God, I love Sliwa getting trounced (with 69% of votes counted, he's at 7.7%)

He's always been an opportunistic brownshirt. Go take a lint brush to your beret.

Ironically, he's the only candidate in any race I've actually interacted with. We were both getting the day's newspaper at Penn Station back when I was commuting at hours when sane people still have an hour or two before their alarm goes off (I presume he was on his way to his morning radio show). Nothing beyond head nods and "you first" gestures because I didn't really have anything to say to him beyond "you suck", so I left it as neutral encounters. Why get hot and bothered at that hour?

"Conservative" has been the polite term for "Right-winger" for decades, maybe a century or more.

Sometimes "archconservative" makes an appearance, but such phrasing is always intended to soften the impression of extreme views and deflect implied criticism.

It's come to the fore due to recent events, with Charlie Kirk being incessantly described -- even by nonconsevative media -- as a "conservative activist", not at the right-wing agitator that he was.

Objectively, there are distinctions that could be made between "conservative" and "right-wing", but not in everyday language and current common usage. There's no boundary that reliably sorts views into different categories; all RW points of view are welcome under the "conservative" umbrella. After all, it made recruiting much easier, facilitated bringing all these factions to the current Republican coalition.

I don't bring this up to save the word "conservative". The people who'd most like to do that, the NeverTrumpers who spent their careers building an extreme voter base who would just swallow whatever their favorite people told them. Not only were they part of the problem, they've repeatedly shown themselves to be absolutely useless in shifting any of their former audience off the wingnut reservation.

I just want the rest of us to not sugar-coat open, blatant extremism. Soft-peddling hasn't worked before, and it won't do anything now.

Kindness Is Their Kryptonite: Why Are Right-Wingers Mad About the New Superman?

Steve Shives is a Maryland-based YouTube content creator who regularly covers comics, Star Trek, and politics. The latter is because he just can't shut up, and that's a good thing.

Agreed. "Democratic socialism" misuses the term "socialism". It's "New Deal-ism."

The New Deal is not and never was socialism. That's a RW characterization.

There are three types of people who call the New Deal "socialism":

1) RWers, who call EVERYTHING THEY DON'T LIKE "Socialism";
2) Superlefties, who want to claim credit for the New Deal, even though their ideological ancestors in the 30s and 40s railed against it as a sellout and insufficient, because those people WERE socialists and wanted actual socialism, and the New Deal was too much a compromise for them to tolerate. And
3) People who've picked up the definition from either of the other groups.

Everybody is stupid sometimes, and just about everyone can be reliably stupid over cetain things. Con men rely on this.

They search out what makes people switch off the more rational parts of their brain and work the irrational parts. Addict them to it, if they can.

It's the business model of FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, and a host of grifters, including Taco Donnie himself.

Eeeewwwww! I found a Hegseth in my Journal

I was looking back through my DU Journal posts and found this from 2019:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100211862136

My preference for the whole lot of them is "Bolshevik" with a prefix on it

There are a number of radical factions who see Trump as their ticket to grabbing all the marbles.

There has always been a faction of the Conservative Movement that had a sneaking admiration for the Bolsheviks. Not the ideology, of course, but for the ability of a small radical faction to play other factions against each other, maneuver for leverage, and being absolutely ruthless when they saw a chance to take total control.

These Conservo-Bolsheviks have always wanted to do away with the New Deal, get rid of the income tax, any program or policy that helps ordinary people. To them, America's "golden age" was literally that: the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, when "great men" built great industries, amassed huge fortunes, and didn't have to put up with any damn government hampering them for trifles like "grinding people under their heels." This is the leadership of the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society and Project 2025, people like Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh who actively worked to paint Democrats as "the enemy". They demonized Bill and Hillary Clinton so that less extreme Republicans wouldn't decide they could work with a "pro-business" Democrat who was content to work with and tweak the Reaganomics framework rather than to reverse it. If the squishier ones went that way, the Conservo-Bolsheviks could kiss any chance of more extreme measures goodbye. Thus, we've had the last 35 years, with Republicans hamstringing Democrats at every opportunity while going for broke whenever the opportunity presents itself, all while consistently putting conservative operatives on the Federal courts.

Overlapping with them are the Pluto-Bolsheviks. They share a lot of goals with the Conservo-Bolsheviks, but being the guys footing the bills, they want to make sure the outcome is tailored to their liking. This is the Kochs, the Mercers, all sorts of billionaires and multi-millionaires. This group was especially active in trying to get enough support for a new constitutional convention, where the nation's foundations could just be rewritten to their liking, locking in their own personal obsessions and making reform pretty much impossible. And by making reform impossible they would make revolution inevitable.

Next up are the Theo-Bolsheviks, an odd coalition of extremist Evangelical Protestants and right-wing Catholics. They think America has been a moral nosedive since the 60s, and they're out to put the country "back" to a place it never really was, but the facade makes them all tingly. These are the various Trump-loving Evangelicals who rationalize his behavior as that of a modern King Cyrus, the hardliners of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Opus Dei people, all the Catholic RWers on the Supreme Court, etc. Even if the Theo-Bolsheiks came out on top, they're doomed to simply turn on each other due to the "Catholics aren't Christian" views of the Evangelicals. But for the time being they have enough in common with each other and the other factions that they can work together on "step 1: taking control."

The latest addition are the Techno-Bolsheviks: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and others who have adopted Curtis Yarvin as their guru. Yarvin argues that American democracy is a failed experiment that should be replaced by an accountable monarchy, similar to the governance structure of corporations. They fully believe they're the only ones who have brains. The rest of us are pretty much insect drones, and lesser beings whose expertise can be replaced with AI. In other words, they're F***ING NUTS, and they'd be harmless if they were muttering into their cups together at some dive bar, but instead they're some of the richest men in the world, and their views overlap enough with the other groups that they're all useful to each other.

After 4 hours, my reply to this YouTube video has 220 likes and 9 replies, all positive

The original video is from Thomas Powell Jr., a YouTube version of videos he puts out on Tik Tok and Instagram as a Chicago-area social media creator, this particular one about a North Carolina woman explaining her support for Trump's tariffs as an antidote to various forces that closed textile mills in her area.

A comment I left there has, at the time of this writing, 220 likes and 9 replies. The replies are all of the "YAS!" or the "THAT and this other thing!" variety.

Because it's NOT just one person, it's several collections of zealots who see him as their "big chance"

There has always been a faction of the Conservative Movement that had a sneaking admiration for the Bolsheviks. Not the ideology, of course, but for the ability of a small radical faction to play other factions against each other, maneuver for leverage, and being absolutely ruthless when they saw a chance to take total control.

These Conservo-Bolsheviks have always wanted to do away with the New Deal, get rid of the income tax, any program or policy that helps ordinary people. To them, America's "golden age" was literally that: the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, when "great men" built great industries, amassed huge fortunes, and didn't have to put up with any damn government hampering them for trifles like "grinding people under their heels." This is the leadership of the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society and Project 2025, people like Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh who actively worked to paint Democrats as "the enemy". They demonized Bill and Hillary Clinton so that less extreme Republicans wouldn't decide they could work with a "pro-business" Democrat who was content to work with and tweak the Reaganomics framework rather than to reverse it. If the squishier ones went that way, the Conservo-Bolsheviks could kiss any chance of more extreme measures goodbye. Thus, we've had the last 35 years, with Republicans hamstringing Democrats at every opportunity while going for broke whenever the opportunity presents itself, all while consistently putting conservative operatives on the Federal courts.

Overlapping with them are the Pluto-Bolsheviks. They share a lot of goals with the Conservo-Bolsheviks, but being the guys footing the bills, they want to make sure the outcome is tailored to their liking. This is the Kochs, the Mercers, all sorts of billionaires and multi-millionaires. This group was especially active in trying to get enough support for a new constitutional convention, where the nation's foundations could just be rewritten to their liking, locking in their own personal obsessions and making reform pretty much impossible. And by making reform impossible they would make revolution inevitable.

Next up are the Theo-Bolsheviks, an odd coalition of extremist Evangelical Protestants and right-wing Catholics. They think America has been a moral nosedive since the 60s, and they're out to put the country "back" to a place it never really was, but the facade makes them all tingly. These are the various Trump-loving Evangelicals who rationalize his behavior as that of a modern King Cyrus, the hardliners of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Opus Dei people, all the Catholic RWers on the Supreme Court, etc. Even if the Theo-Bolsheiks came out on top, they're doomed to simply turn on each other due to the "Catholics aren't Christian" views of the Evangelicals. But for the time being they have enough in common with each other and the other factions that they can work together on "step 1: taking control."

The latest addition are the Techno-Bolsheviks: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and others who have adopted Curtis Yarvin as their guru. Yarvin argues that American democracy is a failed experiment that should be replaced by an accountable monarchy, similar to the governance structure of corporations. They fully believe they're the only ones who have brains. The rest of us are pretty much insect drones, and lesser beings whose expertise can be replaced with AI. In other words, they're F***ING NUTS, and they'd be harmless if they were muttering into their cups together at some dive bar, but instead they're some of the richest men in the world, and their views overlap enough with the other groups that they're all useful to each other.

"Antichrist" you say? As God as my witness, I'll never pass up a chance to repost this