Here’s how Stoermer describes Liberal Nationalism and the role it plays in american politics:
There’s a belief system that combines two things — first, that change must happen through official channels (voting, courts, proper debate), and second, that this procedural faith is wrapped in American exceptionalism. The system isn’t just legitimate. It is sacred because America itself is exceptional.
Now here’s where it gets complicated. Klein says the project is “the American experiment.” Newsom builds on that. Kirk said the same things, but meant something completely different. Kirk’s American experiment would destroy Klein’s and Newsom’s — he wanted to dismantle multiracial democracy, restrict voting, and return to what he called the real Founders’ vision. That would end everything Klein and Newsom claim to value.
Yet Klein’s nationalism enables Kirk’s. By treating Kirk’s anti-democratic project as legitimate discourse within the American experiment, by claiming they share common ground, Klein validates extremism as just another voice in the great American conversation.
And I keep wondering: Does the white Christian nationalist movement understand something about liberal nationalism that we don’t? Do they realize that as long as they frame their goals in terms of the Constitution, the Founders, and the American experiment, individuals like Klein will always find common ground with them?
I found other notable liberal figures saying similar things while perusing twitter. Notably senator John Fetterman recently insisted that americans (sorry, I refuse to capitalize demonyms. Sue me) should stop calling Trump an autocrat and pleaded for toning down the anti-Trump rhetoric. To me this attitude plays right into MAGA’s hands. This is the kind of stuff that whitewashes bigotry and helps reactionaries move the Overton window further right.
I would venture that in a similar situation, on this side of the pond we would be out on the streets, striking the economy to a screeching halt. But in the US, there seems to be this nationalist bootlicking mentality that prevents people from even considering direct action, simply because they believe the system will somehow fix itself and everything will be honky dory in the end.
I can’t help but think the US of A was never truly the haven of freedom we were told it was. And as much as I appreciate the comparably stronger fighting spirit of the working class here, I’m not sure it will be enough to resist the rise of the far right here in Europe either, propped up by the ever influential american politics. I’m a pessimist, so please give me hope, or don’t. Thoughts, please?
petrushka,
>When it comes to politics I try to pay attention to what happens, rather than to what politicians say.
Well, releasing/not-releasing the files is a thing, not a statement. His actions here speak louder than words.
It’s easy: Trump was the one practically living together with Epstein, so he is desperate to point out someone else instead of himself, thus he necessarily lies, because there is nobody else. Historically the closest associate of Epstein is Maxwell (see how Trump treats her) and the next-closest is Trump.
Oh, so it was the Dems who have been hiding the Epstein files all along, whereas Trump is genius Savior God-King, saintly defender of the victims, and he manipulated the Dems to release the files! So Epstein files now
1. Don’t exist
2. Are a Democrat hoax to make Trump look bad
3. Democrats are hiding the files because it’s all Democrats in them
4. Trump is championing the release of the files to let the truth out
5. All of the above is true at the same time!
petrushkian reasoning 😀
petrushka;
There’s been plenty of action along with Trump’s words, and the actions speak pretty loudly: Trump knows there’s something bad in the files.
How does it benefit Trump that all of the Democrats voted to release the files when none of them were opposing it in the first place? Are you suggesting that Trump, at great cost to himself, manipulated them into doing something they wanted to do anyway? Great cost for no gain? Is that what Trump supporters mean when they talk about “4D chess”?
Things are being covered up, and Trump and the DOJ are out of control.
I haven’t seen any indication that Democrats want a coverup. Have you? The Dems have been pushing for release, and the Republicans have been opposing it. Every House Democrat signed the discharge petition. Only four Republicans did. It appears that the Republicans are the only ones trying to cover anything up.
It’s OK, they’ll be along in 30 days… OK, 60 tops. We have to shift all the boxes of classified docs at Mar-a-Lago; it’s in there somewhere. This thing we were going to do nearly a year ago takes time, you know. It’s … shit, was that a tornado? At this time of year? Yeah, all blew away. Ah well.
The best thing about Trump’s 2nd term is that now Americans can *easily* diagnose among their fellow people who is a genuine Trump cultist and who is not. When Trump makes a shift in policy – such as first cracking down on anybody who looks Mexican, be it American citizen or not, but then announces a plan to import over half a million Chinese students to USA, or first denouncing and hushing down everything about Epstein, but now signing Congress bill to release the files – then true cultists stay on board abreast with Trump throughout.
petrushka and colewd are true Trump cultists. Interestingly, Marjorie Taylor Greene turned out not to be. She is still a Q/MAGA cultist and an America First fascist, but not a Trump cultist. She puts principles (fascist principles as per her conscience) over the worship of personality. But petrushka and colewd worship the personality no matter how the shape shifts and the wind blows.
I keep thinking of a nixonian phrase: modified limited hangout.
This site makes it difficult for someone like me to communicate, because everything I say gets twisted into tribal language, and I am not tribal. I have no loyalty to any groups.
Secondly, I hold my thoughts and opinions as possibilities rather than certainties (or even probabilities).
I lean toward thinking Epstein worked as a kind of sting operation, supported by intelligence and police agencies. Many people in high places say his primary product was blackmail. Among the many people is Dershowitz, Epstein’s lawyer.
Beyond that generality, I have nowhere to go. I will make an observation: child sex trafficking involves kids of all ages, even infants. But Epstein seemed to specialize in kids no younger than 14. There’s an ick factor in kids younger than that, and I think it would be difficult to hold together a coalition of law enforcement agencies if the kids were younger.
Spycraft and foreign policy and political shenanigans are out of my league. I do not pretend to know what goes on or even whether it is evil when compared to warfare.
But I’m pretty sure that Epstein was a government operation that crossed the political aisle.
Why do you have close to zero facts, no source-critical analysis and why are you full of delulu BS traceable to Q conspiratorial talk shows? On political topics I have seen exactly zero opinions from you that could indeed be yours. That you say that you *think* you are not tribal while you very obviously are just goes to show that never in your life have you expended any energy on thinking.
Edit: I guess it works psychologically as follows. USA is a two-party country. Therefore, to think of oneself as “independent” one simply places oneself somewhere between the two parties and calls it “balance” or “common ground”. Unfortunately, to give a proverbial analogy, there is no balance or common ground between space travel and flat-earthism.
This Epstein debacle is not a partisan thing at all. Trump was the closest friend of Epstein (after G.Maxwell) regardless of any party – and when he was, he was a Dem much of the time. It’s a matter of knowing facts about Trump (and knowing Epstein and knowing their relationship), not a matter of party adherence. Tribalists will never get this through to their skulls, because they can only think tribally.
If indisputable facts were available, the Epstein document release would be unnecessary. I have posted my metaphor: Geraldo’s Vault. It is my expectation.
No one will be going to prison based on this release. Some people will be embarrassed by having their correspondence revealed. A couple of people already have.
Regarding self driving cars: we are at the point where the next one percent improvement will take 99 percent of the work. But taxis are already in operation, and more are coming.
No one here has addressed my reasoning.
I do not believe Epstein was stupid. He would not have kept a written diary of clients and their misbehavior. Everyone in a position to know says he made videos and kept them for blackmail.
Such videos would be child pornography, and will never be released. It’s the perfect catch 22. They are useful as a threat, but cannot be seen by the public.
So the remaining question is, will we ever see a definitive list of people who committed crimes. I don’t know, and neither does anyone here. I do believe we will go to our graves hearing accusations from democrats and republicans.
You do not have any reasoning. You evade all facts that are available and have been pointed out to you. You keep concocting theories (lies really) that all end up in one single direction – defend the pedos. The concoctions come raw from partisan Q conspiracy podcasts without any modification or filter, thus not from yourself.
You do not believe there is anyhing there in Epstein estate, even though all latest revelations are from there – and the revelations would really be unnecessary, if the justice system did its work, but it is doing the opposite. You do not think that victims exist and have anything worth saying. You do not think that the already known pedo connections, such as Epstein-Brunel and Trump-Casablancas prove anything (not to mention Trump-Epstein-Maxwell, easily the most visible one). This is the profile of a tribalist pedo-defender.
Edit: You think there are no facts, because you are an eminent no-fact guy. Disappointingly, you also think that nobody else can know any facts, certainly not more than you. But no, pretty much everybody knows far more than you and, specifically, the facts.
Youtuber Rebecca Watson found herself in the Epstein emails
Your rant is incoherent.
I have been speculating about what is in the files about to be released.
I don’t know what’s in them, and neither do you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein
You do not know what is even in the files that have been available for over a decade or more. You display zero awareness how damning they are for Trump. You display zero awareness of Trump’s biography entirely.
Of course you know nothing about the future when you know nothing about the past. Yet despite all your lack of knowledge, you never fail to defend the pedos – somehow you know exactly who to defend!
Just one example: I knew about Trump’s birthday letter to Epstein before it became common knowledge. You do not know about Trump’s birthday letter even now when it is common knowledge.
You keep *not* learning from dozens of facts like these. You never budge from defending the pedo.
Edit:
I do not follow the Dem/Repub party lines, so of course I come across as incoherent to you, hyperpartisan hypocrite. So, thanks for the compliment.
petrushka:
I haven’t twisted what you’ve said, and nothing I’ve argued depends on assigning you to any particular tribe or group. I’m just responding to what you write.
Which is fine, and easy to convey: Just say “one possibility is that…” and describe that possibility. That’s exactly what I was requesting when I wrote:
You wrote:
…and my response was to ask you why that would make sense as a strategy:
I’ve tried, and I can’t think of any way in which such a strategy would pay off for Trump. What are the possible scenarios in which it would? Give us a plausible account of why Trump would pursue it. (Plausible — not certain. I just want to know why you think that this is a reasonable possibility.)
Why the asymmetry, then? Democrats want the files released. Republicans don’t — or at least they didn’t until it became a political necessity. If both sides of the aisle are implicated, why do the Democrats welcome it?
We know Epstein ran a human trafficking ring. We know some of the girls were younger than 18. We know he had a lot of clients. We know the FBI confiscated all his records, and we know it came to hundreds of gigabytes of emails, texts, audio and video recordings. We know Epstein and Trump were best friends for years. We know Trump fought against releasing the files as hard and long as he could.
Now, we get to the speculations. We can be pretty sure the FBI and DoJ are doing everything possible to scrub anything incriminating about any Republicans from all this material. We know that Trump simply could not help knowing what was going on, and we won’t believe Trump played no role (given his beauty pageant behavior, his access Hollywood tapes, the dozen or more women claiming he groped them, his conviction for sexual assault, etc.) What Epstein was doing was right down Trump’s alley. Nobody is going to believe that these files (before redaction/removal) didn’t incriminate Trump. We can assume that Bondi is going to release anything as late and little as possible, small anodyne bits at infrequent intervals, almost entirely blacked out.
Personally, I doubt the public will ever learn what was in those records. Even if a Democrat becomes President in 2028, the Epstein matter will be small potatoes compared with trying to rebuild some semblance of what Trump wrecked.
This is not complicated. Republicans didn’t want anything released because Trump instructed them to cover it up. Reports have come out that nearly all Republicans wanted the files released, but none of them would defy Trump. We saw how they acted when Trump caved. And as Trump points out, when the Democrats were in power, they didn’t release anything either.