I think with these kinds of suits the core conceit is that gun manufacturing/sales is a sordid, immoral business along the lines of cigarettes, and that the very existence of a consumer market for their product implies their misuse and negative impact on society. Therefore, they should bear more responsibility for that impact.

They were emboldened by the suit against Bushmaster/Remington that succeeded and ultimately bankrupted Freedom Group.

It does not take much effort to throw some 3rd party troll farm a few dimes a post.

One, it does give some room to dismiss accusations, even if just rhetorically.

Two, when you are able to coerce your subjects to say the sky is green, the sun sets in the East, and Dear Leader won the election, its an exercise of power over them. It feeds the ego and it becomes a litmus test for the disloyal.

Understand that some or most of the key posters there are literally pawns of Russian or Chinese intelligence. Troll farms, wumao, what have you. Whether they are literally government employees or contracted through a third party, their purpose is to astroturf positive optics of their employer and negative optics of the US/the West as a whole. A more sinister interpretation, they are trying to destabilize the West by doing things like trashing Biden, now Harris, hoping to secure a chaotic and inwardly destructive Trump presidency.

Anything they say is to service these goals, anything they believe is mutable to these goals, and nothing they argue is in good faith.

It probably was fake. I’d imagine the people who are selected for these assignments are borderline or complete sociopaths who don’t have problems putting their mission above their entanglements.

If these kids are old enough to have any sense they aught to flee the first chance they get.

I worry that they felt confident laying this out because they believe the fix is in, and that no popular resistance is going to stop it.

I feel like there’s a followup with that fucking dragon as the giant hologram, and I’m trying not to imagine it.

In a more just world they’d be treated like Milosevic’s Serbia.

“Other Emergencies” is a euphemism for liberal/non-white protests. The idea of their home town being overrun by “leftist” mob violence occupies both the nightmares and the fever dreams of the kinds of gun owners who would respond to this call-up.

DeSantis reactivated the Florida State Guard on similar grounds of “disaster relief” then started training them like soldiers. Now he has a force of 1500 or so that reports directly to him and cannot be federalized. He even sent a few of them to the Texas border to test the waters.

Expect to see more of these yokels try to muster up armed thugs in the coming months. I fear the worst no matter the outcome of the election.

He got fucking dragged by Trumpworld after he resigned over Trump’s stance on Afghanistan (or was it the Kurds?), it was probably one of the most severe about-faces I’ve ever seen from conservatives about one man. Went from a Marine’s Marine, a warrior-scholar, to a complete disgrace to the Corps as far as they’re concerned.

Really cemented my view of Trump as a cult of personality when I saw that narrative, and the base eating it up, in real time.

Mmm fecal microparticles

Doing everything possible to dismantle it as an organization short of Tim McVeighing the headquarters?

I was under the impression that basically every commercial weather station just copied the NWS’s homework, which is a decidedly Republican arrangement: have the taxpayer foot the bill for the actual work while private interest reaps the benefits.

If the NWS goes away, they’ll have to do their own meteorology. Maybe there’s some way to spin some profit from that situation that I’m not degenerate enough to see yet, but it seems like it’s against their own interests.

The angry mob wanted to kill him, not the orchestrators that would have pull with the USSS. Do you think they were going to drive him out into the mob to the world’s shittiest gallows?

If it ever came out that people in the Trump administration actively participated in a well-defined plot to kill Pence, they would fry. That’s why they sicced the mob on the capital to commit spontaneous violence. Difficult if not impossible to prove conspiracy, and the people getting jail time would be the red hat morons, not the people in charge. Again, they (the orchestrators) were half-hearted cowards that were more concerned with saving themselves if it failed than doing anything to make sure it succeeded, and for this moment in time we should be thankful for that.

I don’t think they were going to kill him. I think their play was to bring him off-site “for his safety” so he couldn’t certify the election, at most a kidnapping.

The whole thing was too noncommittal by the big players in case things went to shit, which it did. They didn’t have the balls to plan out an assassination of the VP.

It might have worked if they had the balls to do that, and other things.

They ain’t called “a gas station masquerading as a country” for nothing. The world switching to renewables, either proactively now or out of desperation later, would be a massive hit to them.

Other than that maybe climate refugees? But they likely intend to conquer the places these people come from anyway, and don’t have many qualms about “dealing with” unwanted populations.

Violence and the threat of violence is an inexorable part of any system of law since forever. All the people bleating “this is unacceptable!” know this, they just don’t want things to get out of their control.

As an American I think that would all be reasonable…if the official US position was that Mexico has no right to exist, the Mexican people should be forcibly integrated into our society as 2nd class citizens, and the US Army was in the process of a “peacekeeping operation” in Mexico to carry all this out.

For all our flaws, we respect the borders of our neighbors and don’t have irridentist aspirations that belong in the 19th century. Russia is the aggressor here, and they have demonstrated that they have little interest in global peace or human rights, only increasing their sphere of influence.

Continually rolling over for thugs because it’s what avoids nuclear conflict will only lead to a global order based on thuggery, and it likely won’t even avoid nuclear conflict in the end.

There’s some subtle differences in the frame shape and other things that I’m too dumb to articulate. The only marks I can see are import marks from “CAI” - Century International Arms, which would be strange to see on a USGI 1911.

I think this model is a Star BM, and surplus retailers were hocking these things for ~$250-300, about 6/7 years ago. I almost got one but decided against it.

It’s some Star model pistol, looks like a 1911 but not quite, and in 9mm.