Agreed. Anyone with a modicum of common sense knew this was the plan all along. It's not like it was hard to find people saying this before the election.
I'm not excusing elected officials. I would go further and blame Vivek Ramaswamy for playing a huge part in pitching the failed DOGE. I'm just pointing out that the Trump admin deliberately lied about its connection to Project 2025, which made DOGE's connection unclear to people who consume Fox News etc.
People are downing my comment for suggesting that many people who don't take the internet straight into their veins every day might have had a hard time connecting the dots between DOGE and Project 2025.
I think at some point people need to take some accountability for their own information ecosystem.
It really is a Catch-22 though, since the imperative and ability to do that is itself derivative of the information ecosystem.
Which is why I blame, more than anyone else, the actual smart people (largely cynical, craven, and greedy) who didn’t through their weight against this stuff when it could’ve mattered.
All they had to do was skim any decent daily, weekly, or monthly newspaper or news magazine in 2024. Folks whose only news sources are Facebook shares and Fox News are simply stupid. The reason they don’t know WTF is going on may be due to their news sources, but they chose those. That’s a really stupid thing to do.
Well, sure. There’s most of a century of science behind the finding that votes aren’t really made or motivated by the things a democratic idealist might hope they are, nor do most voters have half a clue what’s going on or how anything works.
All modern campaigns assume large segments of the electorate are very dumb. Because they in-fact are. You’ll get your ass handed to you by a less-idealistic campaign every time if you pretend things are otherwise.
The trouble now is the huge private media empire capitalizing on that fact was deliberately built over a period of 40+ years and is now entrenched. Countering that is gonna be hard and take generations. Everyone alive now is going to have to suffer for decades before it maybe gets better.
> would go further and blame Vivek Ramaswamy for playing a huge part in pitching the failed DOGE
Ramaswamy is a useless idiot. He wasn’t useful in getting DOGE to exist. (He rallied voters in states Trump couldn’t or otherwise would have won. It’s why he was easily cast aside–he didn’t bring anything to the table.)
I know people who didn’t know the government had shut down until more than two weeks into it (and on discovering it were like “oh shit this might affect us!” because their whole lifestyle depends on money from the government).
The same people didn’t know the east wing had been torn down until a couple weeks after it happened.
In both cases they only found out when my wife told them.
They pay attention to lots of “news” but it’s AI videos of mass crimes and viral “look how bad democrats are” garbage.
That people are dense motherfuckers (can we stop sugar coating how stupid these people are if they’re surprised about any of these things? I mean dumb as a bag of hammers kinds of dumb, dimmest bulb in a box of broken bulbs, that level of dumb) doesn’t mean this wasn’t clear.
It is 100% these morons’ own fault they’re surprised.
I think you're being too harsh. "Dense motherfuckers"?
My own sense is that these people are willfully ignorant. That is, they seek to find confirmation of what they already believe. Kind of human nature, really. It's sad that there is a complete infrastructure that spouts what these people want to hear, make lots of money doing so.
I’m done with treating willful morons nicely. The last year has turned me from a Vonnegut to a Twain, if you will. A good chunk of My Fellow Americans are just awful, and after 25ish years of serious political awareness & attention and watching what’s happened over that time my benefit-of-the-doubt tanks are dry, having been siphoned at high rates continuously that entire time. Probably I was myself stupid ever to have thought better of these dangerous dipshits. It’s not like I wasn’t pretty familiar with history, but somehow, it took watching people be extremely dumb and never learn over a long period to break through what I suppose was some kind of savior-complex ego thing that made me want to be the kind of person who believed people were mostly pretty good. How embarrassing.
They’re dense motherfuckers, and that’s the generous take. They’re a black hole of stupid. That’s the level of density we’re dealing with. And that’s just the America I’ll be living with until I die. One that’s been trashed so thoroughly by the idiot brigade that hope for actual improvement is gone for, best case, several more decades, which will amount to the rest of my life.
They’ve wrecked shit out beyond the horizon of my plausible lifespan, in all likelihood. They’ve been continuously working toward doing this my whole life. No, I’m absolutely not being too harsh.
Maybe cutting some slack would be more appropriate if the voting public didn't make decisions that end up killing a large number of people and turning the U.S. into a fascist state.
>No, it wasn't clear. I know several Trump voters who either didn't know Project 2025 existed or believed the lies that it was a liberal hoax.
>To anyone paying an ounce of attention, yeah it might have been clear.
Many, many folks were out there long before the election saying (both as promises -- from the Trumpers and warnings -- from pretty much everyone else) that Project 2025 would be the blueprint for a new Trump administration.
That some folks either ignored or disbelieved it doesn't make it "unclear." Rather, it means that a lot of people believed the lies. Which says more about those who believed such lies than it does about everyone else.
And to put a fine point on it, what more could others have done to disabuse those folks of the lies told them by the Trump campaign? Seriously.
