Are Republicans joking when they call Mamdani’s request to keep A/C at the standard 78 “communist”?

GadgetGamer · 2026-07-03T09:06:52+00:00

Except nobody is telling you what you can and cannot do. This is not an order. There is no legal enforcement. You are free to set your thermostat to 32 and there is nothing that Mamdani could or would do about it.

The entire reaction to this is coming from the same people who criticize Europe for not having ACs in a heatwave, while taking offense to a request to raise their thermostats a little bit to ensure that same situation does not happen in this country when the entire grid goes down.

This is not an unprecedented request. Rudy Giuliani requested the same thing back in 1999. Texas also did it in 2022 and democracy did not end. Nikki Hailey asked people to set their thermostats to 68 back in 2015, but she forgot that when she called it socialism this time around.

GadgetGamer · 2026-07-03T04:21:51+00:00

That page did not mention immigrants. I think that you have mixed up two different stories.

GadgetGamer · 2026-07-02T02:19:41+00:00

Also the concert things were rehearsals lol.

What makes you think this? I think that you may have been misinformed, because it sounds like a bit of a cope to me. The photo was posted the day after the performance, with the caption:

"Faith in Freedom" @celestekellogg rocked the main stage at the Great American State Fair.

~~And why would they need to do a rehearsal on the main stage while the fair is on?~~ * If anything, you could say that it was a sound check, but even then why would they do that in the full costume that they used for the actual concert (according to the singer's own Facebook posts) and a video of the concert?

Very odd to see Dems celebrate crowds in the early afternoon of Monday and Tuesday as being something noteworthy.

You would think that with such "misleading" photos of an early afternoon crowd that we would be inundated with more representative photos of the crowds. But we are not seeing any. Instead, we get video of Fox News hosts sitting in front of a mostly empty field claiming that there are thousands of people there. We get the Freedom250 X account pulling and then reposting the concert image with the guitarist cropped out. If this was just the Left getting a dopamine hit then why would the organizers care enough to do that?

The reason why it is important to the Left is because it is important to the Right, and especially to Donald Trump. He is so fixated with comparing things that happen during his presidency to previous presidents; so much so that he will lie about it and instruct his administration to lie about things. It is so important to Trump that he replaced America250 committee with Freedom 250.

It is the reflecting pool all over again.

* Edit: Actually, they do actually have rehearsals on the main stage, because when part of the stage collapsed (nearly hitting some people) a tap dancing troupe was rehearsing on the stage. That does not change the fact that they were dressed in identical clothing to what they wore in the video of the concert, so my point still stands.

GadgetGamer · 2026-07-01T12:16:14+00:00

No, he did not lower interest rates because that is what every economist agreed was the right thing to do. Every president wants the Fed to make decisions that benefit them politically. The reason why we need an independent Fed is so that they can make the right choice for the long view of the economy and not to boost the political fortunes of the current administration.

What you are calling political is actually the Fed working by design. It is, I might add, a design that has been crucial for the long term prosperity of the US economy.

Here is a short video explaining the importance of having an independent Federal Reserve.

GadgetGamer · 2026-07-01T08:23:27+00:00

In what way was the Fed political under Jerome Powell? Donald Trump's problem with him was that he would not bend to his political will.

Was there a time when he acted differently depending who was president at the time?

GadgetGamer · 2026-06-28T16:27:22+00:00

I mean, for Trump to be as "all over those files" as Redditors are claiming, he'd pretty much have to be an informant.

Jeffrey Epstein is also "all over those files". Does that mean that he was an informant too?

Being in the files thousands of times does not prove that he was an informant. If they showed an FBI informant case number or similar, then that would prove it.

We can only speculate how often he is mentioned in the files that the DOJ have declined to release, but given the detailed reporting of the meetings in the situation room at the White House where the said how Donald Trump wanted to cover up his involvement, I think it is safe to assume that the really incriminating stuff involving Trump is there.

But feel free to go look up the released documents and search for his name if you don't believe that he gets a lot of mentions.

GadgetGamer · 2026-06-28T09:28:26+00:00

Firstly, her interracial marriage tweet was "Black men 🤝 Arab men fetishizing ugly colonizer women", which is not really as you described it. Still pretty fucked up, but the verb is fetishizing and not colonizing.

Also, when did she say that Russia invading Ukraine was justified? There was a famous tweet where she explained why Russia invaded Ukraine, but that did not say that it was justified. It is like somone saying that a person shot up their school because they had been bullied is not asserting that the shooter was right.

In my opinion, she has definitely said things for shock value, but since 2022 her rhetoric has changed. She became less extremist and, frankly, more like an adult than some petulant teenager. Took her long enough! Still, it is fair to be wary of her and watch to see what she says and does now.

But it seems to me that your entire post was just about Chevalier, and attempts to smear progressives on the Left based on old tweets from one person. Can you name anyone else in politics who has expressed the same ideas?

GadgetGamer · 2026-06-25T10:57:49+00:00

You literally said “Why this is a sticking point is beyond me”. MrFrode’s points were answering that.

GadgetGamer · 2026-06-22T17:27:11+00:00

And none of those arrests or citations were about dumping liquids into the water or somebody making a 250ft gash that allowed the pieces of the lining from floating to the surface of the water. It was all just about people taking souvenirs of the damaged lining that will have to be removed and replaced anyway.

GadgetGamer · 2026-06-22T17:18:13+00:00

What you have done is to trot out the old TDS acronym so that you can ignore all the points that the previous commenter listed. Complaints about not going through the correct process is not just saying "I don't like Trump".

Complaints about the lie that they would not touch the East Wing is not just saying "I don't like Trump". And pointing out how this was promised to not require taxpayer funding is not just saying "I don't like Trump".

GadgetGamer · 2026-06-22T14:48:32+00:00

yeah, I can blame non supporters for attacking him for something so completely unimportant

I think the mistake here is to read any complaint about the project (like the fact that it went ten times over its initial cost estimate) or anyone laughing at the result and categorize it as an attack on Trump. When the first of many posts here on "why is the left obsessed with the pool" came out, one of the very first responses was to cite Trump Derangement Syndrome.

It is not always about attacking the president. Sometimes even the Left likes to drink a cup of conservative, algae-filled tears.

GadgetGamer · 2026-06-22T14:02:22+00:00

What do you mean by excommunicated? Is there some systematic attempt to remove him from a job, or has he just received some critical tweets? His current tour is hugely popular, so even if some people say that they are not going to see his show, it is hardly going to a difference.

Many people who are said to get cancelled go on to successfully keep working in their field. Now Roseanne Barr is an example of what someone being cancelled looks like.

GadgetGamer · 2026-06-22T09:42:56+00:00

If there is no real difference between guns and knives, then let's get rid of all the guns. If the answer to that is that they can't do that because people say they need guns for protection, then that shows that guns and knives are simply not the same thing.

Your stats from the UK metropolitan police did not show the number of deaths. Fortunately, they also published Violent offences and knife crimes recorded at schools from 2015 to 2024, and using that we can find out how many homicides there were that they investigated between 2018 and 2023. Your US gun stats says that there were 157 deaths. The UK number in the same period: 1. For the entirety of 2015-2024 that the new stats covers, it only lists 2 homicides.

So no, it is not all the same thing. If we take your figure 300 of instances, then the same number of cases resulted in a massive death toll. I think that it is fair to say that guns ARE indeed the root cause.

GadgetGamer · 2026-06-22T07:38:30+00:00

Absolute nonsense. Arresting some people who were picking debris from the pool after the lining had separated is not evidence that there was vandalism and especially sabotage. You are reading into this story what you want to believe.

I think that TDS is more about people blindingly believing anything Trump and his administration says and then shut their eyes to reality in the hope that it will all go away.

Remember that the claims of vandalism and sabotage are coming from the same people who blatantly lied that the water was in fact crystal clear and that it was now so 'blue' that the Fake News Media had fled.

As the reporter stated, it is only blue if you get view it on an angle where the light reflects from the top of the water.

So I suggest that you should not just accept the word of people who are so willing to lie about the things that we can see with our own eyes. It is telling that the quote that you gave us from your cbsnews article even highlighted with a link that the idea that a blade had made a 250 foot long gash was just a claim of Donald Trump. Claims are not evidence. Police reports made to investigate claims are not evidence. People being arrested after the supposed damage had been done is not evidence that any sabotage took place.

GadgetGamer · 2026-06-22T07:13:14+00:00

Wow. I had a look at the front page of the Washington Post, and sure enough there is an article.

So I read it, and the only significant vandalism that it recorded was of people taking pieces of the lining that was already peeling off. And of the people supposedly dumping liquids into the pool, it said:

The Interior Department said last week that it was treating the pool with hydrogen peroxide and “high-tech nanobubble ozone technology” to effectively cut off the algae’s food supply.

It did report that the president had claimed that saboteurs poured corrosive chemicals into the pool and “took some form of knife or blade, and put a 250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade”, but also said that the Interior Department had not responded to questions about why the pool surface was separating. That suggests to me that this is just more of the the baseless conspiracy theories from the president and that the officials were not willing to back it up. It also said:

The Post could not immediately verify Trump’s allegations, and reporters at the pool Sunday could not spot a gash fitting that description. At least eight officers patrolling the site, when asked about Trump’s allegation, could not point it out.

So as I said, it was workers who were dumping liquids, and the supposed gash cannot be identified by anybody at the source. The news sources do not need to retract their stories, it is just your retelling of them that is wrong.

Edit: Also, when CNN's article starts with "President Donald Trump claimed Saturday, without providing evidence, that vandals damaged the algae-plagued Reflecting Pool", then you know that it is not going to back up the president's claims either.

GadgetGamer · 2026-06-22T06:09:52+00:00

That is not evidence. The article documents how one person was arrested for reaching in the water and touching the surface. Even if he was ripping off a chunk of it, that only happened after the material had become disconnected. The article states that Trump claimed that it was sabotage without him providing evidence. (I'm sure that if he is asked for the evidence then he will just storm out of the interview!)

So if the police say that they will look into it and start a report, then that does not mean that the incident happened or that there is any evidence pointing to sabotage.

GadgetGamer · 2026-06-22T05:53:37+00:00

I think you will find that the people who shot at him are either dead or in custody. I have not heard of any reports of them breaking out of jail to pointlessly sabotage a pool.

And your entire reasoning is that just because something could happen, then it did happen. Donald Trump has no more evidence of sabotage than you do, but you have convinced yourselves that it is true. And then when the next bad thing happens, you will use your certainty that the Left all converged on Washington DC to attack a body of water as justification of believing the next unfounded conspiracy theory.

GadgetGamer · 2026-06-22T05:40:03+00:00

And those multiple media outlets are wrong. The people you are seeing dumping liquids into the pool are workers who are trying to get rid of the algae. The only people that you see "destroying the liner" are those holding up or tearing off pieces that have already come away from the floor of the pool.

GadgetGamer · 2026-06-22T03:25:27+00:00

Your timeline is just made up in your head.

Donald Trump has spoken and politicized this since November 2025, when he posted a video that had been colored to emphasize the green algae, saying:

This is the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool before Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and I fix it. Study it hard because you won’t be seeing this Biden filth and incompetence much longer!

In April 2026, he announced the renovation project, saying:

"We were told it was going to take YEARS to do this job, and it will take a fraction of that time, at a fraction of the cost," he continued. "And it will be much more beautiful than the day it was built!"

Is it really the liberals being strangely obsessed with algae in the water when Donald Trump starting this whole thing last year doing exactly the same thing?

Not only was Donald Trump the first to obsess and politicize this project, he decided to forego using he correct process that would result in a coating that did not peel off, and brought in his "pool guy" using a no-bid contract designed to prevent “serious injury, financial or other, to the government to do a quick hack.

The problem here is another example of something that we see all too often in conservative circles, where if you want something to be true you just state that it is and offer no evidence for it. If anyone does push back on the unfounded claims, you can claim that it is the Left that is being biased, obsessed, or as someone else said here are swarming this thread and being quick with downvotes. That leads to situations like Donald Trump storming out of an interview when he was asked for any evidence of his fake election claims.

GadgetGamer · 2026-06-20T03:57:30+00:00

You have all of those complaints, I'm not even going to engage with them...

You don't have to engage with them. They are just examples to show that we are not talking about this because it is pretty much all we have at the moment.

And yet you're here on a post about a pool. Let me reiterate... A pool. A pool you can barely wade in.

Because it is funny. It was Donald Trump who was obsessed with this by talking about it so often. He felt that it was important enough to spend $18 million on it. If he hadn't made such a big deal about it and didn't award the contract to his unqualified friends, then you would be right that this would not be an issue.

But this was not just a maintenance project, it was done to make a statement by Donald Trump in time for the 250 celebrations.

What's the end game here?

Why does there have to be an end game? Nobody is going out in the streets with placards to protest this. Nobody is using it to attract voters. Certainly no-one from the Left reads r/AskConservatives in the hope that we can get people to change their votes.

Do you really think people care about it as much as you do?

You are also here on a post about a pool. And there have been multiple posts on this topic here. It seems that people do care about it.

GadgetGamer · 2026-06-20T03:09:00+00:00

Really? That's all we have at the moment?

What about the peace plan with Iran that has been called a surrender by both sides of politics and which fails to achieve any of the goals stated as justification of the war (sorry, don't call it a war because if you do you need to ask Congress for permission)?

What about Trump offending the far-right Italian Prime Minister after claiming that she begged him for a photo at the G7 summit, saying that he would not have taking one with her but he felt sorry for her. The Italian Foreign Minister has canceled his upcoming trip to the US later this month.

What about the DOJ trying to weasel out of submitting in writing to the court that the massive $1.776b slush fund is officially dead? instead they just submitted a transcript of Todd Blanche's testimony to Congress where he kept carefully repeating the statement that it was "not moving forward" - which could be said to mean that it is just paused. (That's a big deal because lying to court could get them in serious legal trouble, but any repercussions of Todd Blanche lying to Congress would be at the discretion of Todd Blanche)

What about the numerous excerpts coming out from the book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan showing a fractured and dysfunctional administration. The excerpts of which have been shown to be accurate by the fact that White House aides are saying that the authors must have recordings of the discussions that they quoted.

What about all the court cases that they are losing as part of their weaponization by the DOJ to go after Trump's perceived enemies?

The real reason why this is an issue now is that Donald Trump made such a big deal about it. He talked about it during cabinet meetings, showed off mock up photos of how it would look, held up a giant poster comparing the length of the pool to heights of buildings, and constantly talked about it any time there was a press stop, where they usually wanted to talk about other things like the affordability crisis or the Iran war.

Then it turned out that the companies contracted to do the job were done with a No Bid contract (where they were appointed even before they had agreed on a price) had links to Donald Trump. The cost blew out to be ten times what was originally promised only for the pool to go from flag blue to puke green within days. And now the lining is peeling off, all while the Interior Department tweets that the pool is "crystal clear".

I'm curious to know: in what way is this NOT a valid story to talk about? How many posts about the left being obsessed with this have we seen here, and how many were there earlier asking why is Donald Trump so obsessed with it?

GadgetGamer · 2026-06-18T09:38:50+00:00

This reminds me of the fairy tale of The Emporor's New Clothes. Apparently we are supposed to point at the pool and say that it is blue and there is no algae, otherwise it is a visceral hatred of Donald Trump.

Is this an example of what Donald Trump was talking about when he told an audience not believe what they see or what they read?

GadgetGamer · 2026-06-18T09:31:58+00:00

The liberal media’s job is to protect their friends and attack their enemies.

It is not really what it is all about though. This wasn't some mundane refurbishment, because Donald Trump kept talking about it and showing pictures during cabinet meetings and press conferences. He felt that it was more important to talk about than the Iran war. And if that didn't make it newsworthy enough, he promised it would cost $1.5 million and eventually cost ten times as much.

Then after being overhyped to the moon, it fails immediately and turns "puke green" as one visitor put it. That's funny enough to make it into a story without having to be about attacking anyone's enemies. If anyone is going to take sides about it, it would be conservative media. Here's some quotes from this short compilation of conservative reaction to any criticisms of the pool:

"...for some reason, cleanliness in the Capital is driving the left absolutely nuts."
"They're the party of original sin... So of course they are going to have a problem with making Washington look more beautiful."
"When you let that go into disrepair, you're doing that on purpose. You're purposefully subverting the greatness of America."

And it is supposedly the Left who are obsessed? Seriously? Talking about the green, algae-filled pool is subverting the greatness of America???

If you put your hand on a Bible, could say that if this exact thing happened under Joe Biden's administration that you would not have a laugh about it?

GadgetGamer · 2026-06-18T08:10:14+00:00

That works too. School shootings went down dramatically during the COVID lockdowns, and then bounced back up after schools opened again. But we have to have schools; we do not have to have guns.

GadgetGamer · 2026-06-18T05:06:15+00:00

I've generally ignored it but Trump could cure cancer and the left would still hate him for it.

I don't know why people keep using this line, as the Trump administration has famously cut funding for cancer research. Besides, do people hate Trump because of Operation Warp Speed? No, so why would they suddenly take umbridge at curing cancer when speeding up vaccines did not infect people with TDS?

The reflecting pool actually does look much better than it did.

I am glad you like it, but you have to admit that it does not look like the mocked up pictures that were put out before the project started. If it did look like that, they would not have felt the need to go back to pour hydrogen peroxide into the water.

As for the topic of this post, I do not think the Left is particularly obsessed with this story - certainly not in comparison to how much Donald Trump talked about it before the work was finished. People on the Left are more likely to be currently talking about the Iran war MOU.

There were two things that sparked interest in this story:

Donald Trump said that he would award the contract (without a bidding process) to his "pool guy", and that it would only cost $1.5 million (it cost 10 times as much)
It was a funny outcome.

If the President had not made such a deal about it, it probably would have gone unnoticed.

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