This is their counterattack. They are trying to normalize pedophilia again, just like they normalized workplace sexual assault and protecting rapists again after 2018. They miss the Age of Epstein. They miss raping underage girls. They want us to move on so they can start doing it again.

Meanwhile, they take advantage of good but naive people who would never do such things and underestimate the depravity, and enlist men in the gray area who aren't full-on abusers, but have been socialized with predatory ideas about flirting and courtship, and interpret accusations accordingly.

They also accrue power because people who defile the most intimate and violent boundaries think nothing of other limits. So they are getting ahead by cutting other corners and breaking other rules. Look at how many powerful people associated with Epstein. Look at what Trump gets away with.

Rapists and pedohpiles are disproportionately powerful because they have a lot of social solidarity. They bond with each other by sharing in the violation of other human beings. Remember that letter Trump sent to Epstein about how they share a wonderful secret about "enigmas" who "never age?"

Remember how in 2018 it looked like Me Too was the end of normalized rape and workplace sexual assault? But the men who faced consequences ended up being rare exceptions and things reverted shortly after? This is that, but for rapists who like to rape teenage girls too instead of just adult women.

Apply to BART

The idea that Jewish people have reason to worry about their own safety is swiftly becoming the sort of fringe position opposing the occupation of Palestine was five or ten years ago. The two should coexist but instead they’re basically trading places.

Combine this with confiscation of ill-gotten fortunes (the entire Trump organization and all his bribes should be the seed capital for a social wealth fund) and it amounts to a redistribution.

And for fuck’s sake President Pritzker or AOC or whoever needs to put their name on the god damned checks.

Every family with a story about a brother or cousin who Trump swept up in a raid should also have a story about how the reconstruction government sent them (or goodness forbid their next of kin) a check that paid for their home or their kid’s college tuition.

Like, they want to be ruled by a pedophile but they think I’m the sex freak. I don’t know what there is to be done with that, but it’s true.

I don’t really know what to do about it but I’m no longer pretending that these people aren’t peasant-brained racists who hate women and fear those who exercise freedom. Ending gerrymandering will help but it will not get rid of them. How do you persuade them? I dunno. I suspect you can’t.

SHSHugar!

So, yes, we need to exploit this cleavage to defeat fascism, but we should be under no illusions at all that this shift is a good thing in absolute terms, and we cannot assume that antisemitism will harm them more than help them. Antisemitism is probably an electoral winner now.

Fuentes and MTG going full Volkisch is a mainstream tendency on the right now, and even among the more humanist and pluralist parts of the left, the idea that Zionism has ever been anything other than genocidal ethnonationalism, or has ever had an organic connection to Jewish safety, is mostly gone.

That takes the argument too far, I think, because this was the conventional wisdom about Trump. You *want* the Overton Window to shift in your direction and the Overton Window on antisemitism *has* shifted in ways that will probably never be reversed in our lifetimes.

omg we love a swamp

do you have insights about what bonuses and penalties to different troop types terrain should confer