JD Vance, Trump's running mate, the righteous hypocrate, from Never Trump to Ever Trump and beyond (4)

Sequel to (1), (2), (3)

«Why is a smart man spending so much time saying stupid things? The simplest explanation is that Vance believes his voters are stupid. Or as Vance himself told Rogan last week: “There’s a real populism that I’m very much a fan of because I think you should be responsive to people, but there’s, like, a faux populism of: The way that I’m going to appeal to people is by assuming that they’re idiots and acting like they’re idiots.”

This is admission by analysis. All politicians pander, but the best of them do it with some finesse. Vance, who struggles through the most basic photo ops, is not one of the best; his two successful elections are both testaments to Trump’s political muscle. In 2022, when he was a U.S. Senate candidate, I included Vance in a round-up of very intelligent Republicans who were clumsily pretending to be fools for electoral purposes. Vance seems to have doubled down on the strategy since then, but each new incident just offers more evidence of his dripping disdain for voters’ intelligence.

This may not be the wisest political strategy, H. L. Mencken notwithstanding. Vance’s approval ratings have been underwater for more than a year, and the Never Trump pollster Sarah Longwell recently conducted a focus group with Trump voters and found that Vance has left them cold. Either way, Vance’s performance plays as tragicomedy: comic because he’s so bad at it, but tragic because of who Vance was not that long ago. Much has been made of his critique of Trump in his 2016 Atlantic essay, and although his flip-flop on the president is astonishing, he has also reversed himself on a more fundamental view of politics.

In that essay, he criticized the demagogic tendency to condescend to people in so-called flyover country, where he grew up—to view them as yokels who could be easily manipulated with simplistic talking points and grievance plays. The harms that Trump identified, Vance wrote, “demand serious thought and measured action—from governments, yes, but also from community leaders and individuals.” Trump, he argued, was cynically co-opting those harms for his own gain and doing Americans a disservice. That Vance was right; this Vance doesn’t seem to care.»

J. D. Vance Isn’t a Fool. Why Does He Act Like One?, David A. Graham, The Atlantic

Is Bibi following in the footsteps of his godfather, who attacks his allies and venerates his enemies?

Groundnews

Is this intended to build the Golden Trump Resort of Gaza?

Fonte

Golden Trump Resort of Gaza

JD Vance, Trump's running mate, the righteous hypocrate, from Never Trump to Ever Trump and beyond (3)

Sequel to (1), (2)

«Mike Pence should have been a warning to J. D. Vance about the inevitable abasement in store once you join a ticket with Donald Trump. Before he became Trump’s running mate a decade ago, conservative Christian values were the center of Pence’s political identity, but in October 2016, he reluctantly stood by Trump after the release of the tape in which Trump boasted about grabbing women “by the pussy.” It was a sign of things to come. Pence became vice president, and for the next four years, he defended his boss through moral abominations and deficit explosions that cut against his fiscal conservatism, flinching only when Trump asked him to help steal an election. His reward? Trump did nothing while a mob threatened to hang Pence.

All of this was common knowledge when Vance agreed to run with Trump in 2024. No one lands on a presidential ticket if they’re not outrageously ambitious—nearly every veep for at least a century has fancied themselves a future president—but Vance is particularly brazen. Becoming Trump’s running mate required a yearslong effort to ingratiate himself with a guy whom Vance had, in the pages of this magazine, referred to as “cultural heroin” and elsewhere called “America’s Hitler.” Maybe Vance’s ambition blinded him to Pence’s lesson, but the war in Iran is teaching it to him the hard way.»

J. D. Vance learns what Mike Pence already knows

______________

«JD Vance just delivered one of those painfully awkward moments that ends up defining a political appearance.

While speaking at a rally in Hungary where he was promoting Viktor Orbán Vance tried to create a headline-grabbing moment by calling Donald Trump live on stage to show support. Instead, it completely backfired. Trump didn’t answer.

Trying to play it off, Vance joked with the crowd that it might get embarrassing if the call didn’t go through. Moments later, that’s exactly what happened the call went straight to a voicemail that wasn’t even set up. The room was left with an uncomfortable silence and a failed stunt.

He eventually tried again and did get Trump on the line, but even that didn’t help much. Trump sounded distracted and irritated, briefly mumbling before offering a generic endorsement of Orbán. It felt more like an obligation than enthusiasm.»

Hudson Flores, Quora

______________

«Vice-President J.D. Vance loves big ideas, or at least the idea of big ideas. Unlike President Donald Trump, he reads books and even writes his own, and he talks, authentically, like a diploma-carrying member of the elite they both ostentatiously disdain. He aligns himself with the “post-liberal right”, a term so highfalutin one struggles to imagine Mr Trump using it. Mr Vance serves as the chief emissary between the Trump White House and the intellectual “New Right”, the agglomeration of pointy-heads, Silicon Valley potentates and podcasters with big ideas of their own for saving Western civilisation, as Mr Vance, apocalyptically, likes to describe his mission.

It is heady stuff. It must also, on some days, prove vexatious, for it has led Mr Vance to cast himself as the chief ideologist of a movement, MAGA, whose essence is that it has no ideology. MAGA is committed instead to the instincts, impulses and glory of one man. As a result, Mr Vance’s theories of governance keep taking a beating from Mr Trump’s practice.

For example, contrary to the big ideas of Mr Vance, Mr Trump has recently been threatening to destroy a civilisation. Mr Vance, a veteran of the Iraq war, has been an advocate of isolationism. As he put it during the last presidential campaign, “America doesn’t have to constantly police every region of the world.” A war with Iran seemed to him a particularly bad idea. It was not in America’s interest and would mean “a huge distraction of resources”; war between Israel and Iran was “the most likely and the most dangerous scenario” for starting a third world war.»

J.D. Vance’s theory of Trumpism is no match for the practice

The ayatollahs' bullshit is defeating Trumpism's bullshit in its own domain: social media

Source

Duvidas (386) - Tem a certeza de que não trocou emails com o Jeffrey?

Por força da lei aprovada em Novembro, o Departamento americano  de Justiça publicou em 30 de Janeiro mais de 3 milhões de páginas de documentos relativos ao caso Epstein, um volume de informação impossível de ler em pouco tempo. 

Um grupo de engenheiros de software  usando uma ferramenta de IA, identificaram os arquivos contendo emails e em 11 de Fevereiro tinha processado 4 milhões de e-mails. A revista Economist usando esses dados identificou cerca de 500 pessoas que surgiam com mais frequência e usando um modelo de IA de linguagem (LLM) atribuiu um score de "alarme" para cada cadeia de emails.

Analisando os emails de pessoas que não faziam parte dos empregados e colaboradores de Epstein foram identificadas 500 pessoas com maior número de emails. Concluiu-se que as mensagens tinham a seguinte repartição: cerca de 19% com financiadores; 10% com cientistas ou médicos; 8% com pessoas da mídia, entretenimento ou relações públicas; 7% com tecnólogos; 6% com advogados, políticos, académicos e outros empresários; e 5% com magnatas imobiliários. 

Fonte

Algumas dessas pessoas estão identificadas no quadro acima e entre elas individualidades conhecidas fora dos EU, como Ariane de Rothschild (CEO do Grupo Edmond de Rothschild), Noam Chomsky (um célebre filósofo muito apreciado nos meios esquerdistas), Steve Bannon (o Rasputine de Trump) e Bill Gates e Elon Musk que não carecem de apresentação. Entre as personalidades não incluídas no quadro encontram-se bilionários como Peter Thiel (uma eminência parda com quem o vice JD Vance trabalhou) e Ehud Barak (ex-primeiro-ministro israelita).

Birds of a Feather Flock Together (9) - Besides sharing the same feather, these birds have a large bird as a common enemy

The Moscow Times

Blinded by his gigantic ego and deluded by past, present, and, he believes, future dealings, the Big, Beautiful Bird has not yet realized that.

Truth comes out in anger or with friends like these, who needs enemies? (3) - A new party is born fathered by an old star, the former first buddy

[Other Who needs enemies?]

Truth comes out in anger or with friends like these, who needs enemies? (2)

[Sequel of this post]

I can hardly imagine the dilemma MAGA devotees are facing, torn between two allegiances and which one is the more insane. And yet all of this was predictable, because MAGA is an opportunistic alliance based on contradictory ideas and policies between a vanishing working class stranded in an imagined glorious past, isolationist nativists, and billionaire tech barons obsessed with power and greed who pretend to believe the bullshit of ideologues, led by a pathological narcissist.

Truth comes out in anger or with friends like these, who needs enemies?

Elon Musk's post on X

A former Kremlin propagandist appointed U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Tell me who you appoint, I'll tell you who you are

«Ed Martin is the Trump administration’s nominee to be the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. A failed political candidate and former chairman of the Missouri Republican Party, he is now a right-wing podcaster and social-media figure—and a January 6 truther who believes that Justice Department lawyers are the president’s personal consiglieri. He has also, however, been a regular commentator on RT America, the English-language flagship for the Kremlin’s propaganda efforts until it was dropped by major content providers after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.»

The Atlantic

Black Nationalist Gets $20 Million to Promote ‘Segregation’ (and racism) in Public Schools with donations from the government and nonprofits, including the Gates Foundation

«An adviser to Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, who supports school segregation and is a member of the Black Panther Party with family ties to Iran, runs a nonprofit that has raked in nearly $20 million in donations from the government and nonprofits, including the Gates Foundation.

Sharif El-Mekki, a former middle and high school teacher and principal, founded the Center for Black Educator Development (CBED) in 2019, which defines its vision as “a world where. . . all black students are taught by high-quality, same-race teachers,” and where “all teachers demonstrate high levels of expertise in anti-racist mindsets.” CBED argues that employing black teachers to educate black students increases educational outcomes.

Since its founding, CBED has trained thousands of teachers across the U.S. in “education activism,” urging a “commitment to liberation education from the racism inherent in America’s institutions, including our schools.” A CBED information packet titled “The Anti-Racist Guide to Teacher Retention,” developed with the Pennsylvania Department of Education, defines education as “a political act” that “can upend white supremacy and a racist history of using education as an oppressive social force.” 

“Every lesson plan is a political document, and every classroom interaction a political statement,” the guide reads. 

El-Mekki’s nonprofit boasts more than $19.5 million in assets, boosted by funders including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which donated over $1.4 million between 2020 and 2021, and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which gave over $1.1 million in 2022, according to public tax filings. Other backers include NBC Universal, Nike, the Bezos Family Foundation, the University of Pennsylvania School of Education, and dozens more. In 2023 alone, CBED trained more than 1,700 educators. In their most recent tax filing from 2023, El-Mekki drew a salary of $233,410 from the organization.

“He started up this organization, which on paper sounds like a really wonderful endeavor, getting more black teachers in the classroom,” said Dr. Mika Hackner, a senior research associate at the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, which drafted a report on El-Mekki’s extremist views and activism that she shared with The Free Press. “But if you scratch beneath the surface—not even beneath the surface, it’s on their website—he’s propagating some pretty dangerous and divisive ideas.” 

El-Mekki, she added, is “bringing in segregation by a different and more socially and politically acceptable name.” »

Francesca Block in The Free Press newsletter

Body language. O algodão não engana ou os gestos falam mais alto do que as palavras

Para o caso de já não se recordarem, a criatura curvada é o Sr. Eng. António Guterres, o picareta falante, actual secretário-geral da ONU, antigo líder do Partido Socialista, antigo primeiro-ministro e inventor da coligação do queijo limiano, fugido em 2001 do pântano que ele próprio ajudou a criar.

A criatura perante quem ele se curva é o ditador russo Vladimir Putin que, por ter invadido a Ucrânia e cometido diversos crimes, tem um mandato de prisão do Tribunal Penal Internacional, instituição criada pelo Tratado de Roma, aprovado em 1998 pelos membros da mesma organização de que o Sr. Eng. Guterres é o secretário-geral.

O contexto da curvatura do Sr. Eng. perante o Czar é o de uma reunião dos chamados BRICS, um grupo informal de países (Brasil, Rússia, Índia, China, África do Sul, Etiópia, Irão, Egito e Emirados Árabes Unidos) na sua maioria com regimes ditatoriais.

JD Vance, Trump's running mate, from Never Trump to Ever Trump and beyond (2)

Sequel to (1)

The following portrait of J. D. Vance shows that Trump's running mate, like all populists, is a repository of contradictions. In some areas he is more socialist than Elisabeth Warren, despite severely criticizing the new English Labor government (it happens to be not very socialist) which, according to him, will transform the United Kingdom into the first Islamic State to have nuclear weapons. A false prophecy, because Pakistan already has them, and empty of meaning, typical of those who bring together ignorance, parochialism and radicalism that characterizes Trumpism.

«On economics, Mr Vance is one of the new breed of Republicans who have appropriated Democratic contempt for Wall Street and professed admiration for the working class. He is solicitous of labour unions, but dislikes “Big Labour” (along with “Big Tech” and big business). He has more in common with Elizabeth Warren, a progressive Democratic senator from Massachusetts, than you might expect. Last year he introduced a bill with her that aimed to claw back compensation from bank executives. He once endorsed a German-style proposal for giving workers seats on company boards. He has praised Lina Khan, Mr Biden’s antitrust enforcer and a pariah to Silicon Valley, as “one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job”.

He has made positive sounds about industrial policy, tariffs and expanded tax credits for families. He justifies immigration restrictions by claiming they raise the wages of the native-born. “At the basic conceptual level, he’s in favour of worker power,” says Oren Cass, the founder of American Compass, an outfit that is taking conservative economics in a more populist direction. “Vance is the most distinctive possible choice [for Mr Trump], which shows that the centre of gravity for the Republican Party has permanently shifted.”

On foreign policy, Mr Vance has managed to outdo even Mr Trump in his scepticism towards NATO and opposition to American aid for Ukraine. Mr Trump is often elliptical on Ukraine, claiming that he would somehow settle the conflict in one day. When Volodymyr Zelensky visited Capitol Hill to beg for more military aid and urge Republicans against linking it to extra border funding, Mr Vance criticised the Ukrainian president’s actions as “disgraceful”. “There are a lot of bad guys all over the world, and I’m much more interested in some of the problems in East Asia right now than I am in Europe,” Mr Vance told the Munich Security Conference.

Still, Mr Vance maintains that it is important for America to continue giving military aid to Israel because that, in contrast to Ukraine’s case, has “clear end goals”, including weakening Iran. Like Mr Trump, he is sceptical of America’s capacity to shape the world. At a recent confab of anti-globalists he even fired some shots at America’s closest ally. “I was in London last year, and it’s not doing so good,” he said, before musing that Britain might be the first Islamist country to have nuclear weapons, given Labour’s election victory.

The vice-presidency can be a tragicomic position. And those who drift too close to Mr Trump can find themselves excommunicated or in serious legal trouble. Might Mr Vance wind up similarly sidelined? Two reasons suggest he might not.

First, he has already proved adept at managing up, successfully moving beyond his past publicised worries about Mr Trump as “cultural heroin” and “America’s Hitler”. Such canniness does not just disappear. Second, when Mr Trump became president he was content to delegate policymaking to congressional figures like Paul Ryan, then the speaker of the House, and Mitch McConnell, then the Senate majority leader. His vice-president, Mike Pence, was not a policy maestro. All three were from the old guard. This time he would have not just a sharp vice-president interested in policy, but a Trumpified Congress as well. The speaker of the House if Republicans kept their majority would be deferential to the president. Mr McConnell will be leaving his leadership post.

What began as an insurgent movement within the Republican Party, organised around a cult of personality, has become steadily more mainstream and professionalised. There are now parallel institutions including think-tanks armed with detailed plans for power. Mr Trump and his allies have fostered their own international alliance of like-minded anti-globalists. The next presidential term would be the last for Mr Trump; but it may well not be the last for Trumpism. »

Birds of a Feather Flock Together (8) - Who could be better to discuss peace in the Middle East than the Putin-Assad duo responsible for 600,000 victims in the Syrian civil war?

Reuters

JD Vance, Trump's running mate, from Never Trump to Ever Trump

For those, like me, who found it unexpected that someone like J.D. Vance, who has said about Donald Trump in the past what Muhammad did not say about pork, has been named Trump's running mate, the following article by Olivia Reingold of The Free Press, who followed Vance on the campaign trail in 2022, shed some light.

«Donald Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as his running mate is remarkable in more ways than one. There is Vance’s journey from the broken home in a poor, rural Ohio he wrote about in Hillbilly Elegy, to the Marines, to Ohio State, then to Yale Law School and to the Senate, and now a presidential ticket. Also remarkable is his transformation from a prominent “Never Trumper”—who once called his now–running mate “America’s Hitler” and an “opioid for the masses”—to an enthusiastic Trumpist in the vanguard of the New Right. 

For some, Vance’s journey is simple enough to explain: it’s the story of a smart and ambitious “sellout” and an “angry jerk,” as one of his (ex-) friends from law school put it on X yesterday. To this crowd, Vance is only the most extreme example of a familiar story of Republicans kowtowing to the man who took over their party. 

But Vance is a much more complicated—and interesting—figure than that. 

Agree with him or not, he has undergone a sincere ideological conversion since 2016. That much was obvious to me when I followed him on the campaign trail in 2022. And it’s obvious from any speech or interview he gives. He is not someone who just parrots his party’s talking points. (He has also undergone an actual conversion: I recommend Rod Dreher’s interview with him on the day he was baptized and received into the Catholic Church in 2019.) 

In the Senate, he hasn’t just voted with the GOP herd but teamed up with Democrats on a range of bills that stake out new ideological territory for Republicans. He makes some of Trump’s donors uncomfortable. 

By picking Vance, Trump has made clear his project is about more than personality. The Republican presidential ticket now has a distinct ideological flavor. It has teeth. National Review’s Philip Klein called the pick “another nail in the coffin of Reagan Republicanism.” (This is not a compliment at that magazine.) Vance is a prominent critic of U.S. involvement in Ukraine (for more on his foreign policy views, I recommend this piece by my colleague Isaac Grafstein). 

He’s also economically unorthodox—and more relaxed about government involvement in the economy than many of his colleagues. He has backed a higher minimum wage and praised Lina Khan, Joe Biden’s FTC chair and a proponent of more robust antitrust policies. 

Did these ideological considerations clinch it for Vance? I suspect a bigger factor was that in Vance, Trump saw someone who was welcomed into the elite—as Trump never has been—but who turned his back on it.»

Birds of a Feather Flock Together (7) It's a new polyamorous bromance. They're going to solve it!

 

On his tour to Make Europe Great Again and achieve peace in Ukraine, on the 5th Mr. Órban visited Mr. Putin, on the 8th in Beijing Mr. Xi, and on the 12th Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago resort, where he emphatically declared "It was an honor to visit President Trump today. We discussed ways to make peace. The good news of the day: he’s going to solve it!".

TIROU-ME AS PALAVRAS DA BOCA: Temos de preservar a liberdade de ouvir o que os idiotas têm para dizer

«É uma das características mais úteis da liberdade de expressão: não protege apenas o direito de um idiota falar, protege também o nosso direito de o ouvir. Um deputado que é impedido de exprimir as suas ideias abjectas não deixa de ter ideias abjectas, tal como a cozinha com a luz apagada não deixa de ter baratas — nós é que deixamos de as ver.»

Ricardo Araújo Pereira, é um comediante talentoso - provavelmente o mais talentoso do Portugal dos Pequeninos desta época - que se deixa tentar frequentemente pelo facilitismo do humor de causas, um humor preguiçoso que tem sempre um público garantido. Por isso, não é muito frequente concordar como agora com o que ele diz, ou escreve neste caso.

Não é uma concordância absoluta é relativa. A minha concordância é com não devermos impedir a expressão de ideias que achamos idiotas, ideias que podem ser expressas por idiotas ou não, admitindo que os idiotas possam expressar ideias que não sejam idiotas (sim, é difícil, eu sei). É uma boa explicação para o nosso escrúpulo de censurar as caixas de comentários do (Im)pertinências.

O entendimento de Aguiar Branco tocou o nervo dos que entendem que liberdade de expressão é poder dizer o que eles acham que pode ser dito

Uma espécie de continuação desta ESTÓRIA E MORAL.

De quase todos os quadrantes políticos irromperam no mínimo protestos e no máximo exigências de demissão de Aguiar Branco em resposta ao seu entendimento sobre a liberdade de expressão dos deputados face ao desafio da socialista Dr.ª Alexandra Leitão, entendimento que ele expressou assim 

«A liberdade de expressão está constitucionalmente consagrada, não é uma liberdade sob ponderação do juízo de uma qualquer pessoa faça em relação àquilo que no discurso político é dito. Não haverá condicionamento na liberdade de expressão. A avaliação do discurso político que seja feito nessa casa será feito pelo povo em eleições se se revê nas suas posições.»

Das inúmeras reacções, escolho uma do "investigador" António Brito Guterres (ABG), com um título Quem nos defende de Aguiar-Branco?» que é todo um programa, onde conclui que «a luta contra o racismo não se resume a afrontar a bancada do Chega, mas que é algo muito mais lato, com cúmplices em todas as esferas políticas e instituições do país.» Aí está, Aguiar Branco é para ABG apenas o porta-voz de uma cabala dos cultores do rácismo que, para simplificar, são todos os que não se identificam com a geringonça alargada.

Como o comentador se declara «a favor da liberdade de expressão absoluta» devemos concluir que também é a favor da liberdade de expressão tout court mas apenas para exprimir o que ele achar que pode exprimir-se.

Pedro Gomes Sanches, um dos poucos comentadores que se desalinhou com estes entendimentos da liberdade de expressão, recordou uma decisão de 1969 do Supremo Tribunal americano no caso Brandenburg v. Ohio que estabelece o seguinte critério para os discursos de ódio, como hoje são chamados: 

«A state may not forbid speech advocating the use of force or unlawful conduct unless this advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.»

É um bom critério, que depara com grandes obstáculos para ser aplicado, sobretudo num país onde «a liberdade é muito difícil, sobretudo porque não temos liberais. Temos libertinos, demagogos ou ultramontanos de todas as cores, mas pessoas que compreendam a dimensão profunda da liberdade já reparei que há muito poucas», como em tempos concluiu António Alçada Baptista.

ESTÓRIA E MORAL: Liberdade de expressão não é poder dizer o que acham que pode ser dito

 Estória

O Dr. Ventura e o Chega pretenderam criminalizar o Dr. Marcelo por traição à pátria por este ter expressado a sua opinião de que Portugal deveria reparar a prática de escravatura de que foram vítimas africanos dos territórios coloniais.

Todos os partidos representados no parlamento rejeitaram a queixa por traição à pátria apresentada pelo Chega. 

No mesmo parlamento, o Dr. Ventura disse que «os turcos não são conhecidos por serem os mais trabalhadores do mundo», expressão que indignou deputados dos partidos que se tinham indignado pela queixa-crime do Chega contra o Dr. Marcelo.

Os mesmos ou outros deputados também se indignaram pelo presidente da AR ter permitido a expressão de juízos, como aquele, que eles consideram racista. E um spin-off do PSR, um partido de que foi líder o Dr. Louçã, apressou-se a considerar que o presidente não tinha condições para se manter na presidência da AR, por ter consentido e afirmar que «A liberdade expressão está constitucionalmente consagrada, não é uma liberdade sob ponderação do juízo de uma qualquer pessoa faça em relação àquilo que no discurso político é dito. Não haverá condicionamento na liberdade de expressão. A avaliação do discurso político que seja feito nessa casa será feito pelo povo em eleições se se revê nas suas posições.»

Moral

Os deputados dos partidos representados na AR, com a excepção conhecida do Dr. Aguiar Branco, parecem estar de acordo que liberdade de expressão significa o direito de dizer o que eles acham que pode ser dito e, por isso, parecem não estar de acordo com George Orwell a quem possivelmente teriam proibido de dizer o que disse:

«Se liberdade significa alguma coisa, significa o direito de dizer às pessoas o que elas não querem ouvir.»