NoneOfUrBusiness

What are Democrats to do here that can counter the infinite depth of lies of the other side?

Actually do something. The implementations of the right solutions are complex, but the solutions themselves are pretty simple to understand. Tax the wealthy invest in public services and infrastructure pass election reform fucking kill the filibuster already there are mountains of things that need to be done and democrats don’t care enough to do most of it. Republican lies only work as much as they do because they only need to sound better than the paper-thin Democrat excuse of “we’re trying but it’s complicated” when most people aren’t seeing results because the Democrats aren’t trying. If the DNC really wanted to improve things, they’d listen to people like Bernie and AOC who are calling for real change.

Israeli Nazis killed more than a thousand babies and this guy is still trying to whatabout their war crimes.

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Your annual reminder to BDS from Google. Well it’s basically impossible to boycott them, but you can still divest.

That seems outside the scope of the conversation. Remember that we were talking about defensive democracy; the Klan thing was straight up terrorism and not an issue of anti-democracy positions being allowed in politics.

PS: I just learned about this today while looking things up for this convo so I might be overlooking something or straight up wrong.

And result in president Vance? Nope, absolutely nope.

Had the defensive democracy been in place after the civil war, we could have banned Confederate symbolism, the Dixiecrats and the then Democrat party.

And then accomplished what? I mean many more people should’ve been executed or spent their life in prison, that’s for sure, but after the civil war there wasn’t a threat to democracy to defend against.

I mean there’s no right answer here, but do note that the same power of the state to ban Nazi symbolism and rhetoric is also used against pro-Palestinian activists, and this is from a perfectly democratic Germany. If people like the AfD come into power expect many more kinds of speech to become illegal.

You say “unfortunately” but do you really trust the GOP with this kind of power?

They could be, but that would require another amendment, or in other words either a 2/3 majority in both houses or 2/3 of all state legislatures. You’d never get that many people to give up their right to free speech, because as soon as you put one kind of speech on the table all speech is on the table. Would you trust Trump with that kind of power?

IF Nazi symbols were to be outlawed then the freedom of speech should not equal to freedom from breaking the law.

It does, though, because such a law would be struck down as unconstitutional. The First Amendment doesn’t just protect lawful speech; it protects all speech and the American government just barely carved out an exception for inciting violence. These amendments are part of the constitution, which stands above and restricts the rest of American law. If you made a law saying that Nazi symbols were illegal, your law would (at least theoretically) be illegal and struck down in court and people would retain the freedom to use Nazi symbols. You might take issue with that, but if only legal speech was allowed then… the government could just make any speech it doesn’t like illegal.

Again, the first amendment protects the right to free speech and association; as far as American law is concerned, Elon didn’t break any laws.

Is 53 out of 100 senate seats really enough to make country fall into authoritarian regime?

Well you’d need 60; 53 is enough to do a lot but you can’t amend the constitution or override filibusters.

Is the army really not constitutionally obliged to step in and save the day?

Usually when the army “saves the day” by removing a democratically elected president undemocratically we call that a military coup and it’s considered, to put it lightly, a bad thing.

America isn’t at all volatile as a democracy; as you surmised, it’s on the robust side (sans nonsense like citizens united). However, there’s not much that can be done when the anti-democracy guys won democratically not just the presidency, but also all government posts that would be able to stop them.

America doesn’t have a law forbidding the Nazi salute. It’d be against the first amendment.

I mean imagine if you could impeach the president without a majority. That would be the death of democracy. Just to put things in perspective: The GOP democratically won both houses of Congress and the presidency and because of DNC incompetence also has the Supreme Court. Them being able to do whatever the fuck they want is, in a way, democracy working as intended. It’d be weirder (and much more undemocratic) if there was a way to remove a sitting president without the Supreme Court or Congress.

An Israeli sniper just shot a kid. Yesterday or today I think.

That is, unfortunately, just what happens when Israel accepts a ceasefire. It’s definitely not good, but it’s better than when the genocide was going full steam ahead.

They also air-struck a refugee camp in the West Bank, which hasn’t been happening recently.

The ceasefire doesn’t cover the West Bank. Again not good, but this is how Israel does things and isn’t an indication that the ceasefire is going to fail.

The difference is, Trump is showing up with gasoline, a whole truck full of it, and spraying it on and wants to burn five other houses in addition to this one.

I’m not gonna say this assumption is wrong, because we’ll have to wait and see about that, but people who disagree with your position (including me) see what Biden was doing as nearly the worst way he could’ve handled the war in Gaza. Trump’s rhetoric is definitely worse than Biden, but on the ground what he did in his first term and what he’s doing now is what other US presidents were also doing، give or take symbolic actions like moving the US embassy. To borrow your analogy, the worst Trump could possibly do is put some lego bricks on the boulder and pretend he contributed to its structural stability. The whole thing boils down to: What can he do that Biden didn’t already do?

Also note that I’m discounting any possible relation between Trump and the ceasefire; if we assume he did contribute to the ceasefire then he becomes objectively the better candidate for Palestine no matter what he does from this point, but let’s not get into that.

I also like how every pretty valid criticism that could be levied at Biden because of his support for the war in Gaza somehow instantly applied, also, to Kamala Harris.

I mean it certainly didn’t help that she actively refused to break from Biden on Gaza, said the exact same things Biden was saying and had a VP that said he supported Israeli expansion.

So your answer to the question is “nothing”? And yes, the sum total of four settlers Biden sanction do qualify as “nothing”.

And I’ve found nothing indicating we have sent any more 2k pound bombs since May of 2024. So if we had, please provide a source reporting it.

Apparently there haven’t been any shipments since may, so my bad there.

Trump’s actions are empowering the genocide because they are clearly supportive of both Israel’s bombing and occupation.

I mean the problem is that this doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. You either do things or you don’t, things like empowering or slamming or come to Jesus moments are all rhetoric and rhetoric only matters when it starts affecting the real world. We’ll have to see if the ceasefire holds; if it does then it makes sense (in US foreign policy terms, I of course hate it) for Trump to continue shipments, if not then we can start talking about leopards eating faces. The settler sanctions had zero effect on the real world, so they don’t matter no matter how “empowering” lifting them may be.