same s***. Really amazing to watch it with more context than you hear being given in the news. We're watching a gigantic global and historical shift right before our eyes. Our fellow countrymen are being used as unwitting pawns because a higher power found out just how to work their emotions

Point me in the right direction

I have been LOVING this series, and I highly recommend it to understand Putin himself and either catch up on what has happened in recent years to us and Russia, or just better see where everything is headed youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_pPc6-qR9Zzqyps3_JmrNG6h2kMXGfEE

I also recommend watching a video or 2 on Aleksandr Dugin. They call him "Putin's brain", although I do think that's a little sensationalized. But, if you've ever seen it before, Dugin wrote "Foundations of Geopolitics": en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics#Content

So a couple good videos interviewing him and his views are:

This is also a must-watch, about Trump's buddies Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, etc. netflix.com/title/80114666?s=i&trkid=13747225
They're literal traitors and Paul Manafort did to Ukraine exactly what he and Russia have been doing to us. But these are the people Trump wants to pardon. The media did us all a major disservice by not highlighting these key campaign players' histories more, to make it more obvious how gross it is that Trump defends them

Finally, this was an interesting episode: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/trump-inc/id1344894187?i=1000479379193

So the EU is now discussing the possibility of cutting Americans off from entering, which is exactly where I feared this was all headed.

Imagine by the end of the year or sometime next year, if we're still one of the only countries still being ravaged by the virus, and then have a civil war imposed on us on top of that. The irony of AMERICAN refugees traveling across Europe/the world looking for asylum. I literally applied for my visa about a month ago lol

Also something to think about: one of Russia's primary tactics has been to help disperse refugees to politically vulnerable countries across Europe and to then make it a hot-button issue in that country. I imagine it would be plenty divisive to Europe to fight over whether Americans should be allowed to flee there or not