Hardkill

I am not surprised that Russell Brand has been charged with rape even though he’s an A list celebrity with extreme levels of charisma. He has had a really fucked up past including having been a raging addict. Plus, he’s bipolar and I am sure that he has a very deluded sense of self. Not to mention how much he’s been brainwashed by various conspiracy theories, Trumpism/MAGA, and echo chambers/epistemic bubbles that align with his own strange views of the word. Sadly, I am not sure though that enough people in the world will care about him raping women. Too many people in this day and age including those in western governments don’t care about anything else besides their own finances, affordability, financial success, status, power, etc. Hell, they don’t even trust any news information unless it’s coming from their own echo chambers/epistemic bubbles that they are so comfortable in. Just like how a majority of Americans didn’t care about all of the crimes that Trump committed and elected him president again.

The way the tax rates were set up in our country just before the Reagan era were practically perfect.

It’s also because of this broken media environment and the Democratic party’s terrible messaging and spineless attitude.

Yeah ChadT is right about Peter Schiff being a constant doomer on the US economy, particularly when the country is lead during a Democratic presidency. However, I fear that you’re right, Leo. The broad consensus amongst top economists and financial experts now is that Trump’s tariff policies are absolutely beyond stupid and more than likely to cause the US economy to crash for no good real reason. Even Zandi and his team of economists and Krugman, all of whom rightly predicted the 2008 financial crisis and rightly predicted that the economy during Biden’s president would achieve a soft or softish landing, have been saying for a while now that Trump’s policies are not only going to be inflationary, but also could likely cause a recession if Trump doesn’t back off with his tariff policies. Not to mention that Trump’s moronic tariff regime is seriously jeopardizing millions of Americans retirement funds and ruining the stock market. This completely outdated and extreme tariff policy is not how our country will be able to address the unfair practices that have occurred for decades.

Fortunately, Musk failed to buy the crucial Wisconsin Supreme Court race that happened tonight: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/us/politics/wisconsin-supreme-court-crawford-schimel.html

Oh, God! That is very tragic. My thoughts and prayers go out to all of the victims and their closed ones.

Oh, yeah.... That definitely keeps me up at night. I hope that if that happens that widespread civil unrest, protests, and riots in Washington happen.

So, then how much was the idea of Trump and his party taking away your freedoms and opportunities overhyped? In retrospect, I realize that even people in authoritarian countries like China or Russia have a lot of the freedoms that we have.

I generally agree with the OP. However, at the same time, many older people tend to be more stubborn with old world views that are outdated and need to be replaced by new modern-day views.

But aren't millions of innocent people going to suffer and die under Trump if his administration and the Republicans in Congress cuts funding for essential government services like Medicaid, public education, vaccines, and medical research and guts important regulations protecting the environment, the economy, and human rights in our country this time?

Correction: 6 million more people who voted for Biden in 2020 than Harris in 2024. Also, I thought she ran a better campaign than Hillary Clinton did in 2016 and better than Trump's campaign in 2016, 2020, 2024. In fact, Trump's 2024 campaign was the worst ever. He just had a more clever media strategy than she did. Plus, the unprecedented misinformation, the right-wing propaganda machine, the rise of social media/internet, the rest of the anti-mainstream media in this day and age had brainwashed too many voters into believing that Biden/Harris and the Democrats didn't govern the country well. Moreover, racism, misogyny, and xenophobia our country is still experiencing has made it extremely difficult if not impossible for women of color like Harris to win the presidency. The US is still going through a conservative social backlash. Not to mention the historic levels of income inequality and unjust levels of affordability in country. All of those factors combined caused this anti-incumbent party sentiment in our country, especially amongst the less politically engaged and less informed voters out there in the country.

I know..... It's very sad. However, notice how much less neoliberal the Democratic party has gotten in policy. Remember, Biden shockingly turned out to be the most left-wing president in economic policy since LBJ in the 1960s and the most pro-union president since FDR or Truman. I honestly think that Democrats should stay about civil rights and anything else pertaining to social justice, except for climate change, while focus on bread-and-butter economics like FDR did. They may actually have to be racist in a subtle manner, but economically progressive like Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt were until the racism and xenophobia in our country cools down one day in order to win back the working class, especially the white working class.

I wonder how much the courts and the entire law enforcement want America to be governed by a true authoritarian regime like in Russia.

That's another worry. If the election gets rigged by 2028, then wouldn't he be able to escape responsibility for ruining the country including the entire economy by then? Then again, our country went through both the American Revolution and the Civil War and the victors of those wars ultimately defeated those forms of tyranny in America.

Yeah, that's what I thought too—that's basically how Biden and the Democrats defeated Trump and his party in 2020. I also remember you mentioned this earlier in one of my threads about propaganda used in the Soviet Union. However, year after year after year, we continue to underestimate just how conservative and frankly how stupid most Americans really are combined with how stuck numerous people are in so many of these brain-rotting echo chambers/epistemic bubbles in this day age. 2 to 4 years ago, we didn't think that Trump had any real chance of winning the presidency after he lost in 2020 and his party suffered a humiliating loss in the 2022 midterms overall. I mean even if his presidency ends with having failed to govern the country well including having an economic disaster, widespread civil unrest, very unpopular and bad policy changes made, and scandals like in 2020 under Trump, how we know that the majority of the people won't just be like "Yet, I know Trump is horrible, but the Democrats are still worse because they are too far to the left for me culturally and come off more phoney. So, I'd rather him or another Republican party him again running the country?"