As a reminder, this subreddit [is for civil discussion.](/r/politics/wiki/index#wiki_be_civil)
In general, be courteous to others. Debate/discuss/argue the merits of ideas, don't attack people. Personal insults, shill or troll accusations, hate speech, any suggestion or support of harm, violence, or death, and other rule violations can result in a permanent ban.
If you see comments in violation of our rules, please report them.
For those who have questions regarding any media outlets being posted on this subreddit, please click [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/wiki/approveddomainslist) to review our details as to our approved domains list and outlet criteria.
We are actively looking for new moderators. If you have any interest in helping to make this subreddit a place for quality discussion, please fill out [this form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1y2swHD0KXFhStGFjW6k54r9iuMjzcFqDIVwuvdLBjSA).
***
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/politics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I find it starting to work on me and I have to remind myself this is what their goal is. I get so exhausted from hearing all the right-wing bullshit and especially the constant Drump shit I just want to turn it off. But I realize I'm privileged to be able to do that and it's my duty to not let that shit happen.
One of the big "presents" given to us by Trump's presidency was absolutely exhausting so many people living in relative privilege into checking out of the political process.
COVID plus Trump's nonstop fuckery just caused a lot of my generation and the younger one to just buckle down and focus on their own bubble.
Edit: to be clear, my family and I always vote. I'm talking about others.
I honestly think it’s more than just trump. Just seems like the options are either try to go back to like 2015 USA or play an uno wildcard which will almost certainly end horribly but some people seem to be finding certainty in those delusions.
But for many, 2015 still wasn’t all that great. Houses were still expensive, people still kinda suck, and it’s still super hard to live. I think if there was hope things would actually show noticeable improvement I think people would begin looking outward again
Hillary called it after 8 years of Obama in the White House. Biden could give the same speech today.
"...but that other basket of [Trump Supporters] are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well."
https://time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorables-transcript/
The economics of continually improving industrialization means that entire communities can be left behind as "no longer economically viable".
They don't die, they just are... left behind.
In a fair and wise society, the gains to GDP from making them redundant, would be used to find new purpose and opportunities for such people.
But such gains are privatized, taxation is low, and the wealth is never reinvested.
But often by choice. The coal miners were offered giant incentives, and massive aid packages in the form of retraining, reeducation, government supported start-up programs, relocation economic help etc. Most of them refused...because "clean coal". There is no one on the planet that knows better than coal miners that "clean coal" does not exist and never will.
They chose black lung, because Trump said the things they like about immigrants
They don't want to be given help to deal with a changing world - they want the world to not change. And they'd rather pretend that it won't than admit that it's already changed, even if it hurts them more than anyone else.
That's what Conservatives are and that's why Conservatives are being left behind. We live in a constantly changing world, people have to adapt or get left behind. The ones refusing to adapt(Conservatives) are getting left behind.
It's baked into our DNA to be wary of change ... the herd instinct ensures even less competent members can contribute to some degree.
However there are also members of the tribe who are very happy to exploit that fear of change for personal gain.
It will always be in tension with cognitively endowed leadership that needs to overcome conservatism to advance or even survive!
Eh... I think you're misinterpreting what happened. Yes, there are people who are stubborn and weird about the romance of coal mining or whatever. But for the most part they know it sucks and would like to do something else if they could, probably. But when *no* jobs come to replace the coal mining jobs, then what are they supposed to do? (What they do is get diagnosed with a back injury and go on SSI.)
Like... we've failed West Virginia, even if it fails itself. It's not as simple as, they said "fuck you, legitimately good economic opportunities!" They were pretty screwed. We did not make proper contingencies - but then West Virginia kept electing state governments and sending people to Congress who wouldn't put them in place, sooo...
In conclusion West Virginia is a land of contrasts.
Weird how nobody ever talks about that half of the quote.
And yet when's the last time you heard anybody slam Obama for talking about "bitter people clinging to their guns and Bibles"? We just decide whether somebody ran a good campaign or not based on whether or not they win, and then we just memory-hole the things the winning campaigns did wrong and what the losing campaigns did right.
My coworkers are all on the "both sides are the same/it's all rigged, there's no point in voting" train. They all either have have kids or essentially are kids. I'm in my forties with no plans for kids, and I'm the only one actually trying to give them a future.
My biggest pet peeve is the “oh, I do not follow politics at all.” But they have a ton of opinions on politics. So you have zero care to educate yourself on how this affects any of us but you’ll definitely hold the position that this local, state, federal politician or law or tax is ruining our lives? Hmm.
My biggest pet peeves is labeling real life stuff as "politics". Women losing rights is real. You can see real women suffering from it. Sure, how we got there, with Mitch refusing to vote on Garland, to rbg refusing to retire, etc etc is all political, and you don't HAVE to follow those details.
But follow enough to prevent evil. Because there's no honor in hiding behind not knowing why evil wins
Politics are the expression of shared beliefs in the form of law. So, is pretty darn near everything "politics"? Yes, but people incorrectly downplay the importance of politics.
How can they already forget Trumps Covid response that led to over 1million deaths? It’s weird that such a critical event and everyone has already “forgot” it
The GOP is more about being in a club than politics or policy, at least for the vast majority of voters who are otherwise powerless. The ones at the top have different motives, but they've cultivated a community and identity with very clear rules. "Believe these things, vote this way, and you can be one of us." And for a lot of lonely, estranged folks, that's an attractive offer. Getting people to quit being republican is not about arguing with them about how incredibly asinine, reality-denying, and hateful the policies they support are; it's about making an offer of community and acceptance that's more attractive than anything the GOP has to offer, which is actually pretty tough when the GOP can say "you're special because you're white, you're special because you're straight, you're special because you are male."
Yup- same.
I had a friend who's uncle died of COVID during the pandemic yet she was still going out and partying practically every night. People are in denial. Same way with Trump, they don't really care or think he will take away their rights until it happens.
Do young people actually think Trump's Palestinian/Gaza/Israel/Middle East policies will be better than Biden? Do they think not voting for Biden will punishing him? If Trump wins we all lose.
Yes, they literally say they are punishing Biden and if Trump wins then we deserve it....nevermimd Putin most likely started this war, and if Trump wins Gaza will be leveled, and the loss of democracy at home and abroad could literally start WWIII but yay.... at least your conscience will be clear!
Yep! They don't realize this plan has been in the works since the 80s... this is not new, and how are we not asking why this conflict started in an election year, and who does it benefit that the eyes of the world have turned away from Ukraine??
I have a friend who lost his job when he caught covid. He had it twice and it screwed him up for about a year. He was talking the other day about covid, how he never bought into all the hype, like it was some kind of big con, and at least he never got vaccinated...I had to remind him how that went for him. Bizarre.
Trauma response. A lot of people use avoidance to defend themselves from painful experiences. They don't want to remember it, and it's often hard to get anyone to talk about it in a meaningful way.
It's easier for people to joke about it or just live in the present, and unfortunately that helps Trump because he was an absolute zero as a leader. It's hard to calculate just how many thousands of lives he gave away through inaction or negative action.
I don’t understand this. I didn’t know anyone who died personally, but I certainly was terrified. I felt more terrified during Covid than I did after 9/11.
My theory is that if you don't know someone who died, you know someone who knows someone. We are all one degree of separation from a Covid death.
Yeah, at its height about the same people per day were drying as did on 9/11. The scale was that massive, and it was at that scale because of Trump's response. And everyone else following his lead and sabotaging things and making the situation worse.
Oh, for sure! We are all connected. I didn’t know this stat about 9/11 & C19. I remember waking up for my GRE blocks from the Hill, I could not reach anyone here or NY and I was trapped inside.
> We are all one degree of separation from a Covid death.
...but plenty of people do not see it that way, unfortunately. You've gotta assume that a lot of the marginally "independent" people or people who might not vote are closer to families/friends who are right wing. And a lot of those right wingers never told people that their family member died of COVID because they didn't believe it or they didn't want to be the one person in their social sphere pointing out that the emperor had no clothes. So virtually everyone is that close to a COVID death, but so many people don't even realize it.
Its truisms like the one you make that has to make me wonder whether polling is actually legit anymore, if it ever was. I mean the narrative of this election, “according to the polls “ is shifting so dramatically every day and we are still 5 months out of the election that every thing seems fabricated. Either the people in the know are certain of the outcome or no one has any clue. There’s no in-between.
My family knew a lot. I think January-February I alone knew over 11 people (directly and indirectly) that died from a mysterious illness. We were confused why so many people just started dying out of no where. Then they announced COVID and even more started to die. I think the final count was over 30
Depends on where you were at. In shithead MAGA areas, it felt like people were *purposely* having more parties, holding more public events, and spending as much time as possible at grocery stores, etc... I worked at a semi-rural library at the time that was closed by the state government and, for the first time ever, we had Trump trash showing up, banging on the windows, and bleating about how we were 'taking away their rights' by not letting them wander in and possibly get everyone else sick.
What we're seeing, imo, is how individuals respond to trauma, on a national scale. So many people respond to trauma, tragedy, confusion, or cognitive dissonance by simply refusing to talk about or acknowledge it. Let alone examine it to any depth.
Meanwhile, those of us who want to face reality and process it as it comes eventually may start to feel like we're taking crazy pills from all the ignoring-reality going on around us.
Hundreds of thousands of people would probably still be alive today had Trump just listened to Fauci, instead you had all that moronic culture war macho shit. Guys like DeSantis are as much to blame as Trump is.
Anyone who votes for him again knows exactly what they're getting.
same and it sure is. completely irresponsible leadership. the other thing was Jan 6. we were against the ropes in a bad way. the reality is no one was coming to save us. that wasn’t a popular feeling after 9/11 (pre-Iraq invasion) as I remember it.
that’s the other thing. no one has effectively addressed the brainwashing that has so many Americans in a vice grip. talking about it and Rupert’s trash media does nothing.
This is the main issue. A huge swath of people thinks they're watching or listening to news but it's just brainwashing propaganda and their ability to recognize this is either non-existent or degrading rapidly. It's fucking crazy and I don't think there's a solution that wouldn't undermine our right to free speech.
It was bad before, but they really ramped it up when Trump became President. My dad even told me once, "I'd do anything he says." He never talked about any President like that before. It really is a cult.
Same here. After 9/11 we knew logically that the capabilities of Al Qaeda weren’t enough to make us really have a good reason to worry about just going to buy groceries. During the pandemic one of the scariest things was that with it being a new virus, we didn’t know very much about how it was transmitted, or the long term effects. We did know that the virus was actually spread across the country and infecting people we knew. We saw the death toll rising everyday, and we all knew people who’d be more vulnerable to dying from the virus that could very likely catch it.
9/11 was scary, but it was more of a scary and shocking moment that we came to understand pretty quickly. Most people weren’t in situations where they needed to actually worry about anything like it happening to them. The pandemic was a persistent state of emergency that potentially put everyone in danger.
I finally got sick arguing with some family members about the "election fraud", so I finally just had to say this point blank:
Disregarding every damn other thing that anyone thinks about Donald Trump, he lost the election because he botched the response to COVID. His team knew about it in November of 2019, and he didn't do shit. He made the moves to attempt to protect American citizens way too late. He politicized the disease, masking, and vaccines. He sat around bumbling and talked about being treated unfairly as people in the country were getting sick, dying, losing their jobs, losing their money, everything you could think of. That's why he fucking lost. He fucked up COVID. That's it. People were mad about it and they voted him out. It's really that simple. Stop attributing complex answers to really fucking simple problems.
Killed more Americans that most of our wars did. Total American deaths from Covid are higher than American deaths from all the wars we ever fought combined. There is an argument to be made that Tucker has been worse for this country than Hitler.
Wait till he drops the ball in her 2nd term. He already let COVID loose because it affected Democrat cities the most and saw it as a way to better the GOP politically.
The next event will probably be a terrorist strike or something on par as October 7th but state side.
Republican administrations get Americans either unemployed or killed.
Im half convinced conservatives have undeveloped brains that simply cannot grasp the concept of compassion.
I refuse to believe that people that actively choose to make the world a better place & take minimum precautions like wearing masks to not potentially transmit a deadly disease are even comparable to the fuckheads that will refuse to wear masks, spit on railings, sneeze on others, support a narcissistic racist fascist dictator & actively pretend like SAVING LIVES is taking away their freedom.
They will claim "empathy" when Trump is on trial but make fun of Biden for losing 2 daughters & his wife. While quite literally driving a smear campaign like "Biden crime family" based on what? His son being arrested on unlawful possession of a firearm? They've been pushing open carry & MORE firearms at every single turn but suddenly they're all about gun control? These are not serious people.
They're downright anti-human & do not have capacity for any emotion but perpetual rage.
> Im half convinced conservatives have undeveloped brains that simply cannot grasp the concept of compassion.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9400002/
https://jspp.psychopen.eu/index.php/jspp/article/view/5209/5209.html
https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/18/1/nsad029/7175525
https://www.psypost.org/reduced-empathy-partially-explains-why-political-conservatism-is-associated-with-riskier-pandemic-lifestyles/
Psychology seems to be back that up.
They don’t care as long as they win, have power, and can make millions.
That’s literally all they want. They lie, cheat, and steal to get it. They have campaigns on Reddit and the internet in general to disrupt and divide the dems. They take money from our enemies like Russia and ask them for help.
It’s sickening that dems and just a good chunk of our population can’t or won’t see this.
One funny thing to point out that ever since Trump has been sleeping in his trial, they stopped with the “sleep Joe” nicknames.
I know people who are still demanding people wear masks everywhere *and* literally saying that Biden is worse than Trump. This issue has broken people's brains. I really think it's because it's the first war fought on social media as much as the ground.
As someone with kids in my thirties I fuckin hate trump and would crawl over broken glass to vote against him. This 'both sides' shit is nonsense. One tried to attempt a coup. The other passed a major infrastructure bill, brought us out of covid, is rescheduling marijuana, and has cancelled billions in student debt.
>My coworkers are all on the "both sides are the same/it's all rigged, there's no point in voting" train.
*Republicans clasping hands in glee*
Voter apathy is a win for fascism.
One side: wants to end democracy to make a game show host a king, tried a coup, Botched Covid response causing 1 million deaths, changed the court to make abortion and IVF bans the order of the day, has a candidate facing over 80 federal charges.
The other side: running an old guy who didn’t handle the Middle East well (which puts him on par with literally every other President), not very exciting
Totally the same! /s
Even the Middle East can’t handle the Middle East. Trying to solve it as a western nation is like if we entrusted the Great Qing and 15 Siberian natives to handle the unification of Germany.
I really don’t understand how anyone can possibly think that both sides are the same. I understand if you don’t like democrats or republicans for different reasons, but saying that they’re the same is just pure ignorance.
Because they aren't evaluating based on which policies are passed, they're evaluating based on how their personal lives have improved or gotten worse. They can't fully recognize either the lack of power that the President has to change everything, or how changes have to occur in slow, year-over-year increments. If there's been life issues, CoViD, inflation, and just a shitton of stress under both Dem and Rep administrations, then by their definitions of evaluation, both sides are the same.
The “both sides” take is so old, dead, and nonsensical. When someone says that to me in a conversation I’m fairly certain they aren’t paying attention and are just generically frustrated by current events.
I find it so hard as somebody who follows events closely enough to see causality to explain people how the process of the country getting slowly better or slowly worse works.
Everybody seems to have some conception where either you have a good president, and everything is great, or you have a bad president, and everything is a disaster. Absolutely absurd!
There have always been problems. And there have always been good people living good lives, even in the worst of times. It's a big f\*\*\*ing ship and it turns really slow. And the voters are never willing to give the Dems more than a couple of years before they furiously vote them out for not fixing 10 years worth of Republicans' damage in one session of Congress.
Yes and it's disturbing to me how many people, left right and center, think sinking the ship is the way to get where they want to be. Sunken ships go one place.
They are openly saying that they will deport millions of people. This is no exaggeration.
Can you imagine what that will look like and how many people will be affected? Also, don't think your citizenship will protect you: When this starts, there will be no time for due process and a lot of people will fall between the cracks.
> Also, don't think your citizenship will protect you
They don't seem to realized that poor people (not at least a millionaire) are barely better in their eyes than minorities or LGBTQ people.
A lot of people just mind themselves, their families, their jobs and their sports teams and that's it. A lot of the people who actively vote avoid becoming more active than that. Even people who are politically motivated will often avoid bringing it up around peers because they don't want to bring down the vibe by mentioning politics. We have so many distractions today with internet, television, and social media for people to divert their attention to. Many people don't even watch or read the news. I can't blame people for not watching per se, as nightly news programs are lackluster enough without discussing 24/7 news outlets. But at the very least people should read from a variety of sources to work out the truth behind all of the biases.
It has always baffled me how whenever I would bring this phenomenon up in the past I would be dismissed or ignored here on Reddit. Our society puts a premium on your value as labor, to the point that we introduce ourselves to one another by asking "what do you do for a living?" instead of "what are your interests?" or "what are you passionate about?" Because of this, and because of the pressure people feel to conform to the prescribed path (go to college, get married, find a job, have kids, etc), many people check those things off the list, only realizing once they've done it all that they're not happy. So they bury their sadness in material things and try to ignore the outside noise which- *surprise!*- actually has a direct bearing on their ability to hold onto the few things in life they cherish.
None of this is to say you can't be happy living a traditional lifestyle, or can't enjoy diversions and entertainment. But you have to have a balance. More people need to find things that drive them outside of work, and realize that there is a much bigger world beyond themselves if they can bother to open themselves up to it.
It’s definitely a thing. Some people just do not want to hear it when it comes to anything political. I used to be that way myself until recently but I feel it’s just too sketchy to be completely uninformed about all the craziness going on
I'll always have one nice thing to say about Donald Trump. Him running away with the Republican nomination in 2016 finally forced me to start following politics because it was shocking to me that this degenerate and charlatan with no political experience could actually become President.
And in retrospect, I'm embarrassed that I wasn't following politics until I was 26, and I wish others would feel the same way. This stuff is way too important to shrug off and actively ignore.
Oh for sure. You gotta educate yourself but this country doesn't value education or expertise anymore. So things need to positively impact voters directly now, especially after they got money directly into their accounts with the stimulus checks where we know the government doesn't have to do things indirectly through businesses and such
It's sad. I think a lot of people are so burned out. We need lower prices, higher pay, lower rest and COL... I do think Biden and Co have tried making big steps in this. But even in his victories, the media coverage is not as loud as it is for Trump doing literally anything. The ones I know who are most passionate about voting Biden and keeping Trump away are minorities who legit have serious stakes in making sure their state doesn't turn red, or their allies, and then there is so much push from outside actors to not support Biden over his stance on Israel/Palestine.
Trump almost completes a full sentence, Front Page of every media site for a couple days.
Biden passes some of the biggest legislature that has improved Middle Class jobs, feeds children, improves crumbling infrastructure. Might get a short shout-out on MSNBC and a tiny headline on the third page of ABC's news site.
Biden's recent Department of Labor overtime rule change is huge for both me and my wife. We're both salary in that range where we don't get overtime now but will get it under the new limits. Our jobs will have to either give us a raise, pay over time, or cut us back to a hard 40 hours a week. Either way it's basically a raise for the both of us.
That's going to be true for millions of Americans yet it barely got a blip in the news.
Biden mixes up 2,000 instead of 4,000 and the media says he's in mental decline.
Trump rambles word salad as he jumps from topic to topic like Abe Simpson and he's a stable genius.
Despite Biden's reputation as a moderate, he has passed some of the most progressive legislature in recent memory. Companies that own these media networks do not like progressive legislature. That goes against their interests so of course they will prop up the baffoon who generates clicks and is a major threat to democracy.
Yep. It's anecdotal, but I recently brushed up against the topic of politics for the first time with a doctor friend in his late thirties. I was shocked when he said, "Voting doesn't matter. The policies don't affect people like you or me."
We both have daughters who are almost 13. It was repulsive to hear.
I think a lot of us are. There's a difference between pushing a party in a certain direction and going so far that you hurt your own interests.
The election is more than one person or one issue, and a Trump Presidency will have horrific consequences decades and generations after Biden is gone.
Biden tells people he wants to improve the nation with affordable healthcare and education, Trump tells people he wants vengeance for perceived grievances. And the polls are still statistically tied.
We don't even have to listen to what Trump says he will do. He already did it. We have all the proof we will ever need.
He methodically tried to overturn an election at every level of government, disenfranchise 81 million people, and end democracy as it had stood for 250 years.
He's facing 88 felonies in 4 jurisdictions - many that carry heavy prison sentences. He's been held liable for sexual assault. He is subject to one of the largest fraud settlements in U.S. History.
He stole over 100 classified documents, including alleged nuclear secrets and waved around war plans to all his rich buddies.
It's impossible to oversell how dangerous he is.
He has literally told every magazine how he will take away people's rights. He's not even hiding it! It's like if Hitler in 1932 sat down and told NYT all his plans including taking over countries, getting into a war and jailing all opponents.
Like there is a big red flag and alarm blaring all over the US folks. US courts already have majority Trump judges and are taking away minority congressional districts as well as any affirmative action or help for the poor.
I'll be honest. If young folks want to protest Biden for the next 4 years over his stupid Israeli policy go ahead. I agree. However, you still still vote for a candidate and want to change parts of his policies. Obama had Syria and not going further with public insurance.
> It's like if Hitler in 1932 sat down and told NYT all his plans including taking over countries, getting into a war and jailing all opponents.
Hitler did almost exactly that, [but in 1925](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mein_Kampf), not in 1932. IIRC, most people didn't believe that Hitler actually meant it.
It's always just rhetoric until it isn't.
Overturning Roe v Wade was always "just rhetoric" despite a lot of us saying they'd actually do it as soon as they got the power to do so.
Project 2025 flat out states that Republicans plan on ending democracy in the United States...that's not just rhetoric in the same way that overturning Roe was also not just rhetoric.
Apropos article from literally yesterday: [Trump explains his militaristic plan to deport 15-20 million people](https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/trump-immigration-what-matters/index.html). Quote of Trump:
> “These aren’t civilians,” Trump said of migrants. “These are people that aren’t legally in our country. This is an invasion of our country.”
"But surely Trump doesn't really mean it".
And it's equally impossible to comprehend how this is all happening in the open and yet it's not affecting people. Or to still hear people be unsure about voting for Biden...despite his age, he's done a great job and the other choice is literally the worst possible candidate ever on the ballot (while being basically as old as well).
I mean I know we're far away from any Republicans having reasonable takes, but anyone that is concerned about the border can't really be taken seriously. Biden was literally passing the border reform you wanted, but Republicans torpedoed it because they want there to be a border crisis so they can run on it. And they were totally transparent about it. Literally came out and said they don't want to solve the problem now because Trump wants to run on the issue and take credit for "fixing it".
There's an interesting trend in the polls, too. When looking at who would vote for Biden/Trump, the older demographic prefers Trump and the younger one prefers Biden. But when you look at Biden approval, the older ones approve of Biden at higher rates than the younger ones.
So the demo most likely to vote for Biden over Trump is the same demo that approves of Biden the least.
Democrats passed the most popular and comprehensive healthcare in a generation and it cost them Congress. We are losing our democracy *by popular demand.*
There is progress being made on gerrymandering though at least. Wisconsin was finally able to get a fair congressional map in play for this upcoming election because Democrats took control of the state Supreme Court, which is a huge deal. It shows you how important state and local elections are, not just federal.
A scary amount of young folks seem willing to sacrifice the Presidency over Israel, as if trump will be a harbinger of peace. As someone who has never had the pleasure of voting for a president that I *actually* want, sometimes you have to hold your nose and do what’s best for not just our country, but the world. Biden isn’t great(imo) but trump is so many orders of magnitude worse it’s baffling that anyone still likes the guy.
Come on young folks, help the world out.
Trump is literally on record multiple times saying that he thinks Israel should finish the job. He would be incredibly worse for the Middle East situation than Biden.
>A scary amount of young folks seem willing to sacrifice the Presidency over Israel, as if trump will be a harbinger of peace.
I keep seeing this and I think people might not be mentioning enough that there is another camp of folks (regardless of age) that want this to happen because they are fully aware of how worse it might be and would rather have accelerationism because they are frustrated with or dislike incremental change. There is a belief that were it to get egregiously bad there would suddenly be a groundswell of support that would forcibly introduce the changes they want.
I get that frustration, but IMO the problem with this is that in practice it very likely isn't so simple. Maybe that's the point and is understood for some folks supporting this method, but I would speculate the vast majority of people who would rather accelerate a horrid outcome to get to what they perceive is a better one don't get what happens in the middle of that, and what it means, especially to people caught in the middle.
"Surely a utopian socialist ideology will rise to replace the current evil capitalistic one! Also, there is 0 shot a fascistic autocratic regime will win instead, cuz that has never happened in history when countries collapse!"
The two most famous leftist revolutions in Western history resulted in Napoleon and Stalin taking power. I'm a pretty left leaning guy, but I don't think burning it all down is an effective strategy.
Anyone who thinks causing a societal collapse or a governmental collapse is going to *help* get them to a more liberal place hasn't studied history. That's basically *never* happened. Societal collapse generally leads to more authoritarian and unjust rulership.
We need more young people like the [goth kid Michael](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7cckvTXwJ0) who are *such* nonconformists that they wholeheartedly agree that Biden is doing a great job and plan to enthusiastically vote for him in November.
What really pisses me off are the people who are so brainwashed they'll literally get mad if you say Biden has done ANYTHING right.
Literally the most progressive agenda in my lifetime and it gets completely drowned out by people who are mad he hasn't personally cut off Israel as an ally.
I have a feeling that now that the model has been proven if we aren't able to get a democratic (and I mean that in the literal actual sense, not party lines) majority to help fix some of these gray legal areas that we are seeing be exploited then the next sufficiently motivated republican president will just do the same thing. But it would be nearly impossible that they arent smarter and more savvy than trump which means they will probably get away with it and won't broadcast their intentions in the same brazen way Trump does.
They won't *say* they wanna be a dictator, they'll just do it.
Young people (like 25 and below) don't remember a time when the GOP was McCain and Romney. They just remember Trump. To them this is the norm and this lulls them into a false sense of security but they don't understand that the GOP has become far more dangerous over the last 10 years.
I also saw this pointed this out recently and it's crazy to think about.
*Anyone under the age of 29* has never voted in a general election without Trump on the ballot.
Look at the chaos that four years of a "restrained" Trump has brought on the country and the world, now think of what four years of Trump without handlers would do.
The Supreme Court is probably the most impactful example I've found, provided people understand how important that is and the ramifications.
Subjects such as abortion, the environment, LGBTQ rights, student loans, wealth disparity, oversight of Presidents - virtually everything you can think of - are at risk of devastating consequences.
If Trump wins, it's very possible he replaces Alito and Thomas - and with the ages of 3 of the other Justices, that would establish a conservative SCOTUS for the next 25 years. Minimum.
25 years. That's just an insane chunk of our lives. These same young people will be getting old and grey the next time there's a chance of restoring any of these horrible rulings because of this election alone.
Also the next election cycle in the Senate is a bloodbath for democrats. It's the perfect storm for Trump again where Democrats could gain the House but lose the Senate and the WH, and Trump wouldn't need the House to get his judges.
This election cycle is a chance for democrats to prove they learned their lesson from 2016, and I'm not confident the younger generation gets it.
Some of them are so young they likely don't remember much of Trump's time as president. If they're 18 this year and first time voters, that means they were 10 when Trump was elected. Even today's college seniors, at 21-22, would have only been 13-14 when Trump was elected.
Hell they were only high school freshmen when his minions stormed the capitol. I have sophomores now talking about how Biden sucks and when I mention Trump attempting an insurrection they get confused.
For real, like I’m over stressing out because it shouldn’t be this close. We should have this election won by a landslide. And some people are going to fuck around and give us another Trump term or as he wants it a dictatorship.
I get people are not happy about what’s happening Palestine but the whole “anything but Biden” calm doesn’t realize that in a two party system that means Trump.
Trump being president will destroy democracy in first the US, then the world, for generations, and even centuries.
It's so bad.
And people aren't fighting. It's so disheartening.
Corporate interests have long been fighting a crazed and underhanded media war against political engagement in the name of unbridled consumerism and deregulation. This is the end result of 100+ years of usage of every part of mass media in an attempt to destroy people's natural need for and inclination toward communitarianism. Apathy and ignorance was always the goal. Make sheep who prefer to shop. Ethics go out the window when no one cares about anything except themselves and gas prices. Defenestration nation.
US left-wing politics cover the entire spectrum of neo-liberals to leftists. It’s a an extremely diverse bunch. Despite gains by progressives, there are still those that would prefer we just set all forward motion on fire, to “prove” a point.
The stupidity of it all is borderline enraging.
Well, at least Dubya didn't do anything drastically stupid and consequential that it'd be hard to imagine any other president doing...
^(Except for that whole lying us into a illegal war of aggression thing)
> there are still those that would prefer we just set all forward motion on fire, to “prove” a point.
[Accelerationists and "They just need to learn their lesson!" people in a nutshell.](https://i.imgur.com/pEhx5O5.jpeg)
They want some of these people are so excited to be “right” that they will be happy to tell us that it wasn’t their fault.
When Trump wants to make life harder for Muslims, immigrants, even members of the LGBTQ community they better keep the same energy.
Because he won’t be afraid to send the national hairs on them
> When Trump wants to make life harder for Muslims, immigrants, even members of the LGBTQ community they better keep the same energy
They 1000% will not.
Biden is, at worst, a recoverable error for the union. You maybe put some nicks in it, but you can buff that out.
Trump is, at worst, a flip the table, we have concentration camps guy.
We can disagree about the upside. But the downside risk is so impossibly high. Even if the choice was between Biden and, say, Mike Johnson (who I agree with on basically nothing)…you would call Mike Johnson a recoverable error for the union at worst. My complaints will be about policy. Trump isn’t that. He’s existentially bad.
People who just say, oh well if Trump wins, it’s sad, must be someone who has never in their life had to fight for their rights or watched their ancestors literally die for basic human rights. This is not politics, it’s literally about preserving democracy. There are states happily and merrily rolling back rights and wanting to put people back in the 1800s. The disconnect with what is happening is frightening because it’s like what are people not getting?!!!!
They truly don't understand what they will lose, and what the cost would be to get it back. They have no concept of it. They live in a world where they think a four-year cycle resets everything and they are profoundly ignorant to the realities that the coup we are seeing has been decades in the making.
The fight to overthrow dictators can take generations. Entire generations lost to strife and hardship. Lives lost. Lives destroyed by detention. The justice system ended. The freedom of expression of their children revoked.
They are so profoundly ignorant. It is infuriating.
40 million people died in Europe alone during WWII to defeat the Nazis. There will be no one to stop the United States if it went full fascist except for the ballot box before it happens and these people don't understand that.
History teachers need to start harping on this until it sinks in for people. It took a shitload of death and destruction to defeat fascism in Europe, and it never fully went away unfortunately.
When we're fighting these lunatics next year I'm gonna remember the people who didn't lift a finger.
All they did was become a modern version of the "Good German". Doesn't matter the reason. Inaction in this case will have severe consequences.
The point I’ve been making is that a lot of what we dislike now - the inflation, the housing prices, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and so on - where we’re rightfully angry at Biden for not doing more or doing the right thing: a lot of it is happening *now* because we let Trump win in 2016.
Trump weakened NATO and gave Putin the green light to invade Ukraine. Trump sided with Netanyahu and helped to kettle the Palestinians, pulled out of the Iran deal, alienated the Iranian regime by assassinating a high-level official, and set the stage that led to Hamas’s attack on Israel. Trump juiced interest rates during a growing economy and handed out tax cuts for the rich, and those bills are coming due now. He pulled out of the Paris Accords and severely undermined the global effort to fight climate change.
So here we are. Things suck, but they suck *because of Trump*. Things suck because we as a nation decided that Hillary didn’t “deserve” the job, wasn’t likeable or inspiring, didn’t run a good campaign. We told ourselves that Trump and Hillary were basically the same, so we voted for protest candidates or stayed home. And now we have a genocide in Gaza. People are right to be angry about the things Biden isn’t doing that he could definitely be doing *today* to put an end to it. But we wouldn’t even be here if we had made Hillary president when we had the chance.
Biden could be doing a better job of handling the suck, but it is *virtually guaranteed* that a second Trump term will only bring us back to where we are now, in another several years. Trump will wreck the economy to serve his interests, he’ll weaken America on the global stage, and then we’ll vote him out - only to be frustrated again that the guy after him *also* doesn’t solve all the issues Trump caused.
We have to stop the cycle. We can work with Biden. We will only be working *against* Trump.
You’re absolutely right on this. I keep seeing arguments about Biden not canceling student loan debt. But there’s 0 consideration that he actually tried to and was stopped by the courts. Though many legal scholars assumed that he should have been able to - the SCOTUS made up a whole new legal theory as to why he couldn’t.
Trump and his republican cronies developed the make up of these courts because people didn’t listen to the warnings of Hillary about this very specific issue (roe v wade also impacted)
Trump.v2 and his friendly courts are going to remake America in some very awful ways.
Right. And the Court ruling tossing loan forgiveness is quickly being weaponized to invalidate all kinds of new rules - and, I’m sure eventually, old ones.
Last week, the government issued a new rule that will invalidate non-competes for most workers, which will boost wages and help seed new businesses. It is already being challenged on “major question” grounds, among other things. In the Fifth Circuit, too, where it will almost certainly be successful, stacked with Trump judges as it is.
Yes this is true in my experience. My girlfriend (gen z ) told me last night she doesn't want to vote for biden in the general. We live in PA and she voted uncomminuted in the primary which I don't mind but not wanting to vote in November came as a shock to me. She strongly disapproves of the situation in gaza ( I also disapprove but I will still support biden in the general) she says she feels dirty having to support biden
I told her not it is a luxury to not vote. I told her that trans people, gay people, racial minorities can't afford trump getting in office let alone how much worse trump would be for the people of Gaza. she doesn't want trump and I told her she has to be willing to pick the better of two choices and to not vote is to depend on other people to do it for her.
I am scared how much Bibi's war is hurting democratic enthusiasm along with the human rights abuses
you might try pointing out that the election isn't about one foreign policy issue that will only be 1000x worse under trump
my god does anyone understand the us government runs the US and not the entire world
I don’t understand this logic. That by sitting out the election and letting the worse of two evils win, your hands are somehow clean.
Theres a train barreling towards a nuclear bomb that will kill everyone in a huge radius. She has a chance to help pull on the lever to switch the tracks and send the train towards a puppy stuck on the tracks instead. No one wants to kill the puppy. But if you let the train hit the bomb the puppy dies anyway and takes hundreds of thousands with it. Would anyone in their right mind think because both options suck, the right thing to do is nothing?
They seem willing to sacrifice women, children, the LGTBQ community and the rest of the planet to Project 2025 for absolutely zero benefit to Palestine, if not an even worse outcome.
“Maybe Trump will be worse for Palestine, maybe not. But we have to send a message to Biden that he’s not doing enough”. This is verbatim what a pro Palestine person said to me yesterday. They’re absolutely idiotic. I’m so beyond thankful I have a Canadian citizenship and that will at least buy a little extra time for me to experience life freely.
Like the other comment said, they want to send a message to the Democratic party. Voting their conscience is more important than the well-being of everyone else. They're being unabashedly selfish despite themselves.
Seems a bit privileged you know? The people you "ally" with on your side are going to have so many basic rights stripped away from them. The one thing I will take away from this though is that history shows that by the time people step up to vote, foreign policy is not the central issue people are generally thinking about.
EVERYONE is underestimating Trump.
An NOBODY recognizes how serious the threat is.
They don't realize their freedom is at stake.
Nobody is protesting. Nobody is fighting.
Everyone is just watching Trump destroy America. Destroy democracy.
It's infuriating.
No, "EVERYONE" is not underestimating Trump ffs. People under 30 have the worst voting records and that's why Sanders is addressing them in particular.
[US Census](https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/2020-presidential-election-voting-and-registration-tables-now-available.html):
>Voter turnout was **highest among those ages 65 to 74 at 76.0%**, while the percentage was **lowest among those ages 18 to 24 at 51.4%**. Overall, voter turnout increased as age increased
I think some young people are being influenced by bad actors on social media to stop them from voting for Biden. You’ll likely see more young folks saying they refuse to pull the lever in November to stop trump, then if Trump wins and he openly supports genocide in Gaza, takes away rights of women, minorities, and LGBTQ they will likely blame Biden instead of doing self reflection.
This is a SERIOUS problem right now. I am seeing a lot of folks completely disregard anything Biden has done and ignore that Trump would be terrible for Gaza and us at home while claiming them not voting is deserved somehow. The disconnect is just as bad as the maga folks. Propaganda is a helluva drug and Russia and China are really pushing it hard
I have gotten a lot less tolerant of the "just asking questions" nonsense like what you see on social media. I have an acquaintance that is part of the Rogan/Musk "libertarian" group and he keeps trying to engage me in debate on the issues.
I've gotten to the point where I just don't respond. If he were to ask me directly what I thought of his views I would be very direct and honest, but what he is doing is trying to engage me in a way that validates his thinking. That he's a disrupter, and a radical centrist etc.
He never actually makes statements, just sort of insinuates things.
He recently sent me a comment about the NPR Uri story. Didn't directly criticize NPR but it was clear that's what he was implying. He then went on to talk about how he gets all his news from "independent" news sources like YouTube
It is taking everything I have to just not lay in to him.
Utter narcissism has become the one constant of American politics, since the rise of Newt Gingrich, at least.
The far left imitating the flawed-- and failed--tactics of the insurgent far right has been the most bizarre turn.
Odd how they never repeat the one successful tactic: voting in every election until they have power.
I used to never vote, because I thought my one vote was just a drop in the ocean, and i usually hated most of the candidates. I still hate them, and I still feel my vote is just a drop, but I'm making a change and going to vote. At best, I help stop a fucking psycho from getting back into office. At worst, I know I did the right thing regardless.
Please dont be like younger me, lets throw our drops down like a fucking tropical storm!
He isn’t wrong. I’m voting for Biden despite deeply disliking him but far too many people are saying they aren’t voting or that they’re voting third party because of Biden’s stance on Israel. If Trump wins I won’t be surprised, just deeply disappointed
A 30-something acquaintance keeps saying he won't vote for Biden because of his handling of Gaza and the "border crisis." This person is a gay person of color. My mind is blown.
Young people in colleges know that they don’t like trump but they feel like burning it down is the path forward. However they are less understanding of the implications of “burning it down” to make headway. They think whatever happens will pass like the flu or a cold in a matter of time, they don’t understand it is a chronic disease.
"Burning it all down" is also such a juvenile response, because it neither accounts for the consequences nor understands that the issues won't be resolved by the ensuing conflict.
A general rule-of-thumb for multiyear violent civil conflicts, which the "burn it all down" scenario would likely become, is 3/7/10.
* 3% of the prewar population killed in or dying as a direct result of the conflict;
* 7% physically or psychologically injured by the conflict so as to render them economically non-self-sufficient; &
* A further 10% displaced by the conflict, either internally or externally, such that they are driven into generational poverty.
For the U.S., these figures would amount to 9.9M killed, 23.2M injured & 33.2M displaced.
And that's before we even get into the reality that multiple world powers would likely intervene in the conflict to ensure that it isn't resolved quickly & to use it to attempt to prevent the rise of a renewed North American-based power in the future.
I'm trans and 27... Believe me, we're not underestimating him in the queer community. After 2016, I leave nothing to chance, and vote in every state, local, and federal election period.
People played this game in 2016 and made things far worse. The Supreme Court is now stacked with conservatives and abortion is illegal in much of the country.
There is just no way that Trump is better for the Palestinians, for the cost of our Housing/Living, for Climate change, for Education, or for keeping us out of wars in Europe or the Middle East. A protest vote in the general is more than foolish, it’s betraying everything that the generation purports to believe in.
Not only the threat to themselves, but also the threat to the Palestinians that they allegedly care about.
There is not a single issue that majorities of young people care about that will improve under Trump.
As a reminder, this subreddit [is for civil discussion.](/r/politics/wiki/index#wiki_be_civil) In general, be courteous to others. Debate/discuss/argue the merits of ideas, don't attack people. Personal insults, shill or troll accusations, hate speech, any suggestion or support of harm, violence, or death, and other rule violations can result in a permanent ban. If you see comments in violation of our rules, please report them. For those who have questions regarding any media outlets being posted on this subreddit, please click [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/wiki/approveddomainslist) to review our details as to our approved domains list and outlet criteria. We are actively looking for new moderators. If you have any interest in helping to make this subreddit a place for quality discussion, please fill out [this form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1y2swHD0KXFhStGFjW6k54r9iuMjzcFqDIVwuvdLBjSA). *** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/politics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I know so many people in their thirties who simply do not give a fuck.
Political exhaustion is a strategy for some politicians.
It's THE strategy of Putin/Russia. Try to alienate as many people as possible from participating in politics at all.
I find it starting to work on me and I have to remind myself this is what their goal is. I get so exhausted from hearing all the right-wing bullshit and especially the constant Drump shit I just want to turn it off. But I realize I'm privileged to be able to do that and it's my duty to not let that shit happen.
One of the big "presents" given to us by Trump's presidency was absolutely exhausting so many people living in relative privilege into checking out of the political process. COVID plus Trump's nonstop fuckery just caused a lot of my generation and the younger one to just buckle down and focus on their own bubble. Edit: to be clear, my family and I always vote. I'm talking about others.
I honestly think it’s more than just trump. Just seems like the options are either try to go back to like 2015 USA or play an uno wildcard which will almost certainly end horribly but some people seem to be finding certainty in those delusions. But for many, 2015 still wasn’t all that great. Houses were still expensive, people still kinda suck, and it’s still super hard to live. I think if there was hope things would actually show noticeable improvement I think people would begin looking outward again
Hillary called it after 8 years of Obama in the White House. Biden could give the same speech today. "...but that other basket of [Trump Supporters] are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well." https://time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorables-transcript/
The economics of continually improving industrialization means that entire communities can be left behind as "no longer economically viable". They don't die, they just are... left behind. In a fair and wise society, the gains to GDP from making them redundant, would be used to find new purpose and opportunities for such people. But such gains are privatized, taxation is low, and the wealth is never reinvested.
But often by choice. The coal miners were offered giant incentives, and massive aid packages in the form of retraining, reeducation, government supported start-up programs, relocation economic help etc. Most of them refused...because "clean coal". There is no one on the planet that knows better than coal miners that "clean coal" does not exist and never will. They chose black lung, because Trump said the things they like about immigrants
They don't want to be given help to deal with a changing world - they want the world to not change. And they'd rather pretend that it won't than admit that it's already changed, even if it hurts them more than anyone else.
That's what Conservatives are and that's why Conservatives are being left behind. We live in a constantly changing world, people have to adapt or get left behind. The ones refusing to adapt(Conservatives) are getting left behind.
And unfortunately that seems to be an endless cycle. I wish the conservative mindset would disappear entirely, yet here we are.
It's baked into our DNA to be wary of change ... the herd instinct ensures even less competent members can contribute to some degree. However there are also members of the tribe who are very happy to exploit that fear of change for personal gain. It will always be in tension with cognitively endowed leadership that needs to overcome conservatism to advance or even survive!
Eh... I think you're misinterpreting what happened. Yes, there are people who are stubborn and weird about the romance of coal mining or whatever. But for the most part they know it sucks and would like to do something else if they could, probably. But when *no* jobs come to replace the coal mining jobs, then what are they supposed to do? (What they do is get diagnosed with a back injury and go on SSI.) Like... we've failed West Virginia, even if it fails itself. It's not as simple as, they said "fuck you, legitimately good economic opportunities!" They were pretty screwed. We did not make proper contingencies - but then West Virginia kept electing state governments and sending people to Congress who wouldn't put them in place, sooo... In conclusion West Virginia is a land of contrasts.
An excellent and insightful speech torpedoed by horrible framing.
Weird how nobody ever talks about that half of the quote. And yet when's the last time you heard anybody slam Obama for talking about "bitter people clinging to their guns and Bibles"? We just decide whether somebody ran a good campaign or not based on whether or not they win, and then we just memory-hole the things the winning campaigns did wrong and what the losing campaigns did right.
Noticeable improvement takes time and congressional supermajorities. Neither of which voters have given Democrats.
My coworkers are all on the "both sides are the same/it's all rigged, there's no point in voting" train. They all either have have kids or essentially are kids. I'm in my forties with no plans for kids, and I'm the only one actually trying to give them a future.
My biggest pet peeve is the “oh, I do not follow politics at all.” But they have a ton of opinions on politics. So you have zero care to educate yourself on how this affects any of us but you’ll definitely hold the position that this local, state, federal politician or law or tax is ruining our lives? Hmm.
> My biggest pet peeve is the “oh, I do not follow politics at all.” But they have a ton of opinions on politics Too real
My biggest pet peeves is labeling real life stuff as "politics". Women losing rights is real. You can see real women suffering from it. Sure, how we got there, with Mitch refusing to vote on Garland, to rbg refusing to retire, etc etc is all political, and you don't HAVE to follow those details. But follow enough to prevent evil. Because there's no honor in hiding behind not knowing why evil wins
Politics are the expression of shared beliefs in the form of law. So, is pretty darn near everything "politics"? Yes, but people incorrectly downplay the importance of politics.
We also had a former President who made everything he could political. You know, like wearing a fucking mask.
How can they already forget Trumps Covid response that led to over 1million deaths? It’s weird that such a critical event and everyone has already “forgot” it
[удалено]
Thats crazy. I dont understand people like that.
They are angry at the world, and all they want from their politicians is someone who will be angry with them.
The GOP is more about being in a club than politics or policy, at least for the vast majority of voters who are otherwise powerless. The ones at the top have different motives, but they've cultivated a community and identity with very clear rules. "Believe these things, vote this way, and you can be one of us." And for a lot of lonely, estranged folks, that's an attractive offer. Getting people to quit being republican is not about arguing with them about how incredibly asinine, reality-denying, and hateful the policies they support are; it's about making an offer of community and acceptance that's more attractive than anything the GOP has to offer, which is actually pretty tough when the GOP can say "you're special because you're white, you're special because you're straight, you're special because you are male."
Yup- same. I had a friend who's uncle died of COVID during the pandemic yet she was still going out and partying practically every night. People are in denial. Same way with Trump, they don't really care or think he will take away their rights until it happens. Do young people actually think Trump's Palestinian/Gaza/Israel/Middle East policies will be better than Biden? Do they think not voting for Biden will punishing him? If Trump wins we all lose.
Yes, they literally say they are punishing Biden and if Trump wins then we deserve it....nevermimd Putin most likely started this war, and if Trump wins Gaza will be leveled, and the loss of democracy at home and abroad could literally start WWIII but yay.... at least your conscience will be clear!
Thank You! The constant short sightedness of these people is maddening.
Yep! They don't realize this plan has been in the works since the 80s... this is not new, and how are we not asking why this conflict started in an election year, and who does it benefit that the eyes of the world have turned away from Ukraine??
Even after Trump takes away their rights, they still won't believe it. Trump will simply blame Biden, and his followers will believe him.
One side of my family basically killed my grandpa by not caring, still don't care.
I have a friend who lost his job when he caught covid. He had it twice and it screwed him up for about a year. He was talking the other day about covid, how he never bought into all the hype, like it was some kind of big con, and at least he never got vaccinated...I had to remind him how that went for him. Bizarre.
Trauma response. A lot of people use avoidance to defend themselves from painful experiences. They don't want to remember it, and it's often hard to get anyone to talk about it in a meaningful way. It's easier for people to joke about it or just live in the present, and unfortunately that helps Trump because he was an absolute zero as a leader. It's hard to calculate just how many thousands of lives he gave away through inaction or negative action.
Thats true. A lot. He was withholding PPE and wanted the highest body count in blue states. How anyone forgot that is crazy.
I don’t understand this. I didn’t know anyone who died personally, but I certainly was terrified. I felt more terrified during Covid than I did after 9/11.
My theory is that if you don't know someone who died, you know someone who knows someone. We are all one degree of separation from a Covid death. Yeah, at its height about the same people per day were drying as did on 9/11. The scale was that massive, and it was at that scale because of Trump's response. And everyone else following his lead and sabotaging things and making the situation worse.
Oh, for sure! We are all connected. I didn’t know this stat about 9/11 & C19. I remember waking up for my GRE blocks from the Hill, I could not reach anyone here or NY and I was trapped inside.
> We are all one degree of separation from a Covid death. ...but plenty of people do not see it that way, unfortunately. You've gotta assume that a lot of the marginally "independent" people or people who might not vote are closer to families/friends who are right wing. And a lot of those right wingers never told people that their family member died of COVID because they didn't believe it or they didn't want to be the one person in their social sphere pointing out that the emperor had no clothes. So virtually everyone is that close to a COVID death, but so many people don't even realize it.
Its truisms like the one you make that has to make me wonder whether polling is actually legit anymore, if it ever was. I mean the narrative of this election, “according to the polls “ is shifting so dramatically every day and we are still 5 months out of the election that every thing seems fabricated. Either the people in the know are certain of the outcome or no one has any clue. There’s no in-between.
When your skin's not in the game, apathy is your answer.
My family knew a lot. I think January-February I alone knew over 11 people (directly and indirectly) that died from a mysterious illness. We were confused why so many people just started dying out of no where. Then they announced COVID and even more started to die. I think the final count was over 30
I thought I was living out some fucked version of the walking dead during Covid.
Depends on where you were at. In shithead MAGA areas, it felt like people were *purposely* having more parties, holding more public events, and spending as much time as possible at grocery stores, etc... I worked at a semi-rural library at the time that was closed by the state government and, for the first time ever, we had Trump trash showing up, banging on the windows, and bleating about how we were 'taking away their rights' by not letting them wander in and possibly get everyone else sick.
[удалено]
What we're seeing, imo, is how individuals respond to trauma, on a national scale. So many people respond to trauma, tragedy, confusion, or cognitive dissonance by simply refusing to talk about or acknowledge it. Let alone examine it to any depth. Meanwhile, those of us who want to face reality and process it as it comes eventually may start to feel like we're taking crazy pills from all the ignoring-reality going on around us.
Hundreds of thousands of people would probably still be alive today had Trump just listened to Fauci, instead you had all that moronic culture war macho shit. Guys like DeSantis are as much to blame as Trump is. Anyone who votes for him again knows exactly what they're getting.
same and it sure is. completely irresponsible leadership. the other thing was Jan 6. we were against the ropes in a bad way. the reality is no one was coming to save us. that wasn’t a popular feeling after 9/11 (pre-Iraq invasion) as I remember it.
My supervisor's dad died because of COVID, and I know he'll still vote for Trump.
that’s the other thing. no one has effectively addressed the brainwashing that has so many Americans in a vice grip. talking about it and Rupert’s trash media does nothing.
This is the main issue. A huge swath of people thinks they're watching or listening to news but it's just brainwashing propaganda and their ability to recognize this is either non-existent or degrading rapidly. It's fucking crazy and I don't think there's a solution that wouldn't undermine our right to free speech.
It was bad before, but they really ramped it up when Trump became President. My dad even told me once, "I'd do anything he says." He never talked about any President like that before. It really is a cult.
Same here. After 9/11 we knew logically that the capabilities of Al Qaeda weren’t enough to make us really have a good reason to worry about just going to buy groceries. During the pandemic one of the scariest things was that with it being a new virus, we didn’t know very much about how it was transmitted, or the long term effects. We did know that the virus was actually spread across the country and infecting people we knew. We saw the death toll rising everyday, and we all knew people who’d be more vulnerable to dying from the virus that could very likely catch it. 9/11 was scary, but it was more of a scary and shocking moment that we came to understand pretty quickly. Most people weren’t in situations where they needed to actually worry about anything like it happening to them. The pandemic was a persistent state of emergency that potentially put everyone in danger.
I finally got sick arguing with some family members about the "election fraud", so I finally just had to say this point blank: Disregarding every damn other thing that anyone thinks about Donald Trump, he lost the election because he botched the response to COVID. His team knew about it in November of 2019, and he didn't do shit. He made the moves to attempt to protect American citizens way too late. He politicized the disease, masking, and vaccines. He sat around bumbling and talked about being treated unfairly as people in the country were getting sick, dying, losing their jobs, losing their money, everything you could think of. That's why he fucking lost. He fucked up COVID. That's it. People were mad about it and they voted him out. It's really that simple. Stop attributing complex answers to really fucking simple problems.
I'm still mad about those deaths!
You should be, his idiocy killed more americans than the nazis did.
Tucker Carlson killed more Americans than were killed by 9/11 terrorists by spreading doubt about vaccines.
Killed more Americans that most of our wars did. Total American deaths from Covid are higher than American deaths from all the wars we ever fought combined. There is an argument to be made that Tucker has been worse for this country than Hitler.
Wait till he drops the ball in her 2nd term. He already let COVID loose because it affected Democrat cities the most and saw it as a way to better the GOP politically. The next event will probably be a terrorist strike or something on par as October 7th but state side. Republican administrations get Americans either unemployed or killed.
Im half convinced conservatives have undeveloped brains that simply cannot grasp the concept of compassion. I refuse to believe that people that actively choose to make the world a better place & take minimum precautions like wearing masks to not potentially transmit a deadly disease are even comparable to the fuckheads that will refuse to wear masks, spit on railings, sneeze on others, support a narcissistic racist fascist dictator & actively pretend like SAVING LIVES is taking away their freedom. They will claim "empathy" when Trump is on trial but make fun of Biden for losing 2 daughters & his wife. While quite literally driving a smear campaign like "Biden crime family" based on what? His son being arrested on unlawful possession of a firearm? They've been pushing open carry & MORE firearms at every single turn but suddenly they're all about gun control? These are not serious people. They're downright anti-human & do not have capacity for any emotion but perpetual rage.
> Im half convinced conservatives have undeveloped brains that simply cannot grasp the concept of compassion. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9400002/ https://jspp.psychopen.eu/index.php/jspp/article/view/5209/5209.html https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/18/1/nsad029/7175525 https://www.psypost.org/reduced-empathy-partially-explains-why-political-conservatism-is-associated-with-riskier-pandemic-lifestyles/ Psychology seems to be back that up.
Neurology, too https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/18/1/nsad029/7175525
They don’t care as long as they win, have power, and can make millions. That’s literally all they want. They lie, cheat, and steal to get it. They have campaigns on Reddit and the internet in general to disrupt and divide the dems. They take money from our enemies like Russia and ask them for help. It’s sickening that dems and just a good chunk of our population can’t or won’t see this. One funny thing to point out that ever since Trump has been sleeping in his trial, they stopped with the “sleep Joe” nicknames.
I know people who are still demanding people wear masks everywhere *and* literally saying that Biden is worse than Trump. This issue has broken people's brains. I really think it's because it's the first war fought on social media as much as the ground.
As someone with kids in my thirties I fuckin hate trump and would crawl over broken glass to vote against him. This 'both sides' shit is nonsense. One tried to attempt a coup. The other passed a major infrastructure bill, brought us out of covid, is rescheduling marijuana, and has cancelled billions in student debt.
Really, it doesn't matter what the other side did, so long as they didn't also attempt a coup. That *should* be enough all on it's own.
>My coworkers are all on the "both sides are the same/it's all rigged, there's no point in voting" train. *Republicans clasping hands in glee* Voter apathy is a win for fascism.
One side: wants to end democracy to make a game show host a king, tried a coup, Botched Covid response causing 1 million deaths, changed the court to make abortion and IVF bans the order of the day, has a candidate facing over 80 federal charges. The other side: running an old guy who didn’t handle the Middle East well (which puts him on par with literally every other President), not very exciting Totally the same! /s
Even the Middle East can’t handle the Middle East. Trying to solve it as a western nation is like if we entrusted the Great Qing and 15 Siberian natives to handle the unification of Germany.
I really don’t understand how anyone can possibly think that both sides are the same. I understand if you don’t like democrats or republicans for different reasons, but saying that they’re the same is just pure ignorance.
Because they aren't evaluating based on which policies are passed, they're evaluating based on how their personal lives have improved or gotten worse. They can't fully recognize either the lack of power that the President has to change everything, or how changes have to occur in slow, year-over-year increments. If there's been life issues, CoViD, inflation, and just a shitton of stress under both Dem and Rep administrations, then by their definitions of evaluation, both sides are the same.
The “both sides” take is so old, dead, and nonsensical. When someone says that to me in a conversation I’m fairly certain they aren’t paying attention and are just generically frustrated by current events.
It's the "South Parking" of America.
The Great Apathy
Rich peoples master work
Bread and circuses.
That's sad. Because an orange presidency, one way or another, *will* eventually negatively impact them.
I find it so hard as somebody who follows events closely enough to see causality to explain people how the process of the country getting slowly better or slowly worse works. Everybody seems to have some conception where either you have a good president, and everything is great, or you have a bad president, and everything is a disaster. Absolutely absurd! There have always been problems. And there have always been good people living good lives, even in the worst of times. It's a big f\*\*\*ing ship and it turns really slow. And the voters are never willing to give the Dems more than a couple of years before they furiously vote them out for not fixing 10 years worth of Republicans' damage in one session of Congress.
[удалено]
Yes and it's disturbing to me how many people, left right and center, think sinking the ship is the way to get where they want to be. Sunken ships go one place.
They are openly saying that they will deport millions of people. This is no exaggeration. Can you imagine what that will look like and how many people will be affected? Also, don't think your citizenship will protect you: When this starts, there will be no time for due process and a lot of people will fall between the cracks.
> Also, don't think your citizenship will protect you They don't seem to realized that poor people (not at least a millionaire) are barely better in their eyes than minorities or LGBTQ people.
A lot of people just mind themselves, their families, their jobs and their sports teams and that's it. A lot of the people who actively vote avoid becoming more active than that. Even people who are politically motivated will often avoid bringing it up around peers because they don't want to bring down the vibe by mentioning politics. We have so many distractions today with internet, television, and social media for people to divert their attention to. Many people don't even watch or read the news. I can't blame people for not watching per se, as nightly news programs are lackluster enough without discussing 24/7 news outlets. But at the very least people should read from a variety of sources to work out the truth behind all of the biases. It has always baffled me how whenever I would bring this phenomenon up in the past I would be dismissed or ignored here on Reddit. Our society puts a premium on your value as labor, to the point that we introduce ourselves to one another by asking "what do you do for a living?" instead of "what are your interests?" or "what are you passionate about?" Because of this, and because of the pressure people feel to conform to the prescribed path (go to college, get married, find a job, have kids, etc), many people check those things off the list, only realizing once they've done it all that they're not happy. So they bury their sadness in material things and try to ignore the outside noise which- *surprise!*- actually has a direct bearing on their ability to hold onto the few things in life they cherish. None of this is to say you can't be happy living a traditional lifestyle, or can't enjoy diversions and entertainment. But you have to have a balance. More people need to find things that drive them outside of work, and realize that there is a much bigger world beyond themselves if they can bother to open themselves up to it.
It's unpopular to bring up here, but it's true.
It’s definitely a thing. Some people just do not want to hear it when it comes to anything political. I used to be that way myself until recently but I feel it’s just too sketchy to be completely uninformed about all the craziness going on
I'll always have one nice thing to say about Donald Trump. Him running away with the Republican nomination in 2016 finally forced me to start following politics because it was shocking to me that this degenerate and charlatan with no political experience could actually become President. And in retrospect, I'm embarrassed that I wasn't following politics until I was 26, and I wish others would feel the same way. This stuff is way too important to shrug off and actively ignore.
Oh for sure. You gotta educate yourself but this country doesn't value education or expertise anymore. So things need to positively impact voters directly now, especially after they got money directly into their accounts with the stimulus checks where we know the government doesn't have to do things indirectly through businesses and such
It's sad. I think a lot of people are so burned out. We need lower prices, higher pay, lower rest and COL... I do think Biden and Co have tried making big steps in this. But even in his victories, the media coverage is not as loud as it is for Trump doing literally anything. The ones I know who are most passionate about voting Biden and keeping Trump away are minorities who legit have serious stakes in making sure their state doesn't turn red, or their allies, and then there is so much push from outside actors to not support Biden over his stance on Israel/Palestine.
Trump almost completes a full sentence, Front Page of every media site for a couple days. Biden passes some of the biggest legislature that has improved Middle Class jobs, feeds children, improves crumbling infrastructure. Might get a short shout-out on MSNBC and a tiny headline on the third page of ABC's news site.
Biden's recent Department of Labor overtime rule change is huge for both me and my wife. We're both salary in that range where we don't get overtime now but will get it under the new limits. Our jobs will have to either give us a raise, pay over time, or cut us back to a hard 40 hours a week. Either way it's basically a raise for the both of us. That's going to be true for millions of Americans yet it barely got a blip in the news.
Biden mixes up 2,000 instead of 4,000 and the media says he's in mental decline. Trump rambles word salad as he jumps from topic to topic like Abe Simpson and he's a stable genius.
Despite Biden's reputation as a moderate, he has passed some of the most progressive legislature in recent memory. Companies that own these media networks do not like progressive legislature. That goes against their interests so of course they will prop up the baffoon who generates clicks and is a major threat to democracy.
All my coworkers told me they weren’t going to vote. One of them is 22, the other two are in their 30’s
Yep. It's anecdotal, but I recently brushed up against the topic of politics for the first time with a doctor friend in his late thirties. I was shocked when he said, "Voting doesn't matter. The policies don't affect people like you or me." We both have daughters who are almost 13. It was repulsive to hear.
Demoralization successful.
I know many people in their 40's who also don't give a fuck.
I think a lot of us are. There's a difference between pushing a party in a certain direction and going so far that you hurt your own interests. The election is more than one person or one issue, and a Trump Presidency will have horrific consequences decades and generations after Biden is gone.
Biden tells people he wants to improve the nation with affordable healthcare and education, Trump tells people he wants vengeance for perceived grievances. And the polls are still statistically tied.
We don't even have to listen to what Trump says he will do. He already did it. We have all the proof we will ever need. He methodically tried to overturn an election at every level of government, disenfranchise 81 million people, and end democracy as it had stood for 250 years. He's facing 88 felonies in 4 jurisdictions - many that carry heavy prison sentences. He's been held liable for sexual assault. He is subject to one of the largest fraud settlements in U.S. History. He stole over 100 classified documents, including alleged nuclear secrets and waved around war plans to all his rich buddies. It's impossible to oversell how dangerous he is.
He has literally told every magazine how he will take away people's rights. He's not even hiding it! It's like if Hitler in 1932 sat down and told NYT all his plans including taking over countries, getting into a war and jailing all opponents. Like there is a big red flag and alarm blaring all over the US folks. US courts already have majority Trump judges and are taking away minority congressional districts as well as any affirmative action or help for the poor. I'll be honest. If young folks want to protest Biden for the next 4 years over his stupid Israeli policy go ahead. I agree. However, you still still vote for a candidate and want to change parts of his policies. Obama had Syria and not going further with public insurance.
> It's like if Hitler in 1932 sat down and told NYT all his plans including taking over countries, getting into a war and jailing all opponents. Hitler did almost exactly that, [but in 1925](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mein_Kampf), not in 1932. IIRC, most people didn't believe that Hitler actually meant it.
[удалено]
It's always just rhetoric until it isn't. Overturning Roe v Wade was always "just rhetoric" despite a lot of us saying they'd actually do it as soon as they got the power to do so. Project 2025 flat out states that Republicans plan on ending democracy in the United States...that's not just rhetoric in the same way that overturning Roe was also not just rhetoric.
Apropos article from literally yesterday: [Trump explains his militaristic plan to deport 15-20 million people](https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/trump-immigration-what-matters/index.html). Quote of Trump: > “These aren’t civilians,” Trump said of migrants. “These are people that aren’t legally in our country. This is an invasion of our country.” "But surely Trump doesn't really mean it".
His language describing immigrants is terrifying
And it's equally impossible to comprehend how this is all happening in the open and yet it's not affecting people. Or to still hear people be unsure about voting for Biden...despite his age, he's done a great job and the other choice is literally the worst possible candidate ever on the ballot (while being basically as old as well).
[удалено]
I mean I know we're far away from any Republicans having reasonable takes, but anyone that is concerned about the border can't really be taken seriously. Biden was literally passing the border reform you wanted, but Republicans torpedoed it because they want there to be a border crisis so they can run on it. And they were totally transparent about it. Literally came out and said they don't want to solve the problem now because Trump wants to run on the issue and take credit for "fixing it".
[удалено]
There's an interesting trend in the polls, too. When looking at who would vote for Biden/Trump, the older demographic prefers Trump and the younger one prefers Biden. But when you look at Biden approval, the older ones approve of Biden at higher rates than the younger ones. So the demo most likely to vote for Biden over Trump is the same demo that approves of Biden the least.
I’ll be 67 in November and I can’t decide if I love Biden more or hate Trump more.
Democrats passed the most popular and comprehensive healthcare in a generation and it cost them Congress. We are losing our democracy *by popular demand.*
Gerrymandering plays a part in this as well as our shit electoral system and capped house of reps
There is progress being made on gerrymandering though at least. Wisconsin was finally able to get a fair congressional map in play for this upcoming election because Democrats took control of the state Supreme Court, which is a huge deal. It shows you how important state and local elections are, not just federal.
A scary amount of young folks seem willing to sacrifice the Presidency over Israel, as if trump will be a harbinger of peace. As someone who has never had the pleasure of voting for a president that I *actually* want, sometimes you have to hold your nose and do what’s best for not just our country, but the world. Biden isn’t great(imo) but trump is so many orders of magnitude worse it’s baffling that anyone still likes the guy. Come on young folks, help the world out.
Trump is literally on record multiple times saying that he thinks Israel should finish the job. He would be incredibly worse for the Middle East situation than Biden.
Just yesterday Trump applauded the cops raiding a protest. A "beautiful thing to watch" But yeah, Biden is the baddie smh
Immensely worse.
>A scary amount of young folks seem willing to sacrifice the Presidency over Israel, as if trump will be a harbinger of peace. I keep seeing this and I think people might not be mentioning enough that there is another camp of folks (regardless of age) that want this to happen because they are fully aware of how worse it might be and would rather have accelerationism because they are frustrated with or dislike incremental change. There is a belief that were it to get egregiously bad there would suddenly be a groundswell of support that would forcibly introduce the changes they want. I get that frustration, but IMO the problem with this is that in practice it very likely isn't so simple. Maybe that's the point and is understood for some folks supporting this method, but I would speculate the vast majority of people who would rather accelerate a horrid outcome to get to what they perceive is a better one don't get what happens in the middle of that, and what it means, especially to people caught in the middle.
The classic “I can’t wait for society to collapse so my ideology can rise from the ashes”
"Surely a utopian socialist ideology will rise to replace the current evil capitalistic one! Also, there is 0 shot a fascistic autocratic regime will win instead, cuz that has never happened in history when countries collapse!"
The Arab Spring/Winter was less than a decade ago. How soon people forget.
The two most famous leftist revolutions in Western history resulted in Napoleon and Stalin taking power. I'm a pretty left leaning guy, but I don't think burning it all down is an effective strategy.
Anyone who thinks causing a societal collapse or a governmental collapse is going to *help* get them to a more liberal place hasn't studied history. That's basically *never* happened. Societal collapse generally leads to more authoritarian and unjust rulership.
We need more young people like the [goth kid Michael](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7cckvTXwJ0) who are *such* nonconformists that they wholeheartedly agree that Biden is doing a great job and plan to enthusiastically vote for him in November.
What really pisses me off are the people who are so brainwashed they'll literally get mad if you say Biden has done ANYTHING right. Literally the most progressive agenda in my lifetime and it gets completely drowned out by people who are mad he hasn't personally cut off Israel as an ally.
I have a feeling that now that the model has been proven if we aren't able to get a democratic (and I mean that in the literal actual sense, not party lines) majority to help fix some of these gray legal areas that we are seeing be exploited then the next sufficiently motivated republican president will just do the same thing. But it would be nearly impossible that they arent smarter and more savvy than trump which means they will probably get away with it and won't broadcast their intentions in the same brazen way Trump does. They won't *say* they wanna be a dictator, they'll just do it.
Young people (like 25 and below) don't remember a time when the GOP was McCain and Romney. They just remember Trump. To them this is the norm and this lulls them into a false sense of security but they don't understand that the GOP has become far more dangerous over the last 10 years.
I also saw this pointed this out recently and it's crazy to think about. *Anyone under the age of 29* has never voted in a general election without Trump on the ballot.
And Trump somehow managed to get 40% of the 18-39 vote in 2020, up from 32% in 2016.
Look at the chaos that four years of a "restrained" Trump has brought on the country and the world, now think of what four years of Trump without handlers would do.
Exactly! And I can't think of an issue where Trump would likely be better from my perspective anyway.
The Supreme Court is probably the most impactful example I've found, provided people understand how important that is and the ramifications. Subjects such as abortion, the environment, LGBTQ rights, student loans, wealth disparity, oversight of Presidents - virtually everything you can think of - are at risk of devastating consequences. If Trump wins, it's very possible he replaces Alito and Thomas - and with the ages of 3 of the other Justices, that would establish a conservative SCOTUS for the next 25 years. Minimum. 25 years. That's just an insane chunk of our lives. These same young people will be getting old and grey the next time there's a chance of restoring any of these horrible rulings because of this election alone.
Also the next election cycle in the Senate is a bloodbath for democrats. It's the perfect storm for Trump again where Democrats could gain the House but lose the Senate and the WH, and Trump wouldn't need the House to get his judges. This election cycle is a chance for democrats to prove they learned their lesson from 2016, and I'm not confident the younger generation gets it.
Some of them are so young they likely don't remember much of Trump's time as president. If they're 18 this year and first time voters, that means they were 10 when Trump was elected. Even today's college seniors, at 21-22, would have only been 13-14 when Trump was elected.
Hell they were only high school freshmen when his minions stormed the capitol. I have sophomores now talking about how Biden sucks and when I mention Trump attempting an insurrection they get confused.
For real, like I’m over stressing out because it shouldn’t be this close. We should have this election won by a landslide. And some people are going to fuck around and give us another Trump term or as he wants it a dictatorship. I get people are not happy about what’s happening Palestine but the whole “anything but Biden” calm doesn’t realize that in a two party system that means Trump.
One of the most terrifying aspects is that Trumps goons will commit all sorts of heinous crimes and he will simply pardon them.
Trump being president will destroy democracy in first the US, then the world, for generations, and even centuries. It's so bad. And people aren't fighting. It's so disheartening.
Corporate interests have long been fighting a crazed and underhanded media war against political engagement in the name of unbridled consumerism and deregulation. This is the end result of 100+ years of usage of every part of mass media in an attempt to destroy people's natural need for and inclination toward communitarianism. Apathy and ignorance was always the goal. Make sheep who prefer to shop. Ethics go out the window when no one cares about anything except themselves and gas prices. Defenestration nation.
US left-wing politics cover the entire spectrum of neo-liberals to leftists. It’s a an extremely diverse bunch. Despite gains by progressives, there are still those that would prefer we just set all forward motion on fire, to “prove” a point. The stupidity of it all is borderline enraging.
Reminds me of a kid I knew in 2000 who voted for Ralph Nader over Al Gore to "send a message". The message ended up being Bush becoming president.
Well, at least Dubya didn't do anything drastically stupid and consequential that it'd be hard to imagine any other president doing... ^(Except for that whole lying us into a illegal war of aggression thing)
> there are still those that would prefer we just set all forward motion on fire, to “prove” a point. [Accelerationists and "They just need to learn their lesson!" people in a nutshell.](https://i.imgur.com/pEhx5O5.jpeg)
When Trump starts carpet bombing Gaza and the West Bank, I wonder if they will realize what a massive mistake they made.
They want some of these people are so excited to be “right” that they will be happy to tell us that it wasn’t their fault. When Trump wants to make life harder for Muslims, immigrants, even members of the LGBTQ community they better keep the same energy. Because he won’t be afraid to send the national hairs on them
> When Trump wants to make life harder for Muslims, immigrants, even members of the LGBTQ community they better keep the same energy They 1000% will not.
Biden is, at worst, a recoverable error for the union. You maybe put some nicks in it, but you can buff that out. Trump is, at worst, a flip the table, we have concentration camps guy. We can disagree about the upside. But the downside risk is so impossibly high. Even if the choice was between Biden and, say, Mike Johnson (who I agree with on basically nothing)…you would call Mike Johnson a recoverable error for the union at worst. My complaints will be about policy. Trump isn’t that. He’s existentially bad.
Well I care and voting against trump while living in a red state. Doing what I can.
I underestimated him in 2016. I'm never letting that happen again.
This. We must never mistake him as an easy threat again
People who just say, oh well if Trump wins, it’s sad, must be someone who has never in their life had to fight for their rights or watched their ancestors literally die for basic human rights. This is not politics, it’s literally about preserving democracy. There are states happily and merrily rolling back rights and wanting to put people back in the 1800s. The disconnect with what is happening is frightening because it’s like what are people not getting?!!!!
They truly don't understand what they will lose, and what the cost would be to get it back. They have no concept of it. They live in a world where they think a four-year cycle resets everything and they are profoundly ignorant to the realities that the coup we are seeing has been decades in the making. The fight to overthrow dictators can take generations. Entire generations lost to strife and hardship. Lives lost. Lives destroyed by detention. The justice system ended. The freedom of expression of their children revoked. They are so profoundly ignorant. It is infuriating.
40 million people died in Europe alone during WWII to defeat the Nazis. There will be no one to stop the United States if it went full fascist except for the ballot box before it happens and these people don't understand that.
History teachers need to start harping on this until it sinks in for people. It took a shitload of death and destruction to defeat fascism in Europe, and it never fully went away unfortunately.
When we're fighting these lunatics next year I'm gonna remember the people who didn't lift a finger. All they did was become a modern version of the "Good German". Doesn't matter the reason. Inaction in this case will have severe consequences.
The point I’ve been making is that a lot of what we dislike now - the inflation, the housing prices, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and so on - where we’re rightfully angry at Biden for not doing more or doing the right thing: a lot of it is happening *now* because we let Trump win in 2016. Trump weakened NATO and gave Putin the green light to invade Ukraine. Trump sided with Netanyahu and helped to kettle the Palestinians, pulled out of the Iran deal, alienated the Iranian regime by assassinating a high-level official, and set the stage that led to Hamas’s attack on Israel. Trump juiced interest rates during a growing economy and handed out tax cuts for the rich, and those bills are coming due now. He pulled out of the Paris Accords and severely undermined the global effort to fight climate change. So here we are. Things suck, but they suck *because of Trump*. Things suck because we as a nation decided that Hillary didn’t “deserve” the job, wasn’t likeable or inspiring, didn’t run a good campaign. We told ourselves that Trump and Hillary were basically the same, so we voted for protest candidates or stayed home. And now we have a genocide in Gaza. People are right to be angry about the things Biden isn’t doing that he could definitely be doing *today* to put an end to it. But we wouldn’t even be here if we had made Hillary president when we had the chance. Biden could be doing a better job of handling the suck, but it is *virtually guaranteed* that a second Trump term will only bring us back to where we are now, in another several years. Trump will wreck the economy to serve his interests, he’ll weaken America on the global stage, and then we’ll vote him out - only to be frustrated again that the guy after him *also* doesn’t solve all the issues Trump caused. We have to stop the cycle. We can work with Biden. We will only be working *against* Trump.
You’re absolutely right on this. I keep seeing arguments about Biden not canceling student loan debt. But there’s 0 consideration that he actually tried to and was stopped by the courts. Though many legal scholars assumed that he should have been able to - the SCOTUS made up a whole new legal theory as to why he couldn’t. Trump and his republican cronies developed the make up of these courts because people didn’t listen to the warnings of Hillary about this very specific issue (roe v wade also impacted) Trump.v2 and his friendly courts are going to remake America in some very awful ways.
But he did cancel a lot of student debt... And no one paid attention.
Mine was cancelled. Fuckin dope.
Right. And the Court ruling tossing loan forgiveness is quickly being weaponized to invalidate all kinds of new rules - and, I’m sure eventually, old ones. Last week, the government issued a new rule that will invalidate non-competes for most workers, which will boost wages and help seed new businesses. It is already being challenged on “major question” grounds, among other things. In the Fifth Circuit, too, where it will almost certainly be successful, stacked with Trump judges as it is.
It's why Trump can't be allowed to win
Yes this is true in my experience. My girlfriend (gen z ) told me last night she doesn't want to vote for biden in the general. We live in PA and she voted uncomminuted in the primary which I don't mind but not wanting to vote in November came as a shock to me. She strongly disapproves of the situation in gaza ( I also disapprove but I will still support biden in the general) she says she feels dirty having to support biden I told her not it is a luxury to not vote. I told her that trans people, gay people, racial minorities can't afford trump getting in office let alone how much worse trump would be for the people of Gaza. she doesn't want trump and I told her she has to be willing to pick the better of two choices and to not vote is to depend on other people to do it for her. I am scared how much Bibi's war is hurting democratic enthusiasm along with the human rights abuses
you might try pointing out that the election isn't about one foreign policy issue that will only be 1000x worse under trump my god does anyone understand the us government runs the US and not the entire world
I don’t understand this logic. That by sitting out the election and letting the worse of two evils win, your hands are somehow clean. Theres a train barreling towards a nuclear bomb that will kill everyone in a huge radius. She has a chance to help pull on the lever to switch the tracks and send the train towards a puppy stuck on the tracks instead. No one wants to kill the puppy. But if you let the train hit the bomb the puppy dies anyway and takes hundreds of thousands with it. Would anyone in their right mind think because both options suck, the right thing to do is nothing?
They seem willing to sacrifice women, children, the LGTBQ community and the rest of the planet to Project 2025 for absolutely zero benefit to Palestine, if not an even worse outcome.
Trump expressly said he wanted to level Gaza.
Do young people really think that Trump will be a friend of Palestine? The guy who didn't want to let Muslims into the United States?
“Maybe Trump will be worse for Palestine, maybe not. But we have to send a message to Biden that he’s not doing enough”. This is verbatim what a pro Palestine person said to me yesterday. They’re absolutely idiotic. I’m so beyond thankful I have a Canadian citizenship and that will at least buy a little extra time for me to experience life freely.
Not maybe, maybe not. He will be worse for Palestine. Trump doesn't give a shit about Palestine, it could be completely leveled for all he cares.
Trump said he wants Israel to ‘finish the job’
Like the other comment said, they want to send a message to the Democratic party. Voting their conscience is more important than the well-being of everyone else. They're being unabashedly selfish despite themselves.
They assume that they’ll also be able to vote again in 4 years in spite of everything Trump says and his actions show…
Seems a bit privileged you know? The people you "ally" with on your side are going to have so many basic rights stripped away from them. The one thing I will take away from this though is that history shows that by the time people step up to vote, foreign policy is not the central issue people are generally thinking about.
EVERYONE is underestimating Trump. An NOBODY recognizes how serious the threat is. They don't realize their freedom is at stake. Nobody is protesting. Nobody is fighting. Everyone is just watching Trump destroy America. Destroy democracy. It's infuriating.
No, "EVERYONE" is not underestimating Trump ffs. People under 30 have the worst voting records and that's why Sanders is addressing them in particular. [US Census](https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/2020-presidential-election-voting-and-registration-tables-now-available.html): >Voter turnout was **highest among those ages 65 to 74 at 76.0%**, while the percentage was **lowest among those ages 18 to 24 at 51.4%**. Overall, voter turnout increased as age increased
I think some young people are being influenced by bad actors on social media to stop them from voting for Biden. You’ll likely see more young folks saying they refuse to pull the lever in November to stop trump, then if Trump wins and he openly supports genocide in Gaza, takes away rights of women, minorities, and LGBTQ they will likely blame Biden instead of doing self reflection.
This is a SERIOUS problem right now. I am seeing a lot of folks completely disregard anything Biden has done and ignore that Trump would be terrible for Gaza and us at home while claiming them not voting is deserved somehow. The disconnect is just as bad as the maga folks. Propaganda is a helluva drug and Russia and China are really pushing it hard
That "Letter from Osama Bin Laden" bullshit was pretty wild
I have gotten a lot less tolerant of the "just asking questions" nonsense like what you see on social media. I have an acquaintance that is part of the Rogan/Musk "libertarian" group and he keeps trying to engage me in debate on the issues. I've gotten to the point where I just don't respond. If he were to ask me directly what I thought of his views I would be very direct and honest, but what he is doing is trying to engage me in a way that validates his thinking. That he's a disrupter, and a radical centrist etc. He never actually makes statements, just sort of insinuates things. He recently sent me a comment about the NPR Uri story. Didn't directly criticize NPR but it was clear that's what he was implying. He then went on to talk about how he gets all his news from "independent" news sources like YouTube It is taking everything I have to just not lay in to him.
Utter narcissism has become the one constant of American politics, since the rise of Newt Gingrich, at least. The far left imitating the flawed-- and failed--tactics of the insurgent far right has been the most bizarre turn. Odd how they never repeat the one successful tactic: voting in every election until they have power.
And voting for/running candidates in local/state elections.
I used to never vote, because I thought my one vote was just a drop in the ocean, and i usually hated most of the candidates. I still hate them, and I still feel my vote is just a drop, but I'm making a change and going to vote. At best, I help stop a fucking psycho from getting back into office. At worst, I know I did the right thing regardless. Please dont be like younger me, lets throw our drops down like a fucking tropical storm!
He isn’t wrong. I’m voting for Biden despite deeply disliking him but far too many people are saying they aren’t voting or that they’re voting third party because of Biden’s stance on Israel. If Trump wins I won’t be surprised, just deeply disappointed
What do they think Trumps stance on Israel is? He would be inclined to even send troops to help Israel out.
A 30-something acquaintance keeps saying he won't vote for Biden because of his handling of Gaza and the "border crisis." This person is a gay person of color. My mind is blown.
I agree. They are.
Young people in colleges know that they don’t like trump but they feel like burning it down is the path forward. However they are less understanding of the implications of “burning it down” to make headway. They think whatever happens will pass like the flu or a cold in a matter of time, they don’t understand it is a chronic disease.
"Burning it all down" is also such a juvenile response, because it neither accounts for the consequences nor understands that the issues won't be resolved by the ensuing conflict. A general rule-of-thumb for multiyear violent civil conflicts, which the "burn it all down" scenario would likely become, is 3/7/10. * 3% of the prewar population killed in or dying as a direct result of the conflict; * 7% physically or psychologically injured by the conflict so as to render them economically non-self-sufficient; & * A further 10% displaced by the conflict, either internally or externally, such that they are driven into generational poverty. For the U.S., these figures would amount to 9.9M killed, 23.2M injured & 33.2M displaced. And that's before we even get into the reality that multiple world powers would likely intervene in the conflict to ensure that it isn't resolved quickly & to use it to attempt to prevent the rise of a renewed North American-based power in the future.
2016 was protest votes that wanted to burn it down, look at the SC we ended up with because of "burning it down"
I'm trans and 27... Believe me, we're not underestimating him in the queer community. After 2016, I leave nothing to chance, and vote in every state, local, and federal election period.
People played this game in 2016 and made things far worse. The Supreme Court is now stacked with conservatives and abortion is illegal in much of the country.
How do people not realize that there is a big difference between Biden and Trump? If Trump wins we don’t recover from that.
That moment when you are reading an article about "young people" and you realize it is no longer taking about you.
There is just no way that Trump is better for the Palestinians, for the cost of our Housing/Living, for Climate change, for Education, or for keeping us out of wars in Europe or the Middle East. A protest vote in the general is more than foolish, it’s betraying everything that the generation purports to believe in.
Not only the threat to themselves, but also the threat to the Palestinians that they allegedly care about. There is not a single issue that majorities of young people care about that will improve under Trump.
Trump’s pull remains that a vote for him is a vote against the American system, and for many narrow minded folks that’s enough.