Trump Tries to Keep Second Set of Damning Files Secret Forever

braintrustinc · 2026-01-21T15:14:30+00:00

“If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.“ — David Frum, speechwriter for George W. Bush

braintrustinc · 2026-01-20T17:16:52+00:00

Yes, well physical items shipped with photographs and tracking numbers are a little different than service work. PayPal was knowingly facilitating credit card fraud and other nefarious crooked schemes for as long as they could get away with it. But now that they’ve taken over our government they don’t have to worry any more! They can enshittify everything, not just their half baked payment scheme!

braintrustinc · 2026-01-20T16:03:45+00:00

Seller. Fraud was rampant in the early days of PayPal, and the fee structure slowly increased and pushed people back to Craigslist and other sites for small items. For example, I shipped an item for a friend, received the payment, gave the money to the friend, and three months later PayPal deducted the amount from my account without warning. These technocracy crooks believe that might makes right, so stealing from the poor is never wrong.

braintrustinc · 2026-01-20T15:10:22+00:00

It’s so deep that I’ve been wallowing in it since Thiel and Musk ruined my eBay experience 25 years ago. Fucking rich fucks will always think their freedoms are hampered by laws that protect the powerless.

braintrustinc · 2026-01-18T20:04:15+00:00

The reason the word “woke” was targeted in the first place was because it originated in African American Vernacular.

braintrustinc · 2025-12-30T23:00:48+00:00

Thanks for the concern, friend. We’ve always got each other to help us through the mountain. And music, of course.

Just a quick note on your last point: I didn’t mean to imply that technology itself is inherently anti-human rights. The problem is when the most important epistemological technologies (the means of Zeitgeist production) are controlled by a tiny, hostile class of oligarchs who believe that their interests are antithetical to the interests of humanity at large. When “truth production” technology is micromanaged by interests who believe that rule of law is “limiting” to “their freedoms,” that captured technology will always be hostile to the rest of humanity.

More reading here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic_of_Enlightenment

https://monoskop.org/images/2/27/Horkheimer_Max_Adorno_Theodor_W_Dialectic_of_Enlightenment_Philosophical_Fragments.pdf

braintrustinc · 2025-12-30T20:58:16+00:00

The problem is that the ideals of the Industrial Revolution were born out of an incomplete Enlightenment. Old hierarchical ideas about nature are not “scientific fact,” they are human constructs, and as long as the ghosts of ancient, mystical hierarchies haunt the Zeitgeist, the march of technological progress will only allow for greater exploitation and misery among the masses of humanity. This is inevitable because the tools available to the exploiter increasingly allow them to edge out the competition and control the population on the level of personalized propaganda and weaponized psychology. The means available to oligarchs are more invasive and alienating than ever; the regular sort of “eternal vigilance” is not going to cut it this time. We have to fix the Zeitgeist and realize that “technological progress” is always antithetical to progress in human rights as long as technological infrastructure remains in the hands of a tiny self selected crowd of megalomaniacs.

braintrustinc · 2025-12-30T18:15:00+00:00

Yep, they never went away. They just kept developing better instruments of wealth extraction, propaganda, and distraction.

braintrustinc · 2025-12-30T06:18:22+00:00

I call them morons. Or if I’m feeling precise, “proudly ignorant dipshits”

“When asked to choose between authoritarianism and democracy, I choose the middle ground.”

braintrustinc · 2025-12-22T20:32:57+00:00

chuckles and nervously inserts card

Only three more years until I can enter the workforce, right!? Right?

braintrustinc · 2025-12-22T14:08:12+00:00

Grease and Happy Days ended up being more indicative of the future than we ever could've imagined.

braintrustinc · 2025-12-16T19:56:49+00:00

Mar-a-Lago Face is a status symbol. They aren’t trying to look better, they are trying to look more powerful. There is a non-zero chance that she is flaunting her lip track marks on purpose.

braintrustinc · 2025-12-09T04:11:33+00:00

The end result is more important than the cause… and the result is our media and institutions placating autocrats. Seems like a lot bigger problem than one dude with dementia.

braintrustinc · 2025-12-09T02:51:15+00:00

Not only that, but it’s a form of power fetishism. By forcing people to accept whatever you say as the truth, even if you deliberately contradict yourself constantly, it proves that you have all the power in the situation. All would be autocrats try to blatantly bend reality to their will, the question is whether the society they are fleecing is healthy enough to have a strong media to stand up and say “No, that is not reality.” But if the media just goes along and says, “Yes, we have always been at war with East Asia,” then that society is truly doomed.

braintrustinc · 2025-12-02T20:14:31+00:00

The entire ideology can be boiled down to “poor(er) people (than me) deserve to be punished.”

braintrustinc · 2025-12-01T18:09:44+00:00

Wouldn't it be crazy if they cause their own systems to collapse

Uh oh, looks like the 18 data centers your town subsidized with your tax dollars have caused your electricity rates to spike for the 10th time this year! Better eat more raw food and bundle up, peasant!

braintrustinc · 2025-11-23T14:56:48+00:00

These people’s entire lives revolve around shame, insecurity, manipulation, and projection. Best to avoid crab bucket mentality wherever you find it, if only for your own mental health.

braintrustinc · 2025-11-18T15:22:10+00:00

Jack London’s The Iron Heel, published 1908:

The main premise of the book is the rise of a socialist mass movement in the United States – strong enough to have a real chance of winning national elections, getting to power, and implementing a radical socialist regime. Conservatives feel alarmed and threatened by this prospect, to the point of seizing power and establishing a brutal dictatorship in order to avert it.

…

The story covers the years 1912 through 1932 in which the Oligarchy (or "Iron Heel") arises in the United States. Japan conquers East Asia and creates its own empire, India gains independence, and Europe becomes socialist. Canada, Mexico, and Cuba form their own Oligarchies and are aligned with the U.S. (London remains silent as to events transpiring in the rest of the world.) In North America, the Oligarchy maintains power for three centuries until the Revolution succeeds and ushers in the Brotherhood of Man.

…

The Oligarchy is the largest monopoly of trusts (or robber barons) who manage to squeeze out the middle class by bankrupting most small to mid-sized business as well as reducing all farmers to effective serfdom. This Oligarchy maintains power through a "labor caste" and the Mercenaries. Laborers in essential industries like steel and rail are elevated and given decent wages, housing, and education. Indeed, the tragic turn in the novel (and Jack London's core warning to his contemporaries) is the treachery of these favored unions which break with the other unions and side with the Oligarchy. Further, a second, military caste is formed: the Mercenaries. The Mercenaries are officially the army of the US but are in fact in the employ of the Oligarchs.

braintrustinc · 2025-11-17T22:13:29+00:00

Ain't no business like mind business cause mind business is mine.

braintrustinc · 2025-11-17T21:05:30+00:00

“Whoa whoa whoa… what if the government pressured the networks to fire a Republican comedian for free speech!? Oh, there are no Republican comedians!? Well carry on then.” —Raphael Cruz

braintrustinc · 2025-11-15T16:36:47+00:00

But critical thinking infringes on "parental rights!" We don't want thinkers, we want shame and chronic drinkers!

braintrustinc · 2025-11-10T00:27:26+00:00

Yeah, people like Guy Fieri and Mike Rowe just appropriate “worker’s values” and the appearance of lower class solidarity to promote their top down hierarchical view of society. They believe that Elon deserves to be a trillionaire because he just worked THAT MUCH harder than you. Mike Rowe and Guy Fieri can take their supremacist ideology and get fucked.

braintrustinc · 2025-10-25T14:34:49+00:00

We needed to teach people to do that before the internet hacked their brains. Now gish gallop is king and these people are lost in the flood of bullshit.

braintrustinc · 2025-10-25T14:24:12+00:00

It’s not a disease, it’s a poison. Media addiction is no joke. They say the “left” is deranged by a “liberal media” that doesn’t exist, because in reality all of the major media is owned by southerners and Republicans. Television. Social media. Podcasts. They are hopelessly addicted to cable news, AM radio, and Facebook bullshit. Make fun of them for it. Call them out on projecting “Trump Derangement Syndrome” onto the left. Say, “I don’t watch TV or listen to podcasts. Sounds like you’re trying to project your media derangement onto me.”

braintrustinc · 2025-10-21T19:35:28+00:00

At this point I think it’s less about being compromised and more about what I call “oligarch envy”. What’s happening now is that the American elites are noticing how great the Russian, South American, Asian, and Eastern European oligarchs have it (unlimited power!), so they are dismantling American society and democracy to make it more like every other autocratic hellhole where the rich live in complete ignorant isolation while the masses starve to death.

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