I would argue that most of those celebrities-turned-effective-politician (Franken was not effective long-term, he bowed out for stupid reasons) each had a lot more than face recognition, they were also snakes and scum or narcissists and I just don’t see Stewart in the crowd. He hasn’t expressed desire for politics, he has been an advocate and has been a great orator and journalist in his own way, but he is a different kind of person who wants different things, this means a distinct lack of political capital.

In many ways you NEED a snake or lizard to navigate actual politics. Actual politics is dealing and wheeling and backroom negotiations. It’s exerting will and influence and collecting power in the form of favors, voting blocs, coalitions and all manner of social complexity that shrewd, even narcissistic people absolutely exceed at.

This doesn’t mean they have to be evil but you have to have someone who naturally enjoys playing dirty or skirting the rules and is capable of self-promotion. Of course Trump is all of these things and why he’s been effective at passing policy… stupid, shitty policy, but he has enough political capital that the GOP falls over themselves to suckle at his saggy teets. He’s been setting this up for decades.

But what a lot of people who aren’t following politics don’t realize is Obama and every other president was the same. They were all self-important, hubristic and “scummy” in their own regards.

For example, I don’t like Gavin Newsom at all, but he would probably be a highly effective president when it comes to pushing and passing policy. John Stewart might go in with ideals and goals, and get immediately sidelined and made into a lame-duck by not being able to leverage votes in house and senate or being unwilling to play ball and make sacrifices to get gains later. This is what it means to be an effective president and I don’t see anyone really who has both the will and the sauce.

If anything, they REALLY want an “easy” crime to crack down on, so this is why they are making literally everything illegal, like porn and weed and having a penis in the wrong room or glancing at a cop without a smile on your face.

Permitted, systemic destruction of our education system via exploiting the idea of “fierce independence” I guess from reality itself, over the last half century or so.

what would be the motivation for hiding it?

Their entire “live for today and do nothing for tomorrow” attitude in the conservative christian Right is based on the idea that none of this is permanent, that the bible is factual and literal, and that Jeebus is coming back aaaannny day now and he will make everything white I mean right.

No need to worry about the environment, economy or education system if nothing is real and everyone is going to be raptured to some magic place that lets you … bask in God’s glory? I have no idea what they actually think is going to happen in heaven, dead grandma is going to serve them cookies every day and they are going to be fine with it literally for INFINITY amount of time.

The entire narrative is so flimsy that it takes the concept of some huge conspiracy to keep it alive and remotely believable. This is the entire basis of the flat-earth movement as well.

Our species is lacking more than education and critical thought, we have large sections of the population lacking thought broadly, like no internal system of abstraction, language and comparison to find truth or objective reality. They just react to stimuli and go through life on auto-pilot and emotion. This is why these “movements” persist for hundreds or thousands of years despite all evidence to them being utter bullshit.

I mean, sure. If we’re just going to vote in “entertainment value” I want a whole Hollywood administration.

Lets get The Rock as the president who doesn’t know anything about politics but has a heart of gold and doesn’t give up, John Leguizamo as the street-smart VP who always saves the day, and like, an animated cat as head of national intelligence.

Our population deserves what’s coming to it.

Can you stupid fucks stop worshiping celebrities for like FIVE MINUTES.

I don’t get how mindless our population is.

Nor should he. He’s also too smart to want to trade his retirement years for becoming by default one of the most hated people in the world. This is more celebrity cult worship but from the other side.

Can we please start trying to elect qualified people instead of popular faces.

While it’s not a new idea, every time has led to suffering and persecution, and it should be taken seriously every time they try because it’s not about porn, it’s about controlling and monitoring a population and removing “threats” to the new order they are trying to establish.

You forgot the step in between that mandates Palantir to embed spyware into every personal PC to monitor what you look at and report your deepest secrets to an agency with AI tools designed to judge if your kinks are dangerous to society or if reading historical accounts of slavery can be considered “pornographic.”

Guys, this is VERY serious, they are going to start locking people up for looking at material that they decide if it’s obscene or not. This should be getting spammed on every gaming board, 4-chan, Asmondgold’s subreddit, every fucking place that out-of-touch gaming chuds hang out and tell them very clearly that their support for Trump is going to get them locked up for looking at hentai.