These are Hillary Clinton’s own words, calmly reported by the Guardian as if there were nothing unusual about a politician in a democratic country calling for forcible deprogramming of their political opponents:
Hillary Clinton says Trump supporters may need to be ‘deprogrammed’
Supporters of Donald Trump may need to be “deprogrammed” as if they were cult members, Hillary Clinton said.
“Sadly, so many of those extremists … take their marching orders from Donald Trump, who has no credibility left by any measure,” the former first lady, senator, secretary of state and Democratic nominee for president told CNN.
“He’s only in it for himself. He’s now defending himself in civil actions and criminal actions. And when do they break with him? Because at some point maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members. But something needs to happen.”
Hillary Clinton said those words during an interview conducted on 5th October by CNN’s Christine Amanpour. Here is CNN’s own video report about it:
Clinton calls for ‘formal deprogramming’ of MAGA ‘cult members’
The section about deprogramming starts at 1:40. Note that Christine Amanpour raises no objection to the proposal but merely enquires about the practicalities.
Bit rich coming from the Marxist Democratic Party. Not extremist to cut the cock-and-balls off 8 year olds boys though…
Clownworld.
THEY sued him for everything they could think of. THEY indicted him for everything they could think of.
And now we should denounce him because he has legal troubles?
Sorry, no. We don’t give you mercy because you’re an orphan now that you’ve killed your parents, either.
(There are good reasons for us to move on from Trump. This isn’t one of them.)
@bobby b
(There are good reasons for us to move on from Trump. This isn’t one of them.)
Maybe, maybe not. It seems inevitable the guy is going to end up in jail with all his assets seized. The “grinning like a clown” judge just decided all on his own to dissolve and seize his assets. I don’t know if it’ll survive appeal, but there are just a line of cases, and probably more to come. Nobody can survive that.
And if he is in jail with no assets, can we really expect him to win the Presidency? Is it more important to do right by him than to save the country from destruction?
On the other hand Trump probably can’t win anyway, and even if he did, probably can’t do much. So perhaps the question is moot.
My God, if they send him to jail, which seems to me to be inevitable, the country will be torn to pieces.
The reprogramming is bad enough, but it’s the Patch Tuesday updates that really cause trouble. And if ‘they’ get the reprogramming going, there will be regular patches and updates in store for us. It turns out we have always been at war with Eastasia.
I venture to predict that a great many of the people that Shrillary plans on using to conduct this “deprogramming” are going to find themselves overmatched in a lot of very important ways, not the least of which is firepower.
How many cops are there in the US? How many “internal security forces”? Where, pray tell, do those worthies live? Are they dwelling in easily secured barracks, like most European Gendarmes?
Michigan puts more armed men into the field every hunting season than most of the world’s militaries. Y’all really think that all of the “security forces” in the US are going to round up and “deprogram” 70-odd million Trump voters?
Or, more likely, that’s going to be the spark that lights the fuse to the powderkeg, just like certain idiot Englishmen did when they tried confiscating the militia stores at Lexington and Concord.
You only police and govern with the consent of those who you are policing and governing. You lose that consent? LOL… Baby, you think you’ve seen “ungovernable”. You ain’t seen nothing, yet, Mrs. Clinton.
If Hillary thinks that at least some MAGA nutjobs need ‘deprogramming’ would she be equally happy that some Antifa nutjobs need deprogramming? Of course she wouldn’t say so.
But once you accept deprogramming your political opponents is worthwhile then your eye would soon turn to the awkward squad in your own political network.
Power corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely; etc.
When people make comments like this it’s easy to shrug it off. But consider this: would conventional opinion be happy if someone said that those experiencing “gender” doubt should be deprogrammed? We know the answer because conversion therapy is routinely attacked. Or imagine “de programming” Marxists or Greens.
My immediate reaction was to imagine Edmund Blackadder asking: “…and might addressing these practicalities involve building de-programming centers, by any chance?”.
I sometimes marvel at the sheer hubris these people like Hillary Clinton demonstrate. This is a woman who was thrown, bodily, from the Democratic Party-dominated Nixon prosecution, for misconduct.
Given what we now know about all that, and the facts of the previous administration having infiltrated actual FBI agents into the Goldwater campaign, that’s rather more of an accomplishment than anyone really pays attention to. Nixon gets a bad rap, somewhat deservedly, but the fact is this: He didn’t do anything that earlier Democrat presidents hadn’t already done. The thing about him is that a.) he caviled at using official government assets, and b.) when he tried doing what Kennedy did with the IRS, the Republican he’d put in charge of it refused.
So… There’s Hillary. Her career started with a persecution of a sitting Republican president, during which she was fired for misconduct, and probably should have been disbarred. She then parlayed that experience into Bill Clinton’s governorship, where she managed to turn small money into big, and began her career of grifting. Now, after having essentially destroyed Trump’s administration with lies, she wants to “deprogram” anyone who dared vote for her opponent…
How does she think this plays out? Does this stupid b*tch ever look at the sheer logistics of all this? Does she imagine that Trump’s voters are a small, unarmed minority like the Jews in Germany? That she has the full panoply of state forces that the Nazis co-opted? Seriously? I mean, you look at it, coldly: Posit full cooperation from the US law enforcement and security apparatus: What happens once the round-ups start? I don’t mean guys like Roger Stone, I mean the whole 70 million people who legitimately voted for Trump… How long do you think those cops, FBI agents, and others across the Federal bureaucracy that are tasked with rounding up and “reeducating” these recalcitrant Trump voters last, given that they live among them?
I don’t think a lot of outsiders get this fact about the US: Most of the cops aren’t in barracks, and there aren’t that many of them by comparison with the European forces like the French Gendarmes and the Italian Carabinieri. They all live off by themselves, in or near the communities they police. They’re vulnerable. Their families are vulnerable. They live among the people they’d be rounding up; it’s rather as if the Gestapo had to go next door and arrest heavily armed Jews who outnumbered them and who made up half of Germany’s population.
How long do you suppose this effort to round up and reeducate would last, before the people doing it (not to mention, their families…) wound up quite dead? Do you think that an effort to quickly gather them all into secured enclaves would work?
Would most of them even be on-board with this?
This level of stupidity is why you have to really wonder about the intelligence of this woman and others like her: They want a European-style police state, but they have zero clue how to go about achieving it, in practical terms. They can’t math, at all.
Good grief… They can’t even deal with something like CHAZ or CHOP in Seattle, not that they would have. The Seattle PD would have been swamped had they tried, and they would have had to bring in the National Guard. If similar movements had started elsewhere in the state…? snort I can only laugh the practicalities of it all. Hillary and her crew of dipshit control-freaks never could understand logistics; you’d laugh your ass off if you heard some of the idiocies people they hired, like Madeline Albright, came up with.
Sweeps hand over map “Fix Rwanda… Just get those Army people to go… Jump out of airplanes, or something…” (General in background shyly raises hand, asks “How do we feed them? Supply them? What will we do, once they’re on the ground…?”)
Any actual attempt at actually “deprogramming” Trump’s adherents would result in a paroxysm of violence the likes of which few have seen. It’d be about like the Thirty Years War, and the majority of the people making the attempt would be on the losing side, because once it got going, few if any of them would be remaining on the side of the deprogrammers.
Thank God this stupid twat never got elected. The level of idiocy this woman displays is biblical.
There’s also the rather misguided assumption that the people and their families who make up law enforcement and military are democrat supporters.
Other than the top brass who are politically connected, I’d guess very few of them.
The reality here is that Hillary and her ilk live in a disconnected bubble that has little to no contact with the majority of the population. They think that the loony projections of their minds are the things that are real, and will not learn otherwise until it is too late.
It’s an inability to have any empathy or understanding of “the other”, people who disagree with you or who don’t have your life experience. She’s been living in isolation from any real connection with the people she wants to govern for most of her life, and wouldn’t know what to do or say to them other than accuse them of being “programmed” or “insane”.
This is not a recipe for good judgment or effective governance. The Clinton and Obama administrations were full of these people, with the usual results. The thing that just amazes me is how they could wind up the way that they have, with zero real idea how most of their fellow citizens live. You can tell from the way they campaign and talk; they’re like Obama, having built straw men “bitter clingers” up out of his imagination, thinking that they’re real. The actuality of the people he sought to govern, and change their minds? Never entered into it, at all; it’s all purest projection, all the time.
Which ain’t to say that the people on the “official conservative right” do any better trying to deal with their opposition, but they usually actually have some factual basis and a better understanding of the motivating doctrine, and where they’re coming from. I have met numerous “right wingers” who completely understand and grasp the details and origin sources of leftist thought, but I’ve never, ever met a “left winger” who could do the same. It’s all their imaginary projections and talking points; they don’t know the first thing about their opponents. Look how many basic mistakes are made when they discuss religion. They really don’t know the people they have made opponents out of by demonizing them. Not at all.
Bunch of folks are in for a huge wake-up call, when all this finally breaks down. The people “on the right” are going to find out that these assholes really do mean what they say about deprogramming and reeducation, while the ones on the leftward side are going to find out that their demons are mostly real, and consist of other people that don’t think the way they do. It won’t be pretty…
An odious woman.
Whatever we might think of Obama or Trump, they both genuinely deserve credit for one great achievement: they kept her out of the Oval Office.
People here might see my views as the mirror image of Hitlery’s.
I have thought since late 2008 that the US Democratic Party is best understood as a front for a suicide cult.
(That was about 3 years before i started to associate the modern diet with widespread mental illness.)
Hitlery’s comments just confirm me in my views.
In my defense, let me point out a crucial difference between Hitlery and myself: I would not prescribe for anybody a treatment different from what i follow myself.
Even if i had the power to send people to re-education camps, i would not.
Instead, i’d “nudge” people into eating what I myself eat, by making seed oils more expensive than (extra-virgin) coconut and olive oil, banning HFCS, and imposing heavy taxes on refined sugars and cereal products.
If you think that my program is not libertarian, you are correct; but i fear that, without such authoritarianism, you’ll end up in a re-education camps such as Hitlery has in mind.
In any case, i do not think it cruel and unusual punishment to make other people eat what i myself eat with pleasure.
BTW I heard Vladimir Bukovsky give a talk about Soviet “psychiatry” in the late 1980s.
Snorri… I have to wonder at your position vis-a-vis “nudging”.
Most of your objections to diet originate in just such tomfoolery by the government… Which nobody seems to notice. I’d also suggest that we don’t know what we don’t know about things, and that whenever you set yourself up to “influence” things, god-like in your wisdom… You really, truly do not know what you’re doing. Nobody does.
Your diet is good for you. Maybe… It’s possible that you are doing things with it that are slowly killing you, without knowing it. You have to take into account that everyone’s genetics are different, coming as they are from hundreds of different biomes around the world, each of which they’ve adapted to. I’d get fat as a pig eating Hawaiian poi, for example.
So, I think your fundamental error is not that you’re not like Hillary, but that you think a.) you can control or influence others to their benefit, and that b.) you’ve a right to do such a thing.
I would counter that you don’t know, I don’t know, and the state of the nutritional art is such that I’d seriously distrust any of these geniuses to know what they’re doing. How many times have they changed their stories, just in my lifetime alone? I can remember a half-dozen different “experts” telling me that coffee was good, bad, killing me, doing nothing at all…
As well, who the hell set you up to tell anyone else at all what to do? What “right” do you have to “nudge” anyone anywhere? What if your well-intentioned “nudges” are based on fallacies you aren’t even aware of?
No, you have no such right. At. All. You may live your life setting an example for others, and telling them how you think your diet choices have helped you, but that’s it. The rest of it? You’ve no right at all, because that’s not your place. You’re not god-like in omniscience and foresight; you may be, indeed, on the perfect diet for your genetics. Which, I fear I must point out, are yours alone. You may thrive on what you’re eating, but other people with other genes may not. You’re going to deprive them of their needs, because you think you know better than they do?
The first step down the slippery slope to being Hillary or Hitler is the one you’re taking, whether or not you realize it. I’d point out that this idea of “nudging” originated with people that the Clintons elevated to high position in their administration, and that all those things you decry largely came about in the first f*cking place because someone, somewhere, chose to “nudge” people in that direction. With the best of intentions. Remember how we got High Fructose Corn Syrup in the first place…? Well-intentioned “nudging” in the Nixon administration, because sugar was bad, and imported, and…
You ain’t God. Don’t try playing him, is all I’m saying.
Yes Hillary Clinton and the rest of the American (and international) establishment are fanatical totalitarians – and their “Justice” system is a sick farce, which targets people on political grounds.
In other shock news – water is wet.
@Snorri Godhi
People here might see my views as the mirror image of Hitlery’s.
FWIW, I find it ridiculous, childish, when people use stupid names like Hitlery. I hate it when Trump does it, and I dislike it from libertarians too. Make an argument against someone’s position with grown up words. Using stupid names just marks you out as an ideologue and will certainly not convince anyone of a different opinion. It marks your arguments as jejune and vapid if you have to resort to kindergarten level name mocking.
I have thought since late 2008 that the US Democratic Party is best understood as a front for a suicide cult.
The Democrat party is just a group of big government people who want to have power over others, and use it to enrich both themselves and their massively inflated egos. This is what most politicians are like, the Democrats are just especially adept at it. They are a loose cabal (for example, trade unionists have very little in common with woke-ists or neo-cons.) But they hold together because of their mutual desire for power, and the money power produces. The last thing they are is a suicide cult. They might be happy to see you or I hurt or dead (witness the mass murder in Ukraine), but they are seeking their own aggrandizement.
Instead, i’d “nudge” people into eating what I myself eat, by making seed oils more expensive than (extra-virgin) coconut and olive oil, banning HFCS, and imposing heavy taxes on refined sugars
I also think this is horrible. Your health is a discussion between you and your doctor. The idea of politicians getting involved is a terrible one. After all, it was politicians that instituted the stupid food pyramids that have been killing us for years. It is politicians that take bribes (I mean financial contributions) to enact legislation to protect some of the worst food producers. For example, the US Government’s association with sugar producers is perhaps one of the most corrupt in their whole panoply of corruption. So maybe your views on food are right, even if they seem a bit batty to me, but if you think YOUR ideas would get implemented by the government, you are delusional. Someone else whose intentions are much less honest and pure than yours will be making the decision, with a “advice” from the twinkie and high fructose corn syrup lobby. Rather take the power away from them to manipulate the market and then simply have a discussion with your doctor.
What you are doing here is exactly what is wrong with government. You apparently can’t just convince people your ideas are right so that they make different food choices, so you are going to use the power of government, force backed with threats of jail time, to force people to take on your ideas. This is, to me, prima facie wrong. But even if it weren’t it never works out the way you expect, and you just simply create a mechanism for the worst people to advance their own terrible ideas.
Sorry, but I have been nudged on food all my life. Parents, doctors, the Food Pyramid, and the occasional passing vegetarian. Every decade or so, the direction of the nudges changes. Are eggs good or bad these days? Carbohydrates? Meat? Grapefruit juice? (That last one depends.)
Over the course of eighty years, I’ve built up quite a resistance to nudges.
Ellen:
And i have been gaslighted all my life; which is the main reason why i think it important to avoid interacting with people who eat food that i have learned to avoid.
Those don’t count as nudges: your parents gave you no choice on what to eat (presumably). The others only made suggestions.
The important thing is to ignore all epidemiological (correlational) studies, and newspaper reports thereof; and look only at intervention studies, and expert opinion about the latter.
Also, do some self-experimentation (guided by expert opinion).
Kirk and Fraser are best addressed together.
Fraser:
That Democrat supporters are self-destructive (even if un-intentionally), is something that i should not have to point out.
You might retort that Democrats with power and money, profit from their supporters’ self-destructive tendencies. That is true, but relying on self-destructive supporters does not strike me as a sound long-term strategy.
Kirk:
(a) It’s not the benefit of people whom i would ‘control’ that concerns me: they can slit their own throats if they like. (Unless they are family or close friends.)
What concerns me is the damage that they do to relatively normal people; but you would not share this concern, if US politics does not look as insane to you as it does to me.
(My own behavior when i ate an American-adjacent diet looks insane to me now.)
(b) The issue of my rights is moot, but for the record i do feel entitled to impose on others the same treatment that they would impose on me. The reason why i would not send people who agree with Hitlery* to a re-education camp is not that i do not have the right, but that i do not think it would work.
* and i call her Hitlery because she is not the only Clinton in politics. Calling her Hillary while her husband is called Clinton sounds sexist. Hitlery is more like a term of endearment.
@Snorri Godhi
Kirk and Fraser are best addressed together.
Ouch… two more different people there could not be.
That Democrat supporters are self-destructive (even if un-intentionally), is something that i should not have to point out.
You said the Democrat party, which consists of politicians. Supporters are a different matter. Most supports are low attention voters (which is generally a good strategy since the cost of being informed is high and the benefit negligible, perhaps negative.) The nut jobs like Antifa and the radicals are generally just spoiled brats who never had to do anything useful in their lives and somehow think they know how to run the world economy even though they have never been able to hold down a job as a shift supervisor at McDonalds.
Most Democrat supports are just decent folks who are concerned about the word and other people and go along with the emotional based policies the press jam down their throats because they are too busy working, having fun and raising their kids to do a deep dive analysis. Which is probably the way it should be. My biggest complaint is that the government is too important, and invades far to much of our lives. Mostly the best thing to do is ignore it. Even if it is a burgeoning cancer, there is no effective medicine, so you might as well eat drink and be merry for tomorrow everything will fall apart.
Politicians on the other hand? Among the worst people on the face of the earth.
Fraser: I appreciate the much more moderate tone of your latest comment.
(And btw i appreciate Kirk’s distinction the other day between the Hayekian rationale (a) and the Lockean rationale (b).)
🙂
I am sorry, but the reason i stay away from North America is to avoid meeting people for whom to make excuses, as you do.
(And not just North America: also Britain and Italy — although i am cautiously optimistic about the latter.)
And even your condemnation of politicians is limited to their moral failures, and does not acknowledge their insanity.
And i am not talking only about Democrats, or about Americans.
Fraser Orr – if they, the institutionally corrupt system, can destroy President Trump – they can destroy anyone who defies them, and will.
So your position of throwing President Trump to the wolves in order to “save the country” – is misguided, both morally and practically.
If President Trump can not be saved then neither can the United States of America. Either the institutionally corrupt system must be defeated and destroyed, or it will crush anyone-and-everyone.
As for the “mainstream” international media, the Guardian, CNN, and so on – supporting conditioning, indoctrination…. under the false name “deprograming”, when it is really programming.
Well of course they do – that is what the “mainstream” media, and the education system do.
This system, including the court system, is totally corrupt – for example it rigs elections, in several States, without shame. Not “just” against President Trump – but against anyone else they believe is a threat to them.
This system must be defeated, and it must be destroyed.