#those women who voted against their own rights

[pop-punklouis]

I don’t know much about how politics works there, but does Kamala still have an opportunity or is already lost? Sending love <3<3

she’s unfortunately lost. he’s going to be president again.

[wilwheaton]

The GOP wonders why young people (and others) don't want to vote for them. Some wise scribe assembled this list.

1.) Your Reagan-era “trickle-down economics” strategy of tax breaks for billionaires that you continue to employ to this day has widened the gap between rich and poor so much that most of them will never be able to own a home, much less earn a living wage.

2.) You refuse to increase the federal minimum wage, which is still $7.25 an hour (since 2009). Even if it had just kept up with inflation, it would be $27 now. You’re forcing people of all ages but especially young people to work multiple jobs just to afford basic necessities.

3.) You fundamentally oppose and want to kill democracy; have done everything in your power to restrict access to the ballot box, particularly in areas with demographics that tend to vote Democratic (like young people and POC). You staged a fucking coup the last time you lost.

4.) You have abused your disproportionate senate control over the last three decades to pack the courts with religious extremists and idealogues, including SCOTUS—which has rolled back rights for women in ways that do nothing but kill more women and children and expand poverty.

5.) You refuse to enact common sense gun control laws to curb mass shootings like universal background checks and banning assault weapons; subjecting their entire generation to school shootings and drills that are traumatizing in and of themselves. You are owned by the NRA.

6.) You are unequivocally against combatting climate change to the extent that it’s as if you’ve made it your personal mission to ensure they inherit a planet that is beyond the point of no return in terms of remaining habitable for the human race beyond the next few generations.

7.) You oppose all programs that provide assistance to those who need it most. Your governors refused to expand Medicaid even during A PANDEMIC. You are against free school lunches, despite it being the only meal that millions of children can count on to actually receive each day

8.) You are banning books, defunding libraries, barring subject matter, and whitewashing history even more in a fascistic attempt to keep them ignorant of the systemic racism that this nation was literally founded upon and continues to this day in every action your party takes.

9.) You oppose universal healthcare and are still trying to repeal the ACA and rip healthcare from tens of millions of Americans and replace it with nothing. You are against lowering the cost of insulin and prescription drugs that millions need simply to LIVE/FUNCTION in society.

10.) You embrace white nationalists, Neo-Nazis, and other groups that are defined by their intractable racism, xenophobia, bigotry, and intolerance. You conspired with these groups on January 6th to try to overthrow the U.S. government via domestic terrorism that KILLED PEOPLE.

11.) You oppose every bill aimed at making life better for our nation’s youth; from education to extracurricular and financial/nutritional assistance programs. You say you want to “protect the children” while you elect/nominate pedophiles and attack trans youth and drag queens.

12.) You pretend to be offended by “anti-semitism” while literally supporting, electing, and speaking at events organized by Nazis. You pretend to hate “cancel culture” despite the fact that you invented it and it’s basically all you do.

13.) Every word you utter is a lie. You are the party of treason, hypocrisy, crime, and authoritarianism. You want to entrench rule by your aging minority because you know that you have nothing to offer young voters and they will never support you for all these reasons and more.

14.) You’re so hostile to even the notion of helping us overcome the mountain of debt that millions of us are forced to take on just to pay for our post K-12 education that you are suing to try to prevent a small fraction of us from getting even $10,000 in loan forgiveness.

15.) You opened the floodgates of money into politics via Citizens United; allowing our entire system of government to become a cesspool of corruption, crime, and greed. You are supposed to represent the American people whose taxes pay your salary but instead cater to rich donors.

16.) You respond to elected representatives standing in solidarity with their constituents to protest the ONGOING SLAUGHTER of children in schools via shootings by EXPELLING THEM FROM OFFICE & respond to your lack of popularity among young people by trying to raise the voting age.

17.) You impeach Democratic presidents over lying about a BJ but refuse to impeach (then vote twice to acquit) a guy whose entire “administration” was an international crime syndicate being run out of the WH who incited an insurrection to have you killed.

18.) You steal Supreme Court seats from democrats to prevent the only black POTUS we’ve ever had from appointing one and invent fake precedents that you later ignore all to take fundamental rights from Americans; and even your “legitimate” appointments consist of people like THIS (sub-thread refuting CJ Roberts criticisms of people attacking SCOTUS' legitimacy).

19.) You support mass incarceration even for innocuous offenses or execution by cop for POC while doing nothing but protect rich white criminals who engage in such things as tax fraud, money laundering, sex trafficking, rape/sexual assault, falsifying business records, etc.

20.) You are the reason we can’t pass:—Universal background checks—An assault weapons ban—The ‘For the People/Freedom to vote’ Act or John Lewis Voting Rights Act—The ERA & Equality Act—The Climate Action Now Act—The (Stopping) Violence Against Women Act—SCOTUS expansion.

21.) You do not seek office to govern, represent, or serve the American people. You seek power solely for its own sake so you can impose your narrow-minded puritanical will on others at the expense of their most fundamental rights and freedoms like voting and bodily autonomy.

22.) Ok, last one. You are trying to eliminate social security and Medicare that tens of millions of our parents rely on and paid into their entire lives. And you did everything to maximize preventable deaths from COVID leaving millions of us in mourning.

Source: https://imgur.com/gallery/e8DBZLH

[avelera]

Ugh, sorry, one last political point because it’s the day for it and this is bugging me.

Democrats and people on the left in the US have got to knock it off with this whole, “All Trump voters are obviously stupid” thing.

I’m sure it’s satisfying to believe, but it is simply not true, and making assumptions about your opponents that aren’t true is how you lose elections.

Half of the voting population of this country is not stupid and it is ludicrous to insist on believing that. Trump voters include doctors, lawyers, business owners, people with PhDs and graduate degrees, and people who attend college courses for fun. They are, unfortunately for many of us including yours truly, our parents and relatives and I at least know for a fact in those cases that they are well educated, well traveled people.

Assuming these people are just stupid and uninformed is, in fact, stupid. It a simplistic view of the world that is going to make your platforms lose if you embrace it and refuse to look deeper.

In practice, people engage in politics because they want the greatest happiness and prosperity for the largest number of people that they care about.

Everything after that is just haggling over price.

For example, the Left/Democrats might believe that the great amount of happiness and prosperity is brought to the largest number of people they care about when an advanced degree is available to everyone without leaving them in crippling debt, when people can age with social services that allow them dignity, when billionaires and companies cannot exploit their workers, and when peace and just causes are allowed to flourish around the world, including the education and enfranchisement of women, and the long term health of our planet. I personally believe that brings long term prosperity to us all.

Left and Right wing voters right now both probably agree that everyone is happier and more prosperous if they can afford a house and have a job that covers their needs and then some. How to get to that is the sticking point that they disagree on.

Right wing voters also want prosperity for themselves and those they care for and what they disagree on with the Left is how to achieve that. I’m not going to go into their platforms here because the whole point of this post is not assuming things about your opponents.

Now in order to persuade people to hold more Left leaning views, you need to make the case for why what you care about is a thing that they should care about and, more importantly, how it enhances the happiness and prosperity of them and those they care about.

Otherwise, you are asking them to vote against their own interests, which no one engages in politics to do, at least not on purpose (even if it is the ultimate outcome in many cases).

If you don’t care about making this argument to opposite side, then fine, you’ve already lost and you deserve to keep losing elections.

You deserve to lose because you’re not making a case for why anyone should support your causes in order to gain happiness and prosperity for themselves and those they care about, including expanding the field of people they care about, and it is ludicrous to expect people to do that without being persuaded either intellectually or emotionally.

This is what finding common ground and building coalitions is about, even if you don’t agree on every point. And if you self isolate and stick to your purity, you deserve to lose because politics is about how we govern large groups of people towards a common goal that, ultimately, is best simplified as the goal of their greatest happiness and prosperity.

Good faith politics is negotiating over what that means. Because resources are finite we can’t all get everything we want all at once. And not everyone agrees on everything so you need to prioritize the best possible allotment of happiness and prosperity for the short and long term, and that’s when we get into the nitty gritty of all the horse trading that happens in politics etc etc.

And you get into things like billionaires having outsized ability to enact their own happiness and prosperity but here’s the thing, many people especially on the right go along with those views because they believe (rightfully or not) that those goals will increase their own happiness and prosperity as well and if you don’t agree you’ve got to explain to them intellectually or emotionally why that is and provide and alternate platform or path for them to gain it that is more effective by at least some measure of that value.

Anyway, at the risk of this becoming a political science thesis from someone who isn’t a political scientist, just an amateur academic, tl;dr please knock it off with assuming everyone who disagrees with you is stupid, it is a losing proposition and it doesn’t get us anywhere near the goals we want to achieve politically, ie, the greatest happiness and long term prosperity of the people we care about.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“Brand safety” killed Jezebel

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library this Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

Progressives: if you want to lose to conservatives, all you need to do is reflexively praise and support everything conservatives turn into a culture-war issue, without considering whether they might be right. Because sometimes…they're right.

Remember early in the Trump presidency, when conservatives all woke up and discovered that America's spy agencies – excuse me, "the intelligence community" – were dirty-tricking psychos who run amok, lawlessly sabotaging democracy? Progressives have been shouting this ever since Hoover's FBI tried to blackmail MLK into killing himself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_letter

But millions of progressives forgot about COINTELPRO, CIA dirty tricks and CIA mass spying when this "intelligence community" temporarily set out to wrong-foot Trump. Remember James Comey votive candles?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/08/30/james-comey-fbi-memo-leaks-trump-inspector-general-report-column/2157705001/

Anthropologists have a name for this phenomenon, in which one side reverses its positions because their sworn enemies have done so. It's called schizmogenesis, and it goes like this: "If they hate it, we love it":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Schizmogenesis is an equal-opportunity delusion. Within living memory, white evangelicals supported abortion, because their sworn enemies – Catholics – opposed it. Some of those white Boomer women who voted Trump because abortion was literally the only issue they cared about held the opposite position on abortion not so long ago – and completely forgot about it:

https://text.npr.org/734303135

The main purpose of the culture war isn't immiserating marginalized people – that's its effect, but its purpose is to distract low-information turkeys (working people) so they'll vote for Christmas (the ongoing seizure of power by American oligarchs). For the funders of conservative movement politics, the cruelty isn't the point, it's merely the tactic. The point is power:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/09/turkeys-voting-for-christmas/#culture-wars

Which brings me to "woke capitalism." Conservative string-pullers have whipped up their base about the threat of companies embracing social causes. They (erroneously) claim that corporations have progressive values, and that big business is thumbing the scales for causes they despise. The purpose here isn't to sow distrust of capitalism per se. Rather, it's to stampede talk-radio-addled supporters into backing the oligarchy's agenda. Remember when culture war leaders told their base to support being gouged on credit-card junk fees "to own the libs?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

That's schizmogenesis working against the conservative rank-and-file, tricking them into taking the side of a cartel of wildly profitable payment processors who are making billions by picking their pockets (credit card fees are up 40% since the covid lockdowns), because (checks notes), Target pays these profiteers a lot to process its payments, and Target sells Pride merch (no, really):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

It's easy to point and laugh at conservative dopes when they're tricked into shooting themselves in the balls to own the libs. This is not a hypothetical example:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#musketfuckers

But progressives do it, too, particularly when they embrace monopolies as a force for positive social change. Remember 2019, when people got excited about playing loud pop music at Nazi rallies in the hopes that the monopoly video platforms' copyright filters would make any video from that rally impossible to post?

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/23/clever-hack-that-will-end-badly-playing-copyrighted-music-during-nazis-rallies-so-they-cant-be-posted-to-youtube/

I warned then that if this tactic worked, it would be used by cops to prevent you from recording them when they're macing you or splitting your skull with a billyclub, and yup, within a couple years, cops were blaring Taylor Swift music in hopes of preventing the public from posting videos of their illegal conduct:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/07/moral-hazard-of-filternets/#dmas

Conservatives are (partially) right about woke capitalism. It is a threat to democracy. Concentrating the power to decide who gets to speak and what they get to say into the hands of five or six corporations, mostly run by mediocre billionaires, is bad for society. The moderation decisions of giant platforms are a form of (commercial) censorship, even these don't violate the First Amendment:

https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-form-of-action/

(The progressive delusion that censorship only occurs when the First Amendment is violated is a wild own-goal, one that excuses, for example, the decision by school book-fair monopolist Scholastic to remove books about queers and Black and brown people from its offerings as a purely private matter without consequences for free speech):

https://www.themarysue.com/scholastic-response-to-authors-and-illustrators-on-diverse-books/

Conservatives are only partially right about woke capitalism, though. Here's what they're wrong about: corporations don't have values. Target isn't selling Pride tees because they support progressive causes, they're selling them because it seems like a good way to increase returns to their shareholders. Individuals – even top executives – at Target might endorse the cause, but the company will only durably support the cause if that endorsement is profitable, which means that when it stops being profitable, the company will stop supporting the cause:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/23/business/target-lgbtq-merchandise/index.html

The idea that corporations have values isn't merely stupid, it's very dangerous. The Hobby Lobby decision – which allows corporations to deny basic health-care expenses for women on the basis that a Bronze Age mystic wouldn't approve of an IUD – rests on the ideological foundation that corporate personhood includes corporate values:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burwell_v._Hobby_Lobby_Stores,_Inc.

Citizens United – the idea that corporations should be allowed to funnel unlimited funds to politicians who'll sell out the public good in favor of investor profits – also depends on a form of corporate personhood that includes values:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

There are undeniably instances in which corporate monopoly power benefits progressive causes, but these are side-effects of corporate power's main purpose, namely: taking money and power away from working people and giving it to rich people. That is what monopoly power is for.

Which brings me to ad-tech, "brand safety," and the demise of Jezebel, the 16 year old feminist website whose shuttering was just announced by its latest owner, G/O Media:

https://www.metafilter.com/201349/This-is-the-end-of-Jezebel-and-that-feels-really-really-bad

Jezebel's demise is the direct result of monopoly power. Jezebel writes about current affairs – sex, politics, abortion, and other important issues of great moment and significance. When we talk about journalism as a public good, necessary for a healthy civic life, this is what we mean. But unfortunately for Jezebel – and any other news outlet covering current events – there are vast, invisible forces that exist solely to starve this kind of coverage of advertising revenue.

Writing for the independent news site 404 Media, reporter Emanuel Maiberg and former Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler go deep on the "brand safety" industry, whose mission is to assist corporations in blocking their ads from showing up alongside real news:

https://www.404media.co/advertisers-dont-want-sites-like-jezebel-to-exist/

Maiberg and Koebler explain how industry associations like the World Federation of Marketers' Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) promulgate "frameworks" to help advertisers automatically detect and exclude real news from consideration when their ads are placed:

https://www.peer39.com/blog/garm-standards

This boycott makes use of scammy "AI" technology like "sentiment and emotional analysis" to determine whether an article is suitable for monetization. These parameters are then fed to the ad-tech duopoly's ad auction system, so Google and Meta (who control the vast majority of online advertising) can ensure that real news is starved of cash.

But reality is not brand-safe, and high quality, reputable journalistic outlets are concerned with reality, which means that the "brand safe" outlets that attract the most revenue are garbage websites that haven't yet been blacklisted by the ad-safety cartel, leading to major brands' ads showing up alongside notorious internet gross-out images like "goatse":

https://www.404media.co/sqword-game-dev-sneaks-goatse-onto-a-dozen-sites-that-stole-his-game/

More than a fifth of "brand safe" ad placements end up on "made for advertising" sites, which 404 Media describe as "trash websites that plagiarize content, are literally spam, pay for fake traffic, or are autogenerated websites that serve no other purpose than capturing ad dollars":

https://www.ana.net/miccontent/show/id/rr-2023-06-ana-programmatic-transparency-first-look

Despite all this, many progressives have become cheerleaders for "brand safety," as a countervailing force to the drawdown of trust and safety at online platforms, which led to the re-platforming of Nazis, QAnon conspiratorialists, TERFs, and other overt elements of the reactionary movement's vanguard on Twitter and Facebook. Articles about ads for major brands showing up alongside Nazi content on Twitter are now a staple of progressive reporting, presented as evidence of Elon Musk's lack of business acumen. The message of these stories is "Musk is bad at business because he's allowing Nazis on his platform, which will send advertisers bolting for the exits to avoid brand-safety crises."

This isn't wrong. Musk is a bad businessman (he's a good scam artist, though). Twitter is hemorrhaging advertisers, notwithstanding the desperate (and easily debunked) stats-juking its "CEO," Linda Yaccarino, floats onstage at tech conferences:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/11/math-problem-for-linda-yaccarino-if-90-of-the-top-advertisers-have-come-back-but-are-only-spending-10-of-what-they-used-to-how-screwed-are-you/

But progressives are out of their minds if they think the primary effect of the brand safety industry is punishing Elon Musk for secretly loving Nazis. The primary effect of brand safety is killing reality-based coverage of the news of the day, and since reality has a well-known anti-conservative bias, anything that works against the reality-based community is ultimately good for oligarchy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

We can't afford to let schizmogenesis stampede us into loving things just because conservative culture warriors have been momentarily tricked into hating them as part of oligarchs' turkeys-voting-for-Christmas project. "Swivel-eyed loons hate it, so it must be good," is a worse-than-useless heuristic for navigating complex issues:

https://locusmag.com/2023/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point/

A much better rule of thumb is "If oligarchs love something, it's probably bad." Almost without exception, things that are good for oligarchs are bad for the rest of us. I mean, this whole shuttering of Jezebel starts with an oligarch imposing his will on millions of other people. Jezebel began life as a Gawker Media site, beloved of millions of readers, destroyed when FBI informant Peter Thiel secretly funded Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against the publisher in a successful bid to put them out of business to retaliate for their unfavorable coverage of Thiel:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/hogan-thiel-gawker-trial/554132/

This, in turn, put Jezebel under the ownership of G/O Media, who are unwilling to pay for a human salesforce that would – for example – sell advertising space on Jezebel to sex-toy companies or pro-abortion groups. G/O has been on a killing spree, shuttering beloved news outlets like Deadspin:

https://deadspin.com/this-is-how-things-work-now-at-g-o-media-1836908201

G/O's top exec, an oligarch named Jim Spanfeller who answers to the private equity looters at Great Hill Partners, is bent on ending reality-based coverage in favor of "letting robots shit out brand safe AI-assisted articles about generic topics":

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/ai-articles-disinformation-future-g-o-media-rcna95944

Three quarters of a century ago, Orwell coined a term to describe this kind of news: duckspeak,

It was not the man’s brain that was speaking it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words but it was not speech in true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness like the quacking of a duck.

When investors and analysts speak of "content" (rather than, say, "journalism"), this is what they mean – a warm slurry of platitudes, purged of any jagged-edged fragments to render it a perfectly suitable carrier for commercial messages targeted based on surveillance data about the "consumer" whose eyeballs are upon it.

This aversion to reality has been present among corporate decisionmakers since the earliest days, but the consolidation of power among large firms – ad-tech firms, online platforms, and "brands" themselves – makes corporate realityphobia much easier to turn into, well, reality, giving advertisers the fine-grained power to put Jezebel and every site like it out of business.

As Koebler and Maiberg's headliine so aptly puts it, "Advertisers Don’t Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist."

The reason to deplore Nazis on Twitter is because they are Nazis, not because their content isn't brand-safe. The short-term wins progressives gain by legitimizing a corporate veto over what we see online are vastly overshadowed by the most important consequence of brand safety: the mass extinction of reality-based reporting. Reality isn't brand safe. If you're in the reality based community, brand safety should be your sworn enemy, even if they help you temporarily get a couple of Nazis kicked off Twitter.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/11/ad-jacency/#brand-safety

[boreal-sea]

Who is Tim Walz?

Kamala Harris has apparently picked Tim Walz as her running mate. He seems good, based on his record. He's also responsible for the widely spreading "Republicans are weird" meme I've seen quite a lot of.

He has a good record. Just like I did for Kamala Harris in a post that has become quite popular, I will do a simple review of things I like from Tim Walz' political history. Again, as with Harris, this is just from his Wikipedia page. Let's go!

House of Representatives

Opposed increasing troop numbers in Iraq

Co-sponsored a bill to raise Minnesota's minimum wage

Voted for stem cell research

Voted to allow Medicare to negotiate pharmaceutical prices

Voted against the act to Prohibit Federally Funded Abortion Services

Voted to advance the ACA

Has received a 100% rating from many progressive organizations like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU

Was a member of several caucuses, including the LGBT Equality Caucus

Governor of Minnesota

Signed into law police reforms after the murder of George Floyd

Had Minnesota join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, meaning that all of the state's electors will vote for whichever candidate wins the popular vote nation-wide.

Under his governance, Minnesota passed laws for requiring paid leave, banning non-compete agreements, cannabis legalization, abortion rights, universal free school meals,

Political stances

Pro cannabis

Against bailout bills that loan taxpayer money to large banks and auto manufacturers

Was a former teacher for many years, and is very pro-education and supporting public schools. He is against merit pay for teachers (this is a good thing), and supports lowering tuition costs

Used to be pro-gun, but after Parkland he changed his mind, and as Governor he signed a bill mandating universal background checks

Pro-LGBT - has voted for LGBT rights many times, including as Governor, where he signed bills banning conversion therapy and protecting gender-affirming care

Supports veterans rights and support

Supports abortion rights and women's rights

I am going to copy-paste the entire section for his views on the Israel-Hamas war, because I don't want people claiming I am taking anything out of context. Overall, he has views that echo my own in many ways:

Walz condemned Hamas's October 7 attacks in Israel and ordered flags to be lowered to half mast in the following days. After the 2024 Minnesota Democratic presidential primary, in which 19% of voters cast "uncommitted" ballots, Walz took a sympathetic view toward those doing so to protest President Biden's handling of the war in Gaza, calling them "civically engaged". Of the protests against U.S. funding of the war in Gaza, Walz said: "This issue is a humanitarian crisis. They have every right to be heard... These folks are asking for a change in course, they're asking for more pressure to be put on… You can hold competing things: that Israel has the right to defend itself, and the atrocities of October 7 are unacceptable, but Palestinian civilians being caught in this… has got to end." Walz also said he supports a ceasefire in Gaza.[100]

[deaddee-anime-brownfanlady]

Everything! Everything this man is saying is so damned true. If you are someone who willingly voted for Trump while knowing what he'll do once he gets in Office again.

Deeply FUCK YOU! If you're a person that refuses to vote against him and didn't do anything to stop him at all than FUCK YA'LL too.

If you are a Muslim or Latino or a Non-Black POC that supported and voted for Trump and are now worried about being deported and banned from the country, I really don't feel sorry for any of ya'll. Some of ya'll non-Black POC countine to showcase that ya'll will always choose White Supremacy and Whiteness at the end of the day while simultaneously voting against your own self interests while still being anti-Black as hell.

You won't get any sympathy from me whatsoever. Ya'll Fuckers wanted this so deal with it.

To the percentage of White Women who yet again let down Black Women & other Women of Color by voting for having less bodily anatomy and less rights than you're great great-grandmother, Ya'll don't deserve any sympathy neither.

Pro-Palestine people, FUCK OFF too. Ya'll are also full of bullshit and have showcased that ya'll truly don't give a Fuck about Palestinians or Gazans lives when you let a raging White supremacist like Trump who have said he'll let Netanyahu " Finish the Job", and will have no remorse or issues Nuking the hell out of both Gaza and Palestine altogether.

Ya'll aren't " activists " of any kind and have shown just how unserious, radicalized, brainwashed extremists ya'll truly are in terms of your so-called " Support ".

To the percentage of brain-dead Black men who also voted for this bastard, I rarely used the N-word in my vocabulary. But ya'll are truly some stupid-ass Nigg*s. You're character as a person is garbage and you are a disgrace to your grandparents and many other Black people of the Civil rights movement who fought and died for your fucking ass and this is how you repay them.

By voting for a White supremacist and beyond racist piece of shit. Ya'll Uncle Tom's or I should say Ruckuses don't deserve any sympathy neither.

The third-party voters and those who wasted their vote on Jill stein as a protest vote, ya'll are the stupidest group of people alive and FUCK ALL OF YA'LL as well.

I've seriously had enough of this shit. I'm tired and sick of being held hostage by the ignorant and stupid and hateful people of this damned country.

I'm just so fucking sick.

Ya'll won't get any sympathy from me if you actually wanted this man in power again or refused to actually vote against him during the election.

You've shown ya'll true characters and how horrible of people ya'll truly are.

Don't expect any sympathy or empathy towards you if you're the one who wanted this to happen.

[kvetchlandia]

<Sigh>

It looks like absolutely the worst has come to pass in the United States. It appears Trump will be re-elected and that his cult will control both houses of Congresses. A bigger nightmare is hard to imagine. This result speaks very badly of the American people. I'm not a Democrat, I'm not particularly fond of Harris and her boring, status quo politics. But Trump, the venal, racist, misogynistic, corrupt, multiply convicted felon and serial liar, was known to everyone. His racism is no secret, nor is his sexism. His crudeness is everywhere and his self-interest should really have been apparent to all, since it's been in the press and online constantly for years. Yet in spite of this, it looks like he and his lackeys, toadies and lickspittles will be running this country for the foreseeable future, much to the detriment of everyone on the planet, because the voting majority of the American people chose to either reward those things or to ignore them. And the result? I don't have a crystal ball, but I know what's been promised. Women's right to control their own body? It's gone. Hell, there are members of the Trump Cult who even want to move against birth control and in vitro fertilization. Project 2025? Much of it will be enacted, if not all of it. The courts will be filled with fundamentalists and fanatics who will gut social and consumer protections and force Christian dogma down all of our throats. The environment will be destroyed. And everyone who voted for Trump and for his cult members knew this and chose to vote for them anyway. This is just too much to take.

I'm too depressed to say anything else. When I calm down I'll come back and engage in my usual posting silliness. Well, either that or I'll fucking stick my head in the oven. Oh, don't worry. My oven is electric. All that'll happen is I'll scorch my eyebrows.

[elbiotipo]

Something worth noting is that the constitutions of many Latin American countries were based in the US constitution, which was at the time seen as an example of a liberal republic. So yes, indeed, Argentina once had an electoral college for example.

And indeed that electoral college and restrictive voting laws (the República Conservadora of 1853-1916~) was used to suppress popular will (something like 1% of the population could vote). After the reforms by the UCR, universal male suffrage was achieved, the electoral college always voted proportionally to the popular vote (unlike the US where it's a winner takes all system), though afterwards there was decades of coups so there weren't many elections. Woman suffrage came with Perón and Evita, as well as the 1949 constitution that enshrined worker's and social rights (later repealed by the military dictatorship, though worker's rights are still guaranteed explicitly by the current constitution)

It was with the 1994 constitution when we finally stopped that stupid system and went directly with the popular vote. In any case, as I said, the electoral college voted proportionally to the popular vote so it was more redudant than anything. (I understand, though my knowledge there is limited, that Brazil and other countries had a similar history)

This all happened because like most constitutions, the Argentine constitution has been reformed multiple times. It started mostly as a copy of the US constitution which was a model at the time, but situations changed. Worker's rights, women's right, indigenous rights, environmental rights, changes to the procedure of state, the defense against our history of coups. Many things changed (and indeed the constitution and I argue the whole political system is overdue for a change) and they did by long popular struggle.

The United States remains the only country in the world with an electoral college. Many archaic and unequal things like the all powerful supreme court or the strange voting system in the United States simply aren't found in other such democracies because they changed. It's strange to pretend the United States is a paramount of democracy because their own model of democracy is actually very obsolete, and in fact doesn't even approach the ongoing developments in popular sovereignity in countries like China (which I don't have time to write about but they're very interesting) or indeed, other "average" democracies in Latin America, Africa, Europe, and the rest of the world. And yet democracies in general are having a hard time in responding to the needs of the people (which is natural given the state of class conflict) and there are some that are particularily ossified and not a model for anyone, such as the US and the UK. If you attempt to study or measure "democracy" by their standards, you're doomed to failure.

In the coming decades new ways of concieving the state and the "res publica" will emerge. From an outsider's perspective, the liberal capitalist model of the United States is hopelessly outdated and those who cling to it (like our own Milei) are walking fossils. There is a future for democracy but it will be very different from what we know.

[honey-flustered]

Trump fucking won. The senate and the supreme court is made up of only republicans…i’m sick to my at stomach and dreading the next years to come. To those who voted for Trump, you not only voted against the rights of others (not that you care anyway) but you voted against your own rights. A convicted felon has somehow become president despite felons not being able to vote. A rapist. A racist. A psychotic monster who spewed harmful rhetoric about different groups of people. Who stood on stage and assured that he’d promise to wipe Palestinians of this earth. Who will continue to strip women’s agency over their own bodies. Who will assure that people of the lgbtq+ community will never feel safe again.You have voted for a man who will take away our democracy.

I’m sorry to all those who voted for Kamala hoping for a change and have been failed. More qualified and yet simply because she’s a woman, she fucking lost. I’m discouraged, I’m hurt, and I’m honestly not surprised. Whatever happens I wish you all out there to be safe and well (except you trump supporters yall can suck a dick). America has been set back decades but we’ve been here before. I will fight for my rights even if it looks bleak.

[bananonbinary]

apparently a radfem movement called 4B is getting a surge of popularity on social media since the election, with the reasoning, "if men do not respect us, they should not have access to us at all." the idea is to withhold all sex and intimacy until women have all their rights.

and like. putting aside all the many many reasons that radfem ideology and bioessentialism sucks, and the fact that "men" are not a group you can "negotiate" with as a whole because they are not an organized group with leadership, this is just....a very very dangerous game to be playing.

like. okay. there are two scenarios on how this could play out, because again, it isn't any sort of organized "protest" between ""the sexes,"" it's just gonna be some women and their partners, who do not really give a shit about what a bunch of strangers on tiktok are doing.

option 1) he already respected women's rights, voted against abortion bans, and cannot actually change anything on his own. you are making both him and yourself miserable for literally no reason at all. you have turned what should be a really nice relationship where you can relax into a weird adversarial thing that abhors real vulnerability. this is the BETTER option.

option 2) he IS a trump supporter who thinks he should have access to all women's bodies. in which case, saying "no more sex until you give me rights" is NOT going to go down the way you think it is. you do not have collective bargaining power here. you are going to get very badly hurt, and an already probably abusive relationship is going to get a lot worse. that's not to say that a woman in that position would in any way "deserve" it, just that. when you are faced with an abuser, you should absolutely not try to play mind games or reassert your power to them. you should try and get the fuck out. call real organizations that can help you, don't follow random bullshit tiktok trends. those influencers will NOT give you a place to stay when shit hits the fan.

anyway the national domestic violence hotline is 800-799-SAFE.

[contemplatingoutlander]

“The hour is late for America. Beyond political success, her fate relies on exorcising the leftist specter dominating education, religion, and culture – a 360-degree holy war for the righteous cause of human freedom.”

--Pete Hegseth (2020) in American Crusade: Our fight to stay free.

In this detailed accounting of Hegseth's beliefs, Jason Wilson writing for The Guardian, implies that Hegseth seems to be primarily interested in "freedom" for far-right "Christians," since he seems to consider many others, especially those on the left to be "America’s internal enemies." Wilson also implies (based on comments by John Whitehouse from Media Matters) that Hegseth would be fine with using the military against anyone who protests Trump's neofascist policies--as long as that is okay with the "rightwing audience" that both Trump and Hegseth want to please.

Relying largely on Hegseth's 2020 book, American Crusade: Our fight to stay free, Wilson claimed the following:

MILITANT "NATIONAL DIVORCE":" Back in 2020, Hegseth indicated that he would be okay with a "national divorce" and/or "civil war" if the Democrats won the 2020 election, because he believed there were “irreconcilable differences between the Left and the Right in America leading to perpetual conflict that cannot be resolved through the political process.”

A "PRO-FREEDOM, PRO-CHRISTIAN, PRO-ISRAEL ARMY": However, Hegseth also believes that “If America is split, freedom will no longer have an army.” He believes that the American military is “the only powerful, pro-freedom, pro-Christian, pro-Israel army in the world.” If that happens, Hegseth believes “Communist China will rise – and rule the globe. Europe will formally surrender. Islamists will get nuclear weapons and seek to wipe America and Israel off the map.”

THE ENEMY: On the other hand, if America isn't split, and the American military remains intact, Hegseth believes it will mean the defeat of “globalism”, “socialism”, "secularism”, “environmentalism”, “Islamism”, “genderism” and “leftism.”

INTIMIDATION TACTICS: Hegseth urges his readers to “mock, humiliate, intimidate, and crush our leftist opponents,” whom he feels are engaged in “sedition.” Here's an example of the intimidation he recommends: “When local businesses declare ‘gun free zones,’ remember the Second Amendment, carry your legally owned firearm, and dare them to tell you it’s not allowed.”

WORTHY OF "DISDAIN": Regarding "the media and 'almost all' politicians and credentialed experts" Hegseth tells his audience to “Disdain, despise, detest, distrust – pick your d-words. But all of this must lead to action.”

AGAINST DEMOCRACY: Hegseth does not believe in democracy, although he continues to claim to believe in the Constitution. Hegseth wrote: “For leftists, calls for ‘democracy’ represent a complete rejection of our system. Watch how often they use the word.” He goes on to say, “They hate America, so they hate the Constitution and want to quickly amass 51 percent of the votes to change it.”

GERRYMANDERING IS FINE: Hegseth is fine with gerrymandering. He writes: “Republican legislatures should draw congressional lines that advantage pro-freedom candidates – and screw Democrats.”

PRO-NATIONALISM: Hegseth is a nationalist, who wrote: “Our weapon is American nationalism.” He went on to say, “The Left has tried … to intimidate us into thinking that nationalism is a relic of a bygone era.”

BANNING WOMEN FROM COMBAT: Furthermore, Hegseth is opposed to women serving in combat.

PRO-PARDONING WAR CRIMINALS: In 2019, Hegseth successfully lobbied Trump, who "pardoned three service members who had been charged or convicted with alleged war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan." [all color/emphasis added]

Finally, Wilson notes that

"John Whitehouse, news director at Media Matters for America (MMFA)... said that Hegseth has 'always given off a proto-fascist vibe'”, and that 'the thing that appealed to him was going into Iraq as a crusader, and when that went wrong he started looking at America through the same lens.'” [emphasis added]

Clearly Hegseth is a militant right-wing "Christian" nationalist, who was rightly tagged by the Army National Guard as being a potential threat to our nation. Hegseth certainly doesn't belong anywhere near the Department of Defense, much less in charge of it.

Wilson ends his article by using Hegseth's own words to show his affiliation with militant far-right "Christian" nationalists:

“See you on the battlefield. Together, with God’s help, we will save America. Deus vult!”

--Pete Hegseth (2020) in American Crusade: Our fight to stay free.

[tpquill]

America, what have you done!

I am tonight sitting here (Australia) speechless from what has transpired these last 12 hours or so, what the hell happened?

Why on earth did he get voted back in?

What in the world went wrong?

8 years ago he was elected whether you choose to believe it or not, through nefarious means (Russia influence) at the time people fell for his charisma & charm, but soon realised just like women realise when they fall for the charm and the boyish behaviour, there’s a darker side they don’t reveal until it’s too late. Congratulations America, he revealed it pretty early on once he got his claws into the Resolution Table in the Oval Office.

We (the world) watched in horror as he separated families and deported illegals. He overspent on his billionaire friends and made middle and working class suffer. Had no health care plan, no infrastructure or employment plan. No commerce or education - nothing, zilch. He employed sycophants who bowed and grovelled to do his biding (half of them his own family - nepotism much?) he ran America like one of his bankrupt businesses and almost brought America to the ground. He was responsible for not taking responsibility when a pandemic hit the world and over 1 million died under his watch.

America impeached him twice, investigated him multiple times. Decided then they’d had enough and voted him out. You had four years of peace, of prosperity, of employment health care, higher wages and lowering costs. Your country opened up again and healthcare was restored, you started bouncing back, you’re coming has never been better. Meanwhile he ranted and raged the election was stolen, even though every court hearing and document was thrown out. America had turned a page in history for four years.

What the hell happened?

Joe Biden stood for another term but that wasn’t good enough, the America media had an axe to grind and so did it seemed those who were influential in the media circus and he stood aside for a women he picked as his vice. A woman with an incredible record in prosecution and protection of law. A woman who had fought against cartels and won. A woman of scruples and integrity. Who was willing to stand up to him and hold him accountable. A man who has current,y 34 felony convictions including falsifying business records and inflating assets to hide tax fraud. A man with 6 bankruptcies and multiple accusations of predator and rapist behaviour AND YOU HAVE VOTED HIM BACK IN?

Why?

Was it because you like someone with a need for vengeance? Someone who had made it very clear he intends to run America like Russia? A man who stole your nations top secrets and in some cases sold them off? A man for whatever bizzare reason is allowed to do whatever the hell he likes with no repercussions, because he’s Donald Trump?

This is not the America I remember as a child. This is not the president I saw growing up, who took care of his people, who cared for his country, supported their military and stood up to foreign enemies.

I sit here tonight devastated for all the brave and wonderful women and men, who voted to protect theirs and their daughters basic human, reproductive and civil rights. To the persons of all colours and religions, to the victims of domestic and sexual violence. To the wonderful trans community, to the gay marriages built on love. To all those who have fought both home and abroad in service. To the dreamers who see America as a shiny beacon of light & hope. To those who have crossed many roads in search of protection, in a country who had always welcomed you. I feel all of your sadness and anger at what has transpired.

None of this makes sense, none of this adds up.

Kamala Harris was a future light of hope and peace, of working with both sides for democracy to move America forward - now it seems she will be pulled back into the darkest part of her history. Back to when women had no right to vote, no opinion that was listened to, no voice protecting her own body.

She will be silenced once again.

Immigrants will no longer be welcome.

The church will control what happens in marriages and government decisions.

You will no longer be accepted as a trans or LGBTQ+

If you suffer a medical emergency during pregnancy, you will be forced to endure the consequences of either the child dying inside you, or be forced to give birth at “God’s will” Rape is just a word - a pregnancy from it will be unfortunate but a necessary as your right to choose will not matter anymore.

None of this adds up.

I will not accept that a man who got almost the exact same amount of votes as he did in 2020 can be declared the winner and Kamala only got 60 million, where did the other 20 million go? The votes came in too quickly the declaration called too soon. I’m by no means a conspiracy theorist but the math doesn’t add up?

Bomb threats - is America the Middle East? Interference through social media via Elon Musk and China. Giving away money to people who would vote for Trump. It stinks like rotten fish on a warm summers day here in Oz.

My final take.

If I devoted my entire like in government, in prosecution, in upholding the constitution - I would have questions, I would want answers as to how this happened with no increase in Trumps collective votes from 2020, he didn’t increase, he stayed the same.

President Joe Biden in his last few months of power, should launch an investigation because it’s not a case of well America decided to perform a lobotomy on itself and completely wiped the years between 2016-2020 from her memory and only remember the last 102 days, or something or someone played a hand in some very nefarious and illegal vote tampering.

Madam Vice President - do not concede.

[davidtennantgenderenvy]

A Letter From An Ex-Conservative To Her Parents On November 6th, 2024

Mom and Dad,

     When Trump got shot this summer, I remember you saying that this was all because the Left wouldn’t stop calling him Hitler. How we needed to “turn down the temperature” and stop “inciting violence.” I don’t think you understand that when people compare Trump to Hitler, it is not, in fact, just because they do not like him, but because he uses Hitlerian rhetoric on a regular basis. Obsessing over an imagined past version of a country that never truly existed. Saying that (insert frequently dehumanized other) is “poisoning the blood of the nation.” Before Hitler began the Final Solution against Jews, what did he say he planned to do? Deport them, until he realized it was too costly. I don’t think you understand that Hitler did not start putting people in death camps the second he came to power. Trump is currently in about the same position Hitler was in in the 1930s. Is it going to take him putting undocumented people in gas chambers for you to believe me? 

     You might think that I’ve only come to my current conclusions about Trump because of the lies of “the mainstream media”, which, as I’ve said numerous times, I don’t even watch. But it’s actually been largely due to the things Trump himself has said. I understand that you don’t like Biden calling Trump’s voters “garbage”, but the language Trump uses to describe his political opponents is at least as disturbing. He’s disparaged fallen soldiers as “suckers and losers.” He’s proudly boasted about being the president who got Roe V Wade appealed, regardless of the estimated thousands of women who are dying because the medical treatments they need fall too close to the legal definition of abortion. A massive portion of his campaign advertisements are explicitly anti-trans. He thinks Palestinians should be moved off their land because it would make “great beachfront property.” He regularly speaks positively of and rubs elbows with the most disturbing members of the alt-right, such as Laura Loomer and Nick Fuentes. He’s a bully. (you voted for a bully. Remember when I was bullied?) And if Kamala’s plans are incoherent, which admittedly some of them are, Trump’s are even more so. He doesn't have a plan. America is just another failed business to him. 

     I don’t think you’re bad people. But I do think your party is bad. This is far more than just one guy. My journey has been less one of changing any of my beliefs than realizing that the Republican Party never represented those beliefs to begin with. It is the party of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, of stripping the oppressed of their means to succeed and then asking them to “pull themselves up by the bootstraps.” Your precious Reagan was a racist. There’s recorded evidence. His policies were racist. He enabled denial and misinformation about AIDS until it was too little too late and millions had died. And you proudly display his book on your shelf, right next to Rush Limbaugh and Pat fucking Buchanan. Your son is a gay man. How could you. 

     Being a conservative, whether you think so or not, is inherently about preserving the status quo, about making sure things stay the way they are, that the people who are down stay down, and crushing anyone who tries to make things better. I didn’t vote Democrat because I am one. I voted Democrat because it would be easier under one such administration to push this country in the direction of equity and liberty. Project 2025 was intended for the next conservative administration. Trump may deny involvement, but the foreword of one of the sections was written by none other than his own vice president. And with the House, Senate and Supreme Court all red now, it’s going to be easier than ever for him to pass any portions of it he likes. 

     I’m writing you this letter so that you know that if a nationwide abortion ban gets put in place, if schools and parents who support their children’s gender affirming care (which does NOT mean surgery) start getting investigated (which some already are), if Israel continues bombing Gaza until there’s nothing left, if billionaires continue to take up larger and larger percentages of the nation’s wealth, if immigrants who’ve lived and worked in this country for years start getting deported in droves because they couldn’t get the right paperwork, that it’s on you and people like you, even as you continue deny the very real damage done in Trump’s first presidency, the awful, awful people who felt empowered because of him. I tried for a while this summer to see if I could change your minds, but all it did was screw up my mental health and make me realize something truly painful: that you aren’t the people I thought you were. Not when your reaction to police shooting students the same age as your own daughter with rubber bullets because they don’t want their university to be complicit in a genocide is “well, what are they supposed to do? They’re the police.” Not when a man can say immigrants are poisoning the blood of the nation and you still vote for him. 

     It breaks my heart that you and so many people I love have been so deeply conditioned to vote against their own best interests, to think that a government that actually helps its people without actively harming others is a childish, fanciful expectation. I think I truly believed to the depths of my soul until last night that this wouldn’t happen. That we were better than this. That we wouldn’t reelect someone who objectively ran a terrible campaign, who conducts himself with boorishness and indignity, who genuinely, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart, represents everything that made me scream "Fuck America" out Laura’s car window this summer. But why should I be surprised America likes fascists? My own parents certainly seem to.

     But I hope you’re happy with your lower grocery prices, I guess. Which we probably won’t be getting anyway, because that’s not actually what Trump’s policies are going to do. 

     You sold out my friends, and entire marginalized communities, for cheaper groceries. I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive you for that.

Lauren

[betaphannie]

I fucking hate this. Idc what kamala could've and should've done differently yadda yadda ya. Of course when a woman is running she has to be absolutely perfect to even be considered meanwhile a man who is literally a felon who wants to end democracy gets most of America's votes. I'm used to living around racist assholes but I seriously believed that people were waking up. People I knew who used to be conservative were posting that they were voting for kamala. It's fucking COMMON SENSE that you don't elect the guy who will make it impossible for you to fight against any of his policies. But common sense isn't so fucking common is it? I have to go to work tomorrow knowing that a good portion of those ppl I work with voted against my rights and led this country to its downfall. Don't any of you from blue states tell me "at least the maga cult members will get what's coming to them." Be so fucking for real. The worst of it will come to trans people, people of color, women, queer people, poor people, disabled people, and all the people in other countries who didn't agree to this. We're all gonna fucking die in a climate crisis under a fascist regime and it's my own damn neighbors' fault.

[iamafanofcartoons]

Why voting for Biden is Crucial for 2024

Right now, we're suffering an alarming issue. Next year we will be voting for the presidential election. It will be Biden vs Trump again. One problem. Biden has made some decisions that weren't popular. Because of that, people are somehow saying he's not deserving of their vote. Okay, I want everyone to remember the last time we had a flawed presidential candidate. Hillary Clinton. Like Joe, Hillary spent 8 years working with Obama and helping him heal America. in 2016, she ran against Trump. But she wasn't squeaky clean. So people decided that they would feel better staying at home or tossing their vote. So not only did we fail at getting the first female POTUS? We got trump in the WH and all that hard work Obama did over 8 years got undone. Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat its consequences. We vote Biden in for 2024, he and the Democrats can continue their work of healing America, and Trump can no longer run, and the GOP will self-destruct. Or? We repeat the stubbornness of refusing to vote for a Democrat who is flawed, Trump gets into the office again, and we basically lose America to religious fundamentalists. "But Joe is enabling Genocide!" If Trump gets elected, the genocide of women, POC, LGBT, and atheists will happen in our own backyard! Focus on what's happening right in front of you before you focus on a region 3,000 or so miles away. We can deal with the middle east in full after we make sure that there is still a democratic America left to deal with the Middle East conflict. You can't have your cake and eat it! Compromises are one of the things a leader has to make. And we have to decide what we want to compromise. You have the ability to learn from 2016 and make the right decision this time by voting for Joe, flawed democrat or not. I beg of you...please take it! America's future? Or short-term gratification? Choice is yours. Please don't cut off your nose to spite your face.

[exyrpf]

Do I even want to know what happened in the last 24 hours 😭 I'm almost afraid to ask but I'm also insanely curious

You probably don't want to know but I'll tell you because you have no choice. This will be long and...awful. But there are sources so that's fun! Please keep in mind that this was all released within 24 hours on Thursday, September 20th, 2024 and that, unfortunately, I haven't mentioned everything.

But! The GOP was certainly having a wild one yesterday.

To start things off:

The first 'Big News' to break was about Mark Robinson.

For those saying 'who the fuck is Mark Robinson', he's the current (R) Lt. Gov of North Carolina that is running for Gov. Before yesterday, he was best known for openly hating LGBT+ and Jewish folks, being a Holocaust denier, being (forcefully) anti abortion, saying it was better when women couldn't vote, anti immigrant, hating the civil rights movement, etc, just being a hateful Evangelical nasty fascist. MAGA to his core. Trump has endorsed him, saying he should be cherished and calling him "MLK on steroids". (Robinson is Black).

So, yeah, that's bad enough right? Yesterday it got even worse. CNN released a report about some comments he made on a porn site forum 12 years ago, the most prominent being 'i'm a black NAZI'. He also commented that he wished slavery was legal and that he'd own a few, and called himself a 'perv' that used to 'peep' on women in public locker rooms when he was a teenager.

Also the tale as old as time that I'm sure you could guess when I mentioned 'GOP' 'loudly transphobic' and 'porn site scandal' - trans porn was a favourite of his. Because of course.

Also of course - the GOP hasn't taken him off the ticket, and he will continue to be the nominee for governor in North Carolina!

Read the article, there's more about him and the situation in general. Mind the warnings.

-

Now on to our favourite worm brained bear eating anti vaxxer conspiracy theorist, Robert F. Kennedy Junior! I'm putting this under a read more now.

The first thing to drop about him yesterday was the news of an investigation after he allegedly cut off the head of a dead whale and took it home 20 years ago. Now I bet you're thinking, wow that's bad! Unfortunately for RFK Jr yesterday got worse. It was then revealed that he (70) was having an affair with right wing journalist Olivia Nuzzi (31) after New York Magazine suspended her.

Everything I learn about RFK Jr I learn against my own will.

-

Saying goodbye to RFK for now, let's move on to Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida! This Matt Gaetz, with the botox if you didn't recognise him.

Scary lookin, right?

This isn't a completely new story (here's an article about how he alledgedly paid for sex with a minor) but new court filings were released yesterday alledging that he attended a drug-fueled sex party in 2017 with the 17-year-old girl at the center of the alleged sex trafficking scandal.

Sure is great to have such trustworthy men representing this country!

OKAY, on to the next.

-

This wasn't really breaking news because this is just Trump being Trump but he gave a speech at an ANTI ANTISEMITISM EVENT where he preemptively blamed the Jews for being the reason he'll lose this election, telling them they need to get their head checked if they vote for Harris (that's pretty much part of his stump speech by now though) and saying he'll reinstate his Muslim ban. White fascist blaming Jews? Wow, I did Nazi that coming.

-

I genuinely could go on, I really truly could.

Oh! Kamala Harris went on Oprah and it was really nice and not at all insane and she talked to the family of the first known victim of Trump's abortion ban and it was very touching. Trump's official social media then posted a clip of her talking about her gun and saying 'If somebody breaks into my house, they're getting shot' like it was a snatch when in reality Republicans in the comments are saying 'actually, this would make me vote for her'. Thanks, Trump Team for the free advertising!

Misc:

Chris Rufo (known racist and anti immigration right wing activist) got revealed to have an illegal immigrant wife, and then got revealed to be a user of Ashley Madison (database where people go to cheat on their partners)(Robinson was also on Ashley Madison).

Jasmine Crockett during her thing and ripping white republicans to shreds. (idk this was just fun to me)

Actually Republicans and Project 2025 got ripped to shreds and shut down in general by multiple Congress members.

GOP is on the brink of causing a government shutdown, because of COURSE they are.

Cards Against Humanity sues SpaceX over “invasion” of land on US/Mexico border.

Anyway there's actually MORE believe it or not but I can't remember if it happened yesterday. Thank you for reading, I'm always open to discussing current events. I don't think it's a well known fact that I'm into politics because I don't talk about it on tumblr because people are kinda stupid. Anyway!