#this is why i hate liberals. just left enough to hate trump but not left enough to idk. stop fucking supporting genocide

[ellipsiseffervescent]

Without getting weird and rude, can someone explain to me why we, as the left, have come out of this election thinking "aha! Now the Democratic establishment will learn to listen to us!" or "if the dems would have accomadated all of our views they would have won"?

What I took out of this election is that we are in a serious echo chamber and not in touch w the 'average' American voter. Like when was the last time anyone in our bubble has mentioned listening to Joe Rogan (the biggest podcast in our country and who's platform helped Trump a lot), when was the last time an irl 'normie' knew who our leftist talking heads are, like contrapoints or hasanabi or fd signifier? (and omfg don't come at me for whatever weird controversy they may have they are simply the biggest leftist names I could think of)

And then, on top of that, why should the liberals even think we exist? Seriously. We're loud online, but we don't show up for elections. I'm not even talking about this one, I'm talking about how Bernie, the most mainstream politician to ever adopt our views, got stomped even harder in the 2020 primary than he did in 2016 (literally lost by millions of the popular vote and he does terribly in swing states, which are key requirements to winning elections), so we can't even turn out in great enough numbers to elect our ppl. And I'm not saying this to blame leftists- I'm saying this bc I don't think our numbers are as big as we think they are. I don't think we are a large enough portion of the American voter base to invest in the idea that if we just got what we wanted we would turn out in big enough numbers to win a national election for our candidate.

I feel like somewhere along the lines we got it in our heads that we don't need to sell our ideas to the populace. That because we have science and data and history to back up our ideas, we don't have to play the politics game and accomadate centrists or liberals, and that our numbers are secretly so big that if someone just spoke for us they would win an American presidential election. But like, you know the rest of the country thinks our policies, as they are presented, are insanely radical and out of touch, right? A lot of Americans thought Kamala herself was radical, meanwhile ppl here call her blue maga. (also anyone who isn't on the left thinks that liberals and leftists are one. I hate to break it to you but they literally do not conceptualize us as different from dems).

So anyway, yeah, if someone could show me why some of the online left thinks that Harris lost bc she wasn't left enough I would greatly appreciate it. Because I don't see any voter evidence that would make one think that we are a winning political demographic that can carry an election.

[rotzaprachim]

one thing that’s being missed out a lot in everything from the American center to the American left’s election loss nitpicking is that imho if you use the terms “working class” or “class consciousness” to describe America or even Americans in a positive way, YOU are one of them famous elitest out of touch urban professionals that you’re also currently bagging on the right now because, while those terms are extremely established in economics and the global news sphere, they are not that popular or established among the actual trump voting communities you are talking about. you are one of them hated overeducated elites who might have watched a college lecture on YouTube or cracked an Econ 101 textbook from the library! You are one of the elites! Instead you hear a lot of “middle class,” the supposed party of the common man, and “blue collar,” which hasn’t described the whole or even likely majority of the American working class basically forever, or the “working man,” as if the vast majority of the country… doesn’t work. And that’s a loaded distinction. There’s loaded aspects of every one of those terms. America imho suffers from an incredible degree of classism, but it’s also an internalized classicism because of how many people believe there is something fundamentally more honest, hardworking, and real about being middle class then one of them Bad Poors, no matter what their actual income is. The middle class, after all, isn’t the working class- they could never be the people who need to pay for universal school lunch because THEIR child isn’t hungry. And the “blue collar” is fundamentally not the pink collar, the genuinely hated and more highly educated positions more often held by women, like teachers and nurses, and it isn’t the white collar positions like office workers and civil servants and social workers that are more disproportionately held by liberal voting city slickers. And it’s a working man, a real working man, not like those bad poor and illegals who aren’t working and take what’s mine anyway.

And these terms matter, these distinctions matter, because they tell you a lot about why votes for who and why. Key fact: a lot of analysis of the democrats “abandoning the working class,” and while I think it’s a) far more complex than that and b) a genuine problem that the democrats ARE too centrist and should shape themselves into more of a general social welfare liberal party, what’s often being missed is what the actual white working class - I’m sorry, middle class- who is abandoning the Democratic Party wants, and moreover, who they imagine to be “elite.” Because elite, here, is absolutely not in general and absolute class terms, but a miasma of factors that include education level, cultural markers, ethnicity, and some simple factors of straight up geography where cities are disproportionately liberal and where almost the entirety of the actual American left lives as well. If it WAS in absolute class terms Donald trump would not be the face of this discontent. Money is not sole, or even main, issue here.

and furthermore comes this: the hints of even white male working class political sentiment have not been popular when they’ve been tied even a little bit to progressive policy or Other People Getting Things. Check sherrod brown losing his seat, or the fact tim walz’s campaign didn’t pummel trump and vance into the electoral ground. And that comes back to the class distinction: pro-working class policy is not always popular among the conservative regions that went to trump because they believe they are not the working class and that these policies are never things that they could be so poor as to need. We don’t need free school lunch - I work hard enough to provide for my child. We don’t need childcare - our family can scrape through! We don’t need national infrastructure bills - we’re doing just fine! Instead is a mass rage that what people would be paying for is other people, that the working class is other people, who are not then, who are undocumented, who are not working, who are grifters. (A hell of a lot of this kind of sentiment was established in hillbilly elegy. A shit ton of white working class Americans voted for the guy who wrote the book on white working class Americans being dumb and lazy in a way he personally was fundamentally better than.) why should a hardworking middle class voter pay for freeloaders who could do something so embarrassing as be poor? To understand America, you have to understand that there’s a hell of a lot of upper class rage amongst people who are at the bottom of the heap themselves that lights on fire when issues of race, sexuality, and gender are brought into it.

so that’s my big take on what’s wrong with Class Politics among Conservative Americans that people are missing the fuck out on, and it’s backed up by both stats and organizing experience, but I would fucking love a lot of people being very loud right now to take their socialism a cake for everyone into some of the famously red regions and see how that actually goes over. I don’t think America has to be this way, forever, but it’s pointless to ignore the way it is. And I think there’s another important irony here to remember: people genuinely feel that there is something immoral and also dumb about voting for democrats, but they use their policies anyway. You think the conservative women who voted against abortion never got one? As if. But the same policy applies more generally - Biden’s infrastructure bills were absolutely used in very red counties. People who voted Republican still use Democratic policies in favour of social security to feed their children. It’s just that, well, on paper they don’t actually need them, because they are middle class.

[graveyardmouth]

idk i just feel like the fact that trump being reelected would be awful doesnt mean we cant put pressure on biden? some of you dumbasses are genuinely refusing to at alllllllll push for biden to idk. stop aiding fucking genocide bc "ohhh trump would be worse" like yes trump would be worse we all fucking know that but refusing to do anything in the face of genocide is incredibly fucking stupid

[centrally-unplanned]

I saw this slightly-old post making the rounds recently by former alt-right memelord Walt Bismark, on how the alt-right "won" in the late 2010's - positing that as the cause of why it generally vanished. I agree overall with the vanishing part, its not gone-gone ofc but it waned as a cohesive movement. But I saw a lot of people (and generally not alt-right figures) agreeing with its conclusion and I am a bit more skeptical of those.

Its largely a personal essay so I wont address most of it, but it has a summary of five main points that outline essentially "the agenda of the Alt Right at the beginning" to evaluate success upon. Bismark thinks they won on all five, but overall I think this is playing a trick of inventing an enemy to claim you defeated. Anyway, the points:

1: Shift the “Overton Window” of acceptable public discourse to make it politically viable to openly discuss the interests of white people in mainstream politics, in the same way black people or Jewish people discuss their collective interests. 

This one I will grant a partial victory - there was a legitimate intensification of "white as identity" in politics, a making explicit what was implicit in the 2010's. Now ofc I consider this to be a classic horseshoe moment; the hard left at the time was also extremely interested in abandoning race neutrality and valorizing racial identity as an organizing principle, and did it in a very ham-fisted way that the right capitalized on, so it was an easy battle to win - but that is what it is, ofc the wider environment defined the goals & strategy. I mention it however because I do think this is only partial, and the gap between implicit and explicit isn't that relevant. He mentions as an example of this success:

Affirmative action was of course squashed by SCOTUS and the necessary legal infrastructure is being deployed to burn it down. Mainstream conservatives are mobilizing a lot of resources and energy to this end.

But conservatives have been fighting affirmative action for 20+ years, easily. Here is a 1999 article on precisely such a campaign, I literally just googled "conservatives affirmative action [year]" and I get results each time, 2003 had big cases (the Bollinger cases) on AA, etc. I remember "affirmative action bake sale" memes from like 2006 at my uni! What changed between Bollinger and 2023's Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard is that conservatives had just had enough time to stack courts, and wait for Supreme Court justices to die. That just...takes time to do! The strategy hadn't changed between 2003 and 2023. And meanwhile, did they win? They won that court case, sure. What do you...think the ethic makeup of the next Harvard class is gonna be? Wanna take some bets?

His other listed victories are things like:

"Vivek defended the Great Replacement Theory on national television and remained a major Trump surrogate. The SPLC would have marginalized him for that 10 years ago. Today because of polarization and MAGA closing ranks they can’t do shit."

And like, the Southern Poverty Law Center would have successfully marginalized a Republican politician in idk 2003 are you completely high right now? Strom Fucking Thurmond was an active Senator in 2003! This is the repeated tactic here, the imagined enemies - there was never a time where liberal institutions could consistently force conservative politicians to kowtow, so you can't claim it as a change.

This is why I mention the social justice horseshoe, because he has this point here:

These days you can complain about quotas etc. being unfair to you as a white man and it’s not inflammatory or low status among centrists and conservatives. Even non-woke liberals won’t really hate you for it, just quietly think you’re a bit of a chud. This was not the case in 2015. 

And this is partially correct, I agree there was some norm shift. But that is because in ~2010 there really weren't any quotas against white men, it wasn't a thing almost anywhere outside of university applications, so the complaint would make no sense. What happened was that starting in ~2012 a huge left cultural movement started that just openly supported active discrimination against whites, Asians and men. They were a small minority of course, and never had much power, but they got enough power in certain institutions like non-profits and universities that there was a string of just very obvious cases of clear racial discrimination against in particular whites & asians (both men and women, white women often got it very bad in this wave). And the large majority of people just saw that and went "uh yeah racism is still bad?" and so now you can say that because its actually relevant to say. From that lens, is this a successful cultural victory on the part of the alt-right? In some sense sure, but really its more a cultural failure of the hard left. The status quo just kept on chugging along.

Ugh that point went long, the others repeat so we will go through them quicker.

2: Elevate identity issues like anti-immigration and the promotion of traditional gender norms to the center of Republican politics. 

A fake enemy here - anti-immigration was already a huge issue for Republicans in the 2000's. It had a huge wave under Obama actually, it goes in cycles like that. And it responds to material conditions; it's a big issue again right now because the immigration numbers spiked massively under Biden, its just way worse of a problem now (primarily due to the booming economy of course). Again a partial victory for the first part, I agree its more salient due to Trump platforming it, but I'm skeptical that it is a big shift - people are memory-holing the Tea Party movement really badly here for example.

And the second point is just obviously false, Republicans always cared about that, and they care about it less now, giving up the ghost on gay marriage for example. The Alt-Right coincided with a decline of the influence of the Religious Right, and it shows on this issue, 0 points.

3: Make it socially acceptable to discuss HBD and the resulting moral implications for leveling mechanisms like affirmative action. 

Peak "log off" moment, it was always acceptable to discuss this outside of liberal/professional circles and there it still isn't acceptable to discuss it. Charles Murray wrote the Bell Curve in 1994 and his been an American Enterprise Institute Scholar for this entire span of time. This is confusing churn for change - the mid-2010's had a bunch of big, mainly online fights about HBD, and then everyone just sort of moved on with the status quo pretty much unchanged. Nothing like education policy, even in Republican circles, has shifted over this.

4: Convince conservatives to stop ceding moral authority to liberals and allowing them to determine who on the Right is verboten or beyond the pale. Make it unacceptable among conservatives to “punch Right” or purge people for wrongthink. 

Sigh, again when have Republicans ever ceded moral authority to liberals? Harvard University could not condemn Newt Gingrich in ~2009 and make him change his mind about anything. And "Republicans don't self-criticize while Liberals eat themselves alive" has been a complaint for literally decades, you would hear that as far back as say Clinton and things like the 1999 WTO protests. Its both true and exaggerated - the Tea Party primaried Republican candidates for wrongthink in 2010, and Trump did the same thing! With disastrous results for the Republicans in 2022. I really, really don't think you can look at Trump's Republican party and say they solved the Wrongthink problem.

5: Expose and dismantle the hypocritical attitude that allows neocons to militantly support Israeli ethnonationalism while brutally repressing any white identity politics domestically.

This one is just a lolwut moment, "brutally repressing any white identity politics domestically", like what does that even mean? Name the concrete policy proposals George Bush implemented in 2007 than Donald Trump didn't in 2018 around this topic. Again a fake enemy, they were never repressed by the right, and ofc are still hated by liberal institutions like universities.

Moving on from any specific point, I think its very telling that very little about free trade vs protectionism or isolationism/support of autocracy abroad enters this list. Because beyond immigration those are the big shifts the Trump movement (which is the mechanism the alt-right has to claim for making its impact) has ushered into the party. They didn't change its stance on sexual politics or "race & IQ" or anything, those haven't changed, but meanwhile the party has completely flipped on things like tariffs or opposition to Russian military expansion. But of course those don't align neatly at all with the issues the Alt-Right fought about in 2015.

The reality the Alt-Right can't escape is that they used Trump as their mechanism for change, and Trump never really cared about any of their goals beyond immigration. He used them and then pursued either bog-standard Republican policy or his own mercurial, autocratic whims, eventually channeling all of this energy into election denialism. I really don't think if you pulled aside frikkin Ryan Faulk in 2014, asked him to put down his graphs about Raven's Progressive Matrices of black Caribbean students, and said "Hey 10 years from now all of this energy is being channeled into pretending that a failed real estate mogul didn't lose the 2020 presidential election", that he would look at that outcome and think Mission Accomplished.

I don't want to fully oversell, there are for example wins Bismark doesn't mention (School choice comes to mind, the biggest conservative win of the past decade besides the protectionist swing). The Alt Right was an influential movement, it earned its place in history. But I do not think it is an example of being a "victim of its own success". I think instead it should be understood as part of the "radical froth" of the 2010's, that bubbled over and then evaporated like its more intense leftwing peers did. It made some mark and then got left in the dust.

Net ranking of the 5 points: 0.5 for Point 1, 0.25 for Point 2, 0 for the rest, 1.25/5.

[spaceguy44]

2024 US Election Post-mortem

I need to get my thoughts out about the election. I'll split it into a few main parts. (This will be long) 1. Why did Kamala lose/Trump win?

There's 2 main reasons for the result.

1. The biggest thing isn't that Trump gained a lot (he did somewhat), but that Kamala lost hugely. Kamala ran an "strong" but status-quo style center-lib campaign. This was not the right move to capture the electorate in today's America. It hasn't been since 2012. People at every part of the political spectrum have expressed disdain with the way establishment Democrats have run things. People want change! They have since 2008. Obama convinced everyone that he represented change. Hillary lost in 2016 because they didn't get that change after 8 years, and wanted something new no matter what. Biden did a good job in 2020 of being somewhat of a change candidate, but it was really COVID that allowed him to win. I do think Trump would've won in 2020 if it weren't for the pandemic. Kamala had momentum at first because she literally was "change." Biden was hugely unpopular, and people didn't like the return to liberal status quo, even if he did do more than even Obama to bring (domestic) left-wing policies to the forefront imo. Kamala represented hope at first that we could get away from the Biden that everyone hated, and bring in a whole new kind of politics and movement that would take us out of the neoliberal malaise that was the again Biden. What happened in stead was the establishment decided that there was a contingent of Americans that were allergic to left-wing politics, and they need to be captured.

THIS IS THE MAIN POINT OF FAILURE FOR BOTH HILLARY AND KAMALA. I do not believe there is a (large) population that is inherently right-wing, and another that is centrist, and another that is left-wing. I do think there are some that you could never convince one way or another, but it's just impossible that so many people could vote for Obama, and then turn around for Trump if people had some sort of weird internal political compass that they adhered to regardless of policy. No, Trump (and the right more broadly) MADE his base. This is the other reason Trump won.

2. Trump did make some gains, though I believe the right campaign from Harris could've overcome that. I think the Trump gains are more indicative of what Harris lacked. Kamala tried to adjust her campaign to match an electorate. Trump didn't give a fuck. He said what he wanted, and people liked that. They don't care about decorum. They don't care about "unity". They want someone they think will "fight" for them. People saw Kamala bringing in the Cheneys and just saw another neolib that would flake on any conviction to grab a vote. People don't want a policy. People want a candidate with conviction. Trump was also adept at playing on people's fears and insecurities. He MADE them into Trump supporters by playing on those fears. Harris did not try to make Harris supporters by playing on fears (at least enough). She was best with the abortion stuff, but that wasn't the issue that exit polls showed people care about. The top issue was the economy. Yes, "the economy" is objectively doing better if you look at the stats, but people don't feel like it because prices are still high despite the buying power of the dollar recovering (inflation was reduced!). People felt that because corporations kept prices at pre-inflation reduction levels. Harris briefly flirted with price capping, which would be the exact sort of populist policy that directly addresses people's fears/insecurities and breaks from the status quo that could excite a mythical "Harris base" that maybe existed for 2 weeks.

It's the same with immigration. Trump created a "big lie" about the border being in crisis, and played on the truly hurting average middle-American's insecurities. You have a population that is hurting for corporate consolidation destroying small local business, that has been devastated by opioids, and is seeing the towns and culture they grew up with decay and seemingly leave them behind. Are Trump's policies going to uplift them? Hell no! Does he talk to specifically them all and directly address their insecurities though? Absolutely. In stead of addressing these people (these are the ones on the red arrow map that's been going around), she accepted the lie about immigrants and rejected making any radical policy change from the system that threw middle America under the bus.

I should say I am literally living in a small rural city in a deep-red state, so I know what they're saying. These people aren't necessarily bigots. Some are, but I think most think they aren't. I think anyone can be prone to getting caught up in a hate movement if the right buttons are pressed, and Trump deftly presses those buttons. What needed to happen was pressing the right buttons to address their insecurities and fears that doesn't rely on hate and scapegoating. This is what I think Bernie Sanders does well in general polls, but there's too much movement within the Dems to preserve the liberal status quo. That needs to change or, the Dems die. LIBERALISM IS DEAD. We address the fears that made people Trump voters, or democracy dies! Here are 2.5 other smaller reasons: 3. Sexism, Racism, and Religiosity. I will not deny that these do play a part in certain parts of the electorate. However, I don't think they're insurmountable hurdles in a general election. I think Obama's campaign is proof of this. But we shouldn't deny that there are a significant portion that wouldn't vote for Kamala for purely bigotry reasons. Hell, I know some personally. But I do think it is a mistake to blame these for our failures. WE LEARN NOTHING OTHERWISE! 4. Believe it or not, but there's just a lot of people out there that just don't care or avoid politics all together. These people aren't bad or deficient, but they just don't include thinking about politics constantly as a part of their lives. They think about the election for a few days, and then get on with their lives for 4 years and tune out everything. Generally, these people are privileged, though there's also some that have been so hurt by our system and policies, that they tune out in pure nihilism about it all. These people vote on vibes, they vote based on what those they care about support, and many just sit out the whole thing. Voter apathy is definitely a thing, and it hurst especially the left imo. I do believe the majority of people would loath Trump's policies if they actually knew what they entailed, so this apathy only takes away from the left. 5. Kamala did NOT lose due to the Gaza protest. She might have lost a bit of support by not being an empathetic foil to Trump's "glass the whole strip" rhetoric, but I don't think it made a significant difference. And I'm gonna be real with y'all; Tumblr is mostly full of it if they think they can accomplish anything with a protest vote for Gaza. I learned this in 2016. That action won't do anything, and it's too risky when a literal fascist is on the other side of the ballot. Yes, I hate that Kamala did not oppose the current Biden policy of letting genocide happen, but Jill Stein/no vote can't pressure these people in the establishment without hurting their campaign financing. The votes are in, and 3rd party votes would not have saved Kamala.

2. What happens now? What is a 2nd Trump admin like?Maybe this is a bit of copium, but I do think that Trump will still be overall very incompetent and unable to enact the worst of his policies. Terrible things will still happen (and I'll get to that later), but I think some of the catastrophizing is a bit overblown. Let's take the mass deportation policy for example. This would be a horrible campaign on the level of the worst historical genocides. He would need to create an ICE apparatus so large that it would rival the fucking gestapo. Just think of all the agents and infrastructure that would need to be developed to round up ~20million people and transport them to the border and detention facilities. There's no practical way to deport that many people. The logical end point is concentration camps. Yes, we have them already to an extent (I mean the euphemistically named "immigrant detention facilities"), but we don't have anything that could handle "mass deportation." Building the facilities, hiring the agents, buying the buses and trains, and executing the warrants all takes a lot of time and money. None of this goes unnoticed, and it won't go without resistance today. Congress still controls the purse, despite what the supreme court says about Trump's immunity to do whatever he wants. SCOTUS said he can't be prosecuted for committing a crime, not that he can break a constitutional rule. The margins are too thin in the new congress, and I genuinely do not think that he has the political tact to navigate around how much resistance he'll get. My main evidence for this is the border wall. He had all the support he needed within congress and his base to try to "build that wall." The GOP even controlled both branches of congress, and shutdown the government multiple times to try to get his way. They had a majority in the house his first 2 years. It meant nothing! He got a regressive tax cut passed, and that's about it. I know there's a lot of bullshit he can pull to push terrible things through, and he'll have ghoulish cronies that will be the actual brains behind things, but honestly, they're dumb as shit too. They're too evil for their own good. They will eat themselves alive through infighting and liberal resistance before they can start a genocidal campaign on American soil. That's not to say there will be some horrible things. Here's what I do think he'll be able to do: - Ban abortion nationwide either through the Comstock Act or SCOTUS. - Completely fuck up half of our federal institutions that keep us informed and safe (ie. dismantling or gutting of Dept. of Education, EPA, FTC, NSA, HHS, and more). - Allow for more religious integration into our public institutions like schools - Essentially turn our government into an oligarchy (or more of one than it already is) - Reverse gay marriage rights (overturning obergefell) and restricting the rights of LGBTQ+ in the public sector overall. - Exacerbate the Gaza genocide - Let Putin have his way with Ukraine - Royally fuck up the economy with Tariffs - Probably get us into some kind of overseas war - If he survives to the end of his term, I do think that our democracy will be incredibly fucked. Like, I think they'll be able to push through so many bullshit rules that we won't be able to come back unless an actual leftist populist makes huge rounds.

Overall, it's gonna suck, especially if you're LGBT in a red state. I think he'll also continue targeting undocumented migrants, but I doubt he'll be able to put together the infrastructure to genocide them. Yes, Hitler and his regime were incompetent too, but it was really the enabling act post-Reichstag fire that allowed for him to start pushing the policies that would become the holocaust. It was only at that point that he had no more resistance, and could order whatever he wants. We're definite not there yet with Trump.

3. What do we (the left) do now?Honestly, just stay vigilant, be active within your community, make connections (even with Trump voters), and don't give in to the despair. Once you're hopeless, it will only make it easier for them to keep winning. We fight against the fascists until the bitter end. The only endpoint of fascism is self destruction. I am a leftist, but I am not a revolutionary. I think armed action rarely leads to good outcomes, and history shows that. However, if we get a Reichstag fire moment or an enabling act moment, that's not the point to lose hope. If people start turning their neighbors into the gestapo-fied ICE, that's not the point to hide. These represent the time where politics should be abandoned, and an actual violent fight for freedom and liberty should begin. I pray we never come to that point. Hopefully, these next four years will look like a continuation of 2016-2020. We'll have a slow degrading of our rights, but if too many of those we all care about are hurt, we can come together and help to reverse it. I know things are super polarized and we all have our own little bubbles in society, but there comes a breaking point where too many people are hurt, and even the biggest MAGA head will have someone they deeply care about that is very hurt by Trump. This is my hope, though it unfortunately relies on things getting worse first before becoming better. 

[anamericangirl]

I noticed something recently. Since yesterday, I've been pointing out on liberal posts that Kamala said "Trump wanted to abolish the supreme co-… The supreme co… The supreme… … Land… of our… … … constitutional… American land." and that I think she might be retarded. And people have been replying saying she didn't say that, or that I need to prove she said that, or asking me where she said that.

Same goes for Biden when I point out his golden quotes such as "I was the vice president for Barack America"

Libs always have no idea what I'm talking about. They always demand I prove they said those quotes. When I said Hillary wanted to build a wall long before Trump did, they say she never said that, and I show them the video and they don't wanna watch it.

What I'm getting at is

Liberals don't even watch the speeches of their own candidates. They don't watch them at all! These are incredibly commonly known quotes, these are easy to find videos, these are things they say unbelievably commonly in all of their speeches and libs are always dumbfounded when you bring them up.

THEY DON'T EVEN WATCH THEIR OWN RALLIES.

If I said that Kamala said "We need to build Strength through Joy" at the DNC, which is literally a Nazi thing (google "Strength through Joy"), which she DID SAY, and Oprah Winfrey ALSO SAID IT, the libs would reply "She never said that" as though they didn't even watch the DNC at all.

It's fucking wild

They are completely uninformed, they aren't listening to their own candidates, they're voting entirely out of hate or racially fueled shit like "I want to vote for a black woman" instead of actually watching their speeches.

I've watched every single Kamala, Biden, Trump, RFK Jr, Obama, Hillary, etc. speech for every election I've been old enough to vote for because it's extremely important to me as a human being to know who I'm VOTING FOR TO BE A REPRESENTATIVE OF MY VOICE AND A LEADER TO MY GODDAMN FUCKING COUNTRY EXCUSE ME GOD

And when I bring up quotes that liberal politicians say, liberals will always demand I'm lying and demand proof, and when I give them the proof they refuse to watch it!

I am 100% convinced liberals are just white-hating racists who want slavery to make a comeback which is why they're so strongly for letting illegals into our country and giving them the right to vote and mass amnesty because the democratic party fought tooth and nail to give slaves full voting power so they could get their slaves to vote for the left wing politicians who wanted to keep slavery going because they were filthy rich under slavery, but now that slavery's been abolished they're looking for any other way they can get colored folks to vote blue hence giving them $150,000 home loans in California. 100% convinced.

Get "I study history" on, liberals. Reminder that Kamala's literally a descendant of slave owners. Liberals regularly say shit like "All white people should be killed because they're descendants of slave owners" but despite factual evidence Kamala's a descendant of slave owners, they make an exception.

Sorry liberals. But you are horrible people, you're racist, you're intentionally uninformed, you don't put a single bit of effort into reading about US history or the history of the politicians you're voting for, and you're retarded.

Liberals are the definition of low information/no information voters. They get all their news from tiktok and think they’re informed enough to vote on who is the best person to lead the country.

They have no idea how much context and information they are missing.

And at this point I think it’s largely intentional with some people because otherwise they would have to confront the fact that these liberal politicians they are putting on pedestals as the saviors of America who will restore “democracy” (another term they don’t know the meaning of) are literally everything they claim to hate.

It says a lot about them when they can pull up Trump quotes from 10 or 15 years ago but they can’t tell you what Kamala said yesterday.

[for-the-ninth]

It happens like clockwork every election cycle.

Republican gets elected, people rage and foist all the blame onto third party voters or people who didn't vote. They post their hot takes about the brain dead red states who vote against their own interests and claim the only reason any of us are in this mess at all is because people won't "do the work," when their own definition of "the work" really just comes down to voting Democrat every four years, encouraging others to do the same, and resorting to shame when some of them inevitably don't.

These are often, though not always, folks who don't really know what The Work is. They aren't grounded in the struggle. They are comfortable enough that the only thing that really fazes them is someone like Trump getting elected. They aren't participating in community outreach or mutual aid networks. They are comfortable in many ways they probably take for granted, and the reason they want Dems in office is, in part, to protect that comfort.

What they don't realize, and often refuse to realize no matter how many activists of the present and past tell them, is that liberalism and electoral politics was never going to save us. Democrats have long been committed to the status quo. They cosplay as revolutionaries and leaders of the resistance whenever the next Republican dickhead gets voted in. They co-opt the movement despite having no real stake in it, because they are centrists with no genuine desire to propel the country in a radically progressive direction. And when folks too far left of center step up to the plate, like Bernie Sanders, the rest of the party refuses to put their weight behind them.

It's the same sorry set of excuses every time: oh, but we'll lose the swing voters! and we have to try to win over moderate Republicans! the nation isn't ready for someone so radical! When we all know that's bullshit. Anyone who's tired of crying over their grocery bill - and that's damn near everyone - is ready for radical change.

But sure, let's continue blaming people who didn't vote or voted third party for the result of one of many election cycles during which the Dems failed to provide us with a compelling progressive candidate with policies geared toward uplifting the working class and working poor.

By all means, let's continue doing the work of the imperialists for them, cause the more time we spend fighting each other over minor ideological differences (and yes, if your only beef with someone's ideology is that they didn't bother voting, that is a minor difference and not something worth seething over) the less time we'll spend organizing. The more isolated from each other we'll be. If we blame each other then we're less likely to blame them, for putting all of us in this hellscape.

And make no mistake - they know that. There's a reason Democratic politicians are so quick to disparage working class folks in southern states. If we blame them for just being sooooo willfully stupid and deplorable AND we blame everyone else for having the audacity not to vOTe bLue No MaTtRr wHo then there's no blame left to hurl at the Dems. They want so badly for us to believe that people like Obama, Harris, and Biden - who are all centrists, through and through - will save us if enough of us vote for them. And then when they do get voted in there's a million excuses for why they can't push any meaningful legislation through.

I hate watching so many of you buy right into it. Crucifying each other over not voting for the lesser of two evils like it isn't deeply fucked up that they're our only two options to begin with. Touting Harris like she's some sort of saint by comparison when she stood up on a national platform to say she wanted our military to be the most lethal in the world. Amidst calls for a ceasefire and an arms embargo, she said that shit with her whole chest, and y'all think Donald Trump is the only fascist? Get. A. Grip.

Electoral politics are not going to save us. Kamala Harris was never going to save us. We are the only people who can save us and we do that by building a grassroots movement grounded in class solidarity.

If you're still blaming people who voted third party or didn't vote at all, you're not ready for that movement. If you're still denigrating working class voters in red states for falling victim to the propaganda machine because you're Oh So Smart and that could never be you, you're not ready for the movement.

And if the only "work" you do is urging people to vote every 4 years and writing spicy posts after the fact about how you no longer give a shit about the people who "betrayed" you by not relying on electoral politics to save us - many of whom I can promise you are doing real, tangible work to benefit the people in their own communities - do me and everyone else a favor, and get grounded. Get rooted in the struggle. Stop spewing reactionary nonsense and put that energy into your community - including people who didn't fucking vote for Harris. Cause I can promise you, organizers and activists aren't checking anyone's voting record when they serve up meals at the soup kitchen or fund mutual aid requests for rent money. Folks who are "actually doing the work" don't have time for that petty shit.

[antiterf]

hi, i hope you're doing okay! this is kinda heavy ask so feel free to ignore this but.... what do you do if you feel hopeless as a trans person in regards to all the transphobia and hate and violence we get? i feel like now more than ever transphobes are being so so extremely loud because trans people are actually making (slow) progress and trying to change society to be more accepting. but as a trans guy, especially one that doesn't want to fully transition, i'm left often contemplating if it's best that i just accept that i will most probably have to be closeted until i die to avoid hate. i already have gotten rape and death/suicide wishes many times online for simply being anti terf and transphobia and being openly trans. it's great to see many people, trans and cis, to be supportive and loving but i can't help but feel depressed and helpless and angry at all the transphobes. i'm exhausted thinking every day that my true existence is something very controversial and many people want me either converted or better dead.

That's kind of tricky to answer, I came out in 2016 prior to "Rapid Onset of Gender Dysphoria" conspiracies, the Orlando shooting and the Trump election so while trans people were still stigmatized, it was expected that things would keep getting better.

For me personally, I know it'd be silly to go back. I'd rather leave the United States than go back. The anti trans sentiments are nothing compared to being closeted, anxious and depressed to me. I was bullied and treated like shit at times, but it was still better than what I had before. Hell, I still go through shitty things for being trans, but it'll never be worth detransitioning for me.

But obviously this isn't the case with everyone. I live in a pretty liberal state, instead of restricting access progress is still being made in Illinois.

Especially when you have yet to come out and start the transition process. You're so fucking vulnerable at that point and I'll always understand if people don't want to. At the same time, sometimes we need to take the jump. It's up to you at the end of the day, but if you're in a safe environment generally besides government (this is coming from an American so keep that in mind), I say go for it.

When it comes to keeping hope I look to other trans and trans allies. I don't have hope in my government or society as a whole, but I have hope for my community. It's queer support that allowed me to feel comfortable enough to come out in the first place. It's as plentiful as trans hatred, if not more, and it means a lot more to have supportive people you personally know than a bigoted politician who'll never know who you are. I know you mentioned that knowing that people care doesn't help much, and in concept yeah, it really doesn't. It helps a lot more to personally know those people and surround yourself with them.

If you can, I strongly encourage trying to find a lgbtq center or group to join, hell even lgbtq specific therapy groups. Just, try your best to surround yourself with other queer people. It really helps remind you that you're not alone, that people care, that it's not hopeless, and most importantly that there's effort to make things better.

We're all working to make things better in the ways we can. Because that's what care and support means. It adds up the same way hate does, and if I know how hate can build and be terrifying, then I can't really say that it's impossible for it to work the other way around with love.

I hope this helps in some way. I sometimes question why I have hope too honestly. It's hard, but hopes out there.

[bawwsadface]

Liberals Don't Learn

we live in categorically Tough Times. the climate disaster is already happening, the least educated, most mentally deteriorating elderly cronies in the world are holding the lock and key to the nuclear codes, homelessness rates are skyrocketing, and the big mac costs 10 dollars.

it probably seems like an easy time to give up. probably seems like the perfect storm for apathy. and it has proven to be for many. but in the wake of trump's re-election, i've noticed an effervescent attitude bubbling among my peers. folks far left of the political establishment. folks who have taken enough drives around the same traffic circle to see the plays get run over before they even come. there's been a sense of "well, better keep on trucking i guess."

because we are all educated enough to know better by now. it's still frustrating to see, sure. upsetting to watch the country's full blown descent into fascism that's been happening since 9/11 crystalize before our eyes. we know that they know that we know and they just don't care. but we can't pretend anymore that it's a surprise.

because we know better, we know to not let it be such a heavy weight on our shoulders. we will fight back. we will organize. we will do everything we can within our abilities to strengthen our communities. to grow what is small, what is local, what is huddled together into a stronger coalition. one that may not entirely beat the man, but can stand toe to toe with him when push comes to shove. and that's what matters. so we truck on through. we are all over this. we are all better than this. we need to focus on what makes us human and learn to nurture it.

and i get it, it's tempting to dig into the weeds. to want to play political strategist and history teacher and point fingers. act like any of the third party votes, when fully added up would've swung any of the states she lost (they wouldn't have). or to call people who have checked out of the process altogether privileged cowards. suggest that kamala's nonstarter nature was because she was a black woman. or to handwring about putting aside the politics of a cop who openly supported her administration's genocide because it would be an election that supposedly "saved democracy." oh you mean like the last one? the one before that? and the ones before those as well?

don't look for blame among your peers. those are the very same people you should be trying to rally with. besides, it's pretty easy to see when you take one or two steps back, that it is and has always been the dems and liberals fault that they can't govern. that simpsons joke has remained evergreen since 1994.

learning that the dems predicted a far less gracious turnout for their candidate then ran her anyway? it's no surprise. seeing that they stonewalled any objection to keeping someone with declining mental faculties in the white house just so they wouldn't open up a primary in his wake? you know one where, god forbid, one of their own who actually had a platform could run a successful campaign? yeah that tracks.

listen man, i've been voting for just long enough (since 2012) that i can recognize that even in the two administrations where the liberal establishment seemed like it was "winning", all these problems were still there making them fumble. clinton was a centrist with a house that hated him. obama refused to push any progressive moves thru congress even when he had the doors wide open to do so. and they still expected us to come crawling back and check that same ballot box every four years and then shut up and stop listening in the interim.

i think we're all within our rights to be fed up with it all. and to be so used to the same blows coming that a fascist getting re-elected is just puffing past us like smoke. why would it surprise anyone at this point?

your time is better spent advocating for your community. go volunteer at planned parenthood. go support local meal programs for your neighborhood. share resources openly. get a library card. find a friend who's a teacher or a student and share access to their educational materials. give your time and your energy and your money when you are able to the people that matter. the people that make up your every day that you actually live. and remember to rest and keep yourself nourished along the way.

even after everything, i can still believe in that.

[boreal-sea]

2016 too, like i was 17 that year and couldn't vote and i remember screaming on here about the importance of voting for clinton, for the supreme court as one of the main reasons, because the fact that trump got to appoint 3 justices is why that court is getting away with all this shit now. i remember getting into so many arguments with white leftists about how much harm trump would be for me, as a queer person of color, and not being able to get through to them.

i know it's starting to change among young people, but i'm pretty sure white people still vote majority for republicans. that's what's been so upsetting for me. the constant demeaning of people who try to explain the system by white people (who may not believe in voting dem) while their older family members likely vote republican. all this talk about how black people always show up, complaining about other poc not showing up, when..... if more white people all showed up and voted for democrats, we'd be in a very different position. and it's really frustrating to see a lot of these people instead on here whining about not voting and essentially relying on poc (and the suburban wine mom liberals they scoff at) to show up in large blocks and pull left. and if we aren't enough they dig their feet in even further and complain about this country doing shitty things as if they don't have an opportunity to stop republicans and continue to waste it

(i'm not saying dems are perfect or always do the right thing but our majority in the senate could've been expanded and we could've kept the house and done a lot more. the reason "biden can't do anything" for some of these issues is because we don't have the support of congress, which we might, if they get over themselves and vote)

Biden has done so much good, and people are just blind to it for some reason. It's really frustrating.

And yeah unfortunately, white people do tend to vote Republican, which, as a white person, I absolutely hate.

If it weren't for voter suppression, Democrats would win basically every election. Republicans have outright admitted this. They have admitted they have to gerrymander voting districts, they have to remove polling locations, they have to institute draconian ID laws etc.

So the most powerful thing a white person who actually cares about this can do during an election year is volunteer. Volunteer to get people to the polls. Volunteer to be a poll watcher or poll worker so it's not Republicans doing it, because they purposely do it to scare away minority voters.

But instead, they want to dream of a glorious revolution that will never happen, whine that they have to participate in society, and then they'll scream in horror if Trump is elected and act like there's nothing they could have done to prevent it, that they were completely powerless, and nothing they could have done would have mattered.

[faelapis]

so... i don't disagree. but i want to acknowledge that a lot of leftists are inclusive to average white dudes. people like hasan piker has a very "bro-y" image that appeals to young guys. yet they don't get the giant platforms of your ben shapiros or your charlie kirks. they're not economically boosted by billionaires who share their ideals. they don't appear in your youtube ads. why?

well, a lot of it is the material reality of being a leftist.

the right owns most of the podcast circuit and have billions poured in to dominate the content that young men are interested in. the left can't really do that, because we don't have a bunch of rich benefactors. our politics don't benefit the ultra-wealthy.

also, regardless of how nice the left is, right-wing grifters will always find a cherrypicked anecdote of someone who isn't. they will always be an "angry SJW" on a college campus. or mean comments online. it's impossible to make every single leftist nice. we can try, but it won't realistically happen.

most feminists don't say all men are bad. most leftists don't say all white guys are the devil. and the right knows that. but charlie kirk or ben shapiro will always find some "SJW" to mock. their job is to say that the whole left hates you - regardless of whether that's true.

of course, i still think we should strive towards more empathy. i just want to put it into a material context.

i also think young men's pain go beyond social ills like getting rejected/feeling lonely. the big problem, i think, is that homes are too expensive to buy. they're unemployed. they're in debt. they're working 2-3 minimum wage jobs that don't pay enough to move out of their parents houses. no confidence peptalk will fix that.

which is why i think the leftist project should focus on the universality of class struggle. talk about the similarity between our problems, not just our individual identities. having content "for white bros" is nice, but the core of leftist struggle is universal.

and that's something only the left can provide. the right can try, sure. they can pretend to be populists or act like they hate the capitalist establishment, but that'll always be a grift. trump will never raise the minimum wage or make health care affordable for the average guy. he'll never actually "drain the swamp."

i don't think appealing to white dudes is a special science. maybe i'm wrong, but my hypothesis is that it's not impossible to convince these guys - if we offer them something. they need to feel like it's about their freedom, not just everyone else's.

bernie sanders understood that. he was very popular with young men. he's not a lifestyle influencer or an Alpha Male (tm), he's just an old guy who wants you to have healthcare. he was SO popular with young men that his supporters were called "bernie bros!" that was supposed to be "bad!" but he actually got white dudes into leftism!

the clear message, from the entire, UNIFIED left, needs to be that we're all in this together. it's about universal liberation from the capitalist machine. it's a tough fight, but we can do it if we're willing to unite and understand that our struggle is the same.

i think leftism is about love. and that love should be for everyone.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

[missmentelle]

Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things

If you’ve been paying attention for the last couple of years, you might have noticed that the world has a bit of a misinformation problem. 

The problem isn’t just with the recent election conspiracies, either. The last couple of years has brought us the rise (and occasionally fall) of misinformation-based movements like:

Sandy Hook conspiracies

Gamergate

Pizzagate

The MRA/incel/MGTOW movements

anti-vaxxers

flat-earthers

the birther movement

the Illuminati 

climate change denial

Spygate

Holocaust denial 

COVID-19 denial 

5G panic 

QAnon 

But why do people believe this stuff?

It would be easy - too easy - to say that people fall for this stuff because they’re stupid. We all want to believe that smart people like us are immune from being taken in by deranged conspiracies. But it’s just not that simple. People from all walks of life are going down these rabbit holes - people with degrees and professional careers and rich lives have fallen for these theories, leaving their loved ones baffled. Decades-long relationships have splintered this year, as the number of people flocking to these conspiracies out of nowhere reaches a fever pitch. 

So why do smart people start believing some incredibly stupid things? It’s because:

Our brains are built to identify patterns. 

Our brains fucking love puzzles and patterns. This is a well-known phenomenon called apophenia, and at one point, it was probably helpful for our survival - the prehistoric human who noticed patterns in things like animal migration, plant life cycles and the movement of the stars was probably a lot more likely to survive than the human who couldn’t figure out how to use natural clues to navigate or find food. 

The problem, though, is that we can’t really turn this off. Even when we’re presented with completely random data, we’ll see patterns. We see patterns in everything, even when there’s no pattern there. This is why people see Jesus in a burnt piece of toast or get superstitious about hockey playoffs or insist on always playing at a certain slot machine - our brains look for patterns in the constant barrage of random information in our daily lives, and insist that those patterns are really there, even when they’re completely imagined. 

A lot of conspiracy theories have their roots in people making connections between things that aren’t really connected. The belief that “vaccines cause autism” was bolstered by the fact that the first recognizable symptoms of autism happen to appear at roughly the same time that children receive one of their rounds of childhood immunizations - the two things are completely unconnected, but our brains have a hard time letting go of the pattern they see there. Likewise, many people were quick to latch on to the fact that early maps of COVID infections were extremely similar to maps of 5G coverage -  the fact that there’s a reasonable explanation for this (major cities are more likely to have both high COVID cases AND 5G networks) doesn’t change the fact that our brains just really, really want to see a connection there. 

Our brains love proportionality. 

Specifically, our brains like effects to be directly proportional to their causes - in other words, we like it when big events have big causes, and small causes only lead to small events. It’s uncomfortable for us when the reverse is true. And so anytime we feel like a “big” event (celebrity death, global pandemic, your precious child is diagnosed with autism) has a small or unsatisfying cause (car accident, pandemics just sort of happen every few decades, people just get autism sometimes), we sometimes feel the need to start looking around for the bigger, more sinister, “true” cause of that event. 

Consider, for instance, the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. In 1981, Pope John Paul II was shot four times by a Turkish member of a known Italian paramilitary secret society who’d recently escaped from prison - on the surface, it seems like the sort of thing conspiracy theorists salivate over, seeing how it was an actual multinational conspiracy. But they never had much interest in the assassination attempt. Why? Because the Pope didn’t die. He recovered from his injuries and went right back to Pope-ing. The event didn’t have a serious outcome, and so people are content with the idea that one extremist carried it out. The death of Princess Diana, however, has been fertile ground for conspiracy theories; even though a woman dying in a car accident is less weird than a man being shot four times by a paid political assassin, her death has attracted more conspiracy theories because it had a bigger outcome. A princess dying in a car accident doesn’t feel big enough. It’s unsatisfying. We want such a monumentous moment in history to have a bigger, more interesting cause. 

These theories prey on pre-existing fear and anger. 

Are you a terrified new parent who wants the best for their child and feels anxious about having them injected with a substance you don’t totally understand? Congrats, you’re a prime target for the anti-vaccine movement. Are you a young white male who doesn’t like seeing more and more games aimed at women and minorities, and is worried that “your” gaming culture is being stolen from you? You might have been very interested in something called Gamergate. Are you a right-wing white person who worries that “your” country and way of life is being stolen by immigrants, non-Christians and coastal liberals? You’re going to love the “all left-wingers are Satantic pedo baby-eaters” messaging of QAnon. 

Misinformation and conspiracy theories are often aimed strategically at the anxieties and fears that people are already experiencing. No one likes being told that their fears are insane or irrational; it’s not hard to see why people gravitate towards communities that say “yes, you were right all along, and everyone who told you that you were nuts to be worried about this is just a dumb sheep. We believe you, and we have evidence that you were right along, right here.” Fear is a powerful motivator, and you can make people believe and do some pretty extreme things if you just keep telling them “yes, that thing you’re afraid of is true, but also it’s way worse than you could have ever imagined.”

Real information is often complicated, hard to understand, and inherently unsatisfying. 

The information that comes from the scientific community is often very frustrating for a layperson; we want science to have hard-and-fast answers, but it doesn’t. The closest you get to a straight answer is often “it depends” or “we don’t know, but we think X might be likely”. Understanding the results of a scientific study with any confidence requires knowing about sampling practices, error types, effect sizes, confidence intervals and publishing biases. Even asking a simple question like “is X bad for my child” will usually get you a complicated, uncertain answer - in most cases, it really just depends. Not understanding complex topics makes people afraid - it makes it hard to trust that they’re being given the right information, and that they’re making the right choices. 

Conspiracy theories and misinformation, on the other hand, are often simple, and they are certain. Vaccines bad. Natural things good. 5G bad. Organic food good. The reason girls won’t date you isn’t a complex combination of your social skills, hygiene, appearance, projected values, personal circumstances, degree of extroversion, luck and life phase - girls won’t date you because feminism is bad, and if we got rid of feminism you’d have a girlfriend. The reason Donald Trump was an unpopular president wasn’t a complex combination of his public bigotry, lack of decorum, lack of qualifications, open incompetence, nepotism, corruption, loss of soft power, refusal to uphold the basic responsibilities of his position or his constant lying - they hated him because he was fighting a secret sex cult and they’re all in it. 

Instead of making you feel stupid because you’re overwhelmed with complex information, expert opinions and uncertain advice, conspiracy theories make you feel smart - smarter, in fact, than everyone who doesn’t believe in them. And that’s a powerful thing for people living in a credential-heavy world. 

Many conspiracy theories are unfalsifiable. 

It is very difficult to prove a negative. If I tell you, for instance, that there’s no such thing as a purple swan, it would be very difficult for me to actually prove that to you - I could spend the rest of my life photographing swans and looking for swans and talking to people who know a lot about swans, and yet the slim possibility would still exist that there was a purple swan out there somewhere that I just hadn’t found yet. That’s why, in most circumstances, the burden of proof lies with the person making the extraordinary claim - if you tell me that purple swans exist, we should continue to assume that they don’t until you actually produce a purple swan. 

Conspiracy theories, however, are built so that it’s nearly impossible to “prove” them wrong. Is there any proof that the world’s top-ranking politicians and celebrities are all in a giant child sex trafficking cult? No. But can you prove that they aren’t in a child sex-trafficking cult? No, not really. Even if I, again, spent the rest of my life investigating celebrities and following celebrities and talking to people who know celebrities, I still couldn’t definitely prove that this cult doesn’t exist - there’s always a chance that the specific celebrities I’ve investigated just aren’t in the cult (but other ones are!) or that they’re hiding evidence of the cult even better than we think. Lack of evidence for a conspiracy theory is always treated as more evidence for the theory - we can’t find anything because this goes even higher up than we think! They’re even more sophisticated at hiding this than we thought! People deeply entrenched in these theories don’t even realize that they are stuck in a circular loop where everything seems to prove their theory right - they just see a mountain of “evidence” for their side. 

Our brains are very attached to information that we “learned” by ourselves.

Learning accurate information is not a particularly interactive or exciting experience. An expert or reliable source just presents the information to you in its entirety, you read or watch the information, and that’s the end of it. You can look for more information or look for clarification of something, but it’s a one-way street - the information is just laid out for you, you take what you need, end of story. 

Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, almost never show their hand all at once. They drop little breadcrumbs of information that slowly lead you where they want you to go. This is why conspiracy theorists are forever telling you to “do your research” - they know that if they tell you everything at once, you won’t believe them. Instead, they want you to indoctrinate yourself slowly over time, by taking the little hints they give you and running off to find or invent evidence that matches that clue. If I tell you that celebrities often wear symbols that identify them as part of a cult and that you should “do your research” about it, you can absolutely find evidence that substantiates my claim - there are literally millions of photos of celebrities out there, and anyone who looks hard enough is guaranteed to find common shapes, poses and themes that might just mean something (they don’t - eyes and triangles are incredibly common design elements, and if I took enough pictures of you, I could also “prove” that you also clearly display symbols that signal you’re in the cult). 

The fact that you “found” the evidence on your own, however, makes it more meaningful to you. We trust ourselves, and we trust that the patterns we uncover by ourselves are true. It doesn’t feel like you’re being fed misinformation - it feels like you’ve discovered an important truth that “they” didn’t want you to find, and you’ll hang onto that for dear life. 

Older people have not learned to be media-literate in a digital world. 

Fifty years ago, not just anyone could access popular media. All of this stuff had a huge barrier to entry - if you wanted to be on TV or be in the papers or have a radio show, you had to be a professional affiliated with a major media brand. Consumers didn’t have easy access to niche communities or alternative information - your sources of information were basically your local paper, the nightly news, and your morning radio show, and they all more or less agreed on the same set of facts. For decades, if it looked official and it appeared in print, you could probably trust that it was true. 

Of course, we live in a very different world today - today, any asshole can accumulate an audience of millions, even if they have no credentials and nothing they say is actually true (like “The Food Babe”, a blogger with no credentials in medicine, nutrition, health sciences, biology or chemistry who peddles health misinformation to the 3 million people who visit her blog every month). It’s very tough for older people (and some younger people) to get their heads around the fact that it’s very easy to create an “official-looking” news source, and that they can’t necessarily trust everything they find on the internet. When you combine that with a tendency toward “clickbait headlines” that often misrepresent the information in the article, you have a generation struggling to determine who they can trust in a media landscape that doesn’t at all resemble the media landscape they once knew. 

These beliefs become a part of someone’s identity. 

A person doesn’t tell you that they believe in anti-vaxx information - they tell you that they ARE an anti-vaxxer. Likewise, people will tell you that they ARE a flat-earther, a birther, or a Gamergater. By design, these beliefs are not meant to be something you have a casual relationship with, like your opinion of pizza toppings or how much you trust local weather forecasts - they are meant to form a core part of your identity. 

And once something becomes a core part of your identity, trying to make you stop believing it becomes almost impossible. Once we’ve formed an initial impression of something, facts just don’t change our minds. If you identify as an antivaxxer and I present evidence that disproves your beliefs, in your mind, I’m not correcting inaccurate information - I am launching a very personal attack against a core part of who you are. In fact, the more evidence I present, the more you will burrow down into your antivaxx beliefs, more confident than ever that you are right. Admitting that you are wrong about something that is important to you is painful, and your brain would prefer to simply deflect conflicting information rather than subject you to that pain.

We can see this at work with something called the confirmation bias. Simply put, once we believe something, our brains hold on to all evidence that that belief is true, and ignore evidence that it’s false. If I show you 100 articles that disprove your pet theory and 3 articles that confirm it, you’ll cling to those 3 articles and forget about the rest. Even if I show you nothing but articles that disprove your theory, you’ll likely go through them and pick out any ambiguous or conflicting information as evidence for “your side”, even if the conclusion of the article shows that you are wrong - our brains simply care about feeling right more than they care about what is actually true.  

There is a strong community aspect to these theories. 

There is no one quite as supportive or as understanding as a conspiracy theorist - provided, of course, that you believe in the same conspiracy theories that they do. People who start looking into these conspiracy theories are told that they aren’t crazy, and that their fears are totally valid. They’re told that the people in their lives who doubted them were just brainwashed sheep, but that they’ve finally found a community of people who get where they’re coming from. Whenever they report back to the group with the “evidence” they’ve found or the new elaborations on the conspiracy theory that they’ve been thinking of (“what if it’s even worse than we thought??”), they are given praise for their valuable contributions. These conspiracy groups often become important parts of people’s social networks - they can spend hours every day talking with like-minded people from these communities and sharing their ideas. 

Of course, the flipside of this is that anyone who starts to doubt or move away from the conspiracy immediately loses that community and social support. People who have broken away from antivaxx and QAnon often say that the hardest part of leaving was losing the community and friendships they’d built - not necessarily giving up on the theory itself. Many people are rejected by their real-life friends and family once they start to get entrenched in conspiracy theories; the friendships they build online in the course of researching these theories often become the only social supports they have left, and losing those supports means having no one to turn to at all. This is by design - the threat of losing your community has kept people trapped in abusive religious sects and cults for as long as those things have existed. 

[qqueenofhades]

Re: the post you reblogged about Bush. I'm 21 and tbh feel like I can only vote for Bernie, can you explain if/why I shouldn't? Thanks and sorry if this is dumb or anything.

Oh boy. Okay, I’ll do my best here. Note that a) this will get long, and b) I’m old, Tired, and I‘m pretty sure my brain tried to kill me last night. Since by nature I am sure I will say something Controversial ™, if anyone reads this and feels a deep urge to inform me that I am Wrong, just… mark it down as me being Wrong and move on with your life. But also, really, you should read this and hopefully think about it. Because while I’m glad you asked this question, it feels like there’s a lot in your cohort who won’t, and that worries me. A lot.

First, not to sound utterly old-woman-in-a-rocking-chair ancient, people who came of age/are only old enough to have Obama be the first president that they really remember have no idea how good they had it. The world was falling the fuck apart in 2008 (not coincidentally, after 8 years of Bush). We came within a flicker of the permanent collapse of the global economy. The War on Terror was in full roar, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were at their height, we had Dick Cheney as the cartoon supervillain before we had any of Trump’s cohort, and this was before Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden had exposed the extent of NSA/CIA intelligence-gathering/American excesses or there was any kind of public debate around the fact that we were all surveilled all the time. And the fact that a brown guy named Barack Hussein Obama was elected in this climate seems, and still seems tbh, kind of amazing. And Obama was certainly not a Perfect President ™. He had to scale back a lot of planned initiatives, he is notorious for expanding the drone strike/extrajudicial assassination program, he still subscribed to the overall principles of neoliberalism and American exceptionalism, etc etc. There is valid criticism to be made as to how the hopey-changey optimistic rhetoric stacked up against the hard realities of political office. And yet…. at this point, given what we’re seeing from the White House on a daily basis, the depth of the parallel universe/double standards is absurd.

Because here’s the thing. Obama, his entire family, and his entire administration had to be personally/ethically flawless the whole time (and they managed that – not one scandal or arrest in eight years, against the legions of Trumpistas now being convicted) because of the absolute frothing depths of Republican hatred, racial conspiracy theories, and obstruction against him. (Remember Merrick Garland and how Mitch McConnell got away with that, and now we have Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court? Because I remember that). If Obama had pulled one-tenth of the shit, one-twentieth of the shit that the Trump administration does every day, he would be gone. It also meant that people who only remember Obama think he was typical for an American president, and he wasn’t. Since about… Jimmy Carter, and definitely since Ronald Reagan, the American people have gone for the Trump model a lot more than the Obama model. Whatever your opinion on his politics or character, Obama was a constitutional law professor, a community activist, a neighborhood organizer and brilliant Ivy League intellectual who used to randomly lie awake at night thinking about income inequality. Americans don’t value intellectualism in their politicians; they just don’t. They don’t like thinking that “the elites” are smarter than them. They like the folksy populist who seems fun to have a beer with, and Reagan/Bush Senior/Clinton/Bush Junior sold this persona as hard as they possibly could. As noted in said post, Bush Junior (or Shrub as the late, great Molly Ivins memorably dubbed him) was Trump Lite but from a long-established political family who could operate like an outwardly civilized human.

The point is: when you think Obama was relatively normal (which, again, he wasn’t, for any number of reasons) and not the outlier in a much larger pattern of catastrophic damage that has been accelerated since, again, the 1980s (oh Ronnie Raygun, how you lastingly fucked us!), you miss the overall context in which this, and which Trump, happened. Like most left-wingers, I don’t agree with Obama’s recent and baffling decision to insert himself into the 2020 race and warn the Democratic candidates against being too progressive or whatever he was on about. I think he was giving into the same fear that appears to be motivating the remaining chunk of Joe Biden’s support: that middle/working-class white America won’t go for anything too wild or that might sniff of Socialism, and that Uncle Joe, recalled fondly as said folksy populist and the internet’s favorite meme grandfather from his time as VP, could pick up the votes that went to Trump last time. And that by nature, no one else can.

The underlying belief is that these white voters just can’t support anything too “un-American,” and that by pushing too hard left, Democratic candidates risk handing Trump a second term. Again: I don’t agree and I think he was mistaken in saying it. But I also can’t say that Obama of all people doesn’t know exactly the strength of the political machine operating against the Democratic Party and the progressive agenda as a whole, because he ran headfirst into it for eight years. The fact that he managed to pass any of his legislative agenda, usually before the Tea Party became a thing in 2010, is because Democrats controlled the House and Senate for the first two years of his first term. He was not perfect, but it was clear that he really did care (just look up the pictures of him with kids). He installed smart, efficient, and scandal-free people to do jobs they were qualified for. He gave us Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor to join RBG on the Supreme Court. All of this seems… like a dream.

That said: here we are in a place where Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren are the front-runners for the Democratic nomination (and apparently Pete Buttigieg is getting some airplay as a dark horse candidate, which… whatever). The appeal of Biden is discussed above, and he sure as hell is not my favored candidate (frankly, I wish he’d just quit). But Sanders and Warren are 85% - 95% similar in their policy platforms. The fact that Michael “50 Billion Dollar Fortune” Bloomberg started rattling his chains about running for president is because either a Sanders or Warren presidency terrifies the outrageously exploitative billionaire capitalist oligarchy that runs this country and has been allowed to proceed essentially however the fuck they like since… you guessed it, the 1980s, the era of voodoo economics, deregulation, and the free market above all. Warren just happens to be ten years younger than Sanders and female, and Sanders’ age is not insignificant. He’s 80 years old and just had a heart attack, and there’s still a year to go to the election. It’s also more than a little eye-rolling to describe him as the only progressive candidate in the race, when he’s an old white man (however much we like and approve of his policy positions). And here’s the thing, which I think is a big part of the reason why this polarized ideological purity internet leftist culture mistrusts Warren:

She may have changed her mind on things in the past.

Scary, right? I sound like I’m being facetious, but I’m not. An argument I had to read with my own two eyes on this godforsaken hellsite was that since Warren became a Democrat around the time Clinton signed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, she sekritly hated gay people and might still be a corporate sellout, so on and etcetera. (And don’t even get me STARTED on the fact that DADT, coming a few years after the height of the AIDS crisis which was considered God’s Judgment of the Icky Gays, was the best Clinton could realistically hope to achieve, but this smacks of White Gay Syndrome anyway and that is a whole other kettle of fish.) Bernie has always demonstrably been a democratic socialist, and: good for him. I’m serious. But because there’s the chance that Warren might not have thought exactly as she does now at any point in her life, the hysterical and paranoid left-wing elements don’t trust that she might not still secretly do so. (Zomgz!) It’s the same element that’s feeding cancel culture and “wokeness.” Nobody can be allowed to have shifted or grown in their opinions or, like a functional, thoughtful, non-insane adult, changed their beliefs when presented with compelling evidence to the contrary. To the ideological hordes, any hint of uncertainty or past failure to completely toe the line is tantamount to heresy. Any evidence of any other belief except The Correct One means that this person is functionally as bad as Trump. And frankly, it’s only the Sanders supporters who, just as in 2016, are threatening to withhold their vote in the general election if their preferred candidate doesn’t win the primary, and indeed seem weirdly proud about it.

OK, boomer Bernie or Buster.

Here’s the thing, the thing, the thing: there is never going to be an American president free of the deeply toxic elements of American ideology. There just won’t be. This country has been built how it has for 250 years, and it’s not gonna change. You are never going to have, at least not in the current system, some dream candidate who gets up there and parrots the left-wing talking points and attacks American imperialism, exceptionalism, ravaging global capitalism, military and oil addiction, etc. They want to be elected as leader of a country that has deeply internalized and taken these things to heart for its entire existence, and most of them believe it to some degree themselves. So this groupthink white liberal mentality where the only acceptable candidate is this Perfect Non-Problematic robot who has only ever had one belief their entire lives and has never ever wavered in their devotion to doctrine has really gotten bad. The Democratic Party would be considered… maybe center/mild left in most other developed countries. It’s not even really left-wing by general standards, and Sanders and Warren are the only two candidates for the nomination who are even willing to go there and explicitly put out policy proposals that challenge the systematic structure of power, oppression, and exploitation of the late-stage capitalist 21st century. Warren has the billionaires fussed, and instead of backing down, she’s doubling down. That’s part of why they’re so scared of her. (And also misogyny, because the world is depressing like that.) She is going head-on after picking a fight with some of the worst people on the planet, who are actively killing the rest of us, and I don’t know about you, but I like that.

Of course: none of this will mean squat if she (or the eventual Democratic winner, who I will vote for regardless of who it is, but as you can probably tell, she’s my ride or die) don’t a) win the White House and then do as they promised on the campaign trail, and b) don’t have a Democratic House and Senate willing to have a backbone and pass the laws. Even Nancy Pelosi, much as she’s otherwise a badass, held off on opening a formal impeachment inquiry into Trump for months out of fear it would benefit him, until the Ukraine thing fell into everyone’s laps. The Democrats are really horrible at sticking together and voting the party line the way Republicans do consistently, because Democrats are big-tent people who like to think of themselves as accepting and tolerant of other views and unwilling to force their members’ hands. The Republicans have no such qualms (and indeed, judging by their enabling of Trump, have no qualms at all). 

The modern American Republican party has become a vehicle for no-holds-barred power for rich white men at the expense of absolutely everything and everyone else, and if your rationale is that you can’t vote for the person opposing Donald Goddamn Trump is that you’re just not vibing with them on the language of that one policy proposal… well, I’m glad that you, White Middle Class Liberal, feel relatively safe that the consequences of that decision won’t affect you personally. Even if we’re due to be out of the Paris Climate Accords one day after the 2020 election, and the issue of climate change now has the most visibility it’s ever had after years of big-business, Republican-led efforts to deny and discredit the science, hey, Secret Corporate Shill, am I right? Can’t trust ‘er. Let’s go have a craft beer.

As has been said before: vote as far left as you want in the primary. Vote your ideology, vote whatever candidate you want, because the only way to make actual, real-world change is to do that. The huge, embedded, all-consuming and horrible system in which we operate is not just going to suddenly be run by fairy dust and happy thoughts overnight. Select candidates that reflect your values exactly, be as picky and ideologically militant as you want. That’s the time to do that! Then when it comes to the general election:

America is a two-party system. It sucks, but that’s the case. Third-party votes, or refraining from voting because “it doesn’t matter” are functionally useless at best and actively harmful at worst.

Either the Democratic candidate or Donald Trump will win the 2020 election.

There is absolutely no length that the Republican/GOP machine, and its malevolent allies elsewhere, will not go to in order to secure a Trump victory. None.

Any talk whatsoever about “progressive values” or any kind of liberal activism, coupled with a course of action that increases the possibility of a Trump victory, is hypocritical at best and actively malicious at worst.

This is why I found the Democratic response to Obama’s “don’t go too wild” comments interesting. Bernie doubled down on the fact that his plans have widespread public support, and he’s right. (Frankly, the fact that Sanders and Warren are polling at the top, and the fact that they’re politicians and would not be crafting these campaign messages if they didn’t know that they were being positively received, says plenty on its own). Warren cleverly highlighted and praised Obama’s accomplishments in office (i.e. the Affordable Care Act) and didn’t say squat about whether she agreed or disagreed with him, then went right back to campaigning about why billionaires suck. And some guy named Julian Castro basically blew Obama off and claimed that “any Democrat” could beat Trump in 2020, just by nature of existing and being non-insane.

This is very dangerous! Do not be Julian Castro!

As I said in my tags on the Bush post: everyone assumed that sensible people would vote for Kerry in 2004. Guess what happened? Yeah, he got Swift Boated. The race between Obama and McCain in 2008, even after those said nightmare years of Bush, was very close until the global crash broke it open in Obama’s favor, and Sarah Palin was an actual disqualifier for a politician being brazenly incompetent and unprepared. (Then again, she was a woman from a remote backwater state, not a billionaire businessman.) In 2012, we thought Corporate MormonBot Mitt Fuggin’ Romney was somehow the worst and most dangerous candidate the Republicans could offer. In 2016, up until Election Day itself, everyone assumed that HRC was a badly flawed candidate but would win anyway. And… we saw how that worked out. Complacency is literally deadly.

I was born when Reagan was still president. I’m just old enough to remember the efforts to impeach Clinton over forcing an intern to give him a BJ in the Oval Office (This led by the same Republicans making Donald Trump into a darling of the evangelical Christian right wing.) I’m definitely old enough to remember 9/11 and how America lost its mind after that, and I remember the Bush years. And, obviously, the contrast with Obama, the swing back toward Trump, and everything that has happened since. We can’t afford to do this again. We’re hanging by a thread as it is, and not just America, but the entire planet.

So yes. By all means, vote for Sanders in the primary. Then when November 3, 2020 rolls around, if you care about literally any of this at all, hold your nose if necessary and vote straight-ticket Democrat, from the president, to the House and Senate, to the state and local offices. I cannot put it more strongly than that.

[silvermoon424]

You know... I can empathize with Centrists, particularly the anti-voting crowd. I get it. You don't want to compromise on your ethics to bring the lesser of two evils into power. I get it. You don't want to compromise with the real world because the real world is utter crap. I get it. You want to preach and prattle on about how the Left is "just as bad" while not making waves over what fresh hell the Right wrought upon us on a daily basis. I. Get. It. (cont.)

(cont.) But like it or not, the Right has been actively worse than the Left ever will be. Like it or not, voting out the Republicans must be priority number one. Like it or not, you're not doing the world any good by playing contrarian. It's easy to believe in something that comforts you like a post decrying the Left so you can be "justified" in not voting for them.

Well... I'm voting blue. I'm "compromising" my ethics if it means that I may not have to do so again in the future. I'm casting my vote even if "it won't make a difference." I'm voting because just this once in the year of our lord 2020, I want to seize any chance of the world getting better. I want to walk up one November morning and find #TrumpDumped trending on Twitter. I want to smile like the Ninth Doctor and proclaim with a goddamn grin on my face, "Just this once, Rose, EVERYBODY LIVES!"

I completely agree with everything you said, anon. I can sympathize with third-party and non-voters because I was one in 2016. Admittedly I voted Libertarian just to get a third party vote out there (and tbh I was a lot less liberal 4 years ago), but looking back on it I really wish I had voted for Hillary. Not because I like her now, but because I should have been smart and aware enough to see how important it was make sure Trump didn’t get into office.

Republican politicians have shown time and time again that they don’t give a shit about this country or the people who live in it, as shown with their track records with voting on issues about the environment, LGBTQ+ people, workers’ rights, regulations for corporations, etc. They have shown how spineless they are with their kowtowing to Trump even though they fucking hated him before he got elected. They have shown their willingness to embrace corruption. No, the Democrats aren’t anywhere close to perfect and have their fair share of corruption too, but at least they’re not actively trying to strip rights away from LGBTQ+ people and immigrants. 

The reason why the Right has been able to get so much shit done is because they’re willing to compromise their ethics and overlook idealogical differences if it means getting what they want. Like, white supremacists will work with Evangelicals and young Alt-Righters will work with old, out-of-touch Republicans. Meanwhile the Left is obsessed with purity tests and cannibalizing itself because some leftists have convinced themselves that a leftist who isn’t 100% ideologically perfect is worse than a literal fascist. I have seen this happen so many times and I’m so tired of it. We are our own worst enemy. 

I’m begging everyone who reads this to vote blue down the ballot this November so we can maybe try to get our country back on track. 

[cazort]

I think you've hit some of the big factors but not all of them.

I think a major factor driving people to Trump is reaction to left-wing extremism during the 2010's, so-called "cancel culture". My one friend who is a Trump supporter is like this. He had a bunch of people gang up on him and totally demonize him. Some of their criticisms were fair criticisms of bad things he had done, but that he had apologized for and he thought they had been resolved. He lost his entire social circle minus a few isolated friends like me who did not cut him off. It was traumatizing for him.

My neighbor, who is very liberal, has a son who is also a Trump supporter and he also became such a supporter because he got "cancelled". In his case, he made a single problematic comment about race publicly on social media. He was a freelance photographer. A whole bunch of people ganged up on him almost instantly and destroyed his professional reputation almost overnight. Again, he was traumatized. He moved back home with his parents.

Both of these people ended up going deep down right-wing rabbit holes. The right-wingers spoke to these people and empathized with their pain and listened to their concerns while the left bullied, condemned, and cut them off. It seems totally understandable to me that these people fell into right-wing circles based on how they were treated.

The thing is, each of these people did something wrong. But the mob's reaction to them was disproportionate, and it was condemning not supportive. Completely ruining someone's professional reputation and destroying their source of livelihood is not a proportionate reaction to making a single comment that people perceived as racist. And bringing up bad things a person has done in their past, that they had fully apologized for and thought were resolved, is not even remotely healthy in terms of ways to communicate and act. Even if the original action was quite bad. Neither of these reactions helped the person in any way shape or form to learn or grow.

For every extreme case like this, there are hundreds if not thousands of minor cases.

One thing that I think has driven people away from the left is identity politics, specifically, the way the left does not embrace principles of "treat people equally regardless of their identity" but rather, has embraced ideas where certain groups are labeled "privileged" and others "oppressed" or "marginalized", and the left's general ethic is to give the marginalized groups more of a voice. Special treatment, so to speak. The worst is when people start feeling license to insult or talk down to people in the privileged group. I've been saying for years that targeting privileged groups with hate always ends up hurting marginalized groups the most.

I wrote that post 8 years ago. Not enough people have read it. It only has 24 reblogs. Seriously. You want to figure out why Trump won and prevent this sort of thing from happening again? Read that post. Reflect. Internalize it. Reblog it. Make new material that communicates the same ideas in your own voice. I'm wordy and make these long text posts that don't reach everyone...find new ways to communicate it that will reach others.

Seriously, people, we have a lot of work to do. The nation is hurting and it's not just the people who voted for Harris. The whole Trump movement is a big giant ball of hurt and if we can't see that and can't work to heal those people we will never get ourselves out of this mess.

If Harris loses, please try blaming real issues (Republican-driven voter suppression and intimidation tactics; billionaire-funded Trump-PAC’s and propaganda machines; a broken electoral system that hinges presidential elections on a dozen or so states instead of a simple popular vote; or the Democratic Party’s fumbled opportunities to respond to things like the corporate greed driven cost of living crisis, the housing shortage, the medical debt and healthcare accessibility crisis, the ongoing climate disaster, and the ongoing genocide in Palestine) instead of doing the Right’s job for them by blaming folks like climate protestors, Antizionist and pro-Palestine activists, Black and Brown people, jaded millennials living paycheck to paycheck, and tumblr users with an audience ⅛ the size of the average Christofascist MegaChurch Congregation.

[azzy-the-christian-furry]

You know, my life would be a lot simpler if I just blamed every single thing on "the left" without ever elaborating on what that actually is.

Ah, it's raining? The left did this. Stubbed a toe in the dark? Fucking hell, there goes the left fucking shit up again!

Asriel won't ever love you, because you're an abhorrent mess who refuses to face reality? Instead just constructing and believing the most convenient lie of an enemy so invisible and undefined that you won't ever be forced to confront or deal with it? Damnit, the left did it again!

You know you live a lie and that's why you're unhappy.

Boy, this must be changing houses, because there is a lot to unpack here.

1- When a political ideology is in control of the majority of institutions, especially for years and years, yeah. Blaming them’s fair game for their mess.

2- I’m old enough to remember when liberals got mad at republicans because of weather results.

3- Asriel is a pro life, well armed person who has good ol’ fashion Christian values. What with him being a literal Yoshi loving choir boy that listens to Christian ska bands.

But oh, T, the complete lack of self awareness that you say I can’t face reality as you also say a fictional character would hate me for not being an insane cultist like you. Seems pretty inaccurate at that.

“The left” isn’t undefined or invisible. But whatever lol.

4- I’m not unhappy, or living a lie. So you’re, to quote the legitimately elected POTUS, Donald Trump, “wrong.”