Him not being overtly political honestly tracks. Like, we're all used to the fact that the Right is just Like This now. But imagine a guy who doesn't follow politics, starts dating a trans woman, hears a clip of Kirk's bile and (with good reason!) thinks "holy shit this guy is a fucking monster"

I mean there could be a few of those but Occam's Razor would say most of them are just depressed

Reminds me of The Man in the High Castle where an aging, checked-out Hitler is the only thing stopping the Nazis from starting a nuclear war with Japan

the thing is, when you say he was no MLK he would've taken that as a compliment

yeah the UK is a worrying example here

It's extremely blackpilling that a President incited an insurrection to overturn an election he lost and then wasn't punished, was allowed to run again, won his party's nomination in a landslide and then won the general election while improving on his margin from four years prior in all 50 states

The other scary thing about Jan 6 is the vast number of people who didn't participate in the attack, condemned it at the time, but have now come to see it as acceptable or even good

In addition to the others mentioned: ProPublica, Rolling Stone (yes really), TNR, Liberal Currents

not a chance he would say "disincentivize"

Maybe he thought his audience wouldn't take him literally. But that's meaningfully distinct from "he didn't really mean it", which even the full context of his quote provides no evidence for.

As a former Evangelical Christian: this is wrong. No Evangelical would ever mock the idea of God's Law being perfect. Yes, they absolutely pick and choose which laws to follow but they would never admit it and most of them have convinced themselves that's not what they're doing.

That and the related argument that all Trump voters knew what they were voting for - no, many of them very much did not

Solidarity with my trans brothers and sisters and that’s all

He was a standard Republican bigot. Hated trans people but also Black people, women, etc

bruh