Veteran 60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley reported on Donald Trump’s efforts to strong-arm some of the country’s top law firms into doing his bidding on Sunday night’s episode of the embattled CBS newsmagazine.
Pelley’s segment pulled no punches in describing Trump’s efforts and reminding viewers that Trump is the “first felon” ever to sit in the Oval Office.
Pretty terrifying honestly.
I’m kind of astonished that even republicans can’t see anything wrong with everything happening. Like conservative ideals are one thing but dismantling the rule of law is a whole other thing.
Uh… What did you think conservatives stood for again? Conservatism has always been about putting wealth in the hands of the few and scapegoating vulnerable people to distract the masses; everything else is camouflage.
I don’t think the majority of conservatives actually want that.
They claim they don’t want that, but every single one of their positions feeds into one or both of these two results.
If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you. ― Lyndon B. Johnson
The majority of Republicans are fucking morons that have no idea what is going on in the world and have no desire to so long as they have identified which group they are supposed to hate.
They just want to hate the people who they fear
Because they’re fucking idiots who choose ignorance because thinking is difficult for them
I wish more people understood this. Fear drives them just hate is an easier emotion that they can handle.
What would you say they want, then?
I do suspect there’s a pretty decent sized chunk who bought into that “Republicans are good for the economy” line of bullshit DECADES ago and have just spent the intervening time hell bent on not giving anything political even the tiniest iota of thought. These people still fucking suck, as that basically involves waking up every day and choosing to be a completely uninformed moron rather than spend 5 fucking seconds thinking about something they find uninteresting. So some are hateful bigots and some are just so fucking stupid it’s a minor miracle they’ve survived this long without someone to follow them around covering the outlets and safety pinning mittens to their sleeves. Fuck em both.
I do suspect there’s a pretty decent sized chunk who bought into that “Republicans are good for the economy” line of bullshit DECADES ago and have just spent the intervening time hell bent on not giving anything political even the tiniest iota of thought.
“I’ve been a conservative because I believe the Regan trickle down economics works.”
My old coworker. I literally said “my guy we’ve had fifty goddamn years to show that is complete bullshit. How many more decades do we need to try it for you to realize it doesn’t work?”
As you said, he just spent 0 time thinking about it.
But to be honest, it does work for him in a way… His parents were wealthy and so he has lived his life as a janitor and a doorman and will still be able to retire into a nice house with a ton of inheritance money…
Yeah, it trickles down from rich parents to their kids. That’s good enough for him I guess.
Then why did 77 million Republicans vote for Trump and Republicans?
Because their propaganda game is laser focused and extremely well funded. Propaganda works. They convinced half the population that if you like guns and are a Christian you must vote red or the blues will take it all away. It’s almost that simple.
propaganda game
THIS should be the top comment. I’ve seen friends and family fall for the BS because it was perverse and they never bothered to actually check things out. Republicans have worked overtime propagandizing the population since Nixon. No lie was too outrageous, no dirty trick too vile and eliminating liberal voices was top on their agenda, all backed by big dirty money.
Sure, but that view makes it sound like they are helpless victims in all this. They have access to the internet just like we do. They fall for the propaganda despite all evidence to the contrary and I only see two possibilities that can explain that; they are stupid or they want all that hateful stuff to be true so badly that they choose to shut out everything else. Neither explanation makes them anything other than shitty, selfish people.
Capitalism is the entropy lottery, and the more you remove the graphite the more the reaction runs away toward total meltdown
Conservatism is the belief that we should ban pencils because how dare you limit my chances even a little before everything breaks
I’ve lived in several countries and watched conservatives in all of them over half a century. Nothing I have seen has ever changed my view that conservatism is pathological selfishness disguised as a political philosophy. While other political movements agree on making life better for people in general but disagree on how to do it, conservatives indulge their personality disorder, call it politics, and demand to be taken as seriously as those who actually try.
The only reason why Trump’s approval rating has sunk a bit amongst conservatives is that tariffs are directly affecting them. As you said, they are selfishness incarnate.
Well said
And it’s so overwhelmingly male and (usually) white. Though that can sway depending on country. Seems they want to go back to owning slaves. And feel equality is oppression somehow.
Though there is a growing amount of white ladies now I want to see rot in prison.
Yeah but you’re upset about the country falling apart. They got what they wanted, they’re “owning the libs” because we’re “so mad about Trump winning.” For a lot of them it’s that simple, they just want to see people upset, it’s fun to them.
A certain philosopher seems spot-on about the nature of our enemy.
JEAN PAUL SARTE
They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The antisemites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.
If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.
[The anti-Semite attributes] all or part of his own misfortunes and those of his country to the presence of Jewish elements in the community, … proposes to remedy this state of affairs by depriving the Jews of certain of their rights, by keeping them out of certain economic and social activities, by expelling them from the country, by exterminating all of them …
It is not unusual for people to elect to live a life of passion rather than of reason. But ordinarily they love the objects of passion: women, glory, power, money. Since the anti-Semite has chosen hate, we are forced to conclude that it is the state of passion that he loves.
[The anti-Semite] fears every kind of solitariness… however small his stature, he takes every precaution to make it smaller, lest he stand out from the herd and find himself face to face with himself. He has made himself an anti-Semite because that is something one cannot be alone.
[The anti-Semite is afraid] of himself, of his own consciousness, of his own liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and the world – of everything except the Jews. [He is] a coward who does not want to admit his cowardice to himself.
Anti-Semitism, in short, is fear of the human condition. The anti-Semite is a man who wishes to be a pitiless stone, a furious torrent, a devastating thunderbolt – anything except a man.
This is what every journalist in America needs to be doing right now.
I would argue it’s what every journalist in America should have been doing 8 FUCKING YEARS AGO, but no, they helped create this monster so they could report on it. They are a human/media centipede crossed with an Ouroboros eating it’s own shit. Support independent media, not partisan sources in either direction, they’re ALL compromised by capital.
OK, but this is also what every journalist needs to be doing right now.
(I wanted to “like” this comment, but it was at 69 likes, and I thought that was very nice) ⬆️
Its at 72 now you can upvote it safely
thank you 😔
OH CAUSE ITS THE SEX NUMBER
THAT IS FUCKIN FUNNY MAN WOW
It’s insane, because it’s not some sassy or hyperbolic report. It’s perfectly measured and…logical. A well made report.
Jesus Christ. What subject, other than abject flattery, is Trump not sensitive about? No matter what they do, any story that’s based remotely on fact is gonna piss that fragile little man off, so why not just have at him?
so why not just have at him?
Money, it’s always money. I’m not sure if it is capitalism in general or American culture specifically but our system rewards greedy people so much that they are essentially all we have left in positions of power. Principled leaders barely exist, just craven pretenders who view power as another means to enrich themselves.
I love this. It’s kind of a rule of the internet that if you tell it to stop doing something it’ll just make everyone more determined. I want to see every group that interacts with the administration be so resolute to give them shit.
It’s called the Streisand effect
The almighty power of spite.
This is real journalism, which has become increasingly rare these days. Everything else is just PR.
Glad legacy media still has a few balls left
Extortion of law firms. What the fucking hell scared these businesses so much? Just stopping federal contracts with them?
And with that threat looming overhead, how do they not have the motivation to quietly resist? You want to talk about respecting the law and fighting back - that’s who needs to do it.
Except they bent the knee anyway. We know they’re just as complicit in the Regimes acts now.
And that’s just one issue.
It’s a shit spot to be in, as basically all of them work cases in federal court. If your lawyers are physically prevented entry to federal property because some orange buffoon bans the entire firm by the stroke of a pen, that law firm is completely impotent and unable to argue in federal cases, even those that don’t end up in a courtroom. Judges chambers, pre-trial motions, informal meetings, etc all are impossible or vastly more difficult.
It was a very targeted and deliberate move to put these firms in a lose:lose scenario - give an absurd amount of pro-bono work to your abuser, or wither and die as your clients are forced to move to another firm:
The orders threatened to bar attorneys from where they work, courthouses and federal agencies and cancel the contracts of law firm clients. For example, an aerospace company could lose its federal contracts if it stayed with the firm. A senior partner at one firm told us the president’s orders were, quote, “diabolical.” “Intended to bankrupt [us].”
Man that’s such a small detail I glossed over, that they can bar them from courthouses.
A lot of cowards in powerful positions.
A lot of PAID cowards in powerful positions.
I never realized until Trump came along how strong the urge to lick boots is in humanity - because if anyone is in exactly the right position with the capabilities and know how it these high-powered firms. And yet they’d rather supplicate themselves? Pathetic.
it’s safer, and already successful people hate taking risks that threaten their status.
Lawyers and law firms lean very very heavily on relationships. Far too much honestly. Who your lawyer knows really shouldn’t matter when it comes to legel matters, but often it means more than the law. So being in the sights of the leader of the republican party really reduces the image of a lawyer with connections. Thus it is very very bad for business.
Trump is the biggest piece of shit America has ever produced.
Richard Nixon has entered the chat
Nixon didn’t do shit compared to Donald
Because he inherited a mostly functional democratic society and not the shitshow Trump took over from Obama and later Biden.
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Get your head out of your ass you bootlicker.
Reported for ad hominem.
Every Right wing administration in the last 100 years has sank the economy vs the dem party. That’s a fact.
Did I ever imply otherwise? More relevantly, do I sound like I care?
Trump was handed a gift, TWICE, and turned it into a steaming pile of shit
Yes, the gift of unpopular wars, wildly expanded executive power, a massive surveillance state, backlash to ineffectual neoliberal rule, etc. The march towards fascism started with either Reagan or Nixon, and not with Trump. Trump took a society teetering on the edge of fascism and gave it the final push it needed to fall in.
You think you make good points but you don’t.
And yet you’re the one who cancelled his comment. Pray tell, is it not true that the rise in American authoritarianism started in the late 60es, when the government started to act in spite of what public opinions thought about its action in foreign countries and wars? If not, can you please post any proof supporting this thesis of yours? Because it’s sure as he’ll that I, as many others, will never take your word for granted if you aren’t able to support it with factual information.
Take your head out if your ass and realise that American (like most of us in the “developed” world) have been bought with pearls and trinkets to subdue their reasoning capabilities and voices to capitalism and its venomous fruits. The sooner you accept this ACTUAL FACT the sooner you can start fighting the good fight against capitalism and its cronies (who may also be your friends and family; not all capitalists drive around in nice cars or live in big villas. Most of them are “momentarily embarrassed billionaires” or delusional victims as I like to call them)
Hahhahahahahahhahahaha then when was the last good economy? 2008? LOL
I never said anything about the economy. Reread my reply; I said “mostly functional democratic society”. Democratic norms and checks and balances were in much better shape when Nixon took office than when Trump did.
Are you high?
He’s got a point. As far as culture, norms, and sensibility, it was before Obama. However, he’s leaving out that we got to here because shit heads like him had a fuse blow in their brain when a black man became president.
I will not dignify that with a response.
I mean, sure, you could call it a shitshow, but whenever a republican is president, they make things even worse than a shitshow. 😛
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The question is not what they got, but if they make it better or worse.
Trump measurablly made a lot worse. On a economic AND human quality of life level.
The point I’m trying to make is that Trump managed to make things so much worse because he came at the end of a chain reaction that started around Nixons era. Nixon was restrained by a robust democratic system and society and therefore his shittiness was aimed at sabotaging that system so his successors would have a free hand to ruin everything, so while the shittiness was much less obvious that doesn’t make Nixon better than Trump, just less flashy. We can’t understand Trump without understanding the more than half a century of sabotage of the democratic system by both sides of the aisle (more so by republicans) that led up to him, with special attention to Nixon, Reagan, GWB and Obama.
Well, you claimed a shitshow was given from biden and Obama.
From the perspective of me as a non-American reading american news and media that statement was simply incorrect.
That’s all.
Okay admittedly that wasn’t as clear as it could’ve been but I meant shitshow in terms of viability as a democratic society, so for example democratic norms, rule of law. separation of power and public faith in democratic institutions. Obama and especially Biden left those in shambles, which is why Trump has been able to get as far as he did.
Ronald Reagan “Rookies”.
He just further paved the way
Agreed. Trump is obviously the worst president in history, but Nixon and Reagan paved the way. There seems to be a common denominator there…
They hurt TRUMPS FEELINGS? DEPORT THEM!
-Fuck Your Feelings Conservatives!
Make no mistake, the only reason we’re seeing this in the media now is because big business is getting hit. Mostly a shot in the foot with tariffs but let’s keep those boycotts up!
Absolutely. This kind of media is owned (literally) by big business investors. I know it’s obvious but it needs to be said plainly, mass media is the mouthpiece of the rich. It’s no coincidence that Musk bought Xitter and Bezos bought Washington Post.
They will only cry alongside us when they’re being hurt. They sure didn’t care until now.
I assume the big boys lost more money from the tariff insanity than they made from getting their next tax cut. Losing money is the only thing they do not tolerate because it hurts them in their inhouse pissing contest on who can be the biggest societal parasite.
Only nine years too late.
Still, hope this marks the start of a trend.
Good on Pelley.
That pesky first amendment comes back to bite again!
I hate 60 minutes but watched that on YouTube. Anything to piss on trumps shallow ego.
