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"We're losing a lot of people because of the internet," Trump said. "We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what's happening. We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that Internet up in some way. Somebody will say, 'Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.' These are foolish people. We have a lot of foolish people."
He said this in 2015, folks. And we still elected him. We're fucked.
'We' didn't elect him. A horde of deluded, ignorant douchebags in just the right states did.
No, a bunch of empty land elected him.
I can only imagine where the country would be if we reformed the Electoral College and the Senate. It's absurd to be giving 1 million people in Hickle Dickle the same votes as 30,000,000 in another state. Or even worse, in the EC people in small states get 3-4 times the voting power as citizens of some larger states.
The idea behind doing that was so that the people in Hickle Dickle have their needs heard as much as the people from New Franciscago. Why? Because small towns have different needs than big cities, and it's important to hear from the people living in each area.
However it absolutely needs an overhaul as A) the population difference between New Franciscago and Hickle Dickle have become obscene (you're talking 30m vs 1m, when the reality is closer to 30m vs 100,000 or less), and B) the electoral college is becoming weaponized to override New Franciscago when it was supposed to balance the two and make sure Hickle Dickle still has its needs met.
The real problem happened in 1929 when Congressional apportionment was set at 435. Congress regularly increased in size before then. The population has more than doubled since 1930, yet the overall number of representatives hasn't changed, which means each district gets bigger.
There are 990K people in the largest district by population currently, with 545k in the smallest. (Plot twist: that large district is actually Delaware, which still has only one district, somehow)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_congressional_districts
I have been saying this for years. The Senate is supposed to be where small states get an outsized voice, but by freezing the size of the House, small states have been getting an outsized voice in both houses on Congress and they've been getting a disproportionately high number of electors in the Electoral College.
Based on the 2020 census, Wyoming is the least populous state at 576,851 people. If that were used as the smallest number of people that could be in a district, the US's total population of 335,073,176 would be divided into 580 congressional districts. Over a third of the population is being underrepresented because the House hasn't added seats in almost 100 years.
The idea behind doing that was so that the people in Hickle Dickle have their needs heard as much as the people from New Franciscago.
No, not really. The actual idea behind the Electoral College (and Senators prior to the 17th Amendment) was so the state Hickle Dickle is in, collectively as a sovereign unit could have its needs heard, as expressed by its state legislature. It was basically intended to work like a parliamentary system (where the prime minister is chosen by members of parliament themselves, not by vote of the public), except with the power given to each of the state legislatures instead of Congress, for enhanced Federalism/separation of powers.
Electors don't exist to change the balance the power between urban and rural; that's a side-effect. Their real purpose is to compensate for the fact that different states have different legislative structures [for example: Nebraska is unicameral!] with wildly different ratios of constituents per legislator. They couldn't do "one legislator, one vote" and have it be fair (read: normalized by population across states), so they did the next best thing and gave each state's legislature a number of elector slots equal to that state's representation in Congress, and let them choose people to fill those slots however they wanted.
People think the Electoral College and the Senate don't work right, and that's because they really don't. But that's not because they were designed poorly for what they were intended to do (limit "mob rule" and provide a voice for States as sovereign entities/the middle layer in the federalist separation of powers), but because we've subsequently fucked them up by bolting half-assed attempts at direct democracy to them in the form of the 17th Amendment, the Reapportionment Act of 1929, and state legislators abdicating their power to appoint electors and choosing them by statewide popular vote instead.
At this point, IMO, either implementing direct democracy properly (abolishing the Electoral College and the Senate) or going back to the original design would be an improvement over the broken status quo!
Don't forget the tens of millions of Americans who stayed home because "both parties are the same"
Yeah, that's always the problem. Sometimes it's just a lack of motivation. Also don't discount voter suppression, like how voting day still is not a holiday and there's a significant lack of facilities in urban areas compared to suburban and rural regions. Nobody should have to wait in line for 5 hours (complete with BS like 'giving them water is a crime') to vote.
If the Republicans allowed real democracy to happen, they'd never get elected. They've said this pretty openly.
They used to claim they were the vast majority, silent majority, and so on, but it seems like they changed their tune on that and now it's "we don't need a majority! We're a constitutional republic"
We have to go see Bill Gates
This line... Lol
"Hi Bill, you're the CEO of the internet, right? I'm going to need you to turn it off for me. Thanks."
Well he doesn’t know Al Gore personally, for some reason he never seemed to show up to Epstein’s parties
It’s amazing, he’s said so many terrible things, I’m still learning about stuff like this he said years ago.
"He could invoke powers we've never heard a President of the United States invoke—potentially to shut down companies or turn off the internet or deploy the U.S. military on U.S. soil," he added. "We don't know because the things that are in there, the emergency powers of the president, aren't widely known to the American people.
Wow, it’s almost like we’ve consolidated too much power in the Executive Branch and should do something about it before a despotic asswipe gets elected by an unhinged, manipulated populace.
No matter where an election is coming up - people tend to vote against their interests. This meme popped up in my head when I read this thread:
He's also promising to go into people's houses at night and wreck up the place.
And sell our children's organs to zoos for meat?
"Things the person speaking does not fully understand for $200."
Wait until he hears about amatuer radio licensing, unlicensed spectrum, and experimental radio. It will blow his fucking mind.
I bet he actually thinks that all data is transported by fortune 500 companies that will do as he says "or else."
If Trump elected, America has "turned off its brain", I say
Thankfully, he thinks unplugging the router in the Oval Office breaks it for everyone else, too.
My thoughts and prayers have started ringing to the tune of "please gods may Trump have a heart attack / stroke at the worst possible time for the Republicans and spare the rest of the world another term of American foreign policy behaving as though it was conceived by racist, classist and eight kinds of phobic Elmer Fudd "
Another term? If he gets in again, he ain't leaving until he's dead. It's glaringly obvious that he plans to become a dictator like his friends Putin and Kim.
Please Donald piss off the wrong people. I double dog dare you.
If the Internet goes off, it means most of the US will be pissed off at him. Cellphones would be basically useless.
His followers wouldn't be able to access their favorite propaganda and conspiracy theories, either, so maybe they'd sober up a bit. Either way, it would not be good for him.
I mean, he can't. Even if he claims to have the executive power, even if he found a bunch of lackeys willing to try to do it for him, he can't do it. Whatever he did would be unenforceable. You can't just turn off the Internet. That's literally the reason we invented it in the first place, it's a communication network resilient against nuclear strikes and war and bad-faith governance all at once.
He could probably make it very hard to use, given a lot of time, but he'd be eaten alive by the angry populace long before it ever reached that point.
Who are the wrong people? Have people similar to them offered significant resistance to past fascist regimes?
It was built to survive a nuclear war.
It will survive Trump.
Even if I have to drive a station wagon full of backup tapes myself.
There are countries that turn off the internet all the time. There's a only a few major Telcos that control all backbone infra. It could definitely happen
He already turns everyone else off, so why not?
The internet has gone to shit. Let’s hear him out. Speaking as a web developer who just sat through a wireframe meeting, I’m not completely averse to the internet disappearing.
computers were a mistake (I'm a software engineer)
I'm starting to lean towards the industrial revolution should never have happened.
"In the beginning the Universe was created.
This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Donald Trump may turn off the internet if elected to a second term in the White House, a former staffer has warned.
Miles Taylor, Trump's former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, was asked on MSNBC about what potential damage the former president, who is the frontrunner in the GOP primaries, could do in government without breaking the law.
I think Americans still don't understand the full extent of the president's powers and things Donald Trump could do, bubble-wrapped in legalese, that would be damaging to the republic."
"He could invoke powers we've never heard a President of the United States invoke—potentially to shut down companies or turn off the internet or deploy the U.S. military on U.S. soil," he added.
In a Republican debate later that month, Trump said he was "open to closing areas" of the internet to prevent terrorism.
Removing internet service in certain areas of the U.S. would require multiple companies to turn off their cell towers and fiber networks, and to restrict satellite access to people living in those regions.
The original article contains 636 words, the summary contains 178 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
His MAGAlings must be shocked that he said he'd consult Bill Gates. Of course, cognitive dissonance is like water off a duck's back to them, so that won't last long.