gAlienLifeform

Nah, he was just looking out for himself and liked his odds better with the armed officers than with the angry mob. Fact is if he thought he could get away with imposing his ideal Christian dictatorship on all of us he'd do it in a heartbeat.

He's an asshole and an idiot who was stupid enough to work for Donald Trump in the first place, and thinking that moron dirtbags like him have anything valuable to say is only going to dig America into a deeper hole.

I'm not who you were asking, but I've got at least two problems with this,

The biggest problem is cherry picking examples to reach a conclusion while ignoring contradicting evidence. We had plenty of more successful pop culture stuff that had overtly progressive and feminist themes, and conservative stuff doing well isn't really a new phenomenon this year (the article even points this out where it talks about American Sniper and Passion of the Christ).

The second biggest problem is that the numbers underlying this are suspect - it's easy to manipulate streaming numbers and book sales, and church groups are taking whole congregations to movies if they think it's a culture war win. Also, reading Sydney Sweeney and hawk-tuah girl as conservative wins are stretches that the author never really justifies (not to mention seeing Beyonce getting shit out by the CMAs as anything other than a sign that country music executives don't like independent black women who already have successful music careers beyond their influence).

Which gets to a problem that might only bug me, but this article has nothing to say about any of the art it's bringing up and misses what I think could be an actually interesting conversation - what does the kind of art conservatives are getting into tell us about them? Like, the fact that they've meme-d around hawk-tuah girl, when did conservatives get "sex positive"? (rape positive if we're being honest, but that'd be a conclusion an article could build towards by actually engaging with the material)

e; ttpos

Author of the article? Probably yes. OP? No, this is a fascinatingly wrong opinion (imo).

Who fucking cares what Mike Pence thinks? Republicans hate his guts since Trump turned on him and everyone else has always hated him, and he doesn't have any political power, so his opinion has like negative news value these days. I guess mainstream media companies just can't resist his dynamic intellect and incredible charisma /s (that "/s" doesn't really feel sufficient, he makes Jeff Sessions look smart and Jared Kushner seem human)

Also Pence you forgot you aren't VP anymore

ABC also forgot, how the hell this moron's opinion is worth a whole ass news article is completely beyond me

Meanwhile, the success of Chappell Roan, Inside Out 2, and the Fallout TV series tell us absolutely nothing /s

They pretty clearly do matter since we're all getting what they're getting

Either way, this would explain the discrepancy between the average policy preferences of the generation as a whole and what the ones who voted in 2024 voted for, we're basically talking about different groups

Did Trump actually win more young voters overall or just a larger percentage of the voters who bothered to show up?

This only matters if people in the federal government are willing to say "You don't have any legal authority to tell me to do anything and I don't want to help you, so go away" which I wouldn't count on always being the case

A redundant efficiency department with no direct way to make changes, it's like nominating a sex trafficker to be the attorney general or something

In related news

While Trump has functionally escaped legal jeopardy by winning the election, the other criminal defendant breathing a sigh of relief after Trump’s election is Mayor Eric Adams, who is currently scheduled to go on trial in April on corruption charges. Thanks to Trump, the mayor’s day in court may never come.

Damien Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District whose office indicted Adams, is a presidential appointee who will almost certainly be replaced by Trump. Recall that back in 2017, less than two months into the first Trump term, his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, abruptly and publicly fired 46 U.S. Attorneys who had been appointed by President Obama. That list included Preet Bharara, a mentor and predecessor of Williams.

After getting rid of Bharara, Trump named — and later fired — Geoffrey Berman as his successor. Berman’s days were numbered when he began investigating and prosecuting members of Trump’s inner circle; Berman was replaced by Jay Clayton, a Wall Street securities attorney and golf buddy of the president.

It’s hard to imagine that Williams will not be replaced by Trump and gone long before Adams’s trial date. And that’s where things get interesting.

It’s not at all clear that a new Trump-picked prosecutor will continue the corruption case against Adams, especially in light of the subtle political quasi-alliance between Trump and the mayor. “I know what it’s like to be persecuted by the DOJ for speaking out against open borders,” Trump semi-joked at the nationally televised Al Smith charity dinner. “We were persecuted, Eric. I was persecuted, and so are you, Eric.”

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20241113121556/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trumps-big-win-was-also-a-win-for-eric-adams.html

When a third party swoops into a negotiation and steals your leverage it has a significant impact on what that middle ends up being