It’s just that easy!
What to expect from the debate tonight: as we get closer and closer to the election, the lies get more and more extreme.
Former President Donald Trump repeated his false claim that children are undergoing transition-related surgeries during their school day, exacerbating existing fears among conservatives that educators are pushing children to become transgender and aiding transitions without parental awareness.
“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house, and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school, and your son comes back with a brutal operation. Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” Trump said at a campaign rally in Wisconsin, a vital swing state, on Saturday.
What the hell is wrong with Trump and his audience? And he repeats it again!
When asked by the group’s co-founder how he would address the “explosion in the number of children who identify as transgender,” Trump said: “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”
There is no evidence that a student has ever undergone gender-affirming surgery at a school in the United States nor is there evidence that a U.S. school has sent a student to receive such a procedure elsewhere.
My transgender friends are constantly complaining about how many hoops they have to jump through, how many years it takes to get approval, and how many states won’t even allow you to buy the drugs for maintenance. I’ll have to inform them that all you had to do was say that you used a different pronoun in middle school, and zip, you’re sent to the school nurse, who has a fully equipped surgery, and the sex change is done in a day.
Yeah, right.
And the MAGA idiots will believe it, and are ready for the next lie.
Which happens to be that Haitian immigrants are flooding the country and stealing your pets to eat raw in their apartments in the slums. Sure, fully believable. Everyone knows that housecat is the national dish of Haiti.
both of these point to the use of disgust as a propaganda, which has always been a feature of hate movements. when terfism was new, those creeps seemed near indistinguishable from any given liberalish terminally online random on tumblr. but this was the tell – they spent a lot more time talking about what they considered gross.
being capable of introspection in a way these creeps are not, i have to pause when i’m tempted to speak from disgust, because i know these things. which is difficult, because i find the thoughts of right-wingers so thoroughly fucking disgusting.
Regarding the lie about Haitian immigrants:
I’ve seen plenty of stories going through the origins of the rumor, but I it doesn’t matter what the truth is. The MAGAts already believe that there is a vast conspiracy to cover up the activities of the literally diabolical forces aligned against Trump, America, Christianity, and White people around the world. They will reject any explaination as “fake news.”
I expect the story to mutate into claims these nonexistent animals were killed as part of “Voodoo” sacrifices. The Christian Right has long associated Vodún and Haitians by association with Satanic worship (e.g. Pat Roertson’s claims that the Haitians won their revolution through a Satanic pact.), so the Bible-humpers and QAnon kooks will lap that up with relish.
“ Christian Right has long associated Vodún and Haitians by association with Satanic worship…”
Ugh! Redundancy is redundant. Sorry.
In 1980, Castro decided to attack President Jimmy Carter and help himself by getting rid of his dissidents by having them sail from Cuba to Florida. In some cases, Castro had previously attacked the dissidents by calling them crazy and putting them in mental hospitals as punishment. When Castro released the dissidents, he also forced some of those jailed in mental hospitals to do the risky sailing as well. He told the media that some people were from mental hospitals.
This distorted news from 44 years ago is the most recent basis of Trump’s whining about bad immigrants. Not since then has any government selected people to be refugees at the USA. Trump is living in a past that was delusional 44 years ago!
Just like the rest of the Republican Party.
In the mid-70’s there were “stories” of Vietnamese “boat people,” refugees, settling in neighborhoods in Phoenix and wiping out the dog population. None of it true, of course.
Worse than Trumplethinskin are the other GOPQ vermin who are repeating this story including Shady Vance and Lyin’ Ted Cruz. Top US government officials, no less. We are certainly a nation in decline, perhaps way down the slope of decline. We’ll know in a few weeks whether we are so far gone as to commit national suicide.
Meanwhile, I may have to go out and buy a dog to protect my dog. Just in case, doncha know …
So now he’s inciting vicious irrational pogroms against both Black people and public-school officials.
This is clearly nothing more than hysterical made-up ravings by a party who know they’re about to lose and have absolutely nothing else to offer. And I really hope our “news” media get on the ball and report this for what it is.
It’s just blood libel directed at a different minority.
In a country with media institutions that have forfeited their duty to challenge lies and misinformation and a large fraction of the populace that lacks any critical thinking abilities, absurd nonsense like this should be expected.
I hope the country makes the only right choice in November but I’m skeptical. One more reason to vote for Kamala Harris is that she’s a realist. She said recently, and with the seriousness it deserved, that she was the underdog and, despite all of the fundraising successes she’s had, she is completely correct.
40 years ago, Reagan claimed that
black people on welfare were driving fancy cars because they were ripping off the tax payers. This was based on one (1) black individual who was defrauding the authorities. The racist south believed him, thinking millions of “welfare queens” were defrauding the authorities.
At least, that lie was physically plausible. Now they are claiming that abortions are taking place after (!) birth, that millions of illegal immigrants are voting (they are using Romulan cloaking shields since no one has caught them), the government wants to kill grandma with death panels et cetera. Republican voters keep getting dumber.
The major surgical suite, with multiple surgeons, anesthesiologists, oxygen tanks and masks, operating room nurses, bags of blood for IVs, scrub rooms, etc., in the grade school nurse’s office is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.
In other breaking news, Trump admits he lost in 2020. He says it was by a “whisker” though it was 7-million popular votes and approximately the same Electoral College split as his win over Clinton. It’s not clear if he was just riffing when he said it in an interview, and so not really aware of what he said. We’ll have to wait for the GOP spin doctors to work on this.
Arizona GOP Launches ‘Eat Less Kittens’ Billboards Referencing Unfounded Conspiracy Theory
As Click and Clack used to say, “Unencumbered by the thought process.”
Jordan Klepper puts it in perspective.
Klepper recalled his own experience with medical attention at school.
“One time in middle school I told the nurse I had a stomachache and she put a Band-Aid on my stomach,” he said. “I have a hard time believing they’re doing full-scale operations.”
I suspect that many…maybe most…schools in much of the US don’t have a “school nurse” on staff. You feel sick, they send you home unless you fall over, then they call the EMTs.
In Australia the number one cause of extinction of native fauna is feral and domestic cats. A few million less of them would be nice and making use of all that protein is a good idea.
Watching now. Kamala has already called out Project 2025. ABC live blog here :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-11/live-trump-harris-presidential-debate-latest/104328002
Thanks @StevoR: can’t stand to watch live but this is a good live stream that hits the high and low points.
Gotta love Australia’s ABC: our 8c a day doing us good.
The “debate” (where Trump refuses to answer questions but goes off on whatever issue is on his mind) has so far turned out as expected.
He is recycling the usual lies and coming up with new ones.
My favv claim is he was upset the judges threw out his 2020 election lawsuits because he “had no standing”. He does not understand that legal term. It is in a way worse than losing. It means he has no case at all!
Doesn’t Trump look old? An old, sad, angry lying, weird fraud..
Trump looks even more unfit for office than Trump has ever been (& he never was fit for office) and Trump’s only getting worse.
Keeps attacking Biden too as if he’s confused about who he is facing..
The moderators keep letting Trump interrupt and go on for minutes, but Harris has been very good.
He sounded like a broken recorded repeating lies and nonsense over and over again.
So, that was the “debate”. Remains to see if any undecided voters are impressed by Trump’s performance, if they have not made up their minds yet they are probably not good at fact-checking.
Akira: about the origin of the immigrants stealing cats and eating them story, it was already an old anti-immigrant rumour when I was a wee lad. We blamed the Chinese back then. I would bet a careful journalist (ie nobody working the political press) could dig up such claims dating back a century or more.
The moderators definitely let the senile old man take over their role and interject without giving Harris time to respond. I wish they had continued to reiterate the actual question to trump after each of his rambling non-answers before moving on.
His closing statement was just…weird. I don’t think it contained a single complete sentence, he was clearly just spouting word salad and bizarre nonsense about the border and criminals and fracking and decline.
It was gratifying to hear Harris say ‘You are a disgrace.’
to his face.
@ 16 garydargan
Hey, I support eating pussy but not like that.
Silentbob #28
Seriously?
Nice comment, df.
@ ^ Silentbob : Classy.
(Does that really need a sarc tag.)
Incidentally the whole “eating pets” lie was told about Asian migrants back in the 1970’s -1980’s in Oz. A tired old recycled racist trope.
Which was bullshit then and is bullshit now.
As for the debate, Kamala won and by a big margin. I don’t think its just me saying that. She impressed and was cool and presidential. He got flustered, confused, looked old, angry,, tired and lost.
I really hope she gets a big bounce from this. She’s now got Taylor Swift’s endorsement.
BTW, I think cats are the number one predator pretty much everywhere there are cats.
You wouldn’t think the world’s most beloved memed animal would be also be the world’s greatest killing machine, but there you go.
Jesus. Like sitting through Thanksgiving dinner with your racist senile uncle and progressive grad student cousin. If Thanksgiving dinner was at senile racist uncle’s home in The Villages in FL.
@11 & 14 The last time I went to a public school it was to donate blood and all I got out of the deal was orange juice and some Lorna Doone cookies. Clearly I am doing something wrong if you can get elective surgery for free there.
@15 No, schools are required to have a school nurse… for insurance purposes. Generally, the nurses there can’t even give out aspirin. My federal workplace has two of them… one is pretty good, the other one is terrifying–monotone voice, 100 yard stare. I don’t want the second one touching me, unless she’s going to give me whatever horse tranquilizer she’s on.
(Apparently I’m too X-rated for Pharyngula X-D )
We heard about the cat and dog eaters long ago in the USA.
At the end of the Vietnam war, a lot of refugees flooded into the USA from Vietnam and Cambodia. So the mid 1970s.
And there were claims that they were eating the neighborhood dogs and cats.
The GOP (Faye Stewart II is of course, a Republican) was still making that claim in 2016, 40 years after the Vietnam war ended.
They never let go of a lie, just keep adding more of them.
df #34
pathétique
# 29 違う
Lol. Spinelessly passive-agressive as always. X-D
(For those who don’t know i.e. everybody, “df” is a reference to this pathetic child calling me a “demented fuckwit” on another blog and nearly getting banned. He trying to show me he’s got his big boy pants on by doing it again in the most cowardly and pathetic way imaginable. X-D )
Shoo child.
Silentbob you witless wanker, chigau is a woman. This has been told to you many times.
Where does deliberately misgendering someone sit on the OMG SO DISGUSTING scale you used to bemoan anti-Russian racism yesterday?
This is getting ridiculously off-topic, but I do think it’s interesting from a sociologocal perspective:
Notice how a silly, harmless, even vaguely feminist, non-explicit sexual double entendre (# 28) resulted in immediate condemnation – while the comment it was responding to (# 16) literally called for “making use of all that protein” of “a few million” cats, and was unremarked upon. X-D
“Let’s eat a million cats!”
Pharyngula: Meh
“Silly non-explicit double entendre about oral sex”
Pharyngula: Outrageous! How dare you say such things!
Americans are weirdly prudish. X-D
numerobis@26 I suspect there were probably claims the Irish ate dogs and cats back in the 19th Century. After all you can find anti-Irish propaganda images that portray them as apes, so “They eat dogs!” wouldn’t have been much of a jump.
df #27
Ta bite, est elle tres petite?
@ silent Bob
You need to stop acting like a demented fuckwit towards chigau.
She was absolutely justified in calling you demented fuckwit then, and your continued harassment and weird misgendering toward her only proves that her assessment was correct.
We all know what idiots ‘nearly got banned’ from Mano’s blog for filling the comment threads with troll arguments, and you are near the top of a short list.