#he's not in the fucking democratic primaries!

[overclockedopossum]

I do agree there's a major problem with how a lot of leftist spaces treat men. Men aren't short on spaces that welcome us and are pro-maleness, but we are short on spaces that do that without being shit (like, in terms of politics).

However. I think the fundamental reason for rightward slide is that things are shit and the mainstream Liberal "Left" - as in parties like the Democrats, not anyone on tumblr - is failing to put forward a meaningful alternative. There will be people who voted for Obama then Trump because both promised in there own way to "shake things up". The Average Person(tm) is not gonna be deep in political theory, they certainly don't actually have party-line positions on all issues, and a lot of the time it's gonna come down to "should things change or stay the same".

This is why I think it has always been necessary, and remains necessary, to demand better than moderate "adults in the room" in primaries and better than "just look at the other guy!" overall. And don't give a single fucking penny to the fucking DNC and their fucking pied piper strategy.

It's like people correctly said in 2016 - bernie would have won. Not because his policies were closer to trump's - that didn't work for harris - but because he too offered a credible vision of change. You can't respond to "building a wall / mass deportations will help" with just "no they won't, things can never be better" you have to respond with "no, THIS is what will help".

I couldn't have said it better myself.

[centrally-unplanned]

Let's see if I have one more election take in me:

I am deeply sympathetic to Sam Kriss's rage against the Democratic corpo-political shibboleth, and not just because we are both deeply enmeshed in the grand tradition of dissident Oxbridge-style cantankerous internet rants. He is right that Kamala was a weak candidate, for one. But more importantly, I still feel what he feels deep down. I remember the starry idealism of my halcyon youth, of believing that conviction, that vision, that the zeal only a platform birthed from authentic principles, tempered by struggle and sweat, would carry the day over crass, paint-by-polling-numbers incrementalism. When he describes Harris thusly:

"She’s a machine politician. She wants power, but not for any particular reason. It’s just that life is a game, and the point is to reach the highest level."

I see my own reaction to her when she first stepped into the 2020 limelight, and low-key hating her for it. I feel his heart, for it is my heart.

But it is not my brain. Because I am not a teenager anymore, and his critique is fucking bullshit.

He says all this stuff like:

The reason Kamala Harris lost is the same as the reason she was the candidate to begin with: the Democratic Party is allergic to democracy.

And how the electorate is seen as but ants from inside the towers of the Machine, like the Dems just invented "not running a primary" this time as a lark. As opposed to neither party in America ever having primaries against incumbent presidents! Because they are normally popular, and it would be a waste of everyone's time to do that! Could you imagine, launching a real primary against Obama in 2012? And possibly sabotaging his brand a bit for absolutely nothing? It is a reasonable policy, particularly when incumbents used to have an advantage for being so. Now they clearly don't, Biden was unpopular and too old, and the Dems took too long to realize it. A costly mistake, but it is a purely strategic error. Big orgs have inertia, and the Dems fucked up. It has nothing to do with an "allergy to democracy".

And Kriss can go off summarizing how the Harris campaign was offering voters nothing:

But for some unaccountable reason, among the general public, ‘Kamala: You Already Like Her!’ was not the brilliant pitch it seemed to be. [...] Another option would be to actually offer something to the voters.

Which sounds neat, but he made it up! I remember Kamala's actual campaign speeches, ads, and platforms, which she repeated so monotonically in her tightly-scripted campaign appearances: protect abortion rights, expand the welfare state, provide better child care support, lower the cost of housing. And most importantly, she ran on Biden's record of a strong economy and promised to deliver more of it. What does even mean for this to not be a real platform? Beyond not having some synthesized, totalizing "Critique" of modernity that packages it all into a beautiful, systematizing little box.

Because I promise you, voters synthesize jack shit. None of this is why Harris lost - voters have made that pretty clear:

You can find other data ofc, this or that point varies, but the story is not opaque. They didn't like Biden! They didn't like his inflation. They didn't like immigration, or they didn't like his liberalism, and they thought Kamala was too similar. She had too much policy baggage. And she wasn't charismatic enough to dig herself out of that hole - no disagreement from me on that front.

Though even then, by that we mean she lost an election by ~3-4% margins after getting subbed in at the 4th quarter while down by ~8% in the polls. That ain't bad!

None of the voters who matter share Kriss's sensibilities, and he cannot hide his disappointment in that. So he pretends that Donald Trump, the guy who promised 20% tariffs on everything to fight inflation, is giving them a real vision:

That’s what Trump did: he offered an enemy to blame and the prospect of doing violence to them

I don't know man, I think swing voters just don't like the last four years and think 2019 was better. I don't think the promises of orgastic violence against democrats are why Trump won! Actually a bit of an unforced error on his part.

But since Kriss presumes to value democracy, that thesis can't hold - so the lack of reality delivering on what his vision for democracy should be is displaced onto Harris's mistakes. The voters can never fail you. You can only fail to elevate them with the right candidate. Which, tactically? Sure, why not. But you can leave the moralism at the classroom door.

This ties into our dreaded media discourse debate, so it is time to bring in another explainer, by Michael Tomasky:

The line-by-line isn't interesting here; instead I want to focus on this quote:

Weren’t they bothered that Trump is a convicted felon? An adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of his disgusting imprecations, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest, well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and wouldn’t do anything weird as president? The answer is obviously no—not enough people were able to see any of those things. At which point people throw up their hands and say, “I give up.”

To which the immediate reply is: my dude, what are you talking about??

A 56 percent majority of Americans say Trump is probably guilty of a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results through false claims of voter fraud, including 40 percent who believe he is “definitely guilty.” Republicans are less united than Democrats. Nearly 9 in 10 Democrats believe Trump is guilty, while nearly 7 in 10 Republicans think he is innocent. Among independents, nearly twice as many think Trump is guilty as think he is innocent.

You know how when you ~13 years old, and you have that friend who is just old enough to start taking Dungeons & Dragons books filled with splash art of succubi into the bathroom with him, but not yet old enough to get that "talking to girls" is an acquired skill? And they are blatantly, openly salivating over the first chick in the 7th grade class who discovered what power the combination of a camisole and a push-up bra holds over the male gaze? And she just completely ignores his faltering attempts at ~casual conversation~, so his brain script-cycles through its backlog of tween sitcom plots until it lands on, "Hey, what if I confess to her? Then she will know about my feelings!"

And you have to pull him aside and gently explain that, bro. She knows. That is not your problem.

Kriss is too intelligent a thinker to not understand this, but our dear Tomasky - and so many like him - has stuck his 14-year-old head in the sand over this. Swing voters know Trump is a scumbag! They know he lost the election, they know he raped a few women in his day, they know he is a serial fraudster. Even a bunch of those Republicans who, in polls, go "oh it's all a Dem conspiracy"? They know too; they just have the decency to lie about it. How could they not? Every media outlet in the country has been repeating it for a fucking decade! I might think voters are morons but even I won't stoop this low; they have eyes and ears, they aren't illiterate.

They just don't care.

Not enough at least, not enough to make it the only thing they consider. And here is the rub, here is the grand mistake Kriss & Tomasky are making - they are at least somewhat right to not care. The height of the Democratic privilege is that they get to play this card because they don't have to deal with it being turned against them. Kamala is a political chameleon but she is a decent person. She would never take a bribe from a foreign government, she would never assault a coworker, she would never, ever, deny a free and fair election.

Which means you don't have to choose between voting for a rapist and voting for someone who is going to shove a bullshit interpretation of the 14th amendment down your throat via a stacked court to ban abortion nationwide, forever. Pro-life people think abortion is genocide against babies! Why are you surprised they aren't voting for the pro-baby-genocide person because she is nice? How sure are you that you would do the same when that is reversed? I guess those boycott-Harris-because-of-Gaza people got some cred, but I think we all agreed they were dumb, right?

This is the rub of why outsiders always have so much difficulty understanding how people like Berlusconi, Trump, Le Pen, etc, get so much vote share - they have no stake in the political struggle beyond the vague idea of democratic norms. It is easy to say "Italy, choose a non-crook!" when you don't have to live with the policy programme of the other guy. From the inside the price of those principles is far, far harder. It isn't shocking that most choose not to pay it.

This isn't to give voters like a moral pass - Trump's conduct is truly disqualifying, I would vote Republican if the shoe was on the other foot in this case. My point instead is that they generally won't as a simple fact of life, and blaming them is futile. If you have wound up in a situation where the political system has taken its pool of hundreds of millions of potential candidates and narrowed it down to two for the voters, and one of them has "launched a coup but will say go to hell to the inflation guy" as a bundled package, someone fucked up and it isn't the voters.

You need political elites to do their part in the system - Republicans never should have let Trump be their candidate in 2016. Open primaries with no organizational thumbs on the scale are a mistake, actually, allowing arbitrary minorities to generate subpar candidates. The decision to let Biden run again was, fundamentally, born from the same impulse - the Democratic Party had no leadership capable of telling him no, because they outsourced that job to "primaries". The Dems are not "allergic" to democracy; democracy is allergic to too much of itself.

But the cat is out of the bag now! These changes happened for a reason after all. Which I won't dig into here - I will keep my point as focused as something as sprawling as this can be. Voters will not save you, and you should not be disappointed when they don't. It was never their job.

[liquidorcard]

Eyyy, well look at that. I call Lily somewhere in between being a neoliberal and classic conservative, and she proves me exactly right but not a day later. That was nice of her. Thanks, Lorch.

Because emotions are high right now, I want to very much stress that, yeah-- the American election was between the Dems being their typical shiteating selves and the Republicans reaching their final form as explicit, out-and-out facists. Uh, clearly those weren't two equally valid choices-- even compared to last time Trump won, where he at least put effort into appearing more as a moderate.

But let's be frank here, the nature of the capitalist hellscape the west currently exists in means that more than ever, people are desperate to be thrown a bone when it comes to the economy. And because in the west we also have piss poor econ comprehension and can barely recognize a Pyramid scheme on the small scale, let alone the nationwide one we currently have, people have been conditioned to vote red when they're struggling financially-- despite Republicans routine history of making the economy worse.

In addition to that, devastatingly large amounts of the voting population is too mentally exhausted to actually keep up with politics, if not vote at all. Why Reps win when they do can't be boiled down to a single primary factor-- but they do remarkably better the less people actually go out and vote. That's why Reps put so much time and effort into voter suppression-- and what probably really won Biden the election last time was how accessible voting was made because of covid.

Similar factors at play here in Canada, but, just speaking on the specifics of the American system here in particular.

Anyone with any degree of meaningful knowledge of history knows-- though not an absolute rule-- facist rhetoric tends to get it's big break in the wake of economic hardship and extreme financial inequality. Yes, the Biden administration did a lot to improve the economy. Yes, a lot of the economic hardship was a direct result of the first Trump term-- but there's just not enough economic and political literacy in the west to have that understood.

People tend to focus on the true MAGA voters here-- and though they are a significant portion of Trump's success in the 2024 election, don't get me wrong; the reality is, the swing demo here was likely a lot of people who were tired and frustrated, saw the orange man be big strong tough bullish leader man, and made their choice out of ignorance and ideas popagandized to them from birth about how the political system works. Or just couldn't be fucked to vote at all out of a sense of doom. As someone who wholly believes in democracy I want to steer away from the idea the population is just too dumb to vote responsibly. They're not. But western democracy has been eroded away by decades of upon decades of small obfuscation that adds up over time to a death by a thousand cuts.

Of course though, Lily so wholly believes in the system, is so profoundly fucking ready to make an appeal to the meritocracy of the western Democratic system as it currently is-- nah. Can't be the system is broken. Can't be that we are in need of radical reform.

I know there's some debate there as to whether or not the Dems' passive support for the Palestinian genocide really costed them the election or not. I personally think it did-- but not that they would have nessesarily won by a sweeping success otherwise. Of course, there are a million other factors that likely added up. To some extent (though it's debatable to how much) Kamala is a woman of colour. She was already heavily associated with the Biden administration and already technically in power. That disastrous first debate with Biden probably did a profound amount of damage out of the gate.

But she did ALSO run on an anti-immigrant position (just a more moderate one.) She also didn't do enough to distinguish herself from the Biden administration-- and she might have not have been able to. She changed her stance on fracking. She didn't do enough to outline (even just as a lie) about how she was going to simulate the economy from the bottom-up position. And though her campaign engaged in some of the smack-talk dunking on the Reps' ridiculous wedge issue bullshitting near the beginning, they very stupidly didn't keep up that energy for some absolutely godforsaken reason even though it was what was carrying her momentum at one point more than anything else. Despite myself never really fucking trusting politicians, I actually really liked Waltz. They fucking leashed him almost immediately in an absolutely braindead move.

And once again, here's fucking Lily being Queen Ghoul over here saying Harris was campaigning on a platform of "harm reduction" over a fucking GENOCIDE. Holy shitballs Lily. That's quite the take, EVEN FOR YOU. You could have blamed Biden. You would have been wrong, but. Antisemitism is unfortunately still pretty acceptable in the left, and people generally don't get the difference between Israel's government and its citizens-- or jewish people as a whole. You've been comfortable being antisemitic in the past, your fanbase is already primed for it. I'd prefer you not being the fucking bigot you are at all Lily, but like, at least that would have been your average level of awful. NOT MAKING EXCUSES FOR COMPLIANCE WITH GENOCIDE. The fuck is wrong with you!?

Also, there's no way to transition into this but, I gotta point this out: Yes Lily is being her usual profoundly unselfaware self as per fucking usual-- even though I don't think every person who voted republican is inherently a monster, her own fucking beloved brother ABSOLUTELY IS.

We actually agree on that point, Lily. Cameron and people like him need to be shot into the fucking sun.

[corbinite]

it's mindnumbing to me that everyone has already decided that they're gonna let Biden win the primaries and aren't even considering a possibility where he doesn't win even after his approval ratings have fallen to some of the lowest levels for any president in history. We're all having these debates about whether we should vote for him in the general to keep trump out or if we should abstain but like why are we even jumping to that??? Vote Williamson in the primaries. We're all doing that way right? RIGHT??? You wanna talk about lesser of two evils but aren't even considering the candidate that at least supports SOME sort of ceasefire? (yes even though it is severely lacking) Stop playing the same strategy the democratic party has been playing for decades. Stop just assuming that the centrist borderline republican is the only electable candidate in the democratic party, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[certified-bi]

Look I thought about not being nasty. So I won't be to the extent I feel it. That being said: everyone who thinks

1) Harris shouldn't have focused on the center as much as she did, despite Biden being even more center than she was and winning in 2020 with voters who didn't bother to show up this time, and instead should have tried to pander to inactive voters who cared more about moral grandstanding than the rights of those around them or couldn't be bothered to show up without a pandemic on their minds.

2) That Bernie is right and the working class didn't show up for her because her economy policies weren't that good for the working class(they were, I read them), despite the fact numerous economists said he would at best put us in a recession and we were actually doing fairly well considering covid, and not that no one in this country actually understands the economy outside of stocks.

3) Or that any of the losses that occurred were not because of the fact voters have short fucking memories and democrats would rather stay home than protect themselves and their mothers, wives, sisters and daughters than vote for a black, asian woman.

Like we can pretend that men haven't been in echo chambers online breeding incel communities. We can pretend that Harris was somehow way more awkward and stiff than Biden in 2020. We can pretend she wasn't competent in her presentation and messaging. We can pretend that FBI launching an investigation into racist text messages has nothing to do with the climate around the politics of this election. We can pretend that identity has nothing to do with politics despite evidence to the contrary but let's be fucking real.

People weren't willing to vote in 2024 without 4 years of hell fresh on their memory and a candidate who would stop it. Instead they got complacent with Biden making positive changes everyday despite the House flipping halfway through his presidency. The voters who didn't show up decided they didn't care about the threat to women's rights, or the safety of minorities or even FDA food inspections to name a few things of the top of my head, which honestly hurts more than the half of the country that wants him somehow. Because we know they could have made an effort. They just didn't.

[fairy-ganj-mother]

the billionaires paying off the government to shape it to suit them will not voluntarily give up power, the working class must seize this power. trump does not stand for the average american but rather only serves to further divide the working class, by appealing overwhelmingly to folks that share his views of hatred and feeding them lies to make them believe their neighbor is the enemy instead of elon musk or jeff bezos. this distraction of in-fighting in the working class then diminishes the ability to organize and allows the mega-rich to do whatever they want behind the scenes. folks don't notice that these people are infringing on their rights because they're too concerned with harboring hate towards their immigrant neighbor or their liberal kids, who were never their enemy until trump told them so. it's all part of the plan to increase the divide between rich and poor and increase the power of the rich.

[cuckweeds]

i really need white liberals to stop telling people who's loved ones are actively being murdered in a genocide funded by joe biden that they still need to vote for him because "trump is worse". I know we are all afraid of what could happen to things like reproductive rights and the lgbtq+ community under trump, that we think that is the worst nightmare to live through, but consider what palestinians are living through RIGHT NOW. they are living through their worst nightmare. and it's being funded and approved by joe biden himself. I know how scary it is to think about losing your rights and privileges to safety, but that is literally already happening to people right now on joe bidens dollar. he will not save us.

[falinscloaca]

rewatched paranoia agent by proxy (reaction youtube), feeling emotionally akin to warm yet raw eggs again. great.

[montanabohemian]

so then they'd better get registered to vote. and fucking vote. and none of this purity politics bullshit. vote democrat or shut the fuck up forever. this doesn't mean you can't hold them accountable; you should. but ya ain't gonna have shit if the GOP rips away all your rights (including voting rights) which is literally what they are actively doing.

This is why the Fascists are doing everything they can to steal power now.

[nohriantomatoes]

Going through the Joe tag rn is so wild like

I kno tumblr could theoretically be diverse, but yall really sound like a bunch of bitching white kids rn.

"We're free" are you fucking kidding me? Joe was the most blasé middle ground normal ass Democrat to win in the middle of this extremist pit we call America. We are free of... mediocrity? 4 months before election day?

stg yall are just interested in chaos

[gaast]

Truly there are no communists in foxholes.

[treesah]

Also, has everyone forgotten that although we have a two-party system, the two parties don’t need to remain the same two parties? Do you remember the Whigs? Well they stopped being relevant because everyone got sick of their wishy-washiness on the slavery issue and started voting for the staunchly abolitionist radicals (wild to think that the Republicans were once the progressives, but that’s just history).

The reason why we still have the Democrats instead of a truly progressive party in both word AND deed is because people believe this “harm reduction” shit out of fear or bad reasoning instead of the truth—if enough of us vote for a single third party (and I’m gunning for the Greens), then that third party becomes one of the main parties.

Not voting for Biden isn’t the same as voting for Trump.

Also don’t even talk to me about local and state politics. I bet none of you spent any time at all personally researching all 67 judges up for retention in Cook County (I spent three days in between full-time work and full-time parenting), or spent time and money campaigning for Megan Mathias to become 45th Ward Alderwoman, or knocked on doors to urge your conservative-leaning neighbors to vote YES to the Bring Chicago Home tax referendum. And I cast my blank ballot for every federal-level Democratic race in the primary, in addition to calling Congressman Quigley’s office so much the people answering the phones don’t even ask me my personal information anymore.

If your vote is assured, then what incentive is there for politicians to listen to you at all?

Gonna need yall to stop putting Biden is Just As Bad propaganda on my dash. Had to unfollow someone because I don’t want to a start a fight with them over it, but I’m about to bite the next person who puts that shit in front of me.

If you don’t like Biden, vote in your god damn local and mid term elections for third party or further left candidates so that we get better democratic candidates for future elections. But this one is already fucking decided, and I’m NOT ending up under a Trump led dictatorship because yall value protecting your personal sense of moral purity over the collective good. Whether it offends your personal morals to vote for Biden is IRRELEVANT in the face of the alternative.

This isn’t a lesser of two evils situation. One guy sucks. The other guy is LITERALLY PLANNING TO OVERTHROW OUR DEMOCRACY AND INSTALL HIMSELF AS A PUTIN STYLE DICTATOR.

PLEASE look up Project 2025 and stop acting like abstaining is some kind of personal ethical decision!

[crookedfandomquill]

This is very situational, and sadly may not be realistic for everyone, but I need y’all to understand that a very important part of political activism is fucking talking to your conservative or moderate friends and family.

My dad voted for Trump in 2016. He’s a middle class white evangelical from Arkansas. He raised me with conservative Christian values, just like his parents raised him. When he voted Trump, he was holding his nose, but he didn’t feel too bad about it, and went on to vote red down the ticket in the 2018 midterms, as well.

But I started college in 2017. Higher education and independence changed everything for me, and I went home over holidays and summers with fire in my belly and a thousand arguments ready at the drop of a hat, to my father’s dismay.

I remember crying in my room after emotional, intense arguments with him. I told him over and over that I felt betrayed by his choice to vote for a man who admitted to sexually assaulting women, who built his platform on dehumanizing immigrants and the disabled, who spread overtly-racist rhetoric, who flouted the values of kindness and self-discipline that I’d been raised on. And my dad always had some justification about the “greater good”: fighting against abortion, bolstering the economy, getting other Christian politicians into office.

But over time, as we grew further apart and I lost my will to discuss anything with him at all, he softened. He started asking me why I thought the way I did about the things we disagreed about. He would listen to my answers without interruption, and mull them over afterward instead of expressing his own opinion. And all the while, he watched the Trump presidency become cruel and absurd and devastating.

The first time he openly expressed regret to me, I had come home for a weekend after Kavanaugh was confirmed to SCOTUS. My dad realized he had helped elect a man who preyed on women… and that man had opened the door to more predators. I can’t tell you what it felt like for him to admit that he’d made a mistake, not just in voting for Trump but in defending him for so long. We kept arguing, but it was more debating than fighting. I knew he was capable of seeing my side of things, even if it took a while, and he knew I wasn’t just a sensitive college student with shallow new ideas about the world.

And then 2020 hit. Specifically, George Floyd was murdered, and the events that followed played out on the national stage. My dad was incredibly shaken by it. He asked me if I had any books from college about racial issues. I loaned him The New Jim Crow, one of the required readings for my Race and the Law class. Then I gave him Just Mercy. Then he watched the documentary 13th. Then he joined a racial harmony group he learned about through one of the few Black families at our church and insisted our whole family come. He held up signs at a protest against Confederate monuments in our conservative southern town. In three years, he went from defending Trump’s comments about “Black-on-Black crime” to publicly advocating for racial justice and opposing the death penalty.

We went together to vote in the 2020 primaries. I couldn’t help asking who he’d voted for; I didn’t even know if he’d asked for the Republican or Democratic ticket. He admitted he’d voted for Bernie. fucking. Sanders, then made me promise not to tell my grandma he’d voted liberal. When the election rolled around in November, he voted Biden. I’m sure he held his nose to do it, just like he held his nose voting in 2016. But I know he doesn’t regret it.

I am, of course, unbelievably lucky to have a parent who loved me enough, and was empathetic enough, to choose his relationship with me over his strongly-held opinions. He kept searching for truth because, as much as he’ll deny it, he’s a very smart and curious person. No degree of intelligence or curiosity makes you immune to propaganda, especially if you were raised not to question the party line. It’s easy to dismiss our conservative, conspiracy-pilled loved ones as stupid, hypocritical, and cruel. Sometimes they are. But sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they will bend to keep their relationships from breaking. Sometimes, if they can be made to understand that their beliefs and actions are harming someone they love, they will make concessions. And sometimes they just need one person in their life to put a foot down, to be vulnerable and assertive and argumentative, to bring the impact of their politics close to home.

As the most important election of our lifetimes approaches, do not put peace over progress. If you have someone like my dad, someone who is good-willed and smart and loves you more than their own opinions, tell them how you feel. Tell them what their choices will mean for you, for your friends, for your community. Tell them what they could lose: your trust, your affection, your respect. Don’t avoid conflict if it could be productive. Because my conflict with my dad didn’t just win him over–it won over my moderate mom and one of my conservative brothers. And it put us in community with other like-minded people and led my parents to a healthier and kinder faith.

All of this to say, there is hope in conflict. There is hope in our relationships with people who think differently from us. There is hope in exposing your fear and anger and pain to people you love. And hope is a form of activism.

[nyaskitten]

Hey, don't you find it fucking TERRIFYING that people in other countries also have to fear the results of the U.S. election, because the most popular Republican and Democratic candidates are both pure fuck evil, tyrannical genocial monsters with no remorse? But yeah sure "Biden is a great guy, let's just IGNORE that he can bypass Congress to kill Palestinian women, men, children, elders, etc, and not to codify Roe V. Wade! We swear he's actually fairly liberal!" No Biden is a fucking monster, a remorseless demon. He has no intent of ceasing aid to Israel until Palestine, and anyone else that Israel deems a threat, is gone. Get that through your thick fucking skull, bludgeon it in if you must, Biden is not a great guy, nor a "lesser of two evils," he's TREMENDOUSLY evil, he's just nice about it.

EDIT: THIS POST IS NOT MEANT TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE DOOMERISMS OF "NO GOOD CANDIDATE!!!" This post was a vent first and foremost! There are other candidates we can push to the primaries, not just Biden!

[qqueenofhades]

oh god is biden dropping out? i don't know what happens then

Jesus effing Christ.

Few thoughts:

The billionaire Democratic donors got their way, apparently. All I saw was that the big-dollar donors were secretly putting pressure on the rank-and-file Democratic elected officials (i.e. House and Senate) to denounce Biden or not get any more money, and other shameful backroom maneuvering to knife Biden. I will refrain (lol, no I won't) from speculating that billionaires of any political stripe feel threatened by Biden's increasingly progressive tax/wealth redistribution policies, and saw their chance after the bad debate performance to knife him. Because until further notice, I'm going to think that was the biggest factor.

I don't know if there's an actual health condition that made Biden agree it was the best time (in fucking July) to step down, but if this was an issue, there needed to be planning last year, at the earliest, to prepare for a new successor. I don't know what's going on. This is a clusterfuck on many, many levels.

However: it is true that this does change things and not necessarily only for the worse, as long as Harris is immediately confirmed as the new nominee and this stupid Democrats In Disarray nonsense, which is giving the media exactly what they want, is put to a fucking end. If Harris is also swept aside and the billionaire donors try to install their preferred "Centrist!!!" candidate (lol Manchin or some shit) with an equally antidemocratic closed-door Star Chamber convention, then yes, we're fucked. Because the Congressional Black Caucus and African American voters saw exactly what the rich white man billionaires were trying to do by torching Biden and then Harris, and they are not going to play ball with some Magical White Man replacement.

If Harris is immediately confirmed as the new nominee (and to the best of my knowledge Biden has endorsed her), then she has a chance of reinvigorating the race. There were a lot of Americans who did not want either Biden or Trump. I suspect they were fucking braindead, but so be it. Harris has apparently polled pretty and increasingly well in recent days (in some cases actually better than Biden) and again, there is no remotely small-d democratic alternative to her. The billionaire donors already trashed the duly elected (by the primary process) Democratic nominee. If they do the same to Harris, then yes. We will have Trump and there won't be any more democracy in this country on either side, because the Republican big-bucks donors will gleefully pick up where the Democratic big-bucks donors left off.

Jesus fucking Christ.

The message needs to be "Harris is Joe's successor, she is younger and already has four years of experience and is the only candidate." Anything else is a fucking gift from god to the Republicans, once more getting trashed after Trump's terrible RNC speech. Maybe she can then pick Whitmer or Shapiro (both popular and effective Democratic governors of swing states, MI and PA respectively) as a running mate, but the nominee has to be Kamala. There is no other fucking choice. This is already enough of a mess.

If that can happen, and the fucking donors can refrain from fucking it up, then... okay. It's not great, but it does change things. It makes the ticket younger. It makes it historic (first Black female president beating Trump would be amazing). It could reach people disenchanted with the current two-old-white-guys setup.

This is an incredible sacrifice on Biden's part and I only wish that I could believe he did it voluntarily, rather than being forced out by a small class of rich people worrying about his policies getting too progressive.

I wish him only the best and I recognize this decision was taken under extreme pressure. If we then lose to Trump, I hope everyone who forced Biden out burns in hell.

I was a diehard Biden supporter not because I loved the guy personally, but because he was the only choice for preserving democracy in America. The essential stakes of the election have not changed, even if the billionaires just knifed us in the fucking back, possibly to nobody's surprise, because R or D, they are not our friends.

Kamala is the only choice. I will now have to defend her as hard as I did for Biden. She needs to beat Trump. There is nothing else to it. If you think she can't, then you need to work at helping her do that. There is already enough calamity and doom. We do not have a choice. We cannot lose sight of what is at stake here.

Kamala Harris/Whitmer and/or Shapiro and/or Buttigieg 2024.

The end.

[nebuletteart]

Gonna be real this post feels incredibly disingenuous. Have Psyops cropped up in the past? Yes. Eternally. Are there likely bots and real folks pushing people not to vote in the election for bad faith reasons? Of course! But this attitude that anyone you see disillusioned with the voting system who are loudly against voting is some fuckin foreign bad actor seems incredibly short sighted. It leads to a breakdown in communication where no one will listen to those hurt and frustrated with the democratic party. Worse off it pushes people away from any solution because if you wont look at the festering wound you will never bandage it. (incoming rant for about 3 paragraphs, skip to the last two if you want a more constructive and coolheaded response lol)

The way I see it both parties do work in tandem. The Republican party is determined to radicalize their base and go to further and further extremes, feeding off an uneducated, deeply frustrated and scared, population. But the Democratic party is HAPPY with this! This is their strategy. There is a reason the Democratic party rarely fulfills their promises, there is a reason that whenever they have the chance they never secure human rights, the reason is because they can hold it over us like jingling keys. all they have to do is wait for us to get desperate enough to vote for them because they're better than the other guys, let the republicans loudly and proudly declare their awful intentions. if the democrats lose, well, they look like the good guys! minorities suffer and they pull on our leash, and when the next election cycle comes we are desperate to vote for them.

And if they win? They barely protect our rights, they uphold the status quo, and then they quietly turn around and do half the shit we raged at republicans about. The Wall? Biden continued building it. Covid, the thing that is still killing americans daily, the thing that killed a family member of mine and i didnt even get to say goodbye to her? The moment the Democratic Party won, despite crying that they believed is science they left us all out to dry! The Democratic Party had how many years to secure Roe v Wade since it's inception before Trump packed the court? fucking 50 years to pass the basest federal protections??? and now Lgbtq+ rights! How many years have we tried to pass the Equality Act?

And now. We gleefully watch the Democratic party fund the Palestinian Genocide. We watch our President repeat racist propaganda and the democratic party follow, to fund their bottom line. Of COURSE people are not going to want to vote! The level of backlash you are seeing isnt just some red scare ass BULLSHIT! Sigh.

Look. I will not get on someones ass for voting for Biden, I understand why someone would-- I was once a vote blue no matter who person myself and am on the fence on what to do if Biden does become the democratic frontrunner. But in this sentence is the the answer! I personally plan on and voting like hell in the Primaries which is what think is the actual solution- The Democratic Establishment does not want change, we need another candidate to beat Biden in the primaries because at this rate he is not going to win the election. You cannot blame the growing number of people burned by Bidens administration for not wanting to vote for him! so dont! Right now we are at a critical moment where Biden is so deeply unpopular with both parties that maybe, if we all pull together that force we did to get Biden in office- we can boot the old fuck out in the Primaries! We can prove to the establishment that we are tired of their shit, that we will not support their ceaseless genocide to fill their pockets! Vote every single one of those fuckers out with the venom you treat republicans with because they're both rat poison, just with a different label!

But. acting like anyone who expresses the opinion that this whole situation is a fucked up scam is stupid or a psyop accomplishes nothing- some people have been effected by the Democratic parties inaction and policies. Push them to vote in the primaries, if only to fuck over Biden. idk, i just feel like there was a better way to word this post, because as it is it reads as a dismissal of peoples genuine feelings rather than a genuine warning.

I feel like the psyops are back…