Summary
Donald Trump, the president-elect and convicted felon, has escalated his legal attacks on media outlets critical of him, sparking fears for press freedom under his second term.
His lawyer recently demanded $10 billion in damages from The New York Times and Penguin Random House over alleged “defamatory” content.
Similar lawsuits target the Daily Beast, CBS News, and others, accusing them of “malicious” reporting and election interference.
Media groups and watchdogs, including the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders, warn these actions threaten press freedom and the public’s right to information.
Well, twenty something percent of citizens voted for him but yes. I don’t think it’ll be quite as bad as he said since there guard rails, but we apparent voted for a full Congress for him too and hoping “sane” Republicans will save us is a fools errend.
But if 2016 is any indication, it’s probably not as bad as brexit, lol. I think we need to leave NATO or something to be that bad. (But, Brits didn’t deserve that, either, nor their crappy Tory leadership. They have my sympathy, as anyone conned by evil people should).
There were guardrails, but most of them are just litter on the side of the road now. The supreme Court has essentially justified any action he takes, Congress will not dare to oppose anything he wants, and he is appointing toadies and lickspittles to the highest offices of the land. Oh, and he is reclassifying all the major bureaucrats as political appointees so they can be fired at will.
It really is as bad as it seems.
We’ll see. The guy practically steals political capital so it is unpredictable; traditional candidates usually have to cut deals with folks in house and Senate when a policy would cost that person votes, but he doesn’t play by that because he can just make shit up. Gaetz will be a good test to see if he’s still able to force bad choices on people.
The only upside is he’s also an idiot who doesn’t trust people around him. 2016-2020 was bad, but man it could have been a lot worse if he wasn’t inept.
over 70% of all eligible voters didn’t vote against him.
That’s a democratic mandate.
It was actually a majority this time, don’t forget. Over half of Americans chose Trump.
Half of voters, and still 47% voted Harris last I checked. And turnout was especially bad, too, hence it technically only being a fraction of Americans. That’s not to say it’s not terrible, but even when Trump didn’t get a majority last two times it was alarmingly high.
But my expertise is in education, I can say definitively that Americans fail at civics and we haven’t done much to fix that in close to half a century. But failing civics doesn’t mean you deserve persecution or deportation or skyrocketing costs or nuclear death-- especially when people can legally lie to you to sway your vote. Systems fucked, but I wouldn’t place the blame on that slight majority of subset of the population.
On the contrary, Republicans have fought tooth and nail to destroy public education and keep people as dumb as possible. This is their desired result.
Yes, I know. Well actually, technically No Child Left Behind was a bipartisan attempt to improve education under Bush but was designed by people with conservative values (hence being a shit show designed to improve public education by punishing it).
But yes, on average, they’ve mostly pushed privatization of education and in more recent years, homeschooling for religious values. Dumbing down of society is probably a welcome side effect of stealing money from kids to fund tax breaks for the rich, though.
Not voting was the same as supporting trump directly.
I might be mistaken, but in Norway, if you do not vote, the missing vote will go to the party with the most votes in your region, so technically, not voting is voting for the most popular party.