By David Futrelle
Never doubt the ability of Reddit’s The_Donald — the site’s biggest hangout for meme-loving, conspiracy pushing Trump stans — to turn the worst debacles into wins (in their minds at least) for our illegitimate president.
But today was something special, even by their standards. On a day that even some GOP Senators came close to calling Trump’s shameless behavior in Helsinki treasonous, The_Donald’s regulars praised Putin even more effusively than their boy Trump for what they saw as the rousing success of the faux summit.
And then they turned around and accused Hillary Clinton of collusion with Russia.
Here’s the top post in the subreddit at the moment, inspired by an evidence-free accusation from Putin during the joint press conference today.
The_Donald’s regulars expressed their faux outrage:
Meanwhile, some suggested literally colluding with Russia to get Hillary sent to Russia for a show trial:
Others, in the same thread, praised the great collusion cooperation between Trump and Putin.
![jomamasophatCA 66 points 9 hours ago These are Men. They are done fucking around with the Clinton cancer on the globe. They are well aware of communism's ills, and not playing that game either. Fuck globalism, fuck the deep state, fuck the media trying to start fires around the globe faster than Trump can put them out. I love seeing these two bad-ass motherfuckers getting along. Real recognizes real. permalinkembedunsavereportgive goldreply [–]River_26 7 points 8 hours ago Agreed. Been waiting for a comment like this. permalinkembedsaveparentreportgive goldreply [–]Automatiic 2 points an hour ago " I love seeing these two bad-ass motherfuckers getting along. Real recognizes real. "](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/yut8iyguoih.png?resize=572%2C828&ssl=1)
Nice racist kicker there, dude.
Someone called Drooperdoo added:
Elsewhere in the subreddit, The_Donald’s regulars mocked those who’ve accused Trump of treason today:
Irony isn’t just dead; it’s been run over by a steamroller.
Fucking assholes. Stupid, illogical assholes.
Reagan ended the cold war?
I guess that chap wasn’t born yet when the Soviet Union collapsed? Because that was not during the Reagan administration.
It’s also just such an incredibly simplistic view to take. There are a lot of different reasons the USSR collapsed.
I know the point of the post is more the ridiculousness of alt righters wanting to sacrifice their own rights and security to own the libs, but I just can never get over how terrible at history reactionaries always are.
WWTH
Of course they’re bad at history, even if they can spout the oft used doomed to repeat it quote.
But did anyone else feel like Billbong876 was basically trying to name the next axis alliance with us on the bad side?
Bonus question. When exactly did the US morph into the evil empire? Trump is a late stage symptom of tyranny. How many early ones did we miss?
It never ceases to amaze me how talented some guys are at pulling stuff out their asses
Truly,Miss Cobalt !!
What’s Equally striking to me is that the Alt-right,assorted Wing Nuts,and Developmentally Disabled,Paranoid Others are so lacking in Creativity….Same Tired,Antique Slogans : “Lock Her Up !” is as Quaintly Obsolete as New World Order,Soros !!,or R.F.I.D. chips.
Poor Losers Desperately Need a New Litany !!
Look, 17 US intelligence services say Russia did rig the US election; but Putin says they didn’t. And as the person who ordered the rigging of the US election, he’s in the best position to know.
@AuntieMameRedux:
I guess it depends on your perspective. Let’s talk Manifest Destiny, continent-wide genocide, enslavement of millions of people for 250+ years–that all sounds pretty evil empire to me. Not to mention theft of Hawaii from its people.
Oh, outside our own borders (once they were established)? How about our long history of destabilizing democratic governments and supporting strongmen through the Americas? All of these people fleeing their homes in Central America for a few generations now are our covert foreign policy chickens coming home to roost. A lot of that was justified as cold war politics, but often was simply self-interested economic exploitation and extraction of other regions. Throw in NAFTA and other neoliberal policies and the resulting massive displacement of subsistence farmers in Mexico who couldn’t support themselves anymore, well. And of course, our actions justified by 9-11 and the ongoing detention of people for more than a decade now…the list goes on.
When everyone identifies us as the sole surviving superpower, how do we not actually entrench ourselves further in corruption, exploitation, and whatever it takes to hold on to our power and privilege?
Perhaps I am overly pessimistic. But having finally gotten a glimpse of our shadowed history that isn’t taught in our schools, I can’t forget that our national ideals are rooted in blood and violence.
@WilliamHooper:
Could we just not with the ableism, please?
Conflicted.
I loathe Trump, and do believe he is financially compromised by Russian operators… I consider Putin a dead-eyed psychopath, but also a skilled national leader.
That said, I am glad to see us step away from our intensely confrontational behavior over the last decade.
Forget the morality of anything; Russia was NEVER going to allow us to overthrow Assad or “liberate” Crimea, because those are THE ONLY major naval bases they have on the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
Throw in our positioning of ‘first strike’ systems on their border, and we are lucky this wargaming hasn’t started a larger war with the other major nuclear power in the world.
@solecism:
Sorry,but I can’t think of these Reddit Morons more charitably than as Severely Developmentally Disabled_However,I suppose we could replace “Disabled” with Lacking.
@William Hooper
It isn’t a case of “maybe”. Don’t be an asshole.
@Christopher Green
Er, you mean you’re happy that the intensely confrontational behavior is directed at allies and trade partners instead?
They just can’t handle the cognitive dissonance from realizing the Orange Oaf is being operated like a glove puppet by Vladimir Putin’s hand up his a**e.
@AuntieMamRedux : Obama was already a pretty big giveaway. Not that he was an evil dictator, but his foreign policy leaned even more heavily into autoritharian crap than Bush, even tho he was supposedly democrat.
When supposedly left wing leaders continue and intensify the work of the would-be dictators, then it’s time to panic.
I’m afraid.
Yeah, I’d say that the taking of Hawaii was probably the first truly major step towards the U.S. becoming an evil empire. There was no anti-communism angle yet. There was no “we’re protecting it from the OTHER empires” bullshit that got a massive workout in the Spanish-American war that immediately followed. It was just a straight-up “this functional, internationally-beloved and well-connected nation isn’t having its government completely run to the whims of U.S.-based corporate interests, so fuck ’em.” And when Grover Cleveland got in for his second (non-consecutive) term of office, he was appalled and tried to get this fixed. The corporate-owned Congress then stalled him the hell out for four years until they could get one of Their Guys back in the Oval Office, and Hawaii was now part of the U.S. permanently. Theodore Roosevelt’s unexpected Presidency may have tried to shift away from the “evil” part, but it ramped up the “imperial” part even further. So things then got nastier and nastier with things like the 30-year occupation of Haiti designed to fuck it over as powerfully as possible, or the way that American oil interests gleefully took over from the oil interests of the fading British Empire following World War II (who had done much to render so much of the world into a dysfunctional mess as a matter of official operating procedure), and we end up inheriting the legacy of the worst crimes of European empires.
https://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/984887612fe3ed21795cc679c785c553
When I saw this foto, my first reaction was… not disgust, tho it is disgusting… not fear, tho it is frightening… not rage, tho it is enraging…. No, my instantaneous reaction was, “I’ve seen this before, a long time ago when I was researching a history question….
(fyi, that’s Neville Chamberlain “appeasing” Adolf Hitler)
hmmm… well, that doesn’t appear to be working at all!?!?!
– Daniel Patrick Moynihan
– /r/The_Donald
You need to start the links with an http, without the s, because wordpress is a bit archaic. You also need a url that ends with an image file extension, like .jpeg, for it to recognise it correctly. Both your image links are unsuitable, unfortunately.
I wonder if this place supports img tags, though…
[img]https://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/984887612fe3ed21795cc679c785c553][/img]
Hooray, my post got eaten. I wonder if it is linked to the editting magic this place has nowadays, becasue my eaten posts usually reappear after the edit window has expired.
Anyway, no. The mamoth hates your images. No inlining for you.
@ChimericMind:
Yeah, I forgot to include Haiti. Thanks for bringing that up.
Not just our occupation but how we orchestrated the giant multimillion dollar fine/compensation Haiti had to pay to France for loss of property when those uppity people had the nerve to free themselves. Haiti’s desperate poverty as a free nation is a direct result of the USA leading the other countries to refuse to recognize its sovereignty unless France was reimbursed. Worse than anything the IMF has ever leveraged on a country.
Christopher Green
“I consider Putin a dead eyed psychopath and also a skilled national leader.”
Scary how those 2 things dovetail
The Hillary story is that Putin has accused a former Russian (now UK citizen) dissident of paying her campaign and claims Trump might look into it if Putin lets him look into the 12 hackers. Despite the guy being in the UK and not under Trump’s control at all.
So…it’s not Russian money. Its ex-Russian UK money. If it even existed.
This breakdown in cognitive dissonance is interesting to watch unfold. On some level, they realize that all they have to do is toss out “whataboutisms” in feeble attempts to discredit or have their ideological opponents wringing their hands about hypocrisy. It doesn’t matter if they say “We should be friends with Russia” in one statement and “Hillary was with Russia the whole time!” in the next because anonymous users can belch any position out at any time and there’s no accounting for them. This is the 4chan/Reddit model and just yesterday, I witnessed it in meatspace.
I’ve mentioned my coworker before (we’ll call him Dan). Now, Dan is three years younger than me (I’m 33) and grew up on the internet pretty much as I have, but he’s more into online gaming than me and clearly stews in those environs. He’s always been one of those “soft” anti-SJWs (plays concern troll about calling out slurs, made a big deal about that “Count Dankula” guy, thinks Anita Sarkeesian was terrible), but every time I push back, he always responds with an ironic over-the-top answer, like “Hillary Clinton clearly eats babies!”. It’s never something real. The closest I get to real is his obvious hatred for Islam (he was born in Iran). I can appreciate his disdain for the current regime, but I keep pointing out that not every Muslim is a fundamentalist, nor does every Muslim follow every verse of the Qur’an. And every time I affirm my commitment to humanitarianism in light of refugees, his response is always “You should try living in Iran for a few months. Then you’ll see how cruel humanity can be.” As if hardship or cruelty will burn the humanity out of me or something.
“Canada can’t save the world!” he says. “We should limit immigration.” Again, I have no idea if he really means that or if he’s just trying to get a rise out of me. I suspect he really believes that, given his hostility to Islam, but he never actually gives me a straight up “this is what I believe” answer.
Recently though, our conversations have been veering into conspiracy theory territory. He’s brought up Seth Rich on multiple occasions, justifying the conspiracy with “What, you think she’s not capable of that? Her email said ‘Make an example of him!'” And every time, I have to defend Hillary Clinton from repeatedly-debunked accusations. Then he says “Why do you like Hillary Clinton so much?” And I say “That’s the thing, I’m not a big fan of hers! She has really problematic ties to Wall Street and her role in the coup in Honduras was indefensible! There’s legitimate stuff to criticize Hillary Clinton on, why does it always have to be conspiracy nonsense?!”
…”Hillary Clinton eats babies!”
But the one that really had me nervous was he dropped in that white people in South Africa are being killed by a racist government. This one I couldn’t let pass, because that’s Lauren Southern-level conspiracy crapola there. I pointed out that these farm attacks are happening all over the country, the victims are black and white and that the Afrikaner congress agrees with the ANC that there’s no element of racism to these. Again, his justification was something half-remembered about some guy saying “Kill whites” somewhere. I asked if it was Jacob Zuma and he couldn’t say for sure, but some South African politician said “kill whites” or something.
A Google Search lead me to Jacob Zuma singing some anti-Apartheid song ten years ago.
In fairness to Dan, I think this is just something he heard while gaming or watching some Twitch stream somwhere and he didn’t know its source, but he really wants to believe that black people (or Muslims or Asians) are just as racist as white people, so everyone should stop talking about it. Personally, I think he’s so immersed in the post-irony internet that he just wants to say all the swears he wants without social consequence. Because he’s one of those “all politicians suck” kinda people who doesn’t vote.
I just wish I didn’t have to be in the cubicle next to him.
I’ve been convinced for over a year that Putin had Trump by the balls one way or another. For the last month or so I’ve felt it had to be something worse than the pee-pee tape – something that would mean instant jail for Trump – simply because Trump seemed to eager to oblige Putin.
Looking at Trump’s happy face in Helsinki I’ve changed my mind. I think the most likely explanation is that he’s been bribed. I think Putin promised to make Trump the dictator of the USA so he can run it as a kleptocracy like Russia.
I hope I’m wrong.