Not to people who depended on it.
I see. You're unable to address the point actually made.
Some of the things I hear my fellow Republicans asserting are troubling. However, those things present few practical problems for me.
That you recognize as such, perhaps.
The Democrats, though, present an existential threat to what I hold dear.
OK, how about this:
Antifa violence is a myth.
As noted previously, you seem to be relying on deceptive fantasy to defend yourself.
To be clear, the anarchists that make up the portion of Antifa that the right-wing like to make into a boogeyman certainly do cause problems. In particular, those problems tend to relate to the opposition to the belief in ownership/property rights. Petty theft, occupation of property, etc. Violence is normally low on the list of actual problems that are actually coming from Anti-Fa. It exists, sure, but the amount and danger is wildly overemphasized by right-wing propagandists to deceive those they reach. Also of note in relation to that is that much crime and violence that's done by other groups is casually misattributed to Anti-Fa by the right-wing as part of their attempts to create and feed the boogeyman.
Also of some note is that there have
long been entirely law-abiding Anti-Fa groups. They just don't get much press because they wouldn't give much in the way of ratings.
Meanwhile, violence is high on the list of actual problems caused by far right groups. Where Anti-Fa has virtually no deaths and murders that can reasonably be linked to them, right-wing extremists normally have the overwhelming share of such. More broadly, right-wing domestic terrorism numbers are consistently overwhelmingly highly than left-wing domestic terrorism numbers.
The real threat that one should be paying attention to it from the right, in short, objectively speaking.
No, I'm going to fight you on that one. From the start, Donald Trump did his best to keep Chinese nationals out of this country when the epidemic first broke (before it was even declared a pandemic),
In a too little, too late kind of way that was disorganized, incompetent, ignored the part where the disease had already spread elsewhere and so took no measures to guard against COVID itself until far too late...
Also, this is irrelevant to the point that Trump's COVID LIES caused more harm and death by orders of magnitude. Trump was caught on tape admitting that he was knowingly lying to the public about how bad COVID was, no less.
but Democrats retaliated by declaring Hug A Chinese Day. As I recall, Nancy Pelosi chose that time to make a visit to Chinatown, just to express solidarity with the Chinese. They tried to paint it as Trump is racist. So, COVID came to this country. Admittedly, it likely would have, eventually, but it isn't right claiming that Trump was the problem.
That. Was. NOT. The. Claim.
With that said, Trump was likely the single biggest problem, after COVID itself, though. Certainly not the only one, but the biggest single problem individual. On the front relevant to the actual claim that I made, Trump fueled 38% of COVID disinformation. That is absurdly massive for a single individual. It's no accident that the death ratio in Republican areas surpassed that in Democratic areas in the end.
On other fronts that you're ignoring, and this isn't even remotely all inclusive, Trump paved the way for COVID's spread by cutting a program in China that, even if it didn't nip it in the bud, likely would have ended up helping to warn the world notably sooner so the world could possibly take appropriate action before it was too late. Trump pretty well hobbled and dismantled the US' ability to respond to pandemics in general before COVID as well, and the federal response after finally starting to take action was chaotic and corrupt to an extreme.
Trump launched Operation Warp Speed (OWS), which proved critical in developing a vaccine against SARS-CoV2. The government invoked the Defense Production Act (DPA) and appropriate massive amounts of funding into fighting COVID. A trillion dollars of federal spending is attributable to Trump's actions fighting COVID.
Operation Warp Speed is one of the very few positive things that Trump can reasonable be given some credit for. It doesn't even remotely outweigh the rest, though, and nor does it at all address the claim that was actually made.
Too bad that Trump doesn't get a pass for having Democratic or institutional opposition.
If he were actually trying to do things that would help the country to help the country, I'd likely give him a pass.
Several of the initiatives that Trump is tackling are issues that have festered, rotted, in our society for decades, but nobody else would touch them. Democrats have been protecting these things, which should in many cases result in the arrest, convictions and prison sentences of a lot of Democrats. They haven't played nice in more than half a century. That's why I'm able to tolerate what Trump is doing now. You richly deserve all of this and more! It's necessary, because the morally and mentally depraved have a firm grip on power in this country and across much of the world.
This rather goes back to the deceptive fantasy bit.
To be clear, there are most definitely a bunch of actual issue that have festered in our society for decades... it's just that trusting Republicans to make things better is generally a fool's move. Fairly consistently, Republican propaganda latches onto real problems (often caused by Republicans) and screams loudly about them. When they get in power on the premise of dealing with those problems, they tend to offer flashy solutions that are minimally effective at dealing with the symptoms (if they don't outright make them worse), while quietly making numerous policy changes that cause the roots of the problem to get worse and worse.
That's Trump's method of tackling these issues in a nutshell, though. Show over substance and he wants the issues to scream about far more than he actually wants them solved.
*shrug* It's certainly what I heard and saw when I was paying attention at the time.
Some people must have thought it important, or he wouldn't have said it.
Sure. That doesn't change how bad it is as an attempt at equivocation.
That's pretty much true of every political group that has existed for the last thousand years. Probably much longer.
An empty claim.
Wow! That isn't even close to true!
An empty claim.
