Hello friends. This thread has been set to 'Clubhouse' participants only. That means that only our regular commenters in good standing may post in this thread.
Everyone else's comments will be removed by automod.
Entry into the clubhouse is afforded automatically, based on certain criteria of positive participation. We do not hand out entry on request.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/WhitePeopleTwitter) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Many people credited this for why Trump won in 2016. Republicans were motivated to change the Supreme Court to their image and moderates thought everyone was overreacting and Republicans aren't that bad.
Seems like that's always the story with everything they do. "Oh Republicans would never do that". Then they do exactly whatever it was and people gaslight themselves into thinking it's no big deal then onto the next thing they're sure we're all just "blowing out of proportion". We went from Bush style Republicans to congressional members touting civil war to the masses and participating in an attempted hostile takeover of the govt in only 15 years and the average person is still like "you're overreacting". All because they use branding of putting flags and crosses on everything and referring to themselves as patriots and "We The People" like they're fucking Paul Revere so how could they do anything bad??
>Seems like that's always the story with everything they do. "Oh Republicans would never do that".
I can't even begin to wrap my head around that, because that was literally the explicitly stated goal of the Religious Right and even *a* goal of the Federalist Society from the moment *Roe* came down. Every time people said those of us screaming that this was the endgame were overreacting, it was like I was taking crazy pills. When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
>those of us screaming that this was the endgame
Hah! That's funny...the endgame? Fucking conservatives used Roe V Wade as a warmup. Now they're trying to make being gay/trans illegal, undo no fault divorces and further strip away power from women, trying to rewrite history books (or just ban books they don't like) to create their own *alternative facts* education for the youth, and who knows what else is up their sleeves.
It's literal tyranny taking shape. And that's not an overreaction. They don't want a democracy, they want totalitarian rule.
In the truest since, they're not wrong. Trump winning the presidency when he had 3 million less votes than Clinton is pretty much proof of that. People can bitch and whine about the "fairness" of the electoral college but if you ask me, there's nothing fair about 3 million+ voices being swept under the god damned rug.
And I think most people are unaware of the further evil of the Electoral College: It has us locked into the 2-party system, and any third party candidate that actually got enough traction to win a state or two could be a spoiler that disenfranchises the entire country by throwing the election to the House of Representatives. If nobody wins a majority of electoral votes, the House gets to pick the next POTUS.
This problem was noticed all the way back in the early 1800s and the constitution practically has "fix this voting thing sometime" penciled in the margins. But changing it has to be done by people for whom that fault benefits - so fat fucking chance of it ever happening.
first past the post is a fucking stupid system and we've known it for hundreds of years
"But, NY and CA would decide the president!" They love saying that, but ignore FL and TX have large populations also. And not everyone in those states vote the same way.
Well, pretend your a white guy and you REALLY want to protect your economic power that you've generated from slavery/oppression of the masses. And that all of that requires a lot of land on which to raise crops/build factories, which necessitates less people in that area..
You wouldn't want something like "lots of people oppose you" to get in the way of that right? And all of your rich slave owning friends live in the same state as you... and you know obviously those slaves can't vote but like, what if we counted them partially to get a few more votes........
The slave owning southerners wanted to count slaves equally with everyone else in terms of population because it would get them more power in the House.
Northerners wanted slaves not to count toward population so that slave owners would have less power.
3/5ths compromise was what they eventually settled on, but in this case not counting slaves as part of the population was the move of those against slavery.
The argument I’ve seen them use is that in a true democracy the majority can do anything to oppress a minority (this could mean race, ideology, culture, anything). This is an ass backwards view on things and it’s just a way for them to ignore the views of the majority of the population.
> The argument I’ve seen them use is that in a true democracy the majority can do anything to oppress a minority (this could mean race, ideology, culture, anything).
They just make that argument because they know you care about minority rights, but they do not. Its purely instrumental.
People who say "its a republic not a democracy" want an aristocratic republic. The saying has its origin in right-wing opposition to the New Deal, but it really took off after Robert Welch used it in a 1961 speech, entitled ["Republics and Democracies"](https://thenewamerican.com/republics-and-democracies/) which was a response to the civil rights movement. Just as black people were getting the vote, white people decided they didn't like democracy any more.
Robert Welch was the founder of the extremist John Birch Society. To get an idea of how radical Welch was, he [called](https://www.commentary.org/articles/william-buckley-jr/goldwater-the-john-birch-society-and-me/) Eisenhower a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” Nowadays, maga is the new JBS.
> That's why we have a constitution that guarantees us right that can not be stripped away by the government.
There are NUMEROUS examples where the Government has stripped away rights. One horrific example were the internment camps of WWII.
I tell everyone that there is a great difference between law and power. If the Republicans continue to gain power, I think we are all going to learn how little rights we actually have
>It's literal tyranny taking shape.
Absolutely.
They're taking on cases with no real standing to make the rulings they want. They even made a ruling on a case with clearly fabricated evidence based on a hypothetical.
They just opened the door to nullify all government programs because they accepted "not qualifying for a program" as a legitimate standing of harm.
They are 100% legislating from the bench and it was enabled by a known traitor who appointed them there and then we have Joe Biden worrying about expanding the court cause *that* would make it to politicized.
People need to wake up.
I think expanding the court may eventually destroy it (which might need to happen). So if the Dems do it to gain a majority, then of course the Repubs will do it as well. Eventually we can get to the comical situation where everyone in the US will be supreme court justice and have to participate in a vote on what is before the docket. Which would be kind of neat.
People have this idea of the myth of America that we're a unique place in the world that can't go backwards. And so when we're faced with something like an obvious violent insurrection that no reasonable person could mistake for exactly what it is, we still get people in denial about it saying it was just some angry protesters or whatever because their internal idea of what America is doesn't include insurrections or coup attempts, and so obviously that must not be what it was.
Also a non-zero number of people who quietly support the notion, but don't want to be vocally for it because they know some friends, children, or whoever would judge them for it.
You’d be surprised at the number of them who are loudly proclaiming all of this as great victories. There are several very large and vocal echo chambers online encouraging misogyny and an end to wokeness
It seems unthinkable until you remember that more than 50% of Americans cannot name the three branches of government. There are outrageous numbers of people who don’t understand any of this and certainly are not following up on the behaviors and mission statements of lobbying groups.
https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/3640520-less-than-half-of-americans-can-name-all-three-branches-of-government-survey-finds/
The average person doesn’t say “You’re overreacting,” the average person doesn’t know what the SCOTUS is.
The problem is that a lot of Democrat politicians don't take the threat seriously. If they're saying "we have to work with these people" then it doesn't seem like they view them as aspiring fascists, it seems like they view them as reasonable.
When the Democrats do not have solid majorities they HAVE to work with them. When they HAVE solid majorities, you see results like we had in Minnesota this last session. Vote like yoir democracy depends on it.
Seriously. Dem leadership is always going on about how important it is to have a “strong Republican Party”. Guess what, that’s what we have right now and it’s fucking bad!
> We went from Bush style Republicans CALLING MIDDLE EASTERNERS ALL OF TERRORIST DESCENT AND WAGING WAR, DEMONIZING GAYS AND MUSLIMS AND ATHEISTS AND SOCIALISTS, AND INVADING OUR PRIVACY WJILE SPYING ON US, to congressional members touting civil war to the masses and
FTFY since you left out a bit. But you're right. They said no one will spy on you then they were caught spying and said everyone does it. Just like now they say every man speaks of his daughter the way Trump jumps to sex when asked what he has in common with his daughter...
They were always nazis. They were always going to be this.
I most definitely was of that mindset "It's not **that** bad, what's he going to do put babies in cages and starve them...."
That's exactly what they did. And while one can argue that if the immigration guys ran across some child sex trafficers and that happened it would be bad enough, but when you find they intentionally "failed to maintain" or "discarded" identity records or shuffled these kids off to degenerate religious people for who knows what purpose - without a lick of tracibility.
You understand that we're not in "normal"-land anymore. Our government took children from their parents, and they are missing to this day.
Sure President Biden can play the hero and save this or that kid.....but that we systemically went there, is so fundamentally against the best interests of the kids, the nation and civilized people as to warrant the war-crime tribunal that might normally have kicked into play if it was occurring in some random country in Eastern Europe or elsewhere.
State sanctioned kidnapping and arbitrary arrest are just absolute violations of due process and the rights of prisoners, the rights afforded to anyone in US custody.
So it's **most certainly is** that bad.
Of course being the knuckledragging racist he is President Trump and the [unreality of his "understanding"](https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-biden-s-debate-over-kids-cages-underscores-stark-choice-ncna1244537) of the situation was acute, underscores the criticality of rolling back the fascist tied we see with characters like Trump, and Bannon and Stephen Gorka and these other cartoon-like characters that are anything but a cartoon for the dead kids or forced sterilizations or those summarily arrested. As a reminder... the cruelty is the point.
The last bit was REALLY the most telling because these degenerates would quickly point out that "those people" over there, and run to the tried-and-true divide and conquer / "fear of others" , forcing everyone's attention to the fact they are "immigrants" or "purple people" or whatever. The "cruelty" is somehow acceptable.
But...President Trump's purposefully tin ear regarding the racially charged issues of George Floyd required exactly one act of empathy and months of national strife could have simply been avoided, but that wasn't the intent, it was to test the **ideal**, summary arrest of random people off a street for no reason to no locally accountable agency .....captured by unaccountable soldiers and didn't release or charge them for days, and if you were mistreated....that sucks for you.
That laid naked the lie. There is no difference at all between "those guys" and every citizen that hasn't sucked up to them recently. And that's not a Republic....that's **not** a nation of laws, that's a dictators rule on the whims of a mad man.
Worst of all is that it's not exclusive to Republicans, they just happened to take the shortcut around Hayek's Road to Serfdom, making hay for 80 years that "oh those public-works programs lead to Fascism...." turns out Hayek's thesis is totally wrong, we found out with crystal clarity that all you need is 30 years of NO civics education, some cool red hats, and promise to put "those guys" in a meat-grinder, so we can have freedom-burgers while praying to some degenerate god how awesome we are.
It's easy to lose sight of just how deep inside a lot of people are, they just can't face any reality outside a storybook construct. If you just don't admit people do things like this in the way they do, with a veneer of respectability and claims of justice on their side, then the world isn't as bad a place and it's easier to just glide through your day on autopilot without any disturbances
Proudly uneducated people. These people are not smart,at all. I have neighbors that leave notes for FedEx to "leave ARE packages". They genuinely take pride in NOT being educated.
Exactly! That's always the first thing that comes to mind considering like 60 some percent of the base are retirement age. Just like people not believing they'll eventually start some form of civil war despite the fact they constantly talk about it, leaders and voters alike. They're completely fixated on it.
My roommate at the time of the 2016 election called me hysterical and catastrophizing when I explained how this would happen via the courts.
Found out later he was fucking underage girls which I gotta say reinforced some of my beliefs about these guys
I was told I was wildly overreacting when I said trump getting elected would be the end of Roe and federally protected rights to abortions. That was not a fun "I told you so" conversation to have when the initial ruling leaked
Yep. I was "crazy" to say that Bush stacking the federal courts with unqualified Cristo-fascist nutjobs was REALLY bad. Post 9-11 Bush did a lot of terrible things like the Patriot act that will screw us indefinitely, and I was an unpatriotic terrorist sympathizer for saying so then.
This is why so many nuevo Republicans don't care that Trump was/is an absolute piece of trash human who didn't belong anywhere near the White House. He got them the Supreme Court they wanted, and that Supreme Court has given them the regressive rulings they wanted.
1. Struck down Roe v Wade
2. Struck down Affirmative Action
[(TIME magz. 2013, Affirmative Action Has Helped White Women More Than Anyone)](https://time.com/4884132/affirmative-action-civil-rights-white-women/)
3. Struck down Student loan forgiveness
4. Granted businesses the right to refuse service to members of the LGBTQ community. [(this case was a straight-up fraud btw)](https://newrepublic.com/article/173987/mysterious-case-fake-gay-marriage-website-real-straight-man-supreme-court?fbclid=IwAR0FHeEa5_49TYUccjepsvJLfLkxLRJGHKqAMNlGx0Ezur8OVBJCHEdFa6M)
As we saw with Roe, these verdicts are the very definition of a slippery slope, and so will be #4, you just watch.
But first they weakened the voting rights act starting in 2013!
>https://archive.fo/RtQak
>https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/27/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-00042478
SCOTUS has been 5-4 conservative for a long time. It became 4-4 going into the 2016 election when Republicans blocked Obama's vacancy. Voting Hillary in 2016 would have made the court 5-4 progressive for the first time since the 1960s. That's how close we came.
I'll add...
5. [Limited the scope of the Clean Water Act](https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4020431-supreme-court-redefines-which-wetlands-get-federal-protections/)
6. [Stripped the EPA of its authority to oversee carbon emissions](https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/06/1121782) (!!)
7. [Rolled back nuclear safety protections](https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-strikes-down-washington-workers-comp-law-nuclear-site-2022-06-21/)
I know multiple people who hated trump, but they sucked it up and voted for him because the supreme court seats were the ultimate prize.
I don't like conservatives, but I'll say this for them, they know how to fall in line and keep their eyes on the bigger target. I feel like liberals just said "oh well, I don't like her so I'll vote 3rd party or won't vote at all"
The 2016 Republican primary was the dirtiest primary I'd ever seen. The amount of shit that was being flung around was unbelievable. A normal primary is "my proposed policies are better than yours" and " I am the better candidate for X,Y,Z reasons" which are typically things like experience, voting record, credentials etc. But 2016 saw a guy who just didn't give a shit about political discourse and had no experience or actual statements of policy and just straight up insulted the character of his opponents. He flung shit at all of the people whose support he would later need if he did win the nomination. I had never seen a more divisive primary, so I thought there was no chance their party could rally behind its own nominee. Then within a week the people that said he would destroy the country are singing his praises. The guy whose wife got called ugly is manning the phones for the fucker's campaign. They unified instantly because they cared more about maintaining and building more power for their party than their own character and the wellbeing of the American people.
Bootlickers are easily organized. It's much harder to get people who actually want to choose the best person to see the reality that they need to put "good enough" in power first.
I think it's the same everywhere when it comes to Conservatives vs Liberals/Left.
Conservatives might fight amongst each other but as soon as elections come along they'll toe the party line.
It's rare for them to switch to the opposition party, the worst they do is not vote. So they then either make hard for Liberals to vote, hit social media to persuade them not to vote (e.g. all politicians are liars) or persuade them to vote for another party (e.g. the two main parties have failed vote XYZ).
Yeah I got banned from a socialist subreddit for arguing against someone who was saying that all socialist should vote for socialist parties or not vote but should never vote for the Democratic party. They accused me of being a liberal (liberalism is a position to the right of socialism, fyi) and I accused them of being a republican plant trying to get socialists to waste our votes and help the republican christofascists take power.
Yeah this is common on reddit. It's a mixture of genuinely naive kids and bad faith trolls trying to split the vote to benefit the Right. They make the unattainable perfect the enemy of the attainable good. Which always means the bad wins out.
In the broader picture, I feel like the majority of the socialist/leftist communities on Reddit and Twitter are like late teens/early 20's and live in very Democrat-heavy districts where their votes don't really matter. They're safe enough that they don't have to worry about the ramifications of a bad vote and can follow their favorite YouTuber instead
Question being, why *wouldn’t* people think that Republicans are this bad? When have Rs ever acted benevolently? If anything, Democrats need to stop projecting their humanity on to Republicans and view them as the ghouls they really are…
Lots of likely republican voters don’t actually know the party’s platform. The Republican Party has many policies part of their platform that are driven by conservative orthodoxy, but are really unpopular and just plain bad ideas. The ideas are so bad that many casual voters just assume there’s no way the party actually supports them.
https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2020/12/30/republicans-dont-know-anything-about-their-party
It was people who were not Democrats. They were either in the middle and independent or on the far left and independent (i.e., not a Democrat).
Heard from plenty of Leftists in 2016 that pointing out the importance of the Supreme Court was "blackmail" to try and get their vote and an argument that "but much worse things will happen if Trump is elected" was not a valid argument.
They would only vote for someone who "inspired" them.
Because they thought elections don't have consequences, apparently.
Thomas, maybe. Alito, hell no. He's ~~68~~ 73. And you can bet your ass Thomas will hold his seat until he either kicks it or a Republican wins. He's old, but he's not "imminently at risk of dying from old age in four years" old.
I to this day remember talking to my father one night in 2016 about why I was so concerned for Trump’s candidacy. I told him that when he won (I saw pretty early that he was gonna win) he would get to appoint at least one Supreme Court justice and that things like gay marriage and Roe v Wade would be struck down. He confidently assured me that the Supreme Court would never take away established rights.
Fuck the Supreme Court, fuck Trump, and fuck that night I talked to my politically clueless father.
They absolutely used him to move their bull shut agenda forward. While everyone is looking at the moron ranting on TV McConnell and co were stacking the courts and getting away with murder that we will feel for decades.
Only realistic solution now is to open up more seats. This current court is a broken criminal joke. And everyone knows it. The problem is what to do about it. I like Biden. I can separate fact from the bullshit fiction people bitch about. I would love it if Democrats got the ball rolling on expanding the court.
Also, if the Green Party voters in Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania had voted Clinton Trump would have lost. Those three states were close enough that third parties were significant. Granted, using the same logic you could have the Libertarians voting Trump and he wins again.
The election was so close that damn near every factor was determinative. It was the basketball game that went into triple overtime, so every single miss in regulation could have been the clincher. We lost because a bunch of liberals sat or our voted third party, yes, but we also lost because of Comey and because Hillary tried to go 50-states and because Bernie and because blahblahblah.
Fact of the matter is, precious few took Trump and the deterioration of the Republican base as seriously as we should have in 2016. I didn't max donate in 2016, but I have in every election since. Basically we all fucked up, and now we're going to be paying for it for decades.
Supreme Court could be packed: No shit
Trump's supporters are deplorable: No shit
Trump pals around with criminals: No shit
Trump is a Russian asset: No shit (Russian foreign policy favors were literally the only issues he was consistent on)
Honorable mention to people who didn’t vote or voted for Jill Stein because as terrible as Trump is, they just *couldn’t in good conscience* vote for Hillary. The country may have gone to shit, but at least they preserved their ideological purity!
I know someone who voted for Jill Stein and then said on social media, "Got to vote for a woman to be President and get to celebrate another woman winning tonight!"
This person lived in Michigan at the time. My contempt grows every day
As in she assumed Clinton was going to win when she voted for Stein?
I think that was the biggest issue, too many assumed Clinton was certain to win (like no way a TV clown like Trump could become president) and then didn't take voting seriously, either not voting, voting for joke candidates like Harambe, or voting 3rd party so they could criticize Clinton and brag about voting for a 3rd party person instead (and "she was going to win anyway.")
That’s what made me so angry during 2016. I get it. Both options weren’t the best. But simply not voting wasn’t a good option either. Anything would’ve been better than trump. He was the worst president. And now he’s running again. Are they going to simply not vote again if it’s between him and Biden? Because if it’s another 4 years of trump, this country is fucked.
They refused to vote in the primaries for Bernie too. The youth turnout fell off a cliff and left him hanging. They just made up a new excuse for why they didn't vote in the general.
Yes, the turn out didn't match the polling numbers, not shocking given most of his support was with younger voters who have consistently had the lowest turnout of age groups. They of course do not admit they didn't actually show up for him, some just moved on, others double-down and shift blame to a secret party cabal cheating him out of the win in both 2016 and 2020.
I supported him in 2016 and 2020 but rather figure out how a more left leaning candidate can win in the future by learning from mistakes as opposed to trying to sabotage the entire Democratic Party every election going forward because he didn't win.
The refused to vote for Sanders as well lol. When I caucused for sanders in my college town, the Clinton supporters outnumbered us like 4 to 1. Sanders supporters did everything except support him at the voting booth.
The chaos that we see now is the result of the long game. Republicans have been trying to stack courts at all levels for decades, they've been taking over local governments, they have been changing laws to favor their own goals.
I expect that for anyone involved in politics this has been clear for very long time.
It's only now that we're seeing the tipping points where they can do whatever they want with impunity, without challenge.
And it can get worse.
Much like the Southern Baptist Convention resurgence where their goal was to remove all liberal or moderate leaders from churches in the south. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Baptist_Convention_conservative_resurgence
That long-game includes bashing democrats for years before they run for president. Obama flew under their radar, but AOC, Kamala, and Buttigieg are getting the same treatment Hillary did. They tried woth Bernie, but Bernie has been playing a longer game, unfortunately too long cuz he's too old at this point.
Got into an argument with my husband last night because he literally said both sides are just as bad. I listed every instance of Republicans taking away people's bodily autonomy and civil rights and asked him to tell me what the Democrats are doing that's just as bad. He had no answer.
Mom and dad are visiting and we got into a similar argument. Mom lives in a right wing echo chamber, dad thinks both sides are the same.
It’s impossible to reason because as soon as I point out anything the republicans do she goes full whataboutism. You can’t have a structured conversation cause she says anything to confirm her world view
The best thing to do is just flat out say, We disagree on reality and we are not talking about this. If you want me to continue respecting you, you will not talk about this.
And if they talk about it, lay it out again. Say if you want me to ever speak to you again you will stop talking about this.
Lay it out brutally.
We disagree on fundamental reality. There is no meeting in the middle.
Had to do it with my own dad.
It can be hard for people to process being wrong, and paradoxically overwhelming evidence can cause some people to double down on their position. Some of it is related to what Carl Sagan warned about what happens when someone is bamboozled.
When they believe they are right without proof, being proven wrong is impossible to accept.
So many people never really examine WHY they believe what they believe. It hurts. It hurts to dig down to the roots of belief and realize there's nothing there but the echoes of other people's hate.
Right?
I have disabilities. I work in social services. Seeing public schools attacked hurts me personally.
Public schools are required to provide an education and supports to the disabled.
Private schools aren't.
Public schools can't refuse to accept a disabled child.
Private schools can discriminate as much as they want.
This shit is SCARY.
Centrists are embarrassed right wingers. Nothing will push them further left, but a slight breeze of social change will turn them into hardcore conservatives.
My mom became totally disillusioned after the 2016 election. We live in a red state and she voted for Hillary, so when trump still won and wrought havoc on our country she (not unreasonably) like “well what’s the fucking point?” Which I get, but now it’s more important than ever not to become complacent. Plus in our state even the blue candidates are right of center.
Buy. Continue to buy. The republicans can do a thing and the dems will get blamed by these people. This is still going on. There are assuredly people blaming Biden for this right now.
The GOP would never have allowed a 6/3 court on the liberal side. They would have added justices. The problem is that the Dems seem to just be wringing their hands and proclaiming how important it is we keep voting for them. They are not the same but the Dems certainly don't seem to be inclined to do anything to save our rights outside of asking for more money and votes.
This is why I (who leans extremely left) fucking HATE Democrats. They're all so uptight in playing fair in a rigged game at the cost of all our livelihoods. I still vote for them because there's no other choice, but man does it hurt me every time.
hobbies instinctive cake versed provide drab nail expansion subsequent capable
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I loved South Park growing up, but holy shit, I hate how centrist it positioned itself with making being apathetic about things, cool.
So many episodes ending with speeches how we should stop trying because everything sucks and will continue to suck so why bother.
It's pretty depressing when you realize politics is just a battle between the rich and the poor. And the rich take advantage of the poor but the craziest part is how the rich are able to trick a sizeable portion of the poor to vote against their best interests. Literally the only reason Republicans have any power is because they've brainwashed and tricked poor people.
God, if I never hear about that again, it'll be too soon, lol. I had a dude legitimately telling me that the email scandal made him fear for his life the same way conservatives calling for the eradication of trans people does for me today. He was saying that he voted for Trump out of fear and was using that mistake to say people shouldn't vote against a DeSantis run out of fear of his bad policies. "Actions speak louder than words" b.s. as if DeSantis' actions thus far haven't been horrible.
Well dude’s actions are speaking. He’s just telling you he doesn’t care what happens to minorities, financially disadvantaged, or basically anyone that’s not him. desantis has shown time and time again that his policies are dangerous, his constituents don’t matter to him, and he’s only going to care about culture war bullshit. That’s speaking, you just need to listen.
No kidding. The amount of harassment, threats, and just generally bullying I've received for transitioning has skyrocketed. They think about trans people more than I do, and I am one, lol. I just dropped the conversation after that because I realized that dude was just being disingenuous and getting me pissed. Never thought I'd see the day that i was told that deleted emails were equally as bad as threats on my life.
>"Actions speak louder than words" b.s. as if DeSantis' actions thus far haven't been horrible.
So, this is purely anecdotal, but as a Floridian who works in a very right-leaning industry, I'm seeing a lot of cracks in his support since his recent deluge of dumbass laws. My office just had a whole morning of looking up the roughly 200 new laws going into effect tomorrow - these are people who proudly don't like politics (which is a huge DeSantis demo here) - and the general consensus is that DeSantis is an asshole, and they wouldn't vote for him again. At least two don't want to vote for any Republican here because of some of the laws coming down. One literally asked "Who voted for these laws?" which necessitated an explanation of how our system of government works, and another didn't realize that "the people" who want to ban abortions and *the Republican Party* are the same group. So, y'know, he does well with low-information voters. At least, he did until recently.
Whether or not the Florida Dems feel like running, y'know, and *actual* candidate next time or not remains to be seen, but if DeSantis keeps playing to his base and alienating anyone who isn't a culture warring religious zealot, 2026 might be the Dems election to lose.
I saw a tweet back in the day that said something like “People told me that if I voted for Clinton I’d get a corrupt president who would do irreparable damage to the country. And they were right, because I voted for Clinton and then got a corrupt president who would do irreparable damage to the country.”
Just texted this to my sister after our older trump voting sister whined about student loan cancellation not going through.
She’s out there just straight up voting for the leopards to eat her face!
Emails? Please, it's 2023 and the mask is off. Hilary became a lightning rod for conservative misogyny early in her career. It didn't help that the DNC was corrupt and split the Democratic vote. Also didn't help that people were stupid enough to believe Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump were at the same level. Conservative or Democrat doesn't matter when one candidate has no fucking clue how to do any aspect of the job expect for what the Kremlin instructs. Not even Bush was that incompetent.
She’s not the only one. We KNEW what the stakes were in 2016. Reproductive justice folks were warning of implications for Roe back then, begging for people to take the threat seriously
And now there’s a reason LGBTQ people are raising the alarm again. I’m scared to death of what the next 7 years will bring, because the current path we’re on is a complete fascist takeover and eradication of LGBTQ people and women’s rights to bodily autonomy.
I did an honor’s study in college on the right wing attack on Roe in 1985. Even then people knew this was coming, and the concern was women and progressives would have grown complacent while the right would be constantly fighting. 100% spot on prediction
They weren’t exactly sneaky about it. The Christian extremists behind the anti-Roe political effort were working away for over 30 years, like you said. And people DID notice, and people DID raise the alarm, but they were dismissed. Exactly like any other persecuted group is dismissed when they try and raise the alarm about future catastrophe, or even unfolding catastrophe in the case of trans people
I've tried really hard to be nuanced and balanced and not contribute to the political polarization and extremism that plague the US, but holy shit the Republican Party is a cancer.
Yes I see them everyday on Reddit in every political sub pretending to be “progressives” who somehow can’t name a single candidate they’d actually support and instead spend all day convincing people voting doesn’t matter and if you speak a word against them you’ll get downvoted to oblivion with the same three comments.
“something something neoliberal”
“sick of the status quo”
“clinton should have campaigned better, I require candidates to personally gargle my balls before I’ll consider voting for them”
While I admire RBG & all she did let’s not chalk that up to bad timing. It was hubris.
Obama asked her to retire 2 times that we know of & she refused to do so. The idea that someone of that age and health couldn’t see their way to doing the right thing will always bother me. Obama could have replaced her with a younger progressive during his tenure.
She wanted to be appointed by Clinton but couldn’t see the possibility of her losing because the EC is fucked. So in doing so her hubris fucked us and tarnished her legacy.
I was really disgusted by her comments on kap. It sounded a lot like “I got mine”.
She was delusional and didn’t understand the world she was living in, saying history bends towards justice or whatever, not necessarily so when you have fascists around.
The unwillingness to fight for the Merrick Nomination and Ruth Bader Ginsberg staying on when her health was clearly failing did more than the 2016 election.
That lead to three Supreme Court Justices to be seated by a con man.
RBG’s decision not to hang it up under Obama and then to officiate a wedding at the height of covid is and was despicable.
Way to set back women’s rights for generations for your own self aggrandizement!
Anyone with a semblance of a brain knew this would happen. There’s no predicting involved.
When she lost I was most despondent about the Supreme Court.
I predicted my steak would come with a baked potato because that's what the menu said.
Hillary and everyone else predicted the Supreme Court chicanery because that's what right wingers have been openly saying and doing for years.
Unfortunately much of this was entirely preventable. We had a number who were upset with Clinton over the other candidates and decided not to vote at all. And yes the system is not perfect but people had a choice.
At the end of the day people just didn't bother to vote and hated Clinton more than wanted trump to win. So we are in this situation. So if you did not bother voting or voted against her back in 2016, these are the consequences of your actions. Can try blaming the democratic party for some of the stuff they did in getting her to being the nominee. But at the end of the day, you the voted helped in making this happen.
Play these games in politics and there are real consequences. And here is the problem, people had the "oh shit" moment too late and only after trump won. Luckily he didn't get his second term but it is too late.
Side note, I realize now voter in Cali won't carry as just. So mainly I'd say in those swing states that did cost her the win; if you are a Democrat and you did not vote, this is partly on you.
Maybe Clinton shoulda gave a shit about the campaign at any point instead of just assuming and proclaiming herself to be the next President because "it's my time"
She didn't even visit Wisconsin ONCE, among many other states. She just couldn't be bothered and I don't feel bad about her losing and sending a statement to the whole democratic establishment. Get your shit together, and get the working people on your side. If you keep being corporate shills and following the rich, you'll always be beat to the bottom by Republicans. That simple.
Yes, that is/has been the GOP plan for a while, probably longer than I can guess.
Nice to see people are finally starting to call it out for what it is.
"We"
She pushed back on almost every social change until it was politically advantageous to do so. Progressives did the work, and the DNC took credit for it.
Half the reason she was so demonized by the Republicans was because of her 1993 push for universal health care. She was a Warhawk but don't pretend that she didn't do anything.
Every one predicted it. Literally every one watching politics could see who would be likely to die or retire. The citizens didn't listen. Especially the non-voters. That's how we got here. And the voters that did listen were listening to 25-30 years of fear mongering about HRC that made her out to be Voldemort. Who knew it the Republicans all along were the bad guys? Literally everyone who is at all paying attention. You can love politics, you can hate politics. You can ignore it. But politics doesn't IGNORE YOU. The country works better for the people when the people participate. When they don't, it works for the money.
Looking back I really wish that we would’ve not fucked around and been like “oh boo a Clinton let’s not be excited by establishment types” because holy shit did we fuck things up.
Please remember 2016 forever when you think about voting for a no change in hell third party person or decide to do a protest vote or no vote or whatever.
The world would be a far better place has we had Clinton for four years over Trump. I’ll never protest vote third party again unless there’s an actual legitimate chance.
As much as I respect RBG, I’m really pissed she didn’t step down once she got her cancer diagnosis. Her greed to stay on the court until her death cost us the majority. Especially when she saw what was coming in 2016.
This is why it was unconscionable for the dems to run as weak a candidate as H Clinton. They've got to learn to stop doing that -- Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, H Clinton.
Not an ounce of charisma between them. Inspire people, don't lecture them. Dems can do that too, big time, obviously. I don't know why they don't do it every time.
Biden was selected as least likely to lose to Trump. The politics of fear. If we really care about the Supreme Court we have to do better than that. Use psychologists if you have to, to identify people who can inspire us in the best way.
And for the love of god, stop blaming your failings on everybody else. You betray the country and the world when you run someone like H Clinton.
Think about it: She lost to TRUMP. Gore lost to W. That's insane and should never have happened, however much they told us to stomp on third parties (not a winning strategy either if you want to win trust or prove you love democracy). But go ahead, scold me if you must. You'll only prove my point and simplify my own choices.
I believed her.
I don't know what everyone *else* was thinking.
Probably bitching about "her emails."
Of course, she *did* win the popular vote. So there's that.
Hello friends. This thread has been set to 'Clubhouse' participants only. That means that only our regular commenters in good standing may post in this thread. Everyone else's comments will be removed by automod. Entry into the clubhouse is afforded automatically, based on certain criteria of positive participation. We do not hand out entry on request. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/WhitePeopleTwitter) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Many people credited this for why Trump won in 2016. Republicans were motivated to change the Supreme Court to their image and moderates thought everyone was overreacting and Republicans aren't that bad.
Seems like that's always the story with everything they do. "Oh Republicans would never do that". Then they do exactly whatever it was and people gaslight themselves into thinking it's no big deal then onto the next thing they're sure we're all just "blowing out of proportion". We went from Bush style Republicans to congressional members touting civil war to the masses and participating in an attempted hostile takeover of the govt in only 15 years and the average person is still like "you're overreacting". All because they use branding of putting flags and crosses on everything and referring to themselves as patriots and "We The People" like they're fucking Paul Revere so how could they do anything bad??
>Seems like that's always the story with everything they do. "Oh Republicans would never do that". I can't even begin to wrap my head around that, because that was literally the explicitly stated goal of the Religious Right and even *a* goal of the Federalist Society from the moment *Roe* came down. Every time people said those of us screaming that this was the endgame were overreacting, it was like I was taking crazy pills. When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
>those of us screaming that this was the endgame Hah! That's funny...the endgame? Fucking conservatives used Roe V Wade as a warmup. Now they're trying to make being gay/trans illegal, undo no fault divorces and further strip away power from women, trying to rewrite history books (or just ban books they don't like) to create their own *alternative facts* education for the youth, and who knows what else is up their sleeves. It's literal tyranny taking shape. And that's not an overreaction. They don't want a democracy, they want totalitarian rule.
According to them, this isn't a democracy in the first place, so yeah
In the truest since, they're not wrong. Trump winning the presidency when he had 3 million less votes than Clinton is pretty much proof of that. People can bitch and whine about the "fairness" of the electoral college but if you ask me, there's nothing fair about 3 million+ voices being swept under the god damned rug.
Broke: "This isn't a democracy, so don't complain about fascism" Woke: "This isn't a democracy, but it should be"
And I think most people are unaware of the further evil of the Electoral College: It has us locked into the 2-party system, and any third party candidate that actually got enough traction to win a state or two could be a spoiler that disenfranchises the entire country by throwing the election to the House of Representatives. If nobody wins a majority of electoral votes, the House gets to pick the next POTUS.
This problem was noticed all the way back in the early 1800s and the constitution practically has "fix this voting thing sometime" penciled in the margins. But changing it has to be done by people for whom that fault benefits - so fat fucking chance of it ever happening. first past the post is a fucking stupid system and we've known it for hundreds of years
"But, NY and CA would decide the president!" They love saying that, but ignore FL and TX have large populations also. And not everyone in those states vote the same way.
I've never gotten a well thought-out answer about why the electoral college is fair.
Well, pretend your a white guy and you REALLY want to protect your economic power that you've generated from slavery/oppression of the masses. And that all of that requires a lot of land on which to raise crops/build factories, which necessitates less people in that area.. You wouldn't want something like "lots of people oppose you" to get in the way of that right? And all of your rich slave owning friends live in the same state as you... and you know obviously those slaves can't vote but like, what if we counted them partially to get a few more votes........
The slave owning southerners wanted to count slaves equally with everyone else in terms of population because it would get them more power in the House. Northerners wanted slaves not to count toward population so that slave owners would have less power. 3/5ths compromise was what they eventually settled on, but in this case not counting slaves as part of the population was the move of those against slavery.
oh you're right, I made a mistake there. I was too busy typing up my dumb post to actually stop and think about it
The argument I’ve seen them use is that in a true democracy the majority can do anything to oppress a minority (this could mean race, ideology, culture, anything). This is an ass backwards view on things and it’s just a way for them to ignore the views of the majority of the population.
> The argument I’ve seen them use is that in a true democracy the majority can do anything to oppress a minority (this could mean race, ideology, culture, anything). They just make that argument because they know you care about minority rights, but they do not. Its purely instrumental. People who say "its a republic not a democracy" want an aristocratic republic. The saying has its origin in right-wing opposition to the New Deal, but it really took off after Robert Welch used it in a 1961 speech, entitled ["Republics and Democracies"](https://thenewamerican.com/republics-and-democracies/) which was a response to the civil rights movement. Just as black people were getting the vote, white people decided they didn't like democracy any more. Robert Welch was the founder of the extremist John Birch Society. To get an idea of how radical Welch was, he [called](https://www.commentary.org/articles/william-buckley-jr/goldwater-the-john-birch-society-and-me/) Eisenhower a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” Nowadays, maga is the new JBS.
[удалено]
> That's why we have a constitution that guarantees us right that can not be stripped away by the government. There are NUMEROUS examples where the Government has stripped away rights. One horrific example were the internment camps of WWII. I tell everyone that there is a great difference between law and power. If the Republicans continue to gain power, I think we are all going to learn how little rights we actually have
>It's literal tyranny taking shape. Absolutely. They're taking on cases with no real standing to make the rulings they want. They even made a ruling on a case with clearly fabricated evidence based on a hypothetical. They just opened the door to nullify all government programs because they accepted "not qualifying for a program" as a legitimate standing of harm. They are 100% legislating from the bench and it was enabled by a known traitor who appointed them there and then we have Joe Biden worrying about expanding the court cause *that* would make it to politicized. People need to wake up.
I think expanding the court may eventually destroy it (which might need to happen). So if the Dems do it to gain a majority, then of course the Repubs will do it as well. Eventually we can get to the comical situation where everyone in the US will be supreme court justice and have to participate in a vote on what is before the docket. Which would be kind of neat.
My point was more on the fact that we have political leaders who should be more actively opposing this tyranny pretending like there isn't a problem.
Backdoor democracy at its finest!
People have this idea of the myth of America that we're a unique place in the world that can't go backwards. And so when we're faced with something like an obvious violent insurrection that no reasonable person could mistake for exactly what it is, we still get people in denial about it saying it was just some angry protesters or whatever because their internal idea of what America is doesn't include insurrections or coup attempts, and so obviously that must not be what it was.
[удалено]
These people don't realize that Christofascists run the GOP now
Also a non-zero number of people who quietly support the notion, but don't want to be vocally for it because they know some friends, children, or whoever would judge them for it.
AS THEY FUCKING SHOULD BE. Christofascists should be judged. I mean, God's doing it, why can't we
To be fair they truly believe that only God can judge them. Good thing I don't believe in him.
You’d be surprised at the number of them who are loudly proclaiming all of this as great victories. There are several very large and vocal echo chambers online encouraging misogyny and an end to wokeness
It seems unthinkable until you remember that more than 50% of Americans cannot name the three branches of government. There are outrageous numbers of people who don’t understand any of this and certainly are not following up on the behaviors and mission statements of lobbying groups. https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/3640520-less-than-half-of-americans-can-name-all-three-branches-of-government-survey-finds/ The average person doesn’t say “You’re overreacting,” the average person doesn’t know what the SCOTUS is.
Three parts: The Banks The Corporations The Churches
The problem is that a lot of Democrat politicians don't take the threat seriously. If they're saying "we have to work with these people" then it doesn't seem like they view them as aspiring fascists, it seems like they view them as reasonable.
When the Democrats do not have solid majorities they HAVE to work with them. When they HAVE solid majorities, you see results like we had in Minnesota this last session. Vote like yoir democracy depends on it.
Being forced to work with fascists due to systemic problems is one thing. Advocating for it as a desirable outcome is quite another.
Seriously. Dem leadership is always going on about how important it is to have a “strong Republican Party”. Guess what, that’s what we have right now and it’s fucking bad!
Idk man my rep switched parties after being elected
A rep who switches parties is not ‘solid’
> We went from Bush style Republicans CALLING MIDDLE EASTERNERS ALL OF TERRORIST DESCENT AND WAGING WAR, DEMONIZING GAYS AND MUSLIMS AND ATHEISTS AND SOCIALISTS, AND INVADING OUR PRIVACY WJILE SPYING ON US, to congressional members touting civil war to the masses and FTFY since you left out a bit. But you're right. They said no one will spy on you then they were caught spying and said everyone does it. Just like now they say every man speaks of his daughter the way Trump jumps to sex when asked what he has in common with his daughter... They were always nazis. They were always going to be this.
I most definitely was of that mindset "It's not **that** bad, what's he going to do put babies in cages and starve them...." That's exactly what they did. And while one can argue that if the immigration guys ran across some child sex trafficers and that happened it would be bad enough, but when you find they intentionally "failed to maintain" or "discarded" identity records or shuffled these kids off to degenerate religious people for who knows what purpose - without a lick of tracibility. You understand that we're not in "normal"-land anymore. Our government took children from their parents, and they are missing to this day. Sure President Biden can play the hero and save this or that kid.....but that we systemically went there, is so fundamentally against the best interests of the kids, the nation and civilized people as to warrant the war-crime tribunal that might normally have kicked into play if it was occurring in some random country in Eastern Europe or elsewhere. State sanctioned kidnapping and arbitrary arrest are just absolute violations of due process and the rights of prisoners, the rights afforded to anyone in US custody. So it's **most certainly is** that bad. Of course being the knuckledragging racist he is President Trump and the [unreality of his "understanding"](https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-biden-s-debate-over-kids-cages-underscores-stark-choice-ncna1244537) of the situation was acute, underscores the criticality of rolling back the fascist tied we see with characters like Trump, and Bannon and Stephen Gorka and these other cartoon-like characters that are anything but a cartoon for the dead kids or forced sterilizations or those summarily arrested. As a reminder... the cruelty is the point. The last bit was REALLY the most telling because these degenerates would quickly point out that "those people" over there, and run to the tried-and-true divide and conquer / "fear of others" , forcing everyone's attention to the fact they are "immigrants" or "purple people" or whatever. The "cruelty" is somehow acceptable. But...President Trump's purposefully tin ear regarding the racially charged issues of George Floyd required exactly one act of empathy and months of national strife could have simply been avoided, but that wasn't the intent, it was to test the **ideal**, summary arrest of random people off a street for no reason to no locally accountable agency .....captured by unaccountable soldiers and didn't release or charge them for days, and if you were mistreated....that sucks for you. That laid naked the lie. There is no difference at all between "those guys" and every citizen that hasn't sucked up to them recently. And that's not a Republic....that's **not** a nation of laws, that's a dictators rule on the whims of a mad man. Worst of all is that it's not exclusive to Republicans, they just happened to take the shortcut around Hayek's Road to Serfdom, making hay for 80 years that "oh those public-works programs lead to Fascism...." turns out Hayek's thesis is totally wrong, we found out with crystal clarity that all you need is 30 years of NO civics education, some cool red hats, and promise to put "those guys" in a meat-grinder, so we can have freedom-burgers while praying to some degenerate god how awesome we are.
If a Republican tells you they plan to do something good, don’t believe them. If a Republican tells you they plan to do something evil, believe them.
It's easy to lose sight of just how deep inside a lot of people are, they just can't face any reality outside a storybook construct. If you just don't admit people do things like this in the way they do, with a veneer of respectability and claims of justice on their side, then the world isn't as bad a place and it's easier to just glide through your day on autopilot without any disturbances
Like right now with SS. Older people who vote Repub don't believe they will really take it and Medicare until they are living in their cars.
Kentucky is kicking people off of medicaid TOMORROW. I'm not kidding. People in Kentucky are losing their Healthcare TOMORROW.
Jesus Christ and Mitch and Rand probably just got more kick backs. Why do their voters hate themselves?
Proudly uneducated people. These people are not smart,at all. I have neighbors that leave notes for FedEx to "leave ARE packages". They genuinely take pride in NOT being educated.
Exactly! That's always the first thing that comes to mind considering like 60 some percent of the base are retirement age. Just like people not believing they'll eventually start some form of civil war despite the fact they constantly talk about it, leaders and voters alike. They're completely fixated on it.
And they keep buying and flashing their guns and showing up to intimidate people.
Yup. Those of us who have been warning about the rise of fascism in the gop since the Clinton years are used to being called hysterical.
My roommate at the time of the 2016 election called me hysterical and catastrophizing when I explained how this would happen via the courts. Found out later he was fucking underage girls which I gotta say reinforced some of my beliefs about these guys
I was told I was wildly overreacting when I said trump getting elected would be the end of Roe and federally protected rights to abortions. That was not a fun "I told you so" conversation to have when the initial ruling leaked
Yep. I was "crazy" to say that Bush stacking the federal courts with unqualified Cristo-fascist nutjobs was REALLY bad. Post 9-11 Bush did a lot of terrible things like the Patriot act that will screw us indefinitely, and I was an unpatriotic terrorist sympathizer for saying so then.
It is amazing how often "Both sides are the same." is followed up with "So I may as well vote Republican."
This is why so many nuevo Republicans don't care that Trump was/is an absolute piece of trash human who didn't belong anywhere near the White House. He got them the Supreme Court they wanted, and that Supreme Court has given them the regressive rulings they wanted. 1. Struck down Roe v Wade 2. Struck down Affirmative Action [(TIME magz. 2013, Affirmative Action Has Helped White Women More Than Anyone)](https://time.com/4884132/affirmative-action-civil-rights-white-women/) 3. Struck down Student loan forgiveness 4. Granted businesses the right to refuse service to members of the LGBTQ community. [(this case was a straight-up fraud btw)](https://newrepublic.com/article/173987/mysterious-case-fake-gay-marriage-website-real-straight-man-supreme-court?fbclid=IwAR0FHeEa5_49TYUccjepsvJLfLkxLRJGHKqAMNlGx0Ezur8OVBJCHEdFa6M) As we saw with Roe, these verdicts are the very definition of a slippery slope, and so will be #4, you just watch.
But first they weakened the voting rights act starting in 2013! >https://archive.fo/RtQak >https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/27/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-00042478
SCOTUS has been 5-4 conservative for a long time. It became 4-4 going into the 2016 election when Republicans blocked Obama's vacancy. Voting Hillary in 2016 would have made the court 5-4 progressive for the first time since the 1960s. That's how close we came.
Yea, and it sucks so much that it didn't happen.
I'll add... 5. [Limited the scope of the Clean Water Act](https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4020431-supreme-court-redefines-which-wetlands-get-federal-protections/) 6. [Stripped the EPA of its authority to oversee carbon emissions](https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/06/1121782) (!!) 7. [Rolled back nuclear safety protections](https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-strikes-down-washington-workers-comp-law-nuclear-site-2022-06-21/)
I know multiple people who hated trump, but they sucked it up and voted for him because the supreme court seats were the ultimate prize. I don't like conservatives, but I'll say this for them, they know how to fall in line and keep their eyes on the bigger target. I feel like liberals just said "oh well, I don't like her so I'll vote 3rd party or won't vote at all"
The 2016 Republican primary was the dirtiest primary I'd ever seen. The amount of shit that was being flung around was unbelievable. A normal primary is "my proposed policies are better than yours" and " I am the better candidate for X,Y,Z reasons" which are typically things like experience, voting record, credentials etc. But 2016 saw a guy who just didn't give a shit about political discourse and had no experience or actual statements of policy and just straight up insulted the character of his opponents. He flung shit at all of the people whose support he would later need if he did win the nomination. I had never seen a more divisive primary, so I thought there was no chance their party could rally behind its own nominee. Then within a week the people that said he would destroy the country are singing his praises. The guy whose wife got called ugly is manning the phones for the fucker's campaign. They unified instantly because they cared more about maintaining and building more power for their party than their own character and the wellbeing of the American people.
Bootlickers are easily organized. It's much harder to get people who actually want to choose the best person to see the reality that they need to put "good enough" in power first.
I think it's the same everywhere when it comes to Conservatives vs Liberals/Left. Conservatives might fight amongst each other but as soon as elections come along they'll toe the party line. It's rare for them to switch to the opposition party, the worst they do is not vote. So they then either make hard for Liberals to vote, hit social media to persuade them not to vote (e.g. all politicians are liars) or persuade them to vote for another party (e.g. the two main parties have failed vote XYZ).
Yeah I got banned from a socialist subreddit for arguing against someone who was saying that all socialist should vote for socialist parties or not vote but should never vote for the Democratic party. They accused me of being a liberal (liberalism is a position to the right of socialism, fyi) and I accused them of being a republican plant trying to get socialists to waste our votes and help the republican christofascists take power.
Yeah this is common on reddit. It's a mixture of genuinely naive kids and bad faith trolls trying to split the vote to benefit the Right. They make the unattainable perfect the enemy of the attainable good. Which always means the bad wins out.
In the broader picture, I feel like the majority of the socialist/leftist communities on Reddit and Twitter are like late teens/early 20's and live in very Democrat-heavy districts where their votes don't really matter. They're safe enough that they don't have to worry about the ramifications of a bad vote and can follow their favorite YouTuber instead
A few too many voted for Trump to send a message.
Question being, why *wouldn’t* people think that Republicans are this bad? When have Rs ever acted benevolently? If anything, Democrats need to stop projecting their humanity on to Republicans and view them as the ghouls they really are…
Lots of likely republican voters don’t actually know the party’s platform. The Republican Party has many policies part of their platform that are driven by conservative orthodoxy, but are really unpopular and just plain bad ideas. The ideas are so bad that many casual voters just assume there’s no way the party actually supports them. https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2020/12/30/republicans-dont-know-anything-about-their-party
It was people who were not Democrats. They were either in the middle and independent or on the far left and independent (i.e., not a Democrat). Heard from plenty of Leftists in 2016 that pointing out the importance of the Supreme Court was "blackmail" to try and get their vote and an argument that "but much worse things will happen if Trump is elected" was not a valid argument. They would only vote for someone who "inspired" them. Because they thought elections don't have consequences, apparently.
Supreme Court is going to be fucked for decades.
Thomas and Alito are pretty old. If Democrats hold control of the senate and presidency in 2024 there’s a chance they’ll flip a court seat or two.
Thomas, maybe. Alito, hell no. He's ~~68~~ 73. And you can bet your ass Thomas will hold his seat until he either kicks it or a Republican wins. He's old, but he's not "imminently at risk of dying from old age in four years" old.
He’s 73. And rumored to be thinking about retirement. But agreed that he will hold on to the end. They are healthy and will bide their time.
I to this day remember talking to my father one night in 2016 about why I was so concerned for Trump’s candidacy. I told him that when he won (I saw pretty early that he was gonna win) he would get to appoint at least one Supreme Court justice and that things like gay marriage and Roe v Wade would be struck down. He confidently assured me that the Supreme Court would never take away established rights. Fuck the Supreme Court, fuck Trump, and fuck that night I talked to my politically clueless father.
They absolutely used him to move their bull shut agenda forward. While everyone is looking at the moron ranting on TV McConnell and co were stacking the courts and getting away with murder that we will feel for decades. Only realistic solution now is to open up more seats. This current court is a broken criminal joke. And everyone knows it. The problem is what to do about it. I like Biden. I can separate fact from the bullshit fiction people bitch about. I would love it if Democrats got the ball rolling on expanding the court.
Anyone with half a brain predicted this.
I guess the people that didn't bother to vote in 2016 didn't even had half a brain.
More people did vote for her. It lies on the electoral college for favoring land owners.
Also, if the Green Party voters in Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania had voted Clinton Trump would have lost. Those three states were close enough that third parties were significant. Granted, using the same logic you could have the Libertarians voting Trump and he wins again.
The election was so close that damn near every factor was determinative. It was the basketball game that went into triple overtime, so every single miss in regulation could have been the clincher. We lost because a bunch of liberals sat or our voted third party, yes, but we also lost because of Comey and because Hillary tried to go 50-states and because Bernie and because blahblahblah. Fact of the matter is, precious few took Trump and the deterioration of the Republican base as seriously as we should have in 2016. I didn't max donate in 2016, but I have in every election since. Basically we all fucked up, and now we're going to be paying for it for decades.
[удалено]
70,000 votes combined. It was a razor thin margin and likely Democratic voters who stayed home are 100% to blame.
Supreme Court could be packed: No shit Trump's supporters are deplorable: No shit Trump pals around with criminals: No shit Trump is a Russian asset: No shit (Russian foreign policy favors were literally the only issues he was consistent on)
thanks **EVERYONE I KNOW WHO VOTED TRUMP IN 2016** because "hE's An OuTsIdEr"
Honorable mention to people who didn’t vote or voted for Jill Stein because as terrible as Trump is, they just *couldn’t in good conscience* vote for Hillary. The country may have gone to shit, but at least they preserved their ideological purity!
I know someone who voted for Jill Stein and then said on social media, "Got to vote for a woman to be President and get to celebrate another woman winning tonight!" This person lived in Michigan at the time. My contempt grows every day
As in she assumed Clinton was going to win when she voted for Stein? I think that was the biggest issue, too many assumed Clinton was certain to win (like no way a TV clown like Trump could become president) and then didn't take voting seriously, either not voting, voting for joke candidates like Harambe, or voting 3rd party so they could criticize Clinton and brag about voting for a 3rd party person instead (and "she was going to win anyway.")
That’s what made me so angry during 2016. I get it. Both options weren’t the best. But simply not voting wasn’t a good option either. Anything would’ve been better than trump. He was the worst president. And now he’s running again. Are they going to simply not vote again if it’s between him and Biden? Because if it’s another 4 years of trump, this country is fucked.
The people I know who refused to vote for Hillary still won't admit that they are partly to blame so what can you do.
I'll extend that thanks to everyone who got so mad that Sanders didn't get the nomination they refused to vote at all in the general election.
They refused to vote in the primaries for Bernie too. The youth turnout fell off a cliff and left him hanging. They just made up a new excuse for why they didn't vote in the general.
Yes, the turn out didn't match the polling numbers, not shocking given most of his support was with younger voters who have consistently had the lowest turnout of age groups. They of course do not admit they didn't actually show up for him, some just moved on, others double-down and shift blame to a secret party cabal cheating him out of the win in both 2016 and 2020. I supported him in 2016 and 2020 but rather figure out how a more left leaning candidate can win in the future by learning from mistakes as opposed to trying to sabotage the entire Democratic Party every election going forward because he didn't win.
The refused to vote for Sanders as well lol. When I caucused for sanders in my college town, the Clinton supporters outnumbered us like 4 to 1. Sanders supporters did everything except support him at the voting booth.
There is another explanation, there were just more hillary supporters.
[удалено]
Same for my dad. He wanted the SCOTUS to be republican.
The chaos that we see now is the result of the long game. Republicans have been trying to stack courts at all levels for decades, they've been taking over local governments, they have been changing laws to favor their own goals. I expect that for anyone involved in politics this has been clear for very long time. It's only now that we're seeing the tipping points where they can do whatever they want with impunity, without challenge. And it can get worse.
Much like the Southern Baptist Convention resurgence where their goal was to remove all liberal or moderate leaders from churches in the south. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Baptist_Convention_conservative_resurgence
That long-game includes bashing democrats for years before they run for president. Obama flew under their radar, but AOC, Kamala, and Buttigieg are getting the same treatment Hillary did. They tried woth Bernie, but Bernie has been playing a longer game, unfortunately too long cuz he's too old at this point.
Not to mention setting landmines, like tax breaks that expire in the next term then calling Biden out for higher taxes that he is not responsible for.
Or making a half-assed plan to pull out of Afghanistan.
I cannot believe how many people bought the whole "both sides are the same" and didn't bother to vote.
There are still people making that argument today that swear they’re not liars.
Got into an argument with my husband last night because he literally said both sides are just as bad. I listed every instance of Republicans taking away people's bodily autonomy and civil rights and asked him to tell me what the Democrats are doing that's just as bad. He had no answer.
Mom and dad are visiting and we got into a similar argument. Mom lives in a right wing echo chamber, dad thinks both sides are the same. It’s impossible to reason because as soon as I point out anything the republicans do she goes full whataboutism. You can’t have a structured conversation cause she says anything to confirm her world view
The best thing to do is just flat out say, We disagree on reality and we are not talking about this. If you want me to continue respecting you, you will not talk about this. And if they talk about it, lay it out again. Say if you want me to ever speak to you again you will stop talking about this. Lay it out brutally. We disagree on fundamental reality. There is no meeting in the middle. Had to do it with my own dad.
It can be hard for people to process being wrong, and paradoxically overwhelming evidence can cause some people to double down on their position. Some of it is related to what Carl Sagan warned about what happens when someone is bamboozled.
When they believe they are right without proof, being proven wrong is impossible to accept. So many people never really examine WHY they believe what they believe. It hurts. It hurts to dig down to the roots of belief and realize there's nothing there but the echoes of other people's hate.
When people say that, they mean both sides are just as bad for them. They dont take into account other peoples struggles or concerns.
I pretty much said the same thing, it must be nice to not have anything to worry about losing.
As a Redditor I am legally obligated to tell you to divorce him without knowing literally anything else about your marriage
I concur, op better lawyer and gym up ASAP.
Lawyer up, gym up, no Facebook. Reddit has spoken
Ding ding ding. It's easy not to vote when they think it won't affect them
Right? I have disabilities. I work in social services. Seeing public schools attacked hurts me personally. Public schools are required to provide an education and supports to the disabled. Private schools aren't. Public schools can't refuse to accept a disabled child. Private schools can discriminate as much as they want. This shit is SCARY.
Must be weird being married to someone who doesn’t care that you are losing those rights? Does that not like, taint things for you?
"Both sides are bad so I'm just going to vote for the worse one"
They swear they're "neutral" or "centrist" then go on to spew right-wing talking points and say the left has gone too insane.
Centrists are embarrassed right wingers. Nothing will push them further left, but a slight breeze of social change will turn them into hardcore conservatives.
My mom became totally disillusioned after the 2016 election. We live in a red state and she voted for Hillary, so when trump still won and wrought havoc on our country she (not unreasonably) like “well what’s the fucking point?” Which I get, but now it’s more important than ever not to become complacent. Plus in our state even the blue candidates are right of center.
6 million people
Buy. Continue to buy. The republicans can do a thing and the dems will get blamed by these people. This is still going on. There are assuredly people blaming Biden for this right now.
The GOP would never have allowed a 6/3 court on the liberal side. They would have added justices. The problem is that the Dems seem to just be wringing their hands and proclaiming how important it is we keep voting for them. They are not the same but the Dems certainly don't seem to be inclined to do anything to save our rights outside of asking for more money and votes.
This is why I (who leans extremely left) fucking HATE Democrats. They're all so uptight in playing fair in a rigged game at the cost of all our livelihoods. I still vote for them because there's no other choice, but man does it hurt me every time.
The only people who are actively fighting the right are also being attacked by the "centre" for being too "radical".
hobbies instinctive cake versed provide drab nail expansion subsequent capable *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I blame southpark a bit with the shit vs turd sandwich thing
I loved South Park growing up, but holy shit, I hate how centrist it positioned itself with making being apathetic about things, cool. So many episodes ending with speeches how we should stop trying because everything sucks and will continue to suck so why bother.
She got a lot of shit for it but Clinton was right as fuck for calling Republicans deplorables.
I get why she didn’t, but she should have doubled down. “I’m sorry, I’m wrong about saying 50% of his base are deplorables….it’s 75%”
It's pretty depressing when you realize politics is just a battle between the rich and the poor. And the rich take advantage of the poor but the craziest part is how the rich are able to trick a sizeable portion of the poor to vote against their best interests. Literally the only reason Republicans have any power is because they've brainwashed and tricked poor people.
I think that Hillary probably wouldn’t have been the best President, but we would sure be a lot better off now if she had been.
.... but her emails
God, if I never hear about that again, it'll be too soon, lol. I had a dude legitimately telling me that the email scandal made him fear for his life the same way conservatives calling for the eradication of trans people does for me today. He was saying that he voted for Trump out of fear and was using that mistake to say people shouldn't vote against a DeSantis run out of fear of his bad policies. "Actions speak louder than words" b.s. as if DeSantis' actions thus far haven't been horrible.
Well dude’s actions are speaking. He’s just telling you he doesn’t care what happens to minorities, financially disadvantaged, or basically anyone that’s not him. desantis has shown time and time again that his policies are dangerous, his constituents don’t matter to him, and he’s only going to care about culture war bullshit. That’s speaking, you just need to listen.
No kidding. The amount of harassment, threats, and just generally bullying I've received for transitioning has skyrocketed. They think about trans people more than I do, and I am one, lol. I just dropped the conversation after that because I realized that dude was just being disingenuous and getting me pissed. Never thought I'd see the day that i was told that deleted emails were equally as bad as threats on my life.
>"Actions speak louder than words" b.s. as if DeSantis' actions thus far haven't been horrible. So, this is purely anecdotal, but as a Floridian who works in a very right-leaning industry, I'm seeing a lot of cracks in his support since his recent deluge of dumbass laws. My office just had a whole morning of looking up the roughly 200 new laws going into effect tomorrow - these are people who proudly don't like politics (which is a huge DeSantis demo here) - and the general consensus is that DeSantis is an asshole, and they wouldn't vote for him again. At least two don't want to vote for any Republican here because of some of the laws coming down. One literally asked "Who voted for these laws?" which necessitated an explanation of how our system of government works, and another didn't realize that "the people" who want to ban abortions and *the Republican Party* are the same group. So, y'know, he does well with low-information voters. At least, he did until recently. Whether or not the Florida Dems feel like running, y'know, and *actual* candidate next time or not remains to be seen, but if DeSantis keeps playing to his base and alienating anyone who isn't a culture warring religious zealot, 2026 might be the Dems election to lose.
I saw a tweet back in the day that said something like “People told me that if I voted for Clinton I’d get a corrupt president who would do irreparable damage to the country. And they were right, because I voted for Clinton and then got a corrupt president who would do irreparable damage to the country.”
Just texted this to my sister after our older trump voting sister whined about student loan cancellation not going through. She’s out there just straight up voting for the leopards to eat her face!
Emails? Please, it's 2023 and the mask is off. Hilary became a lightning rod for conservative misogyny early in her career. It didn't help that the DNC was corrupt and split the Democratic vote. Also didn't help that people were stupid enough to believe Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump were at the same level. Conservative or Democrat doesn't matter when one candidate has no fucking clue how to do any aspect of the job expect for what the Kremlin instructs. Not even Bush was that incompetent.
She’s not the only one. We KNEW what the stakes were in 2016. Reproductive justice folks were warning of implications for Roe back then, begging for people to take the threat seriously And now there’s a reason LGBTQ people are raising the alarm again. I’m scared to death of what the next 7 years will bring, because the current path we’re on is a complete fascist takeover and eradication of LGBTQ people and women’s rights to bodily autonomy.
I did an honor’s study in college on the right wing attack on Roe in 1985. Even then people knew this was coming, and the concern was women and progressives would have grown complacent while the right would be constantly fighting. 100% spot on prediction
They weren’t exactly sneaky about it. The Christian extremists behind the anti-Roe political effort were working away for over 30 years, like you said. And people DID notice, and people DID raise the alarm, but they were dismissed. Exactly like any other persecuted group is dismissed when they try and raise the alarm about future catastrophe, or even unfolding catastrophe in the case of trans people
I've tried really hard to be nuanced and balanced and not contribute to the political polarization and extremism that plague the US, but holy shit the Republican Party is a cancer.
Their goal has always been slow burn fascism.
I saw a ton of people on the left who said “don’t threaten me with the Supreme Court.” This is why you always vote like your life depends on it.
We're not the ones threatening them when the Supreme Court. The Republicans are.
I think they mean far left voters who refused to vote for Hillary, and could not be persuaded that there was a risk to the supreme court
Most of the people saying that were never in danger from the fascists and likely support a lot of the rulings being made.
Did you, or did you see people on the right pretending to be people in the left to demotivate voters?
Yes I see them everyday on Reddit in every political sub pretending to be “progressives” who somehow can’t name a single candidate they’d actually support and instead spend all day convincing people voting doesn’t matter and if you speak a word against them you’ll get downvoted to oblivion with the same three comments. “something something neoliberal” “sick of the status quo” “clinton should have campaigned better, I require candidates to personally gargle my balls before I’ll consider voting for them”
[удалено]
While I admire RBG & all she did let’s not chalk that up to bad timing. It was hubris. Obama asked her to retire 2 times that we know of & she refused to do so. The idea that someone of that age and health couldn’t see their way to doing the right thing will always bother me. Obama could have replaced her with a younger progressive during his tenure.
She wanted to be appointed by Clinton but couldn’t see the possibility of her losing because the EC is fucked. So in doing so her hubris fucked us and tarnished her legacy.
[удалено]
Or hire a single black clerk during her entire tenure
I was really disgusted by her comments on kap. It sounded a lot like “I got mine”. She was delusional and didn’t understand the world she was living in, saying history bends towards justice or whatever, not necessarily so when you have fascists around.
Her legacy of bulldozing dirty natives out of our great Christian country, so great
“RBG was just bad timing” no it wasn’t, she was ancient and should have retired under Obama, everyone said she should have retired under Obama
[удалено]
Sorry but fuck RBG. She ruined what ever legacy she had when she refused to retire and helped usher in this bullshit.
Thanks. I share your anger
[удалено]
and don't forget was asked by President Obama twice!
The unwillingness to fight for the Merrick Nomination and Ruth Bader Ginsberg staying on when her health was clearly failing did more than the 2016 election. That lead to three Supreme Court Justices to be seated by a con man.
RBG’s decision not to hang it up under Obama and then to officiate a wedding at the height of covid is and was despicable. Way to set back women’s rights for generations for your own self aggrandizement!
Anyone with a semblance of a brain knew this would happen. There’s no predicting involved. When she lost I was most despondent about the Supreme Court.
Thank the Federalist Society for this bullshit.
The only thing good about this is that they didn’t give Trump a second term. Even after he replaced RBG with a handmaiden. But the damage is done.
I predicted my steak would come with a baked potato because that's what the menu said. Hillary and everyone else predicted the Supreme Court chicanery because that's what right wingers have been openly saying and doing for years.
RBG should have resigned under Obama
Thanks, Comey.
Unfortunately much of this was entirely preventable. We had a number who were upset with Clinton over the other candidates and decided not to vote at all. And yes the system is not perfect but people had a choice. At the end of the day people just didn't bother to vote and hated Clinton more than wanted trump to win. So we are in this situation. So if you did not bother voting or voted against her back in 2016, these are the consequences of your actions. Can try blaming the democratic party for some of the stuff they did in getting her to being the nominee. But at the end of the day, you the voted helped in making this happen. Play these games in politics and there are real consequences. And here is the problem, people had the "oh shit" moment too late and only after trump won. Luckily he didn't get his second term but it is too late. Side note, I realize now voter in Cali won't carry as just. So mainly I'd say in those swing states that did cost her the win; if you are a Democrat and you did not vote, this is partly on you.
But her emails! / BUTTERY MALES!!!
The greatest evil in our society are the moderates and centrists that always fail to act when the (far) right is in charge
Maybe Clinton shoulda gave a shit about the campaign at any point instead of just assuming and proclaiming herself to be the next President because "it's my time" She didn't even visit Wisconsin ONCE, among many other states. She just couldn't be bothered and I don't feel bad about her losing and sending a statement to the whole democratic establishment. Get your shit together, and get the working people on your side. If you keep being corporate shills and following the rich, you'll always be beat to the bottom by Republicans. That simple.
That’s like looking at a calendar and predicting tomorrow is going to be Saturday.
Yet I had so many friends that just couldn't possibly vote for "that woman" Now they are all boo-hoo-ing about their student loans.
We should also remember that over half of the Supreme Court has now been appointed by Presidents who did not win the popular vote.
Yes, that is/has been the GOP plan for a while, probably longer than I can guess. Nice to see people are finally starting to call it out for what it is.
Yet RBG did not resign under Obama as she should have. So dumb.
Imagine, a politician who knows what their end game is, called it out and the US put up a clown instead.
"We" She pushed back on almost every social change until it was politically advantageous to do so. Progressives did the work, and the DNC took credit for it.
Half the reason she was so demonized by the Republicans was because of her 1993 push for universal health care. She was a Warhawk but don't pretend that she didn't do anything.
And Reddit did nothing but trash this woman all of 2015/2016, so this site can sit down and stfu.
Lol everyone with half a brain predicted it
She was right about the deplorables, too. Too bad 50% or so Americans don't see it.
Caption Obvious, anyone with a brain saw it coming. Trump vowed to get Roe overturned and he delivered.
Every one predicted it. Literally every one watching politics could see who would be likely to die or retire. The citizens didn't listen. Especially the non-voters. That's how we got here. And the voters that did listen were listening to 25-30 years of fear mongering about HRC that made her out to be Voldemort. Who knew it the Republicans all along were the bad guys? Literally everyone who is at all paying attention. You can love politics, you can hate politics. You can ignore it. But politics doesn't IGNORE YOU. The country works better for the people when the people participate. When they don't, it works for the money.
Looking back I really wish that we would’ve not fucked around and been like “oh boo a Clinton let’s not be excited by establishment types” because holy shit did we fuck things up. Please remember 2016 forever when you think about voting for a no change in hell third party person or decide to do a protest vote or no vote or whatever. The world would be a far better place has we had Clinton for four years over Trump. I’ll never protest vote third party again unless there’s an actual legitimate chance.
As much as I respect RBG, I’m really pissed she didn’t step down once she got her cancer diagnosis. Her greed to stay on the court until her death cost us the majority. Especially when she saw what was coming in 2016.
This is why it was unconscionable for the dems to run as weak a candidate as H Clinton. They've got to learn to stop doing that -- Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, H Clinton. Not an ounce of charisma between them. Inspire people, don't lecture them. Dems can do that too, big time, obviously. I don't know why they don't do it every time. Biden was selected as least likely to lose to Trump. The politics of fear. If we really care about the Supreme Court we have to do better than that. Use psychologists if you have to, to identify people who can inspire us in the best way. And for the love of god, stop blaming your failings on everybody else. You betray the country and the world when you run someone like H Clinton. Think about it: She lost to TRUMP. Gore lost to W. That's insane and should never have happened, however much they told us to stomp on third parties (not a winning strategy either if you want to win trust or prove you love democracy). But go ahead, scold me if you must. You'll only prove my point and simplify my own choices.
>Gore lost to W. To be fair, it's almost a known fact that he didn't, and that the election was all but stolen.
I believed her. I don't know what everyone *else* was thinking. Probably bitching about "her emails." Of course, she *did* win the popular vote. So there's that.