Joe Kent, a former Green Beret who is Donald Trump’s pick to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, completed 11 combat deployments during the War on Terror. The combat left scars. In 2019, an ISIS suicide bomber killed his wife, a Navy cryptologist and linguist, in Syria. By the time he returned home, his worldview had shifted: Kent came to believe, as I wrote in a 2022 profile, that his early tours in Iraq gave him a “special gift of clarity.” He understood how quickly a society could come undone.
After this, Kent went from apolitical to active. The Black Lives Matter and antifa protests in Portland during the summer of 2020 triggered fears for him that the United States could similarly implode. Everything, he felt, was crumbling. He and his two young boys quickly left the city for rural Washington.
“We need to treat antifa and BLM like terrorist organizations. We need to use the tools of the federal government, the FBI, the US Marshals—go after them like organized criminals and terrorists,” Kent said in a 2021 conversation with the podcaster Tim Pool about the group’s leaders. “So, when we start arresting these guys and charging them with federal terrorism charges, that’s going to take away a lot of the incentive to go out and riot.”
This is why not protesting when a Dem is president never made sense.
trump won’t care, so the last four years we should have been protesting Biden’s inaction (on so many different issues) which would have at least got him to acknowledge the left and would have likely stopped Trump from winning
But Biden had a D by his name, so the screechers kept calling anyone that didn’t agree with Biden 100% a Russian.
Biden felt no pressure from the left, which made him and Kamala move too far right and lose what should have been another incredibly easy election.
And like we saw at the inauguration, Biden doesn’t even care, we’re the ones that have to deal with consequences while Biden apparently goes into acting without a care in the world
Yes I love how millions of people not voting for Harris didn’t matter at all /s
I agree about your main point, but:
The inauguration where Trump droned on about seeking revenge on Biden, while he was sitting right there?
The inauguration during which the White House released a series of scheduled preemptive pardons for Biden’s immediate family?
I think he does care, but he thinks that:
I think all three of those are outdated ideas, but I can understand a geriatic lifelong politician believing them earnestly.
Which is why Biden doesn’t care about the rest of us…
His “us” or in-group doesn’t include Americans at large, which is why he didn’t do well with dem voters. As long as his immediately family was gonna be ok, he’s not worried about the rest of us.
Like, not to get too into the weeds, but the reason political leaning can be identified with an ~80% accuracy with just a brain scan is people with a larger pre-frontal cortex are overwhelmingly more likely to vote D.
That includes the part responsible for that whole “empathy” thing in the first place.
“Bleeding heart lib” isn’t just some saying republicans and moderates use to shit on progressives, empathy is the largest identifiable trait of Dem voters.
When the candidate doesn’t reflect that, it results in lower Dem turnout.
And it’s also one of the first areas of the brain to suffer from the completely normal signs of aging we’ll all go thru if we’re lucky to live long enough.
Which is why Republican voters are more likely to support geriatric candidates compared to Dems. Losing prefrontal cortex functionality doesn’t change anything republican voters care about.
Like, there’s real-world facts and data to back up how the current DNC has been doing the wrong things, it’s not just an unfounded opinion because I don’t like neoliberals on a personal level.
It’s just explaining all this goes over most heads.