LOL, how cute. You think that still matters.

Nothing stopping both houses from just reducing the threshhold because fuck you that’s why, getting Trump to sign off on it, then getting backing by the Supreme Court. Sure, that’s completely at odds with the Constitution, but who’s left to enforce it?

We already know that at least half the states will just blindly go along with it and say it’s to control immigration, or just because MAGA, or because fuck you that’s why. Threaten the rest with withholding of all federal funding until they get on board and watch how many fall in line. Sure, that’s even more highly illegal, but again…who’s going to stop them? Laws don’t mean shit if there is nobody willing or able to enforce them.

Donald Trump won the 2024 Presidential election in a free and fair election. The indisuptable fact is that 10 million or so Democrat voters chose, for whatever reason, to stay home. Your proposal essentially takes the whining that Trump has been spewing for 4 years and puts it on steroids. The 2024 election was not stolen; the American people had the chance to make their voices heard, and 10 million of them chose to say nothing. We as a country elected Trump, and now must start dealing with the consequences of that choice. Just like Trump, we don’t get a do-over if we don’t like the results.

A valid point, but remember that he’s also trying to avoid having the sword involuntarily shoved into him, too.

Like it or not, he sees the writing on the wall. He knows that the best he can probably hope for under a Trump administration if he doesn’t bend the knee is the end of his career. He is not the first who have bent the knee since the election, and he won’t be the last. Every aspect of society is going to quickly become a lot more favorable to Trump, even if only to avoid his ire. Just check out how much media coverage is now significantly more Trump-friendly. Even the independent Youtube influencers on the left are already taking a much more subdued tone towards Trump.

Jeff Bezos bent the knee out of fear of Trump retaliation. Judges have been pausing Trump and J6 related cases since he won. And before that, our entire judicial system bent to Trump’s will largely out of fear of violence if they don’t. Senators have been saying for years that they will not speak out publicly against Trump out of fear of retribution. Prominent Republicans have seen the end of their careers, driven out of the party at Trump’s hands. Much of social media have rescinded previous policies about banning disinformation. The two GA election workers that had to go into hiding after being targeted by the Trump Hate Machine. People openly marching in the streets promoting Nazi memorabilia and preaching white supremacy. Take a look up and down mainstream media over the past couple of weeks and see how much of the coverage has suddenly become infinitely more favorable towards Trump.

There’s a reason for that. Because even the most powerful and well-connected people in the country do not have the power to stand up to him without being run over. Scarborough is just trying to stay out of jail, just like everybody else. The country is now Trump’s, and most people are just trying to find where their place is in TrumpWorld, because the world they lived in before no longer exists, and there is a growing number of people that are saying that they want it this way.

I mean, you’re still free to stand behind your Constitutional protections and speak out openly against Trump all you want. Feel free to do just that. But when people with infinitely more resources and influence than you or I could ever dream of are having second thoughts and opting to bed the knee instead, you may want to think about why. Constitutional protections don’t mean jack shit if the people charged with enforcing those protections are the ones laughing in your face as they cuff you.

Fighting a battle you have no chance of winning isn’t bravery. It’s suicide. And for those who are going to rush to the downvote button, remember that youtube is a thing. There is exactly nothing stopping you from going on youtube, speaking against Trump, and trying to rally the troops. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

At the end of the day, most people are just trying to keep their heads down, make it through the day, and make it through life. Celebrities are no exception. Very few people are going to be willing to sacrifice everything they’ve worked for, and possibly even their freedom, to fight a battle that they cannot win.

This is very true, but you’d think that in a district that voted nearly 70% to deport them, you’d also get at least one loud voice speaking against them. Either on the news, social media, Youtube, wherever. This is why I believe that at least some of them went on TV or talked to the pollsters preaching about how much they love the Haitians because it was the politically correct thing to say, then went right to the voting box and voted Trump.

This isn’t the case.

If your assets are being seized, it’s (normally) because you are unable to pay whatever judgement was levied against you with cash. If your fairy godfather magically appears and puts up the money necessary so your assets won’t be seized, the judge isn’t going to care. All his job is is to ensure the plaintiffs are made as whole as possible. He will (generally) not care how your debt is paid or by whom. If the debt is paid, the debt is paid and you get to keep your stuff.

Heck, Elon musk could have swooped in himself, offered to buy infowars for 1.5 billion (which, let’s be real, wouldn’t even count as a rounding error to Musk) to satisfy the entire Sandy Hook judgement with the plans of just handing the whole thing right back to Jones for $1. And the families wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it. As far as the courts are concerned, the families were made whole. The families don’t really get to decide how they are made whole.

I told them that was going to be a bridge too far.

The valuation is essentially what someone is willing to pay for it, and in this case, there are only 2 bidders to value it.

Nitpick: This is probably the case 99% of the time, but there is the outside possibility that there were some restrictions on the auction that we do not know about that caused potential bidders to shy away, therefore lowering the perceived value of the assets artificially.

You are correct. It’s just that because the details of the bids are sealed, it appears on the surface that the Onion bid was too low relative to the value of the asset and the competitive bid. The hearing is to clear that misconception up; The onion bid + incentives thrown in (debt relief + benefits to other creditors) actually brings the overall value of the bid to above the value of the competing bid, and possibly of Infowars itself. This means that not only is the Onion bid the actual winning bid, the bid is of greater financial benefit to not only the sandy hook families, but to Jones’ creditors and ultimately Jones himself.

This is normally routine, but given all of the players involved, it just opens the door to a lot of fuckery. Under normal circumstances, a hearing like this wouldn’t even be noteworthy, much less newsworthy.

I’ll let people who know legalese say it better than I do, but the gist of the answer is:

A judge cannot seize a piece of property to settle a debt, then dramatically undervalue it in order to say that the seizure satisfies only a smaller portion of the debt instead.

So in a case like this, if Infowars was valued at $10 million for example. The judge can’t just arbitrarily say it’s only worth $1 million, and therefore the seizure only satisfies $1 million of the debt instead of $10 million. Further, you can’t take something valued at $10 million, put it up for sale for $1 million, then say that the defendant still owes another $9 million, because you’re effectively increasing the judgement against him by that $9 million. I’m probably not saying this perfectly right, but I’m sure you get the idea.

Judges can allow sales like this to go through, but the winning bidder has to show why the other incentives being offered should be accepted over just straight up cash. If a judge just looks at the bottom line and sees (for example), the Onion bid $1 million but Jones’ associate bid $6 million. A judge is absolutely going to hold a hearing and want to ask about 75 million questions about why the “winning bid” was so low. If the Onion and the families go in and say “We want Onion to get the bid. We are willing to waive $5 million off of the total debt owed to us, along with waiving $X million so Infowars’ creditors can get paid. Therefore, our bid is actually higher than the competitive bid after other incentives have been considered.”, a judge should sign off on it with no issues from there.

Again, I hope I’ve explained this correctly. I don’t know any of the specifics of the auction so the numbers I used were pulled out of my ass for discussion purposes.

The biggest concern I have is that the Trump administration could very well meddle in this case and use whatever quazi-legal bullshit they can come up with to essentially hand the company back to Jones through the back door, if not just invalidate the judgement against him entirely on the basis of because fuck you that’s why. Doing so would be a great way for Trump to advertise the rewards that his cronies can expect for those who are deemed loyal enough while costing him no political capital at all.

I do not like this. I do not like this at all.

The whole auction was basically a continuation of the war between Alex Jones and the families he defamed, as the only two bidders were someone bidding on Jones’ behalf and the Onion, with the backing of the families. There seems to be concerns over if this is in the best interest of Jones, the desires of the Sandy Hook families seems to be being ignored, and there is a very real possibility that this judge could rule (legally or otherwise) that the Onion’s bid is disqualified and since Jones’ associate is the only other bidder, he wins. Jones essentially keeps Infowars, continues on with business as usual, and probably takes a giant shit on the Sandy Hook families as his victory lap.

Nope. That’s the voting results from Springfield, Ohio’s district. That’s the district with 20,000 Hatian immigrants in it that they said were welcomed and beloved members of the community that revitalized business in the city…and then voted 2:1 to have them kicked out.

Every single pick he has made so far has made our nation less safe. Like outright, not even trying to hide it.

Look at it this way. Outside of long-term cocksuckers like Gaetz, do you honestly think Trump even knows who 95% of these people are? Or for that matter cares? Do you think that the crayon-eaters Trump has advising him has a clue who 95% of these people are?

Trump has his orders. Get these people into these positions, come hell or high water. And Trump is passing those orders down the chain of command. The only “question” is who’s giving Trump the orders. And if you want the answer, give it a few months and then follow the money. It’s not like the trail of breadcrumbs is hard to follow. The crumbs they throw down are the size of a loaf.

I completely understand that weak cybersecurity is a threat, but we already have the Department of Defense, Department of National Intelligence and Department of State covering it, so there is already built in redundancy, why do we need DHHS doing it too?

Given the fact that Trump is going out of his way to install the worst candidates for every possible government position in existence, I’m actually glad for all the redundancy. With any luck, Trump won’t notice that at least one of these departments exists, leaves someone with more than 3 functioning brain cells in charge, and gives us at least some semblance of cybersecurity.

Can someone please remind me exactly why Republicans are trying to speedrun the collapse of, well, everything?

Yes, finally the public will have a say as to what gets taught in these private schools

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I stopped caring about the opinions of the people of Ohio when they went on the news for months talking about how the Hatian immigrants were a welcome part of the community and revived local business, then turned around and voted by 2:1 in favor of throwing them all out because they eat dogs.

He’s sending the same message to military commanders that he just sent to the US senate: “I am in charge. Get on board, or get run over.” Success here will ensure his control of the US military. The “hearings” will be a bunch of generals either being thrown in jail, or telling Trump what he wants to hear and throwing Biden under the bus. These hearings will be used to purge non-MAGA commanders from the military and give Trump complete control.

Trump is just carrying on the military tradition of sexually assaulting women and then using your position of power over them and their careers to keep them quiet. He’s perfect for the job. He’ll fit right in Trump’s inner circle. There’s Trump, Gaetz, Hegseth…they’ll cozy up together on the weekends and talk about how to be more rapey and stuff. Locker room talk and all that, don’t ya know…

It’s not even consequences any more. That ship has sailed.

People simply are not grasping the fact that (assuming they even care) if it’s not legal, Congress can just make it legal. And if it’s unconstitutional, the Supreme Court is there to declare it constitutional. The guardrails are off. Anybody not fully aboard the Trump train has been purged. He has control of every branch of government, and over half of the state governments. He can literally do what he wants because not only did the Supreme Court explicitly tell him so, but also because everybody with any kind of power, influence, or resources to stand in his way have been successfully removed. The only people left are people that will gladly allow him to step all over them so he doesn’t get his shoes dirty while walking. Remember, the Supreme Court explicitly gave Trump the right to Seal-Team-Six somebody with absolute impunity. They literally asked Trump’s team if immunity meant that he could Seal-Team-Six someone and not be prosecuted for it, Trump’s lawyer explicitly said yes, and the Supreme Court voted in his favor. So even on the off chance you do stand up to Trump and become enough of a nuisance, he can legally just have you killed because fuck you that’s why.

There is absolutely nothing, nothing that stops Trump from invalidating freedom of the press, on the absurdly flimsy premise of “fake news is not protected by the First Amendment”. And since he gets to decide what is and isn’t “fake news”, this means he would literally get to decide what media outlets continue operating, and which ones see their CEOs jailed for “first amendment violations.”

If Trump says that, and Congress passes a bill that says he can do that, and the Supreme Court says that banning “fake news” is “constitutional”, and incoming AG puppet Matt Gaetz is willing to pursue charges against CNN and MSNBC on Trump’s orders, there goes freedom of the press. Full stop. Sure, it’ll still technically exist. But freedom of religion is also enshrined in North Korea’s constitution. Go over there with a Bible and let me know how that works out for you. The same thing would apply here. Laws and protections that the government is no longer willing to uphold or enforce may as well not exist.

The Supreme Court has already invalidated parts of the 14th amendment for being “too vague” and therefore unenforceable. The second the Supreme Court did that, the Constitution immediately stopped being the Sacred Law of the land and became simply a really old piece of paper with some guidelines that can be ignored when they become politically inconvenient. They are already talking about doing the same with the 22nd amendment. What’s to stop them from doing it to the 19th? Or the 13th? Or just all of them? What’s to stop them from just saying “The Constitution as a whole was written over 200 years ago and is no longer suitable for use as the basis of our legal framework in modern times” and just suspend the whole thing? They already invalidated parts of it because they felt like it, and the citizens did nothing. They’re talking about invalidating another part of it, and citizens are doing nothing. What’s to stop them from just saying “fuck it” and invalidating the whole damn thing? It seems to be the endgame anyway.

The chances of this happening are significantly above zero. We will be coronating a king in every way possible without actually using the word “king.”