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6 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"The strange story of that ‘Blacks for Trump’ guy standing behind POTUS at his Phoenix rally"

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At a number of political rallies over the year, a character calling himself “Michael the Black Man” has appeared in the crowd directly behind Donald Trump, impossible to miss and possibly planted.

He holds signs that scream “BLACKS FOR TRUMP” and wears a T-shirt proclaiming with equal conviction that “TRUMP & Republicans Are Not Racist.”

Almost always, he plugs his wild website, Gods2.com, across his chest.

And so it was Tuesday night before a crowd of Trump supporters in Phoenix who had come to watch another show. There was the president, whipping up the wildly cheering crowd, and then there was Michael the Black Man, chanting just beyond Trump’s right shoulder in that trademark T-shirt.

The presence of Michael — variously known as Michael Symonette, Maurice Woodside and Mikael Israel — has inspired not only trending Twitter hashtags but a great deal of curiosity and Google searches. Internet sleuths find the man’s bizarre URL, a easily accessible gateway to his strange and checkered past.

The radical fringe activist from Miami once belonged to a violent black supremacist religious cult, and he runs a handful of amateur, unintelligible conspiracy websites. He has called Barack Obama “The Beast” and Hillary Clinton a Ku Klux Klan member. Oprah Winfrey, he says, is the devil.

Most curiously, in the 1990s, he was charged, then acquitted, with conspiracy to commit two murders.

But Michael the Black Man loves President Trump. And President Trump’s campaign apparently loves him right back.

It’s unclear if the White House or President Trump’s campaign officials are aware of Michael the Black Man’s turbulent history or extreme political views, but he and his followers have stumped for the president at his inauguration and the Super Bowl.

In July, he posted video footage of himself at the Mar-a-Lago Club, President Trump’s so-called “Winter White House,” for the Republican Party of Palm Beach County’s annual Lincoln Day Dinner.

Wearing a black dinner coat over a white “BLACKS FOR TRUMP” T-shirt, Michael posed with the local GOP’s chairman, apparently took a photo of first lady Melania Trump and recorded a selfie video that showed his arm slung over the shoulder of Florida Gov. Rick Scott.

“I saw you on TV with Trump,” Scott can be heard telling Michael. “You did a good job.”

At a campaign rally in late October 2016, down in Sanford, Fla., Trump even gave the “BLACKS FOR TRUMP” signs an approving shout-out.

“Look at those signs behind me,” Trump said to the roaring crowd. “Blacks for Trump. I like those signs.”

The candidate, wearing a camouflage “Make America Great Again” hat, turned to the sign-holders and offered a thumbs-up. Michael, standing behind Trump and grinning widely, gave a thumbs-up right back.

“Blacks for Trump,” the candidate said again. “You watch. You watch. Those signs are great, thank you.”

...

The signs drew national attention at the time, but not because of Michael. Rally watchers came away perplexed after one event when white women were seen waving the signs. That same month, New York Magazine and the Miami New Times published articles recounting the sign maker’s story.

Before he started calling himself Michael the Black Man, the man identified as Maurice Woodside. Around 1980, he joined a cult led by Hulon Mitchell Jr., who went by Yahweh Ben Yahweh and eventually turned violent, reported the New Times. The two men met when Woodside was 21 years old.

Woodside followed Yahweh’s fiery teachings for years, even after the leader allegedly denied his dying, cancer-stricken mother medical treatment and instead prescribed her “vegetables, nuts, and herbs,” prosecutors once said in court, according to the New Times.

In the early 1990s, the New Times reported, Woodside, Yahweh and 14 other members of the cult were arrested by federal agents and charged with racketeering and conspiracy in 14 murders and a firebombing, reported the New Times.

Ricardo Woodside, Maurice’s brother, had once been in the cult but left after his mother’s death. Woodside testified in court that his brother had helped beat a man named Aston Green, who argued with Yahweh and was taken to the Florida Everglades and beheaded with a dull machete, reported the New Times.

He also testified that Maurice Woodside was the cult member who stabbed a Louisiana man named Leonard Dupree in the eye with a sharpened stick.

Yahweh was sentenced to 11 years in prison. Maurice Woodside, who denies the cult was violent or murderous, was acquitted along with six others.

“You know why I wasn’t scared?” Woodside told the New Times in 2011, speaking of those charges. “Because Yahweh wasn’t scared!”

In later years, Woodside changed his name to Maurice Symonette. Eventually, he became Michael the Black Man, an anti-Democrat — or as he calls them, Demon-crat — who preaches the Bible and abhors homosexuality. He started a private radio station, BOSS 104.1 FM, to broadcast his radical beliefs, and began causing a ruckus in public.

At an Obama campaign speech in Coral Gables, Fla., in 2008, he and a group of other protesters loudly interrupted the future president, shouting “Barack, go home!” and waving signs that declared “Obama endorsed by the KKK,” reported the Miami New Times.

One sign, held by Michael the Black Man, read: “Blacks against Obama.”

His website, Gods2.com, proclaims on the landing page: “LATIN, BLACK AND WHITE MUST UNITE!”

Links on that site lead to another one, honestfact.com, which claims that the “Real KKK Slave Masters” are “CHEROKEE Indians (Hidden Babylonians).”

The proclamations only get more unhinged from there: “ISIS AND HILLARY RACE WAR PLOT TO KILL ALL BLACK & WHITE WOMAN OF AMERICA WITH MS-13.”

And: “YAHWEH BEN YAHWEH Taught Us To Vote Republican & is Now VINDICATED.”

And: “BLACKS FOR TRUMP SUPPORTS SENATOR JEFF SESSIONS”

The site also displays a photo of a Confederate flag with the caption: “Cherokee Democratic Flag.”

Under the name Maurice Symonette, Michael has posted many videos to YouTube. One, from February 2017, is titled “BLACKS FOR TRUMP calling Trump” and shows Michael giving a message to the president.

He told Trump he was proud of him for winning the election, saying he “conquered the Kingdom of Babylon and delivered everybody out of the sure hands of death.” Then he said he felt like his movement had been left behind in the wake of victory.

“Here we are, the lone Blacks for Trump,” he said in the video. “We’re the helpless. We just helped you by standing behind you.”

But in Phoenix Tuesday night, Michael the Black Man seemed at peace with his president. As supporters chanted “build that wall!,” Trump turned to the roaring crowd behind him and flashed a thumbs up.

Michael flashed one back. Then he smiled and mouthed, “I love you!”

What a nutjob.

Helps him fit in with all the other people who were standing behind Trump.

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I'm having trouble sleeping, and I got to I thinking about Diamond and Silk, the two black women who used to appear at Trump's rallies when he was campaigning for president. They still make appearances on Fox News and Fox Business, they put out Youtube videos about Trump on a regular basis, and Breitbart had a story about them a couple of days ago, so why aren't they appearing at Trump's rallies anymore? 

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5 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

I'm having trouble sleeping, and I got to I thinking about Diamond and Silk, the two black women who used to appear at Trump's rallies when he was campaigning for president. They still make appearances on Fox News and Fox Business, they put out Youtube videos about Trump on a regular basis, and Breitbart had a story about them a couple of days ago, so why aren't they appearing at Trump's rallies anymore? 

He just needs that one black guy to prove that black people luuuuuve him. But he's pandering to the white folk right now so he has to hire white people for his rallies. 

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This makes me want to scream. It's about 25 minutes from my house: "‘Shocking’: Neo-Nazis fly swastika, salute at Virginia shopping center where leader was killed"

Spoiler

A small group of neo-Nazis gathered outside an Arlington, Va., shopping center Friday to commemorate the 50th anniversary of an American Nazi leader’s assassination.

As one man held a large red flag emblazoned with a swastika, half a dozen others raised their right arms in a Nazi salute. Their ceremony came two weeks after neo-Nazis and white supremacists rallied in Charlottesville, where clashes with counterprotesters left one woman dead and many others injured.

The neo-Nazis who appeared in Arlington are members of New Order, a successor to the American Nazi Party, whose founder, George Lincoln Rockwell, was shot to death at the Dominion Hills shopping center on Aug. 25, 1967.

Martin Kerr, New Order’s chief of staff, said most of those who attended the commemoration live in the Washington area, although one came from Wisconsin to pay tribute to Rockwell.

“We laid a wreath, I said a few words and then we gave a nationalist socialist salute for 88 seconds,” Kerr said, explaining that the 88 seconds symbolized “Heil Hitler.”

Dozens of Arlington residents appalled by the display gathered outside the shopping center a few hours later, carrying signs that read “Love Trumps Nazis” and “No Hate Zone.”

Kerr described Rockwell, who called for shipping blacks to Africa and sending millions of “Communist Jews” to the gas chambers, as “an authentic American patriot.”

Matt Garcia was getting a haircut when he saw the neo-Nazis gathering outside Tom’s barber shop.

“I stood up in the chair to see what was going,” he said. “It was startling, obviously, to see right there.”

Garcia, who is Mexican American, lives in New York City but grew up around the corner from Dominion Hills. He was home visiting his parents and had gone to the barbershop with his mother and five-year-old son.

“I always thought of Arlington as a diverse and welcoming place,” he said. “Seeing a Nazi flag go up in your neighborhood is shocking and disturbing, especially after what happened in Charlottesville.”

Kerr, who attended the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, said his group did not hesitate to pay tribute to Rockwell at such a fraught time and scoffed at any suggestion that it was inappropriate.

“There lots of things in society that offend and disgust me. That’s part of living in a diverse society. You have to put up with it,” he said.

His group’s antics were a “test,” he said.

“It shows whether or not they can tolerate us,” he said. “It shows their commitment to diversity.”

Kerr said that Rockwell’s racist legacy is more alive now than ever.

“We’re very encouraged generally about the mood of the country,” he said. “We think things are moving towards radicalization and polarization. I know a lot of people think polarization is a bad thing, but we don’t. The more racial polarization, the better.”

Garcia, who had never heard of Rockwell before Friday, said he and his son stayed inside the barbershop until the neo-Nazis’ short ceremony was over.

His mother was “disgusted” by the event, he said, but his son seemed unfazed.

“I don’t think he registered exactly what was going on,” Garcia said. “Maybe down the road he might understand.”

His wife, Jamila, who did not witness the neo-Nazi gathering, said they have tried to explain what happened without going into too much detail.

“It’s not something we want to explain to him yet,” she said. “He’s so young, and it’s a very tangled web if you go into why people hate other people.”

 

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I've found this really interesting article in HuffPo, that isn't exactly about BT's, but actually it kinda is.

Are Baby Boomers A ‘Generation Of Sociopaths’?

Spoiler

Long before millennials were dubbed the “Me Generation,” journalist Tom Wolfe used the label to describe the young baby boomers coming of age in the mid-1970s, a time of heightened focus on the self and personal development. 

“The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality — remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self ... and observing, studying, and doting on it,” Wolfe wrote in a 1976 New York magazine cover story. 

To the extent that millennials really are self-absorbed and narcissistic, it may be because they learned from the masters: their parents. Baby boomers ― the unusually large generation born during a wave after World War II ― grew up in a time of historic prosperity. In many ways, the world they’ll leave for their children couldn’t be more different from the one they knew as children.  

Boomers blew through resources, racked up debt, and brought an end to economic growth, using their enormous voting power to elect politicians who enacted policies that typically benefitted boomers’ interests, rather than future generations. Now, millennials face more debt, fewer resources and higher levels of unemployment than their parents, and are likely to see the fallout of runaway environmental destruction within their lifetimes. 

In his new book, A Generation of Sociopaths, writer and venture capitalist Bruce Gibney puts forth the controversial hypothesis that baby boomers ― specifically the large subset of white, middle-class boomers ― are, both individually and as a group, unusually sociopathic. Gibney cites mental health data showing boomers have significantly higher levels of antisocial traits and behaviors ― including lack of empathy, disregard for others, egotism and impulsivity ― than other generations.

As a result, boomers have used their substantial voting power to create a society and government that don’t work very well. Or, as Gibney puts it, boomers’ “private behaviors congealed into a debased neoliberalism.”

The factual basis for Gibney’s case isn’t perfect. Data on generations prior to boomers is thin, because widespread psychological testing wasn’t as common, and younger generations haven’t been around long enough for long-term data. It’s possible that other generations have major issues as well, but we simply don’t have enough information to assess them properly. Gibney, however, insists that there’s something unique with boomers. 

We sat down with Gibney, a Gen-Xer, to learn more about why he says boomers are a generation of sociopaths, and how the boomer agenda has gotten us into the precarious political and economic situation we’re in today. 

I imagine that a lot of people have taken issue with the title of your book. Is it really possible to apply a psychological label to an entire generation?  

Well, I think you can match the behaviors and the policies to certain diagnostic criteria. For the boomers ― the youngest are in their 50s and the oldest are in their 70s ― we have a coherent body of data, collected over decades, that map onto this diagnostic criteria of sociopathy.

So we can see sociopathy-associated traits like improvidence ― there is no greater improvidence than failing to save for your retirement. We can postulate the checklist that way. We have an enormous amount of data about the boomer mainstream, and it matches up surprisingly well with the description of antisocial personality disorder. 

It’s a good diagnostic label, because what we’re really dealing with is an anti-social society. And that highlights the inherent paradox: Can you have an anti-social society? I don’t actually think you can. 

You argue that boomers aren’t genetically predispositioned to be dysfunctional, but instead were conditioned to be that way. What do you mean by that?

I focus mainly on the white, middle-class boomers who constitute the substantial majority of the boom ― it’s a pretty homogenous group, and they were raised in a fairly homogenous way. They were the first generation in the U.S. to be raised permissively. And the evidence strongly suggests that highly permissive parenting leads to some problems later on in life. These people have higher self-esteem, but they tend to be more rebellious and messy, both in the literal sense and in their approach to their own affairs. 

They were also the first generation to be raised with television, and there really weren’t parental reservations about screen time. The literature on TV and cognitive and behavioral development is almost universally negative.

They came of age in a time of fairly effortless prosperity ... They really just assume that things are going to work out, no matter what. That’s unhelpful conditioning.”

And finally, there are certain assumptions that are built up throughout their early lives. For the first half of the boomers particularly, they came of age in a time of fairly effortless prosperity, and they were conditioned to think that everything gets better each year without any real effort. So they really just assume that things are going to work out, no matter what. That’s unhelpful conditioning. You have 25 years where everything just seems to be getting better, so you tend not to try as hard, and you have much greater expectations about what society can do for you, and what it owes you. 

So what’s been the fallout of that, in terms of policy and economics? 

There’s obviously been a substantial deceleration of economic growth. The Great Recession arguably began in 2001 and we’ve never entirely recovered ― so that’s 16 years of lost opportunity. 

The second big thing on the economic front is the intergenerational passing of burdens, and the most salient one is the debt. Gross debt to GDP 40 years ago was 34 percent, and today it’s around 105 percent. It’s projected by [the Congressional Budget Office] to exceed the World War II highs by the early 2030s. When boomers start taking control and influencing policies, the policies get worse on the debt, so that now we haven’t seen these levels of debt in more than 70 years.

There are consequences to these levels of debt. ... But that’s not really relevant for the boomers. This is not their problem and they have not been serious about it. The debt wasn’t discussed as a serious issue during the 2016 presidential election, but Social Security was ― because we know that this program is going to be partially insolvent by 2034. And this is the only thing that Trump and Clinton could agree on: Social Security ― untouchable. Medicare ― untouchable. These things are sacred. They couldn’t even agree where to stand on the stage together, and they agreed on Social Security. 

But the boomers must have done some good things, right? 

Toward the end of the book, there’s a chapter called, “The Myth of Boomer Goodness.” Some of the pushback I’ve gotten on the book is people saying, well, didn’t boomers do all these wonderful things, like fighting for civil rights? But there’s no way that chronology works out. The Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act were 1964 and 1965, and only the very oldest boomers could have voted for the congressmen who pushed through that act. So they played no part in those foundational victories. What we have seen instead is the Voting Rights Act gutted

Or you can take the environment, which is going to affect everybody. This has just not been a serious item for the boomers ... They can’t take credit for these enormous civil rights and environmental victories that we saw in the ‘60s and the early 1970s. 

Are boomers responsible for the rise of Trump? 

Well, he is a boomer, and the leading candidates in the primaries were all boomers. Who’s responsible for the rise of Donald Trump? We could slice and dice the exit polls, or we could blame the FBI, or Putin. 

But what I think is really remarkable is that he was ever considered a viable candidate at all. Only after years of disappointment ― economically and otherwise ― could a Manhattan vulgarian with no prior experience emerge as a candidate for the highest office in the United States. So, older white groups were the most enthusiastic about Trump, but there had to first be the conditions that allowed him to even be plausible.  

I don't really agree with painting all baby boomers with the same brush and labeling them sociopaths, but that boils down to semantics. I do agree (generally speaking) with the broad conclusions the author makes. It's food for thought, at least.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Not sure this piece really fits in this thread, but here goes: "Republicans and evangelicals think they’re victims and remain unmoved by real discrimination"

Spoiler

The Public Religion Research Institute has compiled some of its recent polling to explain Americans’ views on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues. In general, Americans of all races, ages, education levels and income groups are becoming more tolerant; the same is not true of Republicans, and evangelical Christians in particular.

For example, “A majority (53%) of Americans oppose allowing businesses that provide wedding services, such as catering, flowers, and wedding cakes, to refuse services to same-sex couples, compared to about four in ten (41%) who say they would support allowing these wedding-based businesses to refuse services to same-sex couples for religious reasons.” However, two-thirds of Republicans and nearly two-thirds of evangelicals think wedding vendors should be allowed to deny service. While 60 percent of women oppose denying service, only a 48 percent plurality of men do.

When it comes to small businesses in general, the divide between evangelicals and everyone else is stark:

A majority (56%) of Americans oppose allowing small business owners in their state to refuse services or goods to gay and lesbian people if doing so violates their religious beliefs, while nearly four in ten (39%) favor religiously based service refusals to gay and lesbian people. Support for such service refusals has increased since earlier this year. In February 2017, two-thirds (64%) opposed allowing small businesses to refuse goods or services to gay and lesbian people, compared to fewer than one-third (32%) who supported such actions. …

White evangelical Protestants are the only major religious group in which a majority supports religiously based service refusals to gay and lesbian people.

One can see that such people might find themselves and their religious beliefs under “siege” (more about white victimology in a moment) while the rest of the population sees them as supporting discrimination.

On a more positive note, however, “There is continued strong support gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people non-discrimination laws. More than seven in ten (72%) Americans favor laws that would protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people from discrimination in jobs, public accommodation, and housing.” (Notice the oddity that a significant percentage supports “non-discrimination” in public accommodation but supports the right to refuse service, a contradiction worthy of President Trump.)

As for transgender people serving in the military, the partisan divide reappears, with Democrats “more than twice as likely as Republicans (83% vs. 37%, respectively) to say that transgender people ought to be allowed to serve in the armed forces.” On transgender people using bathrooms, there is a partisan divide as well, but a smaller one, with about half of Republicans wanting laws to require people to use “bathrooms that match their birth sex,” while 60 percent of Democrats oppose such laws. A significant percentage of people say they don’t know or won’t say, which may indicate either receptivity to new information or just plain confusion.

On same-sex marriage, we see a familiar pattern: “Nearly two-thirds (66%) of Americans favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry legally, while fewer than one-third (28%) oppose. … No group has remained more steadfast in their opposition to same-sex marriage than white evangelical Protestants. A majority (54%) of white evangelical Protestants oppose same-sex marriage, although a significant minority (43%) now expresses support for the policy.” Among younger adults, support for same-sex marriage is over 80 percent.

Few people support discrimination against gay people when it comes to adoption; however, more Republicans are willing to refuse gay couples the right to adopt children. “A majority (53%) of Republicans, two-thirds (67%) of independents, and more than eight in ten (81%) Democrats oppose allowing religiously affiliated adoption agencies that receive federal funding to refuse to place children with gay and lesbian couples. More than four in ten (43%) Republicans believe agencies that receive federal funds should be allowed to refuse to place children with gay and lesbian couples.” The percentage of evangelicals who would prevent gay couples from adopting is 63 percent. (Opinion is much more closely divided when it comes to religiously affiliated adoption agencies.)

In sum, evangelicals and Republicans more generally are increasingly out of step with other Americans on issues affecting the LGBT community. Once commanding an overwhelming majority of opinion, these Americans may well feel as though the culture has “declined” or they have “lost something.” It comes as a blow to people used to dictating the norms on these issues to find out they are the odd men and women out.

These figures mesh with another survey shedding light on the phenomenon of white grievance, which Trump ably amplified and used to fuel his campaign. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll done for the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics finds only single-digit support for hate groups (e.g., the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, the alt-right). That poll also found:

39% of respondents strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement that “white people are currently under attack in this country,” while 38% disagreed. Strong disagreement (28%) ranked higher than strong agreement (19%). Among whites, 29% disagreed with this statement, whereas 54% of nonwhites disagreed. Among partisans, 21% of Democrats agreed with the statement to some extent compared to 63% of Republicans. Conversely, 59% of Democrats disagreed (47% strongly) while just 17% of Republicans disagreed. About the same percentage of Democrats and Republicans neither agreed nor disagreed (17% for the former, 18% for the latter).

When it comes to evangelicals, the numbers are even more stark. Forty-nine percent of evangelicals strongly or somewhat agree that whites are under attack. Sixty-three percent of Republicans strongly or somewhat agree that whites are under attack.

Despite the absence of any evidence that whites as a group are disadvantaged in schooling, employment, income, public accommodations, political power or any other area, a very large number of evangelicals, and even more Republicans in general, are convinced it is true. That may also account for high levels of opposition to immigrants among these groups. At the same time, these groups are the least likely to express inclusive attitudes toward the LGBT community. Other polling by PRRI also shows that these two groups are much less likely to believe minorities suffer from discrimination.

That dual sense of both victimization and lack of empathy for others, as well as a lack of acceptance of LGBT people, may explain a good deal of Trump’s appeal to these voters — and his constant compulsion to go back to immigration and hot-button LGBT issues to stir up his base.

It is amazing that these people think they are victims.

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So every Sunday my local paper publishes at least one letter to the editor from a local BT. It is frightening because it reminds me that I live amongst some of the most immoral and hypocritical people imaginable. And intelligence isn't a strong point either.

Today's example works to convince us to stop criticizing Trump, a common theme. This gentleman's argument: so what if he lies, the Daily News says men lie all the time! So what if he commits adultery, "several Internet sources" say men do this all the time, too! As a matter of fact it apparently ranges from "30 percent to 6 percent"? Then there's a reference to The Young and  Restless". WTF?

Then the now required defense of Sheriff Joe, what a great American he is! Our gentleman throws in a "snowflake" and says that we have set things right because injustice has been heaped upon this good man.

I think the paper publishes these nutty letters to out these lunatics to their neighbors.

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1 hour ago, GrumpyGran said:

As a matter of fact it apparently ranges from "30 percent to 6 percent"?

Does he get the whole meaning of percent?  Because 30 to 6 is a huge gap.

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On 8/31/2017 at 6:35 AM, fraurosena said:

I've found this really interesting article in HuffPo, that isn't exactly about BT's, but actually it kinda is.

Are Baby Boomers A ‘Generation Of Sociopaths’?

  Reveal hidden contents

Long before millennials were dubbed the “Me Generation,” journalist Tom Wolfe used the label to describe the young baby boomers coming of age in the mid-1970s, a time of heightened focus on the self and personal development. 

“The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality — remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self ... and observing, studying, and doting on it,” Wolfe wrote in a 1976 New York magazine cover story. 

To the extent that millennials really are self-absorbed and narcissistic, it may be because they learned from the masters: their parents. Baby boomers ― the unusually large generation born during a wave after World War II ― grew up in a time of historic prosperity. In many ways, the world they’ll leave for their children couldn’t be more different from the one they knew as children.  

Boomers blew through resources, racked up debt, and brought an end to economic growth, using their enormous voting power to elect politicians who enacted policies that typically benefitted boomers’ interests, rather than future generations. Now, millennials face more debt, fewer resources and higher levels of unemployment than their parents, and are likely to see the fallout of runaway environmental destruction within their lifetimes. 

In his new book, A Generation of Sociopaths, writer and venture capitalist Bruce Gibney puts forth the controversial hypothesis that baby boomers ― specifically the large subset of white, middle-class boomers ― are, both individually and as a group, unusually sociopathic. Gibney cites mental health data showing boomers have significantly higher levels of antisocial traits and behaviors ― including lack of empathy, disregard for others, egotism and impulsivity ― than other generations.

As a result, boomers have used their substantial voting power to create a society and government that don’t work very well. Or, as Gibney puts it, boomers’ “private behaviors congealed into a debased neoliberalism.”

The factual basis for Gibney’s case isn’t perfect. Data on generations prior to boomers is thin, because widespread psychological testing wasn’t as common, and younger generations haven’t been around long enough for long-term data. It’s possible that other generations have major issues as well, but we simply don’t have enough information to assess them properly. Gibney, however, insists that there’s something unique with boomers. 

We sat down with Gibney, a Gen-Xer, to learn more about why he says boomers are a generation of sociopaths, and how the boomer agenda has gotten us into the precarious political and economic situation we’re in today. 

I imagine that a lot of people have taken issue with the title of your book. Is it really possible to apply a psychological label to an entire generation?  

Well, I think you can match the behaviors and the policies to certain diagnostic criteria. For the boomers ― the youngest are in their 50s and the oldest are in their 70s ― we have a coherent body of data, collected over decades, that map onto this diagnostic criteria of sociopathy.

So we can see sociopathy-associated traits like improvidence ― there is no greater improvidence than failing to save for your retirement. We can postulate the checklist that way. We have an enormous amount of data about the boomer mainstream, and it matches up surprisingly well with the description of antisocial personality disorder. 

It’s a good diagnostic label, because what we’re really dealing with is an anti-social society. And that highlights the inherent paradox: Can you have an anti-social society? I don’t actually think you can. 

You argue that boomers aren’t genetically predispositioned to be dysfunctional, but instead were conditioned to be that way. What do you mean by that?

I focus mainly on the white, middle-class boomers who constitute the substantial majority of the boom ― it’s a pretty homogenous group, and they were raised in a fairly homogenous way. They were the first generation in the U.S. to be raised permissively. And the evidence strongly suggests that highly permissive parenting leads to some problems later on in life. These people have higher self-esteem, but they tend to be more rebellious and messy, both in the literal sense and in their approach to their own affairs. 

They were also the first generation to be raised with television, and there really weren’t parental reservations about screen time. The literature on TV and cognitive and behavioral development is almost universally negative.

They came of age in a time of fairly effortless prosperity ... They really just assume that things are going to work out, no matter what. That’s unhelpful conditioning.”

And finally, there are certain assumptions that are built up throughout their early lives. For the first half of the boomers particularly, they came of age in a time of fairly effortless prosperity, and they were conditioned to think that everything gets better each year without any real effort. So they really just assume that things are going to work out, no matter what. That’s unhelpful conditioning. You have 25 years where everything just seems to be getting better, so you tend not to try as hard, and you have much greater expectations about what society can do for you, and what it owes you. 

So what’s been the fallout of that, in terms of policy and economics? 

There’s obviously been a substantial deceleration of economic growth. The Great Recession arguably began in 2001 and we’ve never entirely recovered ― so that’s 16 years of lost opportunity. 

The second big thing on the economic front is the intergenerational passing of burdens, and the most salient one is the debt. Gross debt to GDP 40 years ago was 34 percent, and today it’s around 105 percent. It’s projected by [the Congressional Budget Office] to exceed the World War II highs by the early 2030s. When boomers start taking control and influencing policies, the policies get worse on the debt, so that now we haven’t seen these levels of debt in more than 70 years.

There are consequences to these levels of debt. ... But that’s not really relevant for the boomers. This is not their problem and they have not been serious about it. The debt wasn’t discussed as a serious issue during the 2016 presidential election, but Social Security was ― because we know that this program is going to be partially insolvent by 2034. And this is the only thing that Trump and Clinton could agree on: Social Security ― untouchable. Medicare ― untouchable. These things are sacred. They couldn’t even agree where to stand on the stage together, and they agreed on Social Security. 

But the boomers must have done some good things, right? 

Toward the end of the book, there’s a chapter called, “The Myth of Boomer Goodness.” Some of the pushback I’ve gotten on the book is people saying, well, didn’t boomers do all these wonderful things, like fighting for civil rights? But there’s no way that chronology works out. The Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act were 1964 and 1965, and only the very oldest boomers could have voted for the congressmen who pushed through that act. So they played no part in those foundational victories. What we have seen instead is the Voting Rights Act gutted

Or you can take the environment, which is going to affect everybody. This has just not been a serious item for the boomers ... They can’t take credit for these enormous civil rights and environmental victories that we saw in the ‘60s and the early 1970s. 

Are boomers responsible for the rise of Trump? 

Well, he is a boomer, and the leading candidates in the primaries were all boomers. Who’s responsible for the rise of Donald Trump? We could slice and dice the exit polls, or we could blame the FBI, or Putin. 

But what I think is really remarkable is that he was ever considered a viable candidate at all. Only after years of disappointment ― economically and otherwise ― could a Manhattan vulgarian with no prior experience emerge as a candidate for the highest office in the United States. So, older white groups were the most enthusiastic about Trump, but there had to first be the conditions that allowed him to even be plausible.  

i don't really agree with painting all baby boomers with the same brush and labeling them sociopaths, but that boils down to semantics. I do agree (generally speaking) with the broad conclusions the author makes. It's food for thought, at least.

People forget that the Civil Rights Movement started in the 1950s, not the 1960 (an argument could be made that it really began in the 1940s when black veterans became more aggressive about asserting their rights and the NAACP began winning important legal cases). Assuming that the oldest baby boomers were born at the end of World War II, they would have been way too young to be involved in the Civil Rights Movement. The generation that did the most work in the Civil Rights Movement was that forgotten generation that was too young to have fought in World War II but way too old to be Baby Boomers. I think the only reason some Baby Boomers claim credit for the Civil Rights Movement is because of the ubiquity of the anti-war Movement, which was a completely different animal, both historically and sociologically. 

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1 hour ago, Cleopatra7 said:

People forget that the Civil Rights Movement started in the 1950s, not the 1960 (an argument could be made that it really began in the 1940s when black veterans became more aggressive about asserting their rights and the NAACP began winning important legal cases).

I posted this back at end of July when it was the Google Doodle. Something they never taught in school.  

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/1917-silent-parade_us_597b3c01e4b0da64e8789bff

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@onekidanddoneI had never heard of this . Thank you for posting - the dignified discipline  and silent anger of those marchers brought tears to my eyes. They had so many years to wait, and it isn't over yet.

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"These single women don’t want a man who’s still ‘With Her’"

Spoiler

Relationships are all about compromise, but everyone has lines that they just can’t cross. And since the election of Donald Trump, political divides have been even more contentious than usual.

For many straight liberal women (and some queer women, too), avoiding Trump voters is yet another hurdle to modern dating. While the majority of unmarried female voters cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton, 32 percent of them voted for Trump. And if you search thoroughly enough in liberal-leaning regions of the country, as I did for this story, you’ll find conservative, heterosexual women who aren’t keen on dating a Hillary supporter. Even eight months into Trump’s presidency.

Michelle, the 47-year-old founder of Tshirts4Patriots, is one of those people. She spoke on the condition that only her first name be used, as did all of the women interviewed for this story. Michelle is a Trump voter who lives in Laguna Hills, Calif. — a city that voted for Trump but whose county went to Clinton. Last year, Michelle began an on-again, off-again relationship with a Trump supporter whom she met while he was working for her cousin.

When she first started dating him before the election, his enthusiasm for Trump wasn’t a huge attraction for her. Michelle — who’s of Spanish and Native American ancestry — says she’s always considered herself an independent and has probably dated a liberal without knowing it. She’d never prioritized a potential partner’s politics before, but Michelle said that she’s realized that she only wants “to be with somebody that supports our president, period.”

Why did she change her mind about politics and dating? Well, for one, she didn’t want to date a man who’d oppose the Trump-centric T-shirt company she was starting. But her shift in priorities was also bound up with her opinion that certain media outlets unfairly misrepresent Trump. Michelle said she couldn’t be with someone who, in her opinion, is uninformed enough to fall for such “propaganda.”

Michelle gets offended when people “assassinate his character,” as she put it, by calling Trump racist, sexist or homophobic — or by saying that he never would’ve made it without a loan from his dad. “I just can’t be with somebody who’s closed-minded like that,” she said. “They’re believing all those labels that are just political propaganda. I can’t be with somebody that just listens to tabloids or nightly news, because there’s a lot of hate being promoted.”

When Michelle found herself single again at the beginning of Trump’s administration, she perused TrumpSingles.com, a dating site for Trump supporters. However, she didn’t find anyone she was interested in and ended up closing her account.

She also created a dating profile on eHarmony, specifying on her page that she wasn’t looking for “snowflakes.” The men on eHarmony seemed to be mostly liberal, she said, and some responded negatively to her “snowflake” comment. Again, Michelle didn’t find anyone in whom she was that interested, and ended up going back to dating the guy she’d met through her cousin. That relationship ended again a couple of months ago when he moved away. For the moment, Michelle is trying to focus on her T-shirt business instead of dating.

Like Michelle, a lot of people are signaling their politics on their dating profiles. Elizabeth, a 24-year-old white woman in D.C. who has worked on Republican political campaigns and voted for Trump, said she’s dated Democrats before and doesn’t have a problem with it. Still, “on dating apps, I’ve always had the policy of putting a picture or something in my bio that hints at the fact that I’m a Republican,” she said, such as a picture of her with a recognizably conservative politician. “If that’s something they have a problem with, then they probably shouldn’t even swipe on me.”

It’s very important to Elizabeth to find a long-term partner who wants to get married and have kids. She wants a husband who’s okay with her staying at home when the kids are young but who also supports her continuing her career when they’re a little older. Additionally, she said she could only settle down with a man who’s antiabortion, and who respects her desire to raise her kids in a Christian household. Although she doesn’t think these traits are confined to political conservatives, she does think she’s more likely to find a Republican who matches these specifications than a Democrat.

Soon after the election, Elizabeth started dating a Republican whom she met on Tinder. She admitted that it is a little easier to date someone who moves in the same political circles. Dating a liberal in this heated political climate, she says, might be more difficult because “a lot of Democrats are a little less open to hanging out with people that are so pro-Trump.”

Before she started seeing her boyfriend, did she ever feel like she had a dating advantage because male Trump voters outnumber female ones?

Eh, not really. 

“After the election, I think I had over 200 pending Facebook friend requests from random guys that all had Trump profile pictures or bald eagle profile pictures,” she said. So yes, she received extra attention — but she wasn’t into it. “It’s just a little much and I’m not really interested in people that just friend random girls on Facebook,” she explained. 

Even several months after Trump’s inauguration, she continues to receive Facebook requests from random conservative guys.

By the time CPAC rolled around in February, Elizabeth was steadily dating her boyfriend, but she still had to steer clear of “those types of guys wearing the MAGA hats that are like, creepin’,” she said. “Guys that are young and very involved with politics, in both parties, can tend to err on the side of being a little creepy.” Later, Elizabeth noticed that some of the guys who were a little too friendly at CPAC ended up getting jobs in Trump’s administration. “The creepy people are now in higher-up places in D.C., which is kind of disturbing,” she said.

In addition to the creep factor, Elizabeth isn’t that interested in MAGA-hat-wearing men because she considers herself more of an “establishment Republican” and feels that Trump isn’t a real Republican. Even though she and her boyfriend both voted for Trump, they were hesitant about it, she said, and haven’t been pleased with everything he’s done in his administration.

Even conservative women who didn’t vote for Trump feel pressured to defend him on dates. When liberal guys find out that Deborah, a 24-year-old white woman in Boston, is a conservative, they often ask her how a woman could possibly vote for Trump. That’s the awkward moment when she tells them that she, too, wasn’t happy with Trump’s statements about grabbing women’s genitals; that’s part of why she voted for Evan McMullin instead.

Deborah says she doesn’t like feeling pressured to defend someone she didn’t vote for, and she doesn’t like the way the men she goes on dates with judge her for her political opinions. She tries to avoid talking about politics if she can, but that’s become very difficult, especially in the past few months.

Politics “comes up on most [dates] now just because of everything that’s been going on recently, especially since Charlottesville,” she said. “It’s hard for people not to talk about it, so it just comes up. And then most of the time I just try not to even say anything.” If she offers an opinion, such as, “I can understand the president [saying there’s] multiple sides at fault here,” then her date “just gets completely mad,” she said.

With the exception of abortion, which she is against, she’s open to dating men who have different viewpoints as long as they don’t respond so negatively to hers. “The hardest part for me since I moved to Boston is getting used to that culture up north,” she said, explaining that the guys she meets can come off as “kind of gruff.” Deborah is from D.C., where she says she was able to find more guys with “Southern manners” because the city is a larger blend of north and south than Boston.

“I like manners; I like chivalry. I want the guy to open the door for me,” Deborah said. She likes men who “respect me as a woman but then also realize that I can have intellectual conversations with them,” as well as conversations about sports.

So what kind of guys did she date before she moved to Boston?

“I don’t want to be stereotypical, but — the Southern frat boy,” she said. Unsurprisingly, “they generally tend to be more Republican when it comes to politics.”

This Michelle person sounds like a lovely person. (end sarcasm)

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"For those in the Party of Trump, the Republicans — not the president — are to blame"

Spoiler

OXFORD, N.C. — During one of their usual morning gatherings at the Bojangles’ restaurant in this rural town near the Virginia border, a group of retirees from a local Baptist church shook their heads at the failure of Washington to repeal Obamacare, lower the national debt, build a wall along the southern border, kick people off welfare or get anything else accomplished.

But the focus of their blame is not President Trump, it’s Republicans in Congress — whom they view as standing in the way. And they applaud the president’s recent attempts to work with Democrats on issues ranging from the debt ceiling to immigration.

“I am proud to say I am proud of Trump,” said Mildred Oakes, 76, a former registered Democrat who is no longer affiliated with a party.

“Make that two of us,” said another church member.

“Make it three,” said Norman Boyd, 79, a retired machinist who is registered as a Democrat — but hasn’t voted for one for president since Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

“I think he’s an idiot, but I voted for him,” another church member chimed in, as others laughed and a woman sitting across from him countered with: “As opposed to what was in there before?”

These churchgoers are at the heart of the dilemma nagging Republican leaders as they struggle to forge a path between the Grand Old Party and the Party of Trump. These voters don’t consider themselves Republicans. They are first and foremost supporters of the president.

They are quick to explain away the compromises the former real-estate developer and reality TV star has made and the inconsistencies in many of his positions. They describe Washington as a swamp and speak of Democratic and Republican congressional leaders with the same levels of frustration and disappointment — while describing Trump as if he were a longtime neighbor. They have high hopes for his presidency, but they also fear he might be held back by his party. And they don’t expect their devotion to the president to waver, even a tiny bit, any time soon.

“He’s elected as our president. We need to give him our respect,” said Oakes, who has seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild. “I’ll vote for him four years from now because I think it will take longer for him to clean up the mess that was left by Obama.”

Granville County has long been a Democratic stronghold, but it was one of six rural counties in North Carolina that flipped from voting twice for Barack Obama to voting for Trump last year. Local Democrats blame the flip on low turnout, especially among African Americans who make up a third of the county’s population. But local Republicans say it reflects how many in the county feel left behind by Democrats and are looking for a change.

Statewide in North Carolina, nearly 39 percent of voters are registered as Democrats, but that includes voters who haven’t voted for a Democrat in decades but keep the designation out of a sense of family tradition or because they want to vote in local races that are usually decided in the Democratic primary. The number of unaffiliated voters has steadily grown and, as of this month, is now slightly higher than the number of registered Republicans. One Democratic strategist said that when it comes down to how voters actually vote, North Carolina is pretty evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. In November’s general election, Trump won the state.

In Granville County, Trump beat Clinton by less than 700 votes, while voters narrowly put their support behind a Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, and a Democratic congressman, G.K. Butterfield, along with a Republican senator, Richard Burr.

In interviews last week with nearly three dozen county residents who voted for Trump, nearly all said they vote for the person, not the party. With that emphasis — even if they would never dream of actually voting for a Democrat for president, especially Hillary Clinton — it’s little surprise that many feel more loyalty to Trump than the Republican Party.

Many of the church members gathered at Bojangles’ last week pointed to the president’s Christian faith, saying he brought the Bible and prayer back into the White House. Even though Trump rarely attends church himself, he frequently talked about religion on the campaign trail, promising that with him in the White House, Christians would once again feel free to openly say “Merry Christmas.”

“President Trump has talked more about Christian values than any of the last two or three presidents that we’ve had,” said Wayne Overton, 79, who is retired from the Postal Service and now raises cows on a farm a few miles outside of town and tours the country in a motor home. “And I admire him for picking the vice president that he picked. If something happened, our country would be in good hands.”

Overton and others admit that while Trump is far from perfect, he represents them far better than Obama — and he isn’t afraid to say the unpopular thing. Too often, they said, Republican and Democratic leaders provide the politically correct response instead of the fair one. That’s why they were encouraged to hear Trump speak out against liberal protesters who have sparked violent clashes across the country, defend the country’s history and protect the America that they know.

“It used to be in the [county hospital] waiting room you would see white and black, but mostly black. You go into the waiting room now, you see Latinos. They’re the ones having the babies,” said Oakes, a grandmother of seven and great-grandmother of one who is retired from an agency that provided in-home health care. “So, you know, whites will be the minority very soon.”

When asked if that worries her, Oakes replied: “Well, I believe in Christian values.”

When asked what she meant by that, Oakes gestured to Curtis Nelson, an African American employee at Bojangles’ who is a pastor at a local church, voted for Trump and often stops by to chat with the breakfast club.

“Curtis knows I love Curtis as much as anybody — but I believe in Christian values,” she said, adding that she has a friend who legally immigrated from Mexico and that she is supportive of a Latino church that started in the county.

The church members soon wrapped up their morning gathering and were replaced by the lunch crowd, including Roy Strickland, who grabbed a booth in the corner as he waited for a friend.

Strickland, a Navy veteran, moved to the county in 1973 and worked as a truck mechanic and then as an industrial pipe fitter until he was laid off in 2009. He said he went on disability for his diabetes, arthritis and other health issues, and when he tried to look for work, no one wanted to hire him. He’s now 69 and lives eight miles outside town in what he calls “the middle of nowhere.”

He has long depended on government checks to survive. After working for more than four decades, he says he gets angry when he sees people getting welfare who haven’t yet contributed, and he hopes that Trump will crack down — a common sentiment here.

Strickland is a registered Democrat on paper but otherwise is a longtime Republican. He said he gets frustrated with “mainstream Republicans” in Congress like House Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, who “has an agenda of his own and is trying to undermine what Trump is trying to do.” He was glad to see the president agree with Democrats to raise the government borrowing limit and avoid a government shutdown.

“Something had to be done,” Strickland said. “I don’t think that the deal he cut with them to do that was putting him in their corner. It was just business. Regardless of whatever else he is, he’s a businessman.”

He’s also been heartened to see the president stand up to liberal protesters and the anti-fascist movement, more commonly known as “antifa.” Strickland said that he has never seen the country so racially divided and he blames Obama for “causing trouble” and widening “the gap between the races” by getting involved when black teenagers were shot by white police officers, which Strickland views as rare occurrences that the media blows out of proportion.

When Strickland was growing up in Durham, he said that he would often walk four miles from his home outside of town to the movie theater, passing through black neighborhoods and chatting with those he passed. He often wore a jean jacket with a Confederate flag on the back.

“I never had any trouble. I would meet a black man walking down the street, or a woman, and I’d speak to them, they’d speak to me. . . . Somebody sitting on a porch, we’d wave to each other. There was never a problem with it,” he said. “Look at it now. If a white man walks through sections of Durham, he gonna get killed.”

Strickland said the Confederate flag is part of his history.

“It’s part of everybody’s history, just like these statues that they keep tearing down. They’re history. They’re nothing that’s hurting anybody.”

Later in the day, as the sun set in a grand display of pink and lavender, Debbie Spencer loaded groceries into her car at the Walmart across from the Bojangles’ restaurant. The 65-year-old keeps a baton and three knives hidden in her car so that she can fight off anyone who might try to attack her — but she mostly feels safe here in Granville County, home to winding country roads, tobacco fields, meadows of yellow wildflowers and quiet little towns. She will only go to the nearby city of Henderson during daylight, and she never ventures to Durham, which is about 30 miles south.

Both of Spencer’s parents were Democrats, although she said that they would not recognize the Democratic Party today. She has been a registered Republican all her adult life, although she doesn’t recognize the party that many Republicans in Washington claim to represent — and she doesn’t understand why Republican leaders are fighting Trump. She jokingly suggested that the country might benefit from all of Washington being wiped out during one of Trump’s trips to Mar-a-Lago.

“The Republicans in both the House and the Senate are thwarting the president’s — no, the people’s — agenda,” said Spencer, who is retired after working for nearly three decades manufacturing roof shingles. “They get up there, and they get a taste of power, and they get a taste of money, and they forget us.”

Wow, just wow.

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Is this the right thread to complain about a sewing group I belong to on Facebook with members from all over the world, including Americans, some of whom are #45 supporters?  If so I need to vent about a post someone started because they were so excited Eleventy!!!! to receive the pattern they ordered for a knock off Melania inauguration dress.  Sewer can't wait to get started and commentators are like: "So classy, gorgeous, wish I could wear that dress, a real first lady, Mrs. First Lady, where can I buy that pattern etc."  I am having great difficulty sitting on my hands today.  I apologize if I put this in the wrong thread.  I have had to stay out of the FJ Politics sub-forum for mental health reasons.

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1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"For those in the Party of Trump, the Republicans — not the president — are to blame"

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OXFORD, N.C. — During one of their usual morning gatherings at the Bojangles’ restaurant in this rural town near the Virginia border, a group of retirees from a local Baptist church shook their heads at the failure of Washington to repeal Obamacare, lower the national debt, build a wall along the southern border, kick people off welfare or get anything else accomplished.

But the focus of their blame is not President Trump, it’s Republicans in Congress — whom they view as standing in the way. And they applaud the president’s recent attempts to work with Democrats on issues ranging from the debt ceiling to immigration.

“I am proud to say I am proud of Trump,” said Mildred Oakes, 76, a former registered Democrat who is no longer affiliated with a party.

“Make that two of us,” said another church member.

“Make it three,” said Norman Boyd, 79, a retired machinist who is registered as a Democrat — but hasn’t voted for one for president since Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

“I think he’s an idiot, but I voted for him,” another church member chimed in, as others laughed and a woman sitting across from him countered with: “As opposed to what was in there before?”

These churchgoers are at the heart of the dilemma nagging Republican leaders as they struggle to forge a path between the Grand Old Party and the Party of Trump. These voters don’t consider themselves Republicans. They are first and foremost supporters of the president.

They are quick to explain away the compromises the former real-estate developer and reality TV star has made and the inconsistencies in many of his positions. They describe Washington as a swamp and speak of Democratic and Republican congressional leaders with the same levels of frustration and disappointment — while describing Trump as if he were a longtime neighbor. They have high hopes for his presidency, but they also fear he might be held back by his party. And they don’t expect their devotion to the president to waver, even a tiny bit, any time soon.

“He’s elected as our president. We need to give him our respect,” said Oakes, who has seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild. “I’ll vote for him four years from now because I think it will take longer for him to clean up the mess that was left by Obama.”

Granville County has long been a Democratic stronghold, but it was one of six rural counties in North Carolina that flipped from voting twice for Barack Obama to voting for Trump last year. Local Democrats blame the flip on low turnout, especially among African Americans who make up a third of the county’s population. But local Republicans say it reflects how many in the county feel left behind by Democrats and are looking for a change.

Statewide in North Carolina, nearly 39 percent of voters are registered as Democrats, but that includes voters who haven’t voted for a Democrat in decades but keep the designation out of a sense of family tradition or because they want to vote in local races that are usually decided in the Democratic primary. The number of unaffiliated voters has steadily grown and, as of this month, is now slightly higher than the number of registered Republicans. One Democratic strategist said that when it comes down to how voters actually vote, North Carolina is pretty evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. In November’s general election, Trump won the state.

In Granville County, Trump beat Clinton by less than 700 votes, while voters narrowly put their support behind a Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, and a Democratic congressman, G.K. Butterfield, along with a Republican senator, Richard Burr.

In interviews last week with nearly three dozen county residents who voted for Trump, nearly all said they vote for the person, not the party. With that emphasis — even if they would never dream of actually voting for a Democrat for president, especially Hillary Clinton — it’s little surprise that many feel more loyalty to Trump than the Republican Party.

Many of the church members gathered at Bojangles’ last week pointed to the president’s Christian faith, saying he brought the Bible and prayer back into the White House. Even though Trump rarely attends church himself, he frequently talked about religion on the campaign trail, promising that with him in the White House, Christians would once again feel free to openly say “Merry Christmas.”

“President Trump has talked more about Christian values than any of the last two or three presidents that we’ve had,” said Wayne Overton, 79, who is retired from the Postal Service and now raises cows on a farm a few miles outside of town and tours the country in a motor home. “And I admire him for picking the vice president that he picked. If something happened, our country would be in good hands.”

Overton and others admit that while Trump is far from perfect, he represents them far better than Obama — and he isn’t afraid to say the unpopular thing. Too often, they said, Republican and Democratic leaders provide the politically correct response instead of the fair one. That’s why they were encouraged to hear Trump speak out against liberal protesters who have sparked violent clashes across the country, defend the country’s history and protect the America that they know.

“It used to be in the [county hospital] waiting room you would see white and black, but mostly black. You go into the waiting room now, you see Latinos. They’re the ones having the babies,” said Oakes, a grandmother of seven and great-grandmother of one who is retired from an agency that provided in-home health care. “So, you know, whites will be the minority very soon.”

When asked if that worries her, Oakes replied: “Well, I believe in Christian values.”

When asked what she meant by that, Oakes gestured to Curtis Nelson, an African American employee at Bojangles’ who is a pastor at a local church, voted for Trump and often stops by to chat with the breakfast club.

“Curtis knows I love Curtis as much as anybody — but I believe in Christian values,” she said, adding that she has a friend who legally immigrated from Mexico and that she is supportive of a Latino church that started in the county.

The church members soon wrapped up their morning gathering and were replaced by the lunch crowd, including Roy Strickland, who grabbed a booth in the corner as he waited for a friend.

Strickland, a Navy veteran, moved to the county in 1973 and worked as a truck mechanic and then as an industrial pipe fitter until he was laid off in 2009. He said he went on disability for his diabetes, arthritis and other health issues, and when he tried to look for work, no one wanted to hire him. He’s now 69 and lives eight miles outside town in what he calls “the middle of nowhere.”

He has long depended on government checks to survive. After working for more than four decades, he says he gets angry when he sees people getting welfare who haven’t yet contributed, and he hopes that Trump will crack down — a common sentiment here.

Strickland is a registered Democrat on paper but otherwise is a longtime Republican. He said he gets frustrated with “mainstream Republicans” in Congress like House Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, who “has an agenda of his own and is trying to undermine what Trump is trying to do.” He was glad to see the president agree with Democrats to raise the government borrowing limit and avoid a government shutdown.

“Something had to be done,” Strickland said. “I don’t think that the deal he cut with them to do that was putting him in their corner. It was just business. Regardless of whatever else he is, he’s a businessman.”

He’s also been heartened to see the president stand up to liberal protesters and the anti-fascist movement, more commonly known as “antifa.” Strickland said that he has never seen the country so racially divided and he blames Obama for “causing trouble” and widening “the gap between the races” by getting involved when black teenagers were shot by white police officers, which Strickland views as rare occurrences that the media blows out of proportion.

When Strickland was growing up in Durham, he said that he would often walk four miles from his home outside of town to the movie theater, passing through black neighborhoods and chatting with those he passed. He often wore a jean jacket with a Confederate flag on the back.

“I never had any trouble. I would meet a black man walking down the street, or a woman, and I’d speak to them, they’d speak to me. . . . Somebody sitting on a porch, we’d wave to each other. There was never a problem with it,” he said. “Look at it now. If a white man walks through sections of Durham, he gonna get killed.”

Strickland said the Confederate flag is part of his history.

“It’s part of everybody’s history, just like these statues that they keep tearing down. They’re history. They’re nothing that’s hurting anybody.”

Later in the day, as the sun set in a grand display of pink and lavender, Debbie Spencer loaded groceries into her car at the Walmart across from the Bojangles’ restaurant. The 65-year-old keeps a baton and three knives hidden in her car so that she can fight off anyone who might try to attack her — but she mostly feels safe here in Granville County, home to winding country roads, tobacco fields, meadows of yellow wildflowers and quiet little towns. She will only go to the nearby city of Henderson during daylight, and she never ventures to Durham, which is about 30 miles south.

Both of Spencer’s parents were Democrats, although she said that they would not recognize the Democratic Party today. She has been a registered Republican all her adult life, although she doesn’t recognize the party that many Republicans in Washington claim to represent — and she doesn’t understand why Republican leaders are fighting Trump. She jokingly suggested that the country might benefit from all of Washington being wiped out during one of Trump’s trips to Mar-a-Lago.

“The Republicans in both the House and the Senate are thwarting the president’s — no, the people’s — agenda,” said Spencer, who is retired after working for nearly three decades manufacturing roof shingles. “They get up there, and they get a taste of power, and they get a taste of money, and they forget us.”

Wow, just wow.

Yep, Oxford, NC, one of the most racist places in North Carolina. These people are right, Trump does represent them more than Obama did. Racists, easily manipulated, on government assistance, but, wait, they deserve it, those other people don't. And let's not forget, they're Christians! Brought the bible and prayer back to the White House, my ass.

I love that great-grandmamma Oakes says she respects Trump because he's our elected president and in the next sentence dis-respects Obama. One of the big problems with these idiots is they can't hear what they're actually saying. it's all programmed propaganda.  And they wonder why we call them hypocrites.

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@pook -- I would be complaining too. Sorry you have to deal with the 45 sycophants. I can't imagine wanting to make a copy of that ugly dress. Yes, it's a bit BEC, but I didn't like it at all.

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20 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

@pook -- I would be complaining too. Sorry you have to deal with the 45 sycophants. I can't imagine wanting to make a copy of that ugly dress. Yes, it's a bit BEC, but I didn't like it at all.

I didn't care for it either, she was trying to be Jackie Kennedy. @pook, brave you, I just avoid anyone who supports Dumpy so no need to ponder a response. Every month my neighborhood has a women's lunch and I always think I might go and then have to remind myself that I would end up stabbing someone in the eye.

And did anyone notice FLOTUS standing there beside Dumpy when he was at the U.N.? She had her hand in her pants pocket like she was about to walk the runway. Confused about what the U.N. is?

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On 9/17/2017 at 11:19 AM, GrumpyGran said:

I think the paper publishes these nutty letters to out these lunatics to their neighbors.

In Maine there's a Branch Trumpvidian who has signs up that violate a city ordinance and she's vowing to keep them up no matter what;

Quote

The woman hung the signs on the front gate of her home in Maine. The signs read "I Love Trump" and "He Won, Get Over It."

A city ordinance states signs can be no larger than two square feet, but she says she wasn't aware of that. 

A neighbor complained about the signs, so the city told the woman she must take them down or face a fine. However, she says she has no plans to remove them, even though, it could cost her up to $1,000 a day.

Personally, I'd say let her keep the signs up.  Having Trump signs up is an easy way for people to see who the douche cannons are in the neighborhood.  

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2 hours ago, 47of74 said:

In Maine there's a Branch Trumpvidian who has signs up that violate a city ordinance and she's vowing to keep them up no matter what;

Personally, I'd say let her keep the signs up.  Having Trump signs up is an easy way for people to see who the douche cannons are in the neighborhood.  

Not to mention funding the local firefighters and police officers as long as they are really collecting that $1000 a day fine. But I bet she bails out when she gets up to $5000 or so. Probably thinks Dump is going to show up and pay the fine for her.

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1 hour ago, GrumpyGran said:

Not to mention funding the local firefighters and police officers as long as they are really collecting that $1000 a day fine. But I bet she bails out when she gets up to $5000 or so. Probably thinks Dump is going to show up and pay the fine for her.

Maybe she can get the RNC or TT's campaign to pay for it, since they're paying for the TT's legal fees.

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2 hours ago, GrumpyGran said:

Not to mention funding the local firefighters and police officers as long as they are really collecting that $1000 a day fine. But I bet she bails out when she gets up to $5000 or so. Probably thinks Dump is going to show up and pay the fine for her.

If the BT wants to piss away all her money on something like this, more power to her.

This reminds me of City of Ladue v. Gilleo, 512 U.S. 43 (1994).  In that case Ladue, Missouri (where one Phyllis Schlafly used to live) had their ordinance regarding signage struck down for being too broad and violating free speech.  I wonder if the city where the BT lives might not be able to sustain the ordinance.   I wonder if some reich wing lawyer will take up her case to gain publicity so the reich wing can run around whining about how all the evil, mean liberals want to silence conservatives? 

If it was me, I'd again say leave her be.  Let her put up all the damn fool signs she wants because it points out to the entire fornicating world that she is a Branch Trumpvidian.  

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All she has to do is downsize to a 2 x 2 size as specified by the ordinance.  The ordinance is based on size, not content, so wouldn't count as suppressing free speech, would it?  

 

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In the interest of allowing everyone to use their Fuck You button I'm going to quote from Today's Letter from an Idiot in my local paper:

"I'm a very old Marine and I believe in our right to protest. However, disrespecting our flag is not a protest; it is despicable...I know these kids don't have a very good grasp on what they are doing. They are very young and very wealthy and have done very little in service of their country. I hope they reconsider what they are doing as I, for one, will watch no more pro football...God knows I'm no Trump supporter, but he is right on this one. If you won't stand up and sing the national anthem you should be deported, but I'll settle for FIRED."

*bolding mine*

 

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