They won’t hear about the bad things, or they’ll be told it was the Democrats that did it, and they’ll be believe it. Convincing MAGA of reality is pointless while they’re still feeding from the trough of conservative shit. We’re better off protesting and being disruptive in combination with getting our shit together for next round, where hopefully we’ll have real primaries and get our first competent general election candidate since Obama.
Yeah, home advantage is less and less relevant every year. Once upon a time this would be news, but it’s a new era and he wasn’t even the presidential candidate.
Sort of, with the major distinction that you can just tell somebody water green tea is and they’ll know what green tea is. It’s a trivial fix. You can tell a Trump supporter that Harris is not a communist, and they won’t believe you for a million years, with all the facts in the world behind you.
Plain ignorance is part of it, but I really don’t think it’s the driving factor. You don’t vote for Trump because you lack some key knowledge, no matter how trivial that knowledge is. You vote for him because you’ve been inundated with conservative media for decades, and you have no grasp on reality anymore. You really believe Harris is going to hold you at gunpoint and replace your gas heaters with electric. You really believe she’s going to sell the United States to China for a hundred bucks. You might even believe there’s a war on men, a war on your religion, a war on everything that brings you meaning to your life. If I truly believed the things that conservative media was saying, I’d vote for him too.
It’s not just ignorance. It’s brainwashing.
And I very much recall at least two instances where he said this is the last election you’ll have to vote in. Is he going to find/create a way to suspend the 2028 election and stay in power? Who’s going to stop him?
That’s why I said it’s possible, I just don’t think it’s probable. People are loyal to Trump until they’re not. Nobody’s loyal to him because they like him or they think he’s a good guy, or because they think he’ll bring the country prosperity. They’re loyal because they think they can get something out of it. Most people aren’t in a position where they’re willing to give up literally everything to help this particular asshole become a dictator. Those that are are typically incompetent - see anything and everything related to stealing the 2020 election. They tried a LOT of things, but nothing came even close to working.
So they’ll try again, and I don’t think anybody’s doubting that. And I don’t think our institutions are particularly strong, but they’re probably strong enough to stop that kind of incompetence from leading to a dictatorship.
Let me be clear here. If we have a global nuclear war, that’s not recoverable, because every human on earth will be dead. If we enter a fascist dictatorship with today’s technology, that may not be recoverable, because we may see the permanent end of anything resembling a democracy.
I’m not saying there weren’t horrific atrocities committed during Trump’s reign. What I’m saying is that so far, there’s a chance future generations can live better lives.
The truth is it’s unlikely anything historically big is going to happen in the US. We saw what Trump did last time he was in office, and it was really bad, but it was recoverable. The fear isn’t that it’s likely, but that it’s far from a non-zero chance, and there’s very little we can do about it. That uncertainty is scary when we’ve had a relatively good time in recent decades.
Will we see a sudden shift toward a state where you can get jailed or murdered for being a dissident? Maybe, but probably not.
Will we see an escalation of the wars involving Israel, such that we see a WWIII and/or the first nuclear strike since WWII? Maybe, but probably not.
Will we see economic collapse causing widespread hunger and homelessness that we haven’t seen since the Great Depression? Maybe, but probably not.
The only thing that’s really a guarantee is that we’re another four years away from dealing with climate change, and while that’s massive for humanity down the line, individuals currently living in the US are probably going to be mostly fine. Not to say nobody will be affected - hurricanes, floods, fires, and so on - but it won’t cause catastrophic failure of society in the near future.
They should have given people on the left some reason to be motivated to vote though, not just fear.
This is the massive key that I really don’t think the Democratic party understands. When people are scared, they vote conservative. There are literal studies that show fear is the driving force behind conservative voters. Democrats need to make them feel safe. That’s one of the reasons Obama was so successful - he ran on change and hope. Fear works for Republicans. It doesn’t work for Democrats. But they see fear working for Republicans, so they copy it.
I’m not convinced that’s the reason, but if the country is so misogynistic it’s impossible to elect a woman, we need to stop putting women up for election. That’s shitty, but it’s better than Republicans winning.
The Democrats have managed to field two candidates so unelectable they lost to Donald fucking Trump. That’s how. And we, the Democratic constituents, are failing to either take over or dismantle the Democratic party so we can get a halfway decent candidate in. We fucking suck.
Could just get this tattooed for how often it’s true.
Trump’s likely to win, so we might find out just how bad it gets. I’m betting it’s a literal completed genocide within his term - no Palestinian survivors in the now-official-Israeli-territories. I doubt that would change your mind though, since it’s easy to just say Harris would have done it too.
Pretty classic trolley problem here. One track has genocide. The other side has larger scale and more effective genocide, along with a pile of other issues. Nobody’s saying genocide is good, but they’re saying 50,000 dead in a year is better than millions dead in a year alongside widespread escalation of genocide elsewhere, higher international tensions with a more significant chance of a nuclear incident, and more crackdowns on dissent just like yours and mine.
Your ability to participate in political organization and not immediately be killed or thrown in jail depends on the people who are in power. The United States isn’t immune to regressing to that society, and it’s very clear the Republicans are doing what they can to move in that direction.
Voting for the Democrats and doing nothing else is far from ideal and won’t fix the institutional problems, but it will help prevent new major problems, like mass murder for criticizing the government, from popping up.
Voting for the Democrats so you can continue activism is step one, and is an important step. It’s also a trivially easy step with no downside. It’s just not the only step.
For fun, I went and investigated this, and learned a lot! Greta refuses to fly, citing the emissions caused by air travel, so she goes by boat instead. She crossed the Atlantic on the Malizia II, a racing yacht that sounds like a miserable time because it doesn’t have basic facilities like a toilet. She was taken across by Boris Herrmann of team Malizia, who (as you might guess) race the boat. Neither she nor her parents own it.
She’s also crossed on La Vagabonde, known for its Youtube channel where its owners, as far as I can tell, just kind of sail around. The owners don’t resemble her parents, either.
I also found a particularly bizzare claim including a notably doctored picture that she was “caught” on a yacht with Leonardo DiCaprio. Even that one doesn’t claim her family owns it.
I legitimately can’t even find a fake news site that makes the claim you’re making. Did you make it up whole cloth? To what end? What relevance would it even have to the topic? Is the idea that “big green energy” is coming for oil companies, and her family made their money off of green energy, and the entire purpose of her activism is to be part of big green energy’s master plan to take over big oil?
This a new conspiracy theory to me. Greta Thunberg’s parents, a moderately successful opera singer and non-Hollywood actor, are billionaires? I’d be surprised if they were worth a million, let alone a billion.
As great as it would be if she won Iowa, this is the most obvious outlier poll that ever existed. Almost nobody’s even polling Iowa because it’s not close, and the few polls other than this one show Trump as a clear winner.
I hope I’m wrong, but I’ve been seeing thread after thread of these one-off polls and just general “there’s no way Harris can lose” mentality. She had a huge lead around the time she announced Walz, but it’s been downhill since then. Most reliable predictors have her losing at this point. That sucks, but it doesn’t help to pretend it’s not happening.
Do what you can to get Harris the win, but also consider what your options are if she doesn’t.
With the now-totally-legal-thanks-to-SCOTUS voter purging, theft and destruction of ballots, aggressive voter suppression tactics, and polling that indicates an electoral college but not population vote win for Trump, they might not have to ‘Stop the Steal’ at all. They’ve “legally” pre-stolen it themselves.
Instead of being concerned what the Republicans might do if they lose, it might be worth wondering if everybody else should really take it lying down like they did the 2000 election.
Same answer it’s been for my whole lifetime: a small number of extremely wealthy individuals pumping a constant stream of money into conservative media with the express purpose of changing public opinion.
People who’ve been listening to this stuff their entire lives don’t live in the real world. They legitimately don’t believe in reality, and after a certain point I’m not sure it’s possible to bring them back. Much like climate change, this kind of thing should’ve been stopped at the source decades ago, and it might just be too late now.
True, but that’s not new. George Floyd, Occupy Wall Street, Seattle WTO, and the entirety of the civil rights movement all were met with state violence. The more they crack down, the more necessary it is to protest it.