Summary
Key leaders of the “Abandon Harris” movement, which encouraged voters to oppose Kamala Harris due to U.S. support for Israel during the Gaza war, are now expressing unease about Trump’s incoming administration.
Many in the movement, including prominent Muslim leaders, voted for Trump hoping he would bring peace to the Middle East.
However, concerns are growing over his Cabinet picks, such as Mike Huckabee and Tulsi Gabbard, which some see as troubling for Muslim communities.
Harm reduction is bad?
Obviously, it’s not ideal, but one has to act according to the real life conditions… And in 2024, our only two options were “harm reduction,” and literal fascism with literal concentration camps.
Fuck you if you didn’t choose harm reduction.
To be fair to them, we’re just delaying collapse. It is a choice.
I agree with them that there’s no saving this constitutional structure. In one sense it’s cowardly, because there’s no escape from this capitalist slaughterhouse hellscape without collapse. Collapse is necessary. Trump will certainly usher that in faster.
But Im too much of a softy to let the blood that always has to spill be on my hands.
This country was irreparable since Reagan, a zombie nation oligarch piggie bank. My vote was a cowardly one for a few more years of quiet orderly slaughter, NOT peace.
But we lost, so the slaughter will be loud and bigger than it’s ever been, so maybe it’s time for revolution if we want our kids to have anything left.
Because in 4 years the DNC WILL anoint someone to meet Trump’s economy in the middle, and even I may not be able to stomach voting for that.
Kamala was in a weird place as well.
Normally it’s easy for people to hold their noses for an incumbent. But if Kamala won. Shed run again in 2028.
Which would mean from 2012 to 2032, there wouldn’t have been a fair Dem primary.
20 fucking years…
Party leaders don’t understand that when you take primaries away, it hurts general turnout. Because regardless of who wins, the primary is the time for the eventual candidate to get their finger on the pulse and see what voters want.
Which is reliably that the Dem candidate moves left.
Without a primary they move right and turnout goes down.
We have literally decades of data that shows this, but it’s not what the donors want and the present DNC wants donations more than votes.
Hopefully Winkler gets chair in a few months and that changes.
The DNC would rather have Trump as POTUS than Sanders or AOC.
With Trump, the bribe money keeps flowing to both party machines, They are both paid to keep this sociopath owned economy safe from the people.
Realistically they weren’t gonna hold a fair primary anyway. If they held one we would’ve gotten candidate Shapiro, who would have been stomped into dust by Trump.
I think there’s some truth in thinking that continuing to elect milquetoast corporatist neoliberal candidates just builds up more extremism and discontent as people continue to suffer under option A of 2 - so when eventually a neocon breaks through they tend to be bonkers. It’s why I’m so fucking disappointed in Starmier as he’s clearly going to do fuck all and likely hand the next election to the torries.
That said, that’s a pretty fucking abstract view and there’s always a chance we get lucky. I voted for Harris but I was really hoping we’d get Senator Harris who actually gave a shit and, even if I knew for certain she’d be underwhelming I’d still fucking vote for her because Trump was worse on every issue and would directly cause a lot of additional human suffering. Women would be forced into unwanted pregnancies, trans people would be suppressed or worse - deaths would come from increased incidents of suicide and self-medication, and, lastly, (and I know a fuck ton of pushback on this point here) more Palestinians would die as Trump accelerated genocide.
So yea, I really regret that we are constantly dealt such bad hands but harm reduction is always a good thing to pursue in the absence of better actions.
Seriously though, when Biden dropped out fuck absolutely everyone who defended the DNC anointing Harris instead of running a snap primary.
Democrats going the full Florida route and just nominating Mitt Romney for President in 2028.
At which point, I will roll my eyes, tear up my ballot, and go home. 24 years of voting for least worst, and phone banking for a primary candidate I actually liked in two campaigns to no avail will have been enough for me if the 2028 candidate isn’t an economic leftist, because I already feel like a sucker and capitalism enabler.
The oligarchs were never not going to shoot the hostages for a tidy profit.
If you’re only voting for harm reduction year after year and doing nothing to try and organize grassroots opposition to the lesser evil, yes constantly voting harm reduction is bad. It’s how you allow lesser evils to grow into the larger evils of the current DNC, who care more about fundraising than winning.
If you’re only voting for harm reduction year after year and doing nothing to try and organize grassroots opposition to the lesser evil, yes constantly voting harm reduction is bad.
The thing is that this is everyone in America. The left has practically no grassroots organization and expects online complaints about the DNC to magically accomplish something, and the right has astroturfed horse shit that that is on board with whatever the corporatist GOP wants to do.
The left has practically no grassroots organization
The left literally took over the Nevada Dem committee a few years ago.
What have you done?
That been my realization. I voted for harm reduction for what 12 year now like a lot of us and have little to show for it if not less. Yes the other side is a factor but they also seem more successful in their braindead idiot agenda too.
You clearly just weren’t voting hard enough.
Yes the other side is a factor but they also seem more successful in their braindead idiot agenda too.
The inability to acknowledge the appeal of the opposition and the persistent reliance on “my enemies are only strong because they are dumber than me” have lead to some really depressing political decisions by the Democrats. The Biden/Harris campaign in 2024 really seemed to boil down to saying “If you don’t vote for us, democracy is going away” and “Even Republicans from the Bush-Era like us, so you have to vote for us too”.
And then they lost in a popular landslide, suggesting that (a) democracy is alive and well and (b) neither Republicans nor Democrats seem to like you.
What if its not Republican voters who are stupid for supporting Trump? What if its Democrats who are stupid for supporting candidates lamer and more disappointing than Trump?
Fuck you if you didn’t choose harm reduction.
…thirty years of choosing harm reduction brought us to this point…
…i held my nose and voted against fascism, but if you want to blame someone, blame the f*cking fascists and blame the thirty years of harm reduction which enabled them: pluralities win, that’s how american democracy works…
This is such a dumb take. You can’t say “thirty years of harm reduction brought us here” with the implication that if Republicans won every election in the time frame things would somehow be better, unless you’re actually just a right wing voter.
I’ll say it for the thousandth time: voting in national elections in no way affects your ability to do other activism. If your argument is along the lines of “voting for the worst option will unite the resistance and we’ll make real change”, well, I hope you realize that that “real change” is bloody revolution with an uncertain result.
For years I’ve seen leftists complaining about ‘harm reduction’ and ‘lesser evil’ and how the dems are ignoring their vote. But all we ever do is bicker with ourselves. We don’t have a united front. We don’t have any reliable voting bloc.
They literally don’t care about us because there is nothing to care about. If Dems court one leftist group they risk alienating another because of our unnecessary purity tests and virtue signaling. It’s so much easier and more reliable to get votes if you tack to the center so that’s what they do.
Meanwhile we don’t do any meaningful activism or organizing. We don’t vote practically and only get excited about voting when we have an exciting candidate. Leftists seem to expect their vote to have power but it doesn’t have any. And it’s entirely our own fault because you have to actually do the work to get the power.
Clinton Clinton Bush 2 Bush 2 Obama Obama Fuckface Biden Fuckface
Its as even as you can get over 9 terms (4:5)
Let’s not forget how much absolute harm Bush and Fuckface caused, and I’m not even counting Fuckface’s homicidal COVID response.
The US would have universal healthcare and a sane supreme Court if it wasn’t for Republicans.
Fuck you if you didn’t choose harm reduction.
With caveats.
A lot of people who chose to just not vote were given a choice between two people who want to genocide their family… Harm reduction wasn’t offered to them.
two people who want to genocide their family
Want vs will. There’s a small difference in that binary choice that you don’t need to both-sides it.
If your friend is an alcoholic getting wasted on a bottle of vodka every night, switching them to beer because it has less alcohol is not harm reduction. Rescuing a young woman from Jack The Ripper and giving her to Jeffrey Epstein “for her safety” is not harm reduction. A professional fighter concerned about CTE switching to football is not harm reduction. The lesser of two evils is very much still evil.
Those are all literally harm reduction buddy. If those are the only options available you’d take them because they all mean a better chance of better results in the future. Of course, in these situations you would definitely have better options, but you’re deliberately framing it like there are no others. So are you comfortable saying you’d leave your friend alone with the bottle of vodka, let the woman get disemboweled, and not recommend the sport with helmets?
It is when both parties get the same orders from the same bribers on economic policy and merely war on how to or if to address some of the social issue symptoms, the ones that don’t effect their briber’s quarterly results.
Example: they war over forced births, but abortion is often an ECONOMIC decision, and the markets have demanded 2 breadwinners the last few decades to make moar from themselves, which is antisocial and antifuture. You won’t hear either party calling for a single income for most to all being able to support a family. That’s a matter of economic policy. That’s a choice. There would objectively, naturally be fewer abortions without coersion if economic desperation wasn’t defended here by both parties, no threat of state violence required.
No, our choice is on the social issue of forced births? No forced births? Your choice lol… Then get back to work, battery.
There are tons of ways to reduce abortion and, typically, those are supported by Democratic politicians and opposed by Republicans. The concern is not to reduce abortion, there’s actually very little concern about the actual number of abortions that happen by its opponents. The concern is that the opponents want an opportunity for themselves to take a “strong moral stance” against abortion. They prefer a world of more abortions which are illegal to a world of fewer abortions which are legal.
