I don’t know, I’m a democrat and hold many liberal ideals, and I never heard of many of those terms you mentioned. I think fundamentally, we have been systematically divided, lied to, and manipulated. Given the space and permission to hate. All these issue are mostly nonsense.
I mean who decides fascism, and oligarchs are less dangerous than someone who want to call themselves they/them or marry a person of the same sec. I just don’t care so much… This is nuts.
That said, identify politics did seemed to come out of no where during the pandemic.
I never agreed with it.
Look, all this is just bullshit. I commented on a friends Facebook page during the election and was attacked by his friends and called a radical liberal, a “Demon-crat” what the hell? We’ve lost our way as a people.
Those same peeps were convinced Harris would destroy our country, and compared our future to Venezuela.
I think it time to stop feeding into this, because the reality is we’ve been led by very rich, powerful people. On purpose. They have broken our society.
Identity politics is much older than the pandemic. Todd Gitlin wrote about them decades ago, fearing they were dividing Americans and feeding the reactionary right wing. His book 'The Twilight of Common Dreams' is really good.
Identity politics are there and a ready way for extreme Republicans to bash Dems. Ok yeah. Corp money in politics is the number one problem on both sides. #1 Overturn Citizens United!!
The Harris Walz campaign laid out a plan that appealed to all Americans. (The legacy media claimed it was vague, while somehow Trump's dancing and farting on stage was a policy.) 75 million people voted for them, 77 million voted for Trump, who got a little less than 50% of the votes cast, and two other candidates got the remainder. Harris was a woman of color; you don't think that repelled Hispanic men, and white men, who would never vote for a woman, period? The fact is that right wing media, who are the pornography of their followers, have amplified all the acronyms listed here to grotesque proportions that feed the MAGA hate lust. With all that, this was the closest vote in the presidential elections since Kennedy-Nixon, or possibly even earlier. Harris got 1 million more votes than Trump got in 2020, and Trump got 4 million fewer votes than Biden in 2020. The reason this loss seems so terrible now is the wild deviance of the Republican Party from all normal governance and constitutional constraints. The House GOP has a current margin of only 4 votes, including Vance's, as I understand it. We warned our friends about Project 2025's agenda, Trump distanced himself from it, and they believed Trump when he said that it didn't even exist. Forget the acronym argument. It's right-wing media, and Sinclair's monopoly in rural areas, plus Musk's 250 million dollars into the 2024 campaign, that were overwhelming. And if Musk could spend that on a campaign that netted him 250 billion dollars, what is maybe another 530 million dollars in "gifts" to reward GOP senators to be thick as thieves in his favor. So, in summation, don't disparage Democrats, who clearly communicated what was at stake in 2024. And, who knew about Musk's role in government before the election? DOGE was announced after the election, as I recall. All I can say is, if your state is having a special election, vote for your Democratic representatives. If you are not in those states, donate to the Democratic Party. We will never fix stupid, so we must outnumber them at the polls. Most special elections so far are flipping red to blue. The Democrats are overperforming. Invest in Democrats.
Frank made some good points, but I must say you made some excellent ones as well. The situation has so many variables... This even goes back to young people yearning to vote for Bernie years ago, but the "smoke-filled" room giving them Hillary. If Bernie had been the nominee young people would have turned out in such numbers that we would not be dealing with Trump at all today. Now the young people are disengaged and feel they have no voice. In any event, nice post.
Thank you. I liked Sanders as well, but the right had ammunition to call him a communist, especially after he self-identified as a democratic socialist. Hillary Clinton, former First Lady, Senator from New York, and Secretary of State, beat Trump by 3 million votes, and that's after Comey came out, in violation of the Hatch act, to announce, falsely, that the FBI was opening another investigation into her emails, like 3 days before election day. Clinton lost 3 states in the popular vote by a mere 80,000 votes between them. The GOP has learned to game the swing states in the Electoral College. This time around, in Pennsylvania, they registered the entire Amish community to vote for Trump, claiming that the Democrats were going to ban their unpasteurized milk, This kind of activity costs millions of dollars. I only hope that Trump's out of the gate fascism and unelected Musk will galvanize voters in upcoming special elections to take back the House and narrow the GOP margin in the Senate. The only thing I can think of is that Biden should have stepped aside sooner so that there could have been a convention. Harris, though, being VP, was the obvious nominee. A white male might have prevailed against Trump, sorry to say.
I'm sorry, but how is that relevant to the crisis we are facing now? There are special elections coming up soon that could flip the House. People get stuck on presidential elections and neglect our mid-term state and federal legislatures. I don't care what democrats did in 2016, even though Secretary Clinton did win the popular vote with a 3 million vote margin. We only need to win 3 seats to even out the House. Step up and donate to the Democratic Party if you care about what is happening right now.
You're points are spot on. The confusing appropriation of the pronoun "they" to describe non-binary people, is another example of the overreach of the left. The Balkanization of society into different groups is not going to help the Democrats win back the senate or the presidency.
Well. That and the fact that the majority of our population is ok with a racist, misogynist, grifter, abuser, felon being in the White House. You cannot fix stupid. Stupid people shouldn’t breathe. Nor should they reproduce. They need to be taken out of the gene pool.
Are you sure we can unite around that? Some of those issues are awfully volatile and polarizing. I would think that uniting against fascism should be enough, regardless of the unusual views of some splinter groups. We need to stay united, not fight amongst ourselves.
Let's look at the much bigger picture. trump isn't the problem. He is just a figurehead who was chosen by the real problem; the insanely wealthy, who have spent the decades since the New Deal working tirelessly to get "their" money back. These oligarchs (like the Koch foundations, the Bradley foundation, the Mellon/Scaife foundation, and on and on) remember the Robber Baron era of the 1800s, and they have so much money that they have spent the many decades since the middle class started to grow (the only one of its kind in human history) that they resolved to get "their" money back, no matter how long it took.
These oligarchs got a boost when everybody's favorite senile uncle, Saint Ronnie Raygun, was chosen by them, because they knew he was already sliding into senility (he was, after all, a Democrat before becoming a Republican), and was obviously easy to manipulate. Before he became president*, there were about a dozen billionaires in the country; now we have anywhere from 800 to over a thousand, depending on whose numbers you believe.
After him came Clinton and Obama on the "left," which we don't one of anymore, who practiced neoliberalism, and did little to nothing to help the average American, as the middle class kept shrinking, while the billionaire class kept growing. Joe Biden was part of the problem during Clinton's term.
In the interim, thanks in no small measure to the part of the uber wealthy to defund public education, we now have a populace of which ½ of American adults who have severe literacy issues, and can't read past a sixth grade level (including the president*). They are thus easily manipulated/conned into believing whatever they've been fed for decades, which has been "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" and you too can buy a $500 million yacht, and a dozen homes, etc., and "those people" (pick whatever group you don't like, such as the LGBTQI community, are the Muslims who are coming here to kill us, or the atheists/nonbelievers, who are here to kill us if we don't convert, or the women, who need to stay in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant, or the "illegal" immigrants who are "taking" our jobs, etc., etc.) are the reason you're going broke.
Now we've arrived at a point in time which any empire that doesn't take care of the basic needs of citizens (health care, education, infrastructure, housing, food needs, etc.) always arrives at; the beginning of the end of that empire.
It is a historical fact that all empires, from the Persians to the British (imploding as we watch) devolve into second or third class countries.
We are a devolving nation, now ruled by a fascist aspiring dictator, while we still can't get over sending ever increasing amounts of money to a military/industrial complex (one that even a Democrat president agreed to allocate more money to while those under his reign, despite the obvious disintegration of "his" constituents).
Blaming "woke" nonsense and "cancel culture" nonsense isn't the problem. Joe Sixpack can't feed his family anymore, or put a roof over their head, or drive a newer car to a job that barely pays more than minimum wage, etc., because the oligarchs, plutocrats, kleptocrats and kakistocrats won the battle!
They convinced enough people that a malignant narcissist, lifelong long racist, misogynist, homophobe, xenophobe, and convicted felon 'won!'
Combine that with the fact tens of millions more 'don't do politics,' and don't give a damn enough to get off their asses and vote, and our utterly arrogant, and morally obscene "American Exceptionalism" isn't going to save us.
A big issue is voter suppression. Vigilantes challenged many black votes in swing states. Many mail in votes were purged. Reports are estimating that 3.6 million votes were purged. Law makers truly need to address this issue head on. Then protests against these practices by white people need to happen. Black folks feel abandoned.
I don’t know, I’m a democrat and hold many liberal ideals, and I never heard of many of those terms you mentioned. I think fundamentally, we have been systematically divided, lied to, and manipulated. Given the space and permission to hate. All these issue are mostly nonsense.
I mean who decides fascism, and oligarchs are less dangerous than someone who want to call themselves they/them or marry a person of the same sec. I just don’t care so much… This is nuts.
That said, identify politics did seemed to come out of no where during the pandemic.
I never agreed with it.
Look, all this is just bullshit. I commented on a friends Facebook page during the election and was attacked by his friends and called a radical liberal, a “Demon-crat” what the hell? We’ve lost our way as a people.
Those same peeps were convinced Harris would destroy our country, and compared our future to Venezuela.
I think it time to stop feeding into this, because the reality is we’ve been led by very rich, powerful people. On purpose. They have broken our society.
Social media and greed are to blamed
I want to repeat that,
SOCIAL MEDIA AND GREED ARE TO BLAME.
Identity politics is much older than the pandemic. Todd Gitlin wrote about them decades ago, fearing they were dividing Americans and feeding the reactionary right wing. His book 'The Twilight of Common Dreams' is really good.
And… the horribly huge income divide between the very wealthy and the rest.
💯
Identity politics are there and a ready way for extreme Republicans to bash Dems. Ok yeah. Corp money in politics is the number one problem on both sides. #1 Overturn Citizens United!!
The Harris Walz campaign laid out a plan that appealed to all Americans. (The legacy media claimed it was vague, while somehow Trump's dancing and farting on stage was a policy.) 75 million people voted for them, 77 million voted for Trump, who got a little less than 50% of the votes cast, and two other candidates got the remainder. Harris was a woman of color; you don't think that repelled Hispanic men, and white men, who would never vote for a woman, period? The fact is that right wing media, who are the pornography of their followers, have amplified all the acronyms listed here to grotesque proportions that feed the MAGA hate lust. With all that, this was the closest vote in the presidential elections since Kennedy-Nixon, or possibly even earlier. Harris got 1 million more votes than Trump got in 2020, and Trump got 4 million fewer votes than Biden in 2020. The reason this loss seems so terrible now is the wild deviance of the Republican Party from all normal governance and constitutional constraints. The House GOP has a current margin of only 4 votes, including Vance's, as I understand it. We warned our friends about Project 2025's agenda, Trump distanced himself from it, and they believed Trump when he said that it didn't even exist. Forget the acronym argument. It's right-wing media, and Sinclair's monopoly in rural areas, plus Musk's 250 million dollars into the 2024 campaign, that were overwhelming. And if Musk could spend that on a campaign that netted him 250 billion dollars, what is maybe another 530 million dollars in "gifts" to reward GOP senators to be thick as thieves in his favor. So, in summation, don't disparage Democrats, who clearly communicated what was at stake in 2024. And, who knew about Musk's role in government before the election? DOGE was announced after the election, as I recall. All I can say is, if your state is having a special election, vote for your Democratic representatives. If you are not in those states, donate to the Democratic Party. We will never fix stupid, so we must outnumber them at the polls. Most special elections so far are flipping red to blue. The Democrats are overperforming. Invest in Democrats.
Frank made some good points, but I must say you made some excellent ones as well. The situation has so many variables... This even goes back to young people yearning to vote for Bernie years ago, but the "smoke-filled" room giving them Hillary. If Bernie had been the nominee young people would have turned out in such numbers that we would not be dealing with Trump at all today. Now the young people are disengaged and feel they have no voice. In any event, nice post.
Thank you. I liked Sanders as well, but the right had ammunition to call him a communist, especially after he self-identified as a democratic socialist. Hillary Clinton, former First Lady, Senator from New York, and Secretary of State, beat Trump by 3 million votes, and that's after Comey came out, in violation of the Hatch act, to announce, falsely, that the FBI was opening another investigation into her emails, like 3 days before election day. Clinton lost 3 states in the popular vote by a mere 80,000 votes between them. The GOP has learned to game the swing states in the Electoral College. This time around, in Pennsylvania, they registered the entire Amish community to vote for Trump, claiming that the Democrats were going to ban their unpasteurized milk, This kind of activity costs millions of dollars. I only hope that Trump's out of the gate fascism and unelected Musk will galvanize voters in upcoming special elections to take back the House and narrow the GOP margin in the Senate. The only thing I can think of is that Biden should have stepped aside sooner so that there could have been a convention. Harris, though, being VP, was the obvious nominee. A white male might have prevailed against Trump, sorry to say.
Wasn't it major donors that threatened to withhold money if the DNC allowed Sanders to win in the primaries?
I'm sorry, but how is that relevant to the crisis we are facing now? There are special elections coming up soon that could flip the House. People get stuck on presidential elections and neglect our mid-term state and federal legislatures. I don't care what democrats did in 2016, even though Secretary Clinton did win the popular vote with a 3 million vote margin. We only need to win 3 seats to even out the House. Step up and donate to the Democratic Party if you care about what is happening right now.
Amen brother. Speak it louder for all democrats to hear
You're points are spot on. The confusing appropriation of the pronoun "they" to describe non-binary people, is another example of the overreach of the left. The Balkanization of society into different groups is not going to help the Democrats win back the senate or the presidency.
Well. That and the fact that the majority of our population is ok with a racist, misogynist, grifter, abuser, felon being in the White House. You cannot fix stupid. Stupid people shouldn’t breathe. Nor should they reproduce. They need to be taken out of the gene pool.
Are you sure we can unite around that? Some of those issues are awfully volatile and polarizing. I would think that uniting against fascism should be enough, regardless of the unusual views of some splinter groups. We need to stay united, not fight amongst ourselves.
Let's look at the much bigger picture. trump isn't the problem. He is just a figurehead who was chosen by the real problem; the insanely wealthy, who have spent the decades since the New Deal working tirelessly to get "their" money back. These oligarchs (like the Koch foundations, the Bradley foundation, the Mellon/Scaife foundation, and on and on) remember the Robber Baron era of the 1800s, and they have so much money that they have spent the many decades since the middle class started to grow (the only one of its kind in human history) that they resolved to get "their" money back, no matter how long it took.
These oligarchs got a boost when everybody's favorite senile uncle, Saint Ronnie Raygun, was chosen by them, because they knew he was already sliding into senility (he was, after all, a Democrat before becoming a Republican), and was obviously easy to manipulate. Before he became president*, there were about a dozen billionaires in the country; now we have anywhere from 800 to over a thousand, depending on whose numbers you believe.
After him came Clinton and Obama on the "left," which we don't one of anymore, who practiced neoliberalism, and did little to nothing to help the average American, as the middle class kept shrinking, while the billionaire class kept growing. Joe Biden was part of the problem during Clinton's term.
In the interim, thanks in no small measure to the part of the uber wealthy to defund public education, we now have a populace of which ½ of American adults who have severe literacy issues, and can't read past a sixth grade level (including the president*). They are thus easily manipulated/conned into believing whatever they've been fed for decades, which has been "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" and you too can buy a $500 million yacht, and a dozen homes, etc., and "those people" (pick whatever group you don't like, such as the LGBTQI community, are the Muslims who are coming here to kill us, or the atheists/nonbelievers, who are here to kill us if we don't convert, or the women, who need to stay in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant, or the "illegal" immigrants who are "taking" our jobs, etc., etc.) are the reason you're going broke.
Now we've arrived at a point in time which any empire that doesn't take care of the basic needs of citizens (health care, education, infrastructure, housing, food needs, etc.) always arrives at; the beginning of the end of that empire.
It is a historical fact that all empires, from the Persians to the British (imploding as we watch) devolve into second or third class countries.
We are a devolving nation, now ruled by a fascist aspiring dictator, while we still can't get over sending ever increasing amounts of money to a military/industrial complex (one that even a Democrat president agreed to allocate more money to while those under his reign, despite the obvious disintegration of "his" constituents).
Blaming "woke" nonsense and "cancel culture" nonsense isn't the problem. Joe Sixpack can't feed his family anymore, or put a roof over their head, or drive a newer car to a job that barely pays more than minimum wage, etc., because the oligarchs, plutocrats, kleptocrats and kakistocrats won the battle!
They convinced enough people that a malignant narcissist, lifelong long racist, misogynist, homophobe, xenophobe, and convicted felon 'won!'
Combine that with the fact tens of millions more 'don't do politics,' and don't give a damn enough to get off their asses and vote, and our utterly arrogant, and morally obscene "American Exceptionalism" isn't going to save us.
A big issue is voter suppression. Vigilantes challenged many black votes in swing states. Many mail in votes were purged. Reports are estimating that 3.6 million votes were purged. Law makers truly need to address this issue head on. Then protests against these practices by white people need to happen. Black folks feel abandoned.