Kamala Harris running a damn near flawless campaign, with just a month 1/2 of campaigning. She’s been holding rallies nonstop with Tim Walz & not making her talking points about her race or gender like Hillary. She’s offering expanded healthcare, reinvestments back into public housing, wants to take on corporate greed, protect reproductive rights and chose a pro labor, pro education running mate.
Yet, she’s either barely leading or ties in most polls with a guy that:
Is a convicted felon.
Liable Sexual Predator.
Gets sentenced in November.
Has several more pending cases.
Increased Drone Strikes by 300%. (Joe Biden dosent use drones anymore).
Illegally killed an Iranian General unprovoked with a missle strike.
Increased tensions in Israel/Palestine with the Abraham Accords.
Wants war with Mexico (his words).
Tried to coup Venezuela.
Will bend the knee for Netanyahu’s potential war with Iran.
Lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% (lowest in history).
Obvious tax cuts for the rich.
Told people to drink bleach during the pandemic.
Is the main driving force for America’s current division.
Constantly attacks marginalized groups.
Tried to steal the 2020 election (Find Me 11,000 votes in GA).
Did Fake Elector Slates to pressure Mike Pence to not certify the 2020 election.
Caused a riot on the capitol that lead to his OWN supporters dying.
Just got washed by Harris in the last debate, was completely unprepared on anything but immigration (“I have concepts of a plan”).
And so much more. So seriously what is it? Is it just the attraction to bigotry/racism? Is it to end “wokeness”. Is it because Kamala is a woman of color? You can’t use the both sides argument like Hilary or Biden, Kamala is the obvious better choice. Could you imagine if Kamala had as much baggage as Trump? The media would lose their minds.
Seriously, how the f*** is this guy still in the race?
It’s simple. Bigotry and greed. Trump plays to people’s fears that “others” will soon have the same rights they do while also assuring his rich handlers that he will make them richer. He’s convinced the poor to cut off their nose to spite their face.
Conservatism is a mental illness, it can’t be defeated with logic and reasoning
it can’t be defeated with logic and reasoning
YouTube channel Knowing Better made a video about the Seventh Day Adventist. Basically the same conclusion.
Found it! It’s almost 3 hrs long, so you know what that means: a glass of wine, your favorite easy chair, and of course, this YouTube video streaming on your home system. So, go on, and indulge yourself. That’s right, kick off your shoes, put your feet up, lean back and just enjoy the rational documentary. After all, knowledge soothes even the savage lemming.
FOX “News” has effectively divided, conditioned and massaged Republicans for decades to regurgitate the message disseminated by Rupert Murdoch through their favorite flavor talking heads (Bill O’Reilly, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and more recently Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters).
They went from ‘Russia bad’ in the 1980’s to ‘Russia good’ and ‘America had it wrong’. The viewers lack critical thought under scrutiny and regurgitate the talking points of their favorite broadcasters.
Yep, I lay the majority of our political insanity on Fox’s door. Look, we all know they’re the GOP’s propaganda arm, but how many of you have actually watched a good bit?
I was stuck with a week of it during the Snowden revelations. In the space of an entire week, I didn’t hear a single word on what was worldwide news. Stunning, and I still can’t explain it, but it happened. Point being, a lot of the lies are in what they don’t say. Early afternoon of 01/06, not a blip on the website. (Which BTW, is far more sane than the TV version.) I checked the wayback machine and FOx reported nothing until hours after kick off. I presume they prayed it would blow over or at least die down. Imagine the spin control behind the scenes! Hell, even Tucker Carlson pleased with Trump to make a sane statement and cut it off.
After hearing “Obama” thousands of times, over and over and over, I was sick of him! The whole time my friend’s step-mom was screaming at the screen, “The KKK ought to do their got damned JOB!” These people sat in their armchairs 24/7 (never saw them go to their bedroom), smoking weed and watching nothing but Fox. We tried to put on a movie or another show exactly twice and it promptly got switched back.
One time I was stuck with Fox at the doctor’s office, some kind of round-table show going on. A metric showing black people doing better under the Obama administration came up, something about pay I think. One of the hosts slams his fist of the table and shouted, “Obama’s a RACIST!” Constantly listen to crap like that and you are, eventually, getting brainwashed.
We tried to put on a movie or another show exactly twice and it promptly got switched back.
That’s the irritating part for me. Every time I visit a certain segment of the family, it’s as if I was stepping into 1984 with the big brother screens, except that they must be on all the time. I was forced into it during the missing MH370 news. They blatantly, incessantly push fear, and it hooks the idiots into believing if they aren’t watching 24/7 that they’re going to miss the apocalypse.
“Conservatism […] can’t be defeated with logic and reasoning”
This is the key point that a lot of people miss.
If you wholeheartedly, or at least performatively, believe that there is a “natural” hierarchy where some people are better than others, then what one might see as equality is seen as oppression by hardline conservatives.
This is why emotion is the key component of Trumpian messaging, regardless of veracity.
The key is to never play the game. Always proactivity act with questions, never “defend” and react with truth; they’re not interested in the truth.
It’s not conservativism, conservativism has been captured by think tanks funded by oil and banking billionaires. They’re framed conservativism, gutted it, and replaced its insides with Libertarianism (and sometimes technocratic fascism), as that’s what gives them the lowest taxes, the most corporate welfare, union busting capabilities, and defends their wealth accumulation most efficiently.
They’re not good members of society, this is demonstrated in Trump’s fascism (which is based on Roy Cohn’s fascism). It seeks to destroy society, the nation, and government.
His debate performance was stunning because he spent 75% of his time talking about how we are being invaded by an enormous wave of criminals and insane asylum escapees who are violently claiming buildings and territory. I was like excuse me? Do I need to go check my yard for invaders? I didn’t realize we were being overrun. And yes I live in a state that borders Mexico.
If the race were between The Literal Devil ® and Jesus Christ (D), the vote total would be 45%-55% just based on the letter they choose to run after their name.
Policy doesn’t matter when people base their entire personality on their political party identification.
Jesus was a socialist Jew. We had one of those run for President, too, but couldn’t make it past the Democratic primary.
Wanting us to become fiscally responsible, like not get into new wars into we’ve paid off previous ones? i.e. pay less money to the rich via the Military Industrial complex?
Wanting to tax the wealthy?
Wanting to redistribute money to take care of the poor?
Yeah, obviously evil indeed 😂 (from the POV of “I got mine, now I’m pulling up the ladder🪜”).
If you completely forget everything about Bernie; who he is, what he’s done, how he speaks, everything; he does look like a CEO who would lay off half his staff for a discount on a sandwich. But thats more because he’s an old white guy in a suit and they all look like that
Nothing I’ve read has ever explained Trump’s appeal like this article.
https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about
Nothing in there makes a cute soundbite. “They’re racist!”, is far easier than having to digest what the author lays down.
Seriously, read it. It’s important.
It’s a good article. It explains rural America. It doesn’t explain the well off assholes living in Huntington Beach CA. It doesn’t explain the well off assholes living in suburban Inland SoCal. It doesn’t explain rich privileged shitheads like Musk and Thiel.
People like Musk are cynical, attention-seeking manipulators and narcissists. They aren’t afraid that their way of life is being threatened, they’re using the fears of others to further their own ends, and consider themselves above it all.
That article was the most cogent take I have seen on this subject. I have a similar cultural background (rednecks and urban, religious Polish-Americans), but see myself as a science-literate atheist. I have seen this first-hand, but wasn’t able to articulate it as well.
Those guys just don’t want to see the US go the way of Europe where scorched-earth capitalism has been tamed and extreme wealth is taxed extremely. They are wealthy beyond avarice and STILL don’t feel they are free because they come up against regulations and institutions.
They capitalize on the rural Trumpism because it is the path most likely to lead to unchecked capitalism. Remember, the US isn’t like Europe - yet. And It will take a lot of work to get it there. All those rich guys need is a government that will do nothing. So not only is tax-cut Trump their friend objectively, he creates chaos. And chaos prevents action. Rancorous divisiveness means a logjammed national agenda. Which is all they want: no action. Look the other way while they rape the world.
Is it a good article? I don’t know. There’s some truth in there, but I’m pretty sure there are a hell of a lot more suburban Trump voters than there are rural Trump voters. And in my experience of it the people who live in small towns, medium-sized cities, suburbs, edge city, and even actual rural areas are in general not nearly as monolithic and politically unified as they’re portrayed there. Even if it’s always clear which party is going to get the majority of votes, they most often don’t get all the votes. Perhaps like the writer of that article many of them like to romanticize the idea of being “rural” because they mow their own lawn and could drive to a farm in half an hour if they wanted to, but although there’s some truth in there I think it’s mostly foolish rationalizations. Big cities are alien to me too, that’s not a real reason to buy into all that cheap right-wing mythology that gets used to explain why we should vote against our own interests.
I remember reading this and thinking it had some points. Then I remembered that despite having some of the same issues, we have vastly different responses. When I’m lied to and beaten, I don’t look to the person that did it for help.
For instance, the church being the only social space. They could have a community center or a library. Sure funds are hard to come by but what kind of political party would even consider that? The answer is probably further left than democrats but fifty years of red scare won’t let anyone accept that.
The “writing them off” part comes from their willingness to not ostracize evil people when they get something they want. We can all be bullheaded or blinded by bias from time to time but accountability and decency shouldn’t be political.
I feel like this is just gift wrapping being a dumb racist hick in prettier paper. They are scared of cities because their full of black people, gays, and Mexicans. They like assholes who show the same level of hate as they do - who will keep the black people, gays, and Mexicans away. And they like someone who justifies hiding behind religion so they can tell themselves that God made them this dumb and rascist. So they can delude themselves into thinking they are really the good guy.
The article describes how the rural population has been overlooked and abandoned in favor of the inner cities, leading to higher levels of racism.
“This is just dumb hicks mad at black people!”
Good job buddy
I mean it’s definitely an interesting read. I’m just not sure what to actually do with this information. The fundamental problem feels like a generally small bubble, and at times a specific disinterest in venturing outside of it. If anyone’s whole worldview is shaped entirely by their tiny rural hometown, it’s easy to understand why others with radically different backgrounds feel scary.
But at the end of the day, it doesn’t feel like a good enough reason to drag the rest of the country through rigid christofacist moral dogmas and support the industries that prop up those small towns at the expense of the planet as a whole. But as long as those people aren’t interested in venturing outside their communities and meeting other different people, im not sure how to convince them of this.
Maybe if the cost of living becomes too untenable in major cities and work from home continues in certain industries rural areas will see more growth and this will improve somewhat? Idk
What to do with it is to act understanding and empathetic with people like that instead of standoffish and hostile. You still insist on the better way of doing things, but there’s no actual need to attack anyone that doesn’t support the better way of doing things, even if their reasons aren’t rational or even morally questionable/bad. It only serves to further entrench them in their positions, while the opposite might have a chance to happen in a more cooperative approach.
The problem with that argument is that 80% of people live in cities. There are not enough rural people for them to be a majority of the Republican party.
In america, land votes more than people. We have the electoral college, the senate, and gerrymandering. Rural areas by design have wildly outsized power. This was done intentionally to preserve slavery
Low density places are always going to kind of suck on a lot of metrics. You just don’t have the people to support a lot of stuff. I’m sorry that small towns are dying but like there’s not really a reason they’d thrive.
Cities have been important since like the dawn of history. At least farms grow food. Suburban sprawl is the worst.
Cost of living needs to go down and wages up, but no one should be vying for low density.
Fun piece. I don’t know about best explanation ever.
It starts out talking about how movies idealize simple honest people from the heartlands (Star Wars, The Hunger Games, Braveheart) but then says:
the whole goddamn world revolves around them. Every TV show is about LA or New York, maybe with some Chicago or Baltimore thrown in. When they did make a show about us, we were jokes
So which is it? Does pop culture feed rural America’s sense that it is “Real America” or does it make them hillbillies?
As if explaining politics through TV and movies isn’t reductive enough, it can’t seem to keep its own story straight for ten paragraphs in row.
I’ve read this article when it was posted before and my impression is it does EXACTLY the thing to non-rural voters as it warns the reader about doing to rural voters. I can quote the bits if you are going to force me to read it again, but I don’t see how anyone can fail to see that.
It also doesn’t change the fact that the party who might actually make their lives better is NOT the one they are voting for.
That was from before we knew better. We’ve seen since then that it is indeed racism and hatred that powers the Republican base. That’s why the GOP doesn’t need to have any real policy laid out anymore. They just have to promise to hurt the “right” people this time around. Any sane Republicans that existed then are voting Democrat now.
That was an amazing read. My hometown was really similar, though maybe not as desolate. Lucky there was a college town close by so we could shop at some place that wasn’t Walmart. This really does sum it up, though, the appeal of Trump out of these smaller rural communities. I like the message at the end, too. Thanks for sharing. 🙏
This explains a demographic analysis without explaining anything meaningful or unique. The article could be about any post-Regan Republican campaign (such demographic analysis is used by all modern campaigns, on bith sides), so it wasn’t a satisfying article. Combined with all the pop culture references, it comes off as quite immature and an unextraordinary explanation. Mediocre.
I remember the summer of 2016, when I was playing Pokemon Go in the parks and people I had never talked to and that lived nearby were playing it next to me. We were all celebrating when we caught a pokemon when we were after, and comparing which ones we’d caught with each other.
At the time I thought…who would buy Trump’s conman routine? Who actually thinks that the country is in a terrible enough place that we need to elect this person who seems to actively hate the country and seemed to want to set the entire thing on fire?
I left my Californian home and went back to my original state to visit my family. We went to several different areas of the state in fall of 2016 because my wife was from a rural area and I originally grew up in a slightly more suburban area. I saw the signs in the yards, I saw the discontent, and I saw how people did not seem to be reacting the same way to his craziness. I saw how casually they would put on his rants in the background while talking about other issues. I saw how some of them were amused by his antics. It had been a couple of years since I had last been back and it once again struck me how much worse the area appeared to be from the last time I was there. I was in a rural area when the “Access Hollywood” tape dropped. People seemed to visibly shrink at even the mention of the news. I thought he was done for, and that this was a bridge too far for his supporters to cross. That people would vote third party, or not vote at all. I did not get the sense that my thoughts were shared by those around me.
When I came back to California, people were talking about the debates. It was sunny and nice out, and people would talk about the projects they had going on in their houses, or they’d talk about work related affairs. People were sometimes amused by Trump’s antics, but everyone uniformly thought it was impossible for him to win the election. Having seen what I had seen in the weeks prior, I was no longer one of these people. “They’ll never let him win”, one of my co-workers said. I was stunned…who are “they”? Does the rest of the country actually believe this?
It turns out quite a few of them did. Many people thought there was just simply no way that Trump would win, because either the system was already rigged against him and would not allow him to win, or because the country was just not in dire enough straits to elect such a madman (as I once thought).
Hindsight is 20/20 but when I thought it was bizarre that he was even a viable candidate at one point in 2016, and I saw the decaying state where I grew up, I thought “if he wins the election, then we are in a much worse state as a country than I thought”. And we undoubtedly are.
Of course he won, but the reason that I have this somewhat rambling response to this question is that the answer to “why is he still in the race?” ultimately comes down to the overall state of this country.
He is in this race because this is where we are as a country: barely able to imagine a possible future that is brighter than the present, because we are still caught up in degenerative non-sense that keeps us thinking that our broken down towns, and our poor social bonds are caused by some horde of “others” instead of their true causes: our ever-widening wealth inequality, our ever-decaying moral responsibilities to each other, and our national instinct to absolve ourselves of our responsibilities by claiming that not only is it correct to be forever self-serving, but that even the idea of altruism is a lie.
even the idea of altruism is a lie.
Wow. You’re right. Helping others is as politicized as abortion. One of the tribes can’t even fathom uplifting their neighbors because that could be equated to socialism and it would get them kicked out of their in-group.
You’re in a media bubble. It feels like there’s no way anyone could see it differently. The people who disagree with you are also in a media bubble and don’t understand how you could believe what you do.
For everything you said they
- don’t believe happened
- think it was a deep state plot
- believe it’s good actually and believing anything else means you want to kill babies or destroy the economy
- have never heard of it
Reality may have a leftist bias but most people don’t live in reality. Most people live in a reality constructed by corporate media. Social media is largely derivative of it.
There’s some truth to this, but if you take the effort to break out of your media bubble, to find original sources, to read documentary evidence, indictments, transcripts.
To go the other direction and track down evidence for Trump’s accusations against others,
the guy comes off even worse.
Something a lot of people tend to forget is that reality doesn’t have inherent biases. The facts are the facts, no matter how cartoonishly evil those facts might make one side look.
Presenting “both sides” as equally valid doesn’t mean you’re unbiased. It means you’re giving the Nazis what they want.
That doesn’t help you understand his supporters though. You have to wade in the shit they call news. You have to hear what they say to begin to understand them.
