Good vs Evil, Light vs Darkness, Love vs Hate. It's the final showdown and we've got one shot to vanquish the rot in our political system. If we don't do this, our grandchildren will never forgive us. but I ain't scared. I know my !khive got this. There's no way Drumpf is stepping foot in the White House ever again. We can't

let Project 2025 happen

let a narcissist near the nuclear football

allow republicans to continue stacking the Supreme Court

allow the country to backslide when it comes to abortion and women's rights

allow a racist to be the most powerful man in the world

let down our BIPOC brothers and sisters

let down immigrants

let down young women looking for a role model

let down Oprah, Lil John, Eminem, Beyonce, Amy Schumer, John Oliver, Bill Gates, Jennifer Lopez, Rihanna, LeBron James, Cardi B, Joe Biden, Barrack Obama, and Buzz Aldrin

It's now or never.

Harris botched interview with Muslim influencer by celebrating ‘bacon’ as ‘a spice’ https://t.co/8lXPeLjWDi pic.twitter.com/dSJjYTON8l

— New York Post (@nypost) November 4, 2024

You got this Queen!

!nonchuds !khive cant believe the chuddies think it's some L

A few days ago they had Trump leading by 0.4% (see https://rdrama.net/h/kamala/post/312531/the-dead-heat-in-wisconsin-and) but now it's about a perfect split. This is crazy. It's no guarantee /ourgirl/ will take it but it's a sure sign of Trump losing ground there.

!khive WE'RE BREAKING THE CONDITIONING TOTAL TRUMP DEATH

https://tiktok.com/@kamalahq/video/7433466033429646635

Audio is from one of very many Daniel Larson meltdowns

Kiwi Friends link

!nonchuds !khive 24 HOURS TO GO LETS GET OUT THE VOTE

Ladies, are you READY?! 🤚

Let’s. Do . This! 🇺🇸✨ pic.twitter.com/XbBY85RRUm

— Jeras Ikehorn (@JerasIkehorn) November 2, 2024

!khive !nonchuds

Let's. Do . This! 🇺🇸✨

Title.

She's so dramatic

This is incredible. A Puerto Rican voter cites Donald Trump appearing with a garbage truck — an attempted reference to Biden’s comments — as an added insult after the MSG debacle. https://t.co/AV9TwTQolL

— Jessy Han (@hjessy_) November 3, 2024

In case you missed it:

>Random comedian during a Trump rally calls Puerto Rico a garbage patch

>Biden said "these people are garbage"

>Trump wanted to mock Biden's "basket of depolrables" moment

>Cue: Dukakis-tier photo-op

Who the frick thought this was a good idea lmfao

Me about his campaign officials last month:

Trump is a narcissist who, ever since he took over the GOP 8 years, ago reshaped the party in his image. This is probably good if you're an Iraqi child, but bad for his own reelection propects since he doesn't give a shit about anything other than complete obedience. Say goodbye to competent ruthless campaign officials like Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, say hello to Bogdanova, Tulsi "Less than 1 percent" Gabbard and whichever one of his dimwit sons is not currently hunting another species to extinction in Botswana.

BREAKING: Ann Selzer defends her Harris+3 Iowa poll on Halperin's show, said her sample was "pretty good"

"We got more than a thousand people... we made it represent the state. We just extract those who meet likely voter criteria."

"Do they look different from the last time?…

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) November 3, 2024

!nonchuds !khive

chuddies

INSANE: Professor at ⁦@UnivOfKansas says that men who don't vote for Kamala should be lined up and shot.

He then asks that line to be cut from the recording so the dean doesn't find out.

Any comment @UnivOfKansas?pic.twitter.com/3TotbHSqLa

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) October 9, 2024

!nonchuds !khive Where's the lie?

!nonchuds !khive LET'S GO

A WSJ article looked into the rise in food prices and said:

Many small manufacturers that have raised their prices have another explanation. They say they also are being squeezed by the distributors who act as gatekeepers to many supermarkets.

...

These days, the chief executive of Yellowbird Foods relies on national distributors to ship his product to stores, a process he said is riddled with obscure costs that make it hard to know what, if anything, he'll be paid.

...

Many smaller food makers complain they are being gouged, and that fees and other charges that stream in from distributors have forced them to raise their prices to stay in business.

So basically, every voice that said that greedflation was a conspiracy theory was wrong and Kamala was 100% right.

!khive !nonchuds VOTE early and often

In the game Jenga, players take turns removing wooden blocks from a rickety tower and then stacking them back on the top. Each removed piece makes the base more wobbly; each block put back on top makes it more unbalanced until it eventually topples.

This, I'd argue, is basically how we should be thinking about the stakes of the 2024 election for American democracy: an already-rickety tower of state would be at risk of falling in on itself entirely, with catastrophic results for those who live under its shelter.

We live in an era where democracies once considered "consolidated" --- meaning so secure that that they couldn't collapse into authoritarianism --- have started to buckle and even collapse. As recently as 2010, Hungary was considered one of the post-Communist world's great democratic success stories; today, it is now understood to be the European Union's only autocracy.

Hungarian democracy did not die of natural causes. It was murdered by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who seized control of nearly every aspect of state power and twisted it into cowtools. Not just the obvious things, like Hungary's public broadcaster and judiciary, but other areas --- like its tax administration and the offices regulating higher education.

Bit by bit, piece by piece, Orbán --- whose support Trump regularly touts --- subtly took a democracy and replaced it with something different.

In this, he was a trailblazer, creating a blueprint of going from democracy to autocracy that has been followed, to varying degrees of success, by leaders in countries as diverse as Brazil, India, Israel, and Poland.

The central question of this election is whether voters will grant former President Donald Trump the power to resume his efforts to place the United States on this list.

A predictable crisis\

Trump's statements and policy documents like Project 2025 amount to a systematic Orbánist program for turning the government into an extension of his personal will. Their most fundamental proposal, a revival of Trump's never-implemented Schedule F order, would permit the firing of upward of 50,000 career civil servants.

This is the kind of thing that's easy to dismiss as so much insider Washington drama, but the stakes are sky-high: Beyond hindering the basic functions of government that millions of people depend on, politicizing the civil service is a critical step toward consolidating the power needed to build an autocracy.

Democratic collapse nowadays isn't a matter of abolishing elections and declaring oneself dictator, but rather stealthily hollowing out a democratic system so it's harder and harder for the opposition to win. This strategy requires full control over the state and the bureaucracy: That means having the right staff in the right places who can use their power to erode democracy's core functions.

Trump and his team have plans to do just that. They have discussed everything from prosecuting local election administrators to using regulatory authority for "retribution" against corporations that cross him --- all steps that would depend, crucially, on replacing nonpartisan civil servants who would resist such orders with loyalists.

How far Washington would travel down the Budapest road is very hard to say. It would depend on a variety of factors that are difficult to foresee, ranging from the competence of Trump's chosen appointees to the degree of resistance he faces from the judiciary.

But even if there's a reasonable chance that the worst case might be avoided, the danger remains serious. With specific plans for autocratization already in place, and a recent grant of criminal immunity from the Supreme Court, there's every reason to treat a second Trump term as an extinction-level threat to American democracy.

This assault on democracy didn't come out of nowhere. My recent book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit, argues that rising political antagonism in America is a perennial outgrowth of its defining conflict over race and national identity --- with the current round of conflict sparked largely (albeit not entirely) by backlash to Barack Obama's 2008 victory.

The sense among some Americans that they were losing their country to something new, defined by a more diverse population and a more equal social hierarchy, made the idea of a strongman who could roll back change quite appealing to a significant chunk of the American population. These voters had come to constitute a plurality, if not an outright majority, of Republican primary voters --- creating the conditions for Trump to rise.

In 2016, Trump seized on this reactionary discontent and married it to a whole-scale agenda of backlash against the current political order. His policies and political rhetoric --- on everything from immigration to gender to trade to foreign policy --- were calculated to deepen America's divisions and mainstream ideas once consigned to the fringes.

As potent as this politics proved, it's likely Trump never really expected it to take him all the way to the White House. He had done very little transition work --- nothing like Project 2025 existed. His team was scrambling from the second the contest was called in their favor.

The president himself was unfamiliar with how American democracy worked and largely uninterested in learning the details. So in his first term, he haphazardly yanked at its foundations --- flagrantly assailing basic democratic norms of conduct and installing an incoherent policy process that made it very difficult to rely on any expectation of neutral, stable governance.

The results? Rising tensions between citizens and declining faith in government institutions, in part because government had become legitimately less reliable. There were several near-miss crises --- people forget how close we were to nuclear war with North Korea in 2017 --- and then two very real ones: a botched pandemic response and a democracy-shaking riot at the Capitol.

When critics warn about Trump's threat, the constant rejoinder is that democracy already survived four years of Trump in office. In fact, democracy did not emerge unscathed from Trump's first term.

And, perhaps more importantly, there are many reasons to believe that a second Trump term would be far more dangerous than the first --- starting with the degree of authoritarian preparation that's already gone into it.

A toddler grown into a saboteur\

If the first Trump term was akin to the random destruction of a toddler, a second would be more like the deliberate demolition of a saboteur. With the benefit of four years of governing experience and four more years of planning, Trump and his team have concluded that the problem with their first game of Jenga was that they simply did not remove enough of democracy's blocks.

I do not think that, over the course of four more years, Trump could use these plans to successfully build a fascist state that would jail critics and install himself in power indefinitely. This is in part because of the size and complexity of the American state, and in part because that's not really the kind of authoritarianism that works in democracies nowadays.

But over the course of those years, he could yank out so many of American democracy's basic building blocks that the system really could be pushed to the brink of collapse.

He could quite plausibly create a political environment that tilts electoral contests (even more) in the GOP's favor --- accelerating dangerous and destabilizing partisan conflict over the very rules of the political game. He could compromise media outlets, especially government or billionaire-owned ones. He could wreck the government's ability to perform basic tasks, ranging from managing pollution to safely storing nuclear weapons.

The damage could be immediately catastrophic in ways we saw in the first term: political violence and mass death (from war, a crank-controlled public health system, or any number of other things). But even if the very worst-case scenarios were avoided, the structural damage to the tower of American democracy could be long-lasting --- undoing the complex and mutually supporting processes that work to keep democracy alive.

When government reliably and neutrally delivers core services, people tend to have more faith in all of its functions --- including running fair elections. When they have more faith in elections, they tend to trust them more as a means of resolving major policy disagreements. When they trust election outcomes, they tend to grant a baseline level of legitimacy to the government that follows, making it easier for it to reliably and neutrally deliver core services. The steady house of democracy is built by the gluing together of these functions.

John Rawls, the greatest political philosopher of the 20th century, described this as a long process of trust-building that starts with a basic faith in democratic ideals. When people of all political stripes basically believe in the system, he argues, they start acting inside its rules --- giving others more confidence that they too can follow the rules without being cheated.

"Gradually, as the success of political cooperation continues, citizens gain increasing trust and confidence in one another," Rawls writes in his book Political Liberalism.

A second Trump term risks replacing Rawls's virtuous cycle with a vicious one. As Trump degrades government, following the Orbánist playbook with at least some success, much of the public would justifiably lose their already-battered faith in the American system of government. And whether it could long survive such a disaster is anyone's guess.

!nonchuds !khive THIS IS HER MOMENT.

NEW YORK (AP) --- Vice President Kamala Harris has made an unannounced trip to New York to appear on " Saturday Night Live," briefly stepping away from the battleground states where she's been campaigning with just three days to go before the election.

Harris departed on Air Force Two after a campaign stop on Saturday in Charlotte, North Carolina. She was scheduled to head to Detroit, but once the aircraft was in the air, aides said it was actually going to New York.

Her appearance on the show was confirmed by three people familiar with Harris' plans who were not authorized to speak publicly about them. It is the final SNL episode before Election Day on Tuesday.

Actor Maya Rudolph first played Harris on the show in 2019 and has reprised her role this season, doing a spot-on impression of the vice president, including calling herself "Momala."

Rudolph opened the show's season premiere with the line: "Well, well, well. Look who fell out of that coconut tree." And she's joked about keeping President Joe Biden in his place.

Harris' husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff, has been played by former cast member Andy Samberg and Biden is played by Dana Carvey, who also famously played then-President George H.W. Bush in the early 1990s.

Rudolph's performance has won critical and comedic acclaim --- including from Harris herself.

"Maya Rudolph --- I mean, she's so good," Harris said last month on ABC's "The View." "She had the whole thing, the suit, the jewelry, everything!"

Harris added that she was impressed with Rudolph's "mannerisms."

Senior Trump adviser Jason Miller expressed surprise that Harris would appear on Saturday Night Live given what he characterized as her unflattering portrayal on the show.

Asked if Trump had been invited to appear, he said: "I don't know. Probably not."

Politicians have a long history on SNL, including Harris' Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, who hosted the show in 2015.

Hillary Clinton was running for president in the 2008 Democratic primary when she appeared next to Amy Poehler, who played her on the show and offered a trademark, exaggerated cackle. The real Clinton wondered during her appearance, "Do I really laugh like that?"

Clinton returned in 2016, while running against Trump in a race she ultimately lost.

The first sitting president to appear on Saturday Night Live was Republican Gerald Ford, who did so less than a year after the show debuted. Ford appeared on April 17, 1976, and declared the show's famous opening, "Live from New York."

Barack Obama was still just a Democratic presidential candidate when he appeared in February 2008, and Republican Bob Dole made an appearance in 1996 -- a mere 11 days after losing that year's election to Democrat Bill Clinton. Dole consoled Norm Macdonald who played the Kansas senator on the show.

Then there was Tina Fey's 2008 impression of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin --- and in particular her joke that "I can see Russia from my house." It was so good that Fey won an Emmy award. Palin herself appeared on the show that season, in the weeks before the election.

@Mummyvann pin this

!khive !nonchuds

You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump's corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It's his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he's re-elected, the G.O.P. won't restrain him. Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote.

LMAO Cardi B's teleprompter was broken and she had no idea what to do for over a minute until someone ran on the stage to give her a phone to read off. Holy embarrassing. pic.twitter.com/BRl8xGP72e

— aka (@akafacehots) November 2, 2024

Ignore the bad faith tweet

!nonchuds !khive

Also ignore the bad faith chuds totally ignoring that she was talking about not endorsing only Biden and Trump

This was Cardi B one year ago and now she's endorsing Kamala. Make it make sense. pic.twitter.com/qWFa8k10Eo

— Amala Ekpunobi (@amalaekpunobi) November 2, 2024

Straight
White
Male

Lifelong Texan
Lifelong Christian
Local Church Pastor

Kamala Harris voter. pic.twitter.com/p3Xx2tfYyv

— Zach W. Lambert (@ZachWLambert) November 1, 2024

!khive

This is how we can still win!

!khive