Keep doing what I have been doing - dragging MAGA fence sitters back from the brink one by one. The ones who have adopted Trumpism as their religion are too far gone. But there are a lot who just need to be taken by the hand and shown a better path.
When you see MAGA BS, challenge it with well-reasoned arguments. The object really isn't to change the mind of the poster. It's to prevent them from changing the minds of others.
Can you please give an example of a well reasoned argument that's relevant here?
I'm not sure of the relationship of reason to people that aggressively disregard objective fact and fluidly move the goalpost of their burden of proof.
Look up how to debate. Success is not measured by how bad you make the opponent look. That may work on one person, but you have to repeat it for every person who advances the same argument. Instead, take apart their argument, reveal underlying motives, expose untruths with irrefutable documentation, uncover false logic and bad assumptions, and respond without attacking the messenger.
For instance, "The economy is terrible! Everything is so expensive." Well, stuff -is- expensive. But is the economy really the reason behind it? The US stock indexes are at record highs. Most companies have been beating the expected earnings per share. Isn't it more likely that things are expensive because companies are taking more profit to give to their shareholders? Which candidate do you believe is more inclined to change that?
The object is not to defeat the opponent. It's to prevent others from being convinced by their arguments.
Yeah, there's a huge difference in tactics depending on whether you're trying to comvince the person you're arguing with, or the audience.
The latter is soo much easier - often it's enough to back them into a corner where they out themselves as wrong whatever they say, and they'll quickly descend into a ball of rage.
Thats what my brother does, but he is a cis het man who works in construction as an electrician. He is very left leaning so he does try to challenge things where he can.
But I can't do that. I am a trans woman and confrontation legitimately would put me in danger and it wouldn't work anyways. People claim I am biased because I am in a group who is being targeted, its bullshit beyond belief but thats how people are.
Trump will eventually do something that gets between rich people and their money while also being an impeachable offense. The "sane" bussiness republican VP will pardon Trump after his impeachment and have him live out the rest of his life as a fox news call in guest until he died of "old age".
If we're lucky he'll piss off his Russian contacts and end up falling out a window by accident.
More likely is that this puppet will be used by bad actors to advance their agendas and as usual he'll distract everybody from the actual bad shit happening.
It will make murder legal for him, depending on how the Supreme Court rules on the presidential immunity case. Which they're conspicuously refusing to do before the election.
If they ruled presidents had immunity it would literally make murder legal: Biden could legally murder Trump and only face impeachment. No criminal proceedings could be brought against him.
They're obviously not ruling on it now. Cynically one could argue that they're going to change the ruling depending on who wins. If Biden wins reelection then they'll rule that presidents have legal limits. If he loses then they expand the power of the dictatorship.
Continue living in California, and probably not go to any red state. At least not with my wife. Continue to vote Democrat and spread progressive values.
This is for everyone that is taking the "oh well" stance... or the I'm going to wait it out stance... If you are unfamiliar with what the Republicans plan to do, I encourage you to look at the Project 2025 plan.
Some highlights
slash funding for the DOJ
dismantle the FBI
decimate environmental and climate change regulations in favor of fossil fuels
eliminate the department of commerce
ending the independence of multiple federal agencies
abolish the department of education
scientific funding would be limited to pro-conservative principles
end abortion nationwide
infuse government with Christianity
criminalize pornography
removing protections against discrimination for sexual or gender identity
terminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs and affirmative action
the military would be used for domestic law enforcement
the arrest and detention of undocumented immigrants
speedy capital punishment
Project director Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official, explained that Project 2025 is "systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army, aligned, trained, and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state."
So, for fucks sake, can we stop saying that we can wait out Trump for another term. There won't be an America left if there is another term.
the problem is, when it's illegal, and you get caught, you'll face the consequences.
Or if you did something else wrong. VPN installed to look at porn? Well, now you did two things wrong, you must be a super special bad person. More prison time for you.
The people behind it don't care in the slightest that you watch porn. They care to have something in hand against you in case you're falling out of line
This sounds like a perfectly reasonable plan from the perspective of a conservative. Criminalize porn so people have to take the urges out elsewhere, criminalize abortions so rape victims have to give birth, and slash social services and education funding to create the next generation of uninformed, emotionally-driven voters.
The non-voters don’t care. The ones that actually subscribe to the ignorant narrative of single issue protesting are too stubborn to admit they’re wrong. And the rest of them are right-wing/Russian propagandists.
Basically, what you shared is what either of the aforementioned will use as a platform to bolster their effort to sell everyone on their bullshit ideology.
I think they do care, they've just been taught that their vote doesn't matter. This seems to be especially true of non-white people i talk to. How can we encourage people to engage? A meme or a list of concerns is not going to change their mindset when they've been manipulated into generations of apathetic resistance.
No, they’re upset over a single issue every election year. They’re easily manipulated. That’s it.
This happens every four years. Like clock work. They find some hot button social issue and use it to hold our election ransom.
And also, If they thought their votes don’t matter, they wouldn’t threaten to not vote at all or vote third party if they don’t get their way. Because if their votes didn’t matter- it would be empty threats.
The people I've spoken with who don't vote are mostly black or brown and aren't withholding votes because of some issue. They've never voted. I invited a friend to go primary vote with me and she said, "no thanks, but you have fun with that."
The degree to which one person’s vote matters is a simple matter that is easily seen. There’s no room for “believing” anything.
In the USA for instance, a Presidential vote is extremely unlikely to change the election outcome. Therefore, that vote doesn’t matter very much.
The idea that voting makes a difference, for the individual, is an illusion we use to get people to vote. In the most basic, real, concrete way, which way I vote in an election does not make a difference.
What am I supposed to do then. I tried voting progressive and Democrat, I tried organizing, I tried donating and fund raising, I tried at the local level.
And every step of the way the Democrats have gone out of their way to help move the goal posts to the point that my choices for a school board member we're someone openly racist or someone who is openly sexist.
For president I get genocide or fascism... Gee really motivating me there folks.
you get one choice that has shown he can be pressured with reason and public opinion
and one that wants to commit domestic crimes with impunity, that openly wants to have his political enemies killed, and that has shown he can be pressured by Russia. You know, the country that swore to defeat the US from within.
I will never suggest any form of equivalency because there simply is not one. The republican party is clearly a bad actor and comparing the democrats and suggesting they are in some way an equal evil is a ludicrous fallacy.
But that does not mean that voting democrat is an imperative, nor that they become a valid choice because the "others" are invalid.
The bulk of my voting power comes from republican primaries where I can have an outsized impact on which evil will get the chance to run, but beyond that my votes count for nothing.
My point is simply that if the democrats actually cared about making a difference, they would not prop up dead candidates, they would not bend over backwards to help move the goal posts for the republicans. What they could really do is change the laws around how we vote, create automatic registration, make election days mandatory holidays with mandatory time off to vote, pass laws around campaign fiance and transparency. But they wont, because the same tools help them "win" and have power.
Just look at Trudeau, who ran on a platform of voting reform in Canada, the second he had control he dropped that promise like it was radioactive. Why voluntarily break the system that put him and his party into power.... It clearly worked for them before. Same logic applies to the dem's in the US. They wont change the system, even while its being broken, because they still think it gives them a shot at power. We dont need power, we need actual population based representation and robust protection from corporate ownership of our government.
Swede here, we just joined NATO and this shit terrifies me, and what is worse is that this is what people are saying publicly, how far will they go in practice?
Nah, I doubt they'll manage what they say. Some maybe, and shit'll suck no doubt, but there's a lot of inertia in the bureaucracy. My real worry is what the CCP & Russia will do once they have a green light that the US won't intervene in their expansionist ideals.
Start getting into a resistance mindset. People have a rapidly vanishing window to organize for what's coming. Biden or Trump this cycle it doesn't really matter that much, Democrats and their supporters are simply are not equipped to resist fascism. We've reached the terminal end of the lesser of two evils, and it's going to be bad. Genocide Joe won't save us.
Indeed. I keep asking what is the plan to stop a fascist MAGA candidate from winning the Presidency in 2028, when the Democrats don't have incumbent advantage, and the historical pattern is a party flip, and have received only one (joke) answer. I have heard no talk whatsoever about how to handle a Biden win this year, although the MAGA politicians are signaling another attempt to overturn the election. (My state AG is still "investigating" the fake elector scheme from 2020; no way a prosecution will happen before the election, and likely never.) "Vote harder" is not going to be effective.
It was shocking to see how much better of a society Japan was when I visited. Really the one thing they don’t do as well as us is create shareholder value. To which I say, who gives a fuck?
I hope you’re Japanese or can pass for it. As beautiful as the country is (I loved it there) they are highly xenophobic and racist. There are literally restaurants where foreigners aren’t allowed in (even if you’ve lived there decades), getting housing in most places requires you to be “sponsored” by someone with a very high upfront fee, etc.
I'm shocked more people aren't already better prepared for this, but it's actually the same thing we should be doing now, and continue to do if Biden actually wins:
Organize locally. Get hyperlocal. Organize your city, neighbors, block, building, workplace, and friend group. Establish mutual aid networks, take back city councils, county boards, and school boards from the stewards of landlords and big employers.
Establish protection for those who need it, and plant the crop of future national leaders who will do the long overdue work of putting government to work for the masses. Make it harder for any president or governor to exercise state violence by getting our people in prosecutors offices and judgeships.
The Democrats are not going to save us. Biden is just planning to go down with the ship. Absolutely vote for the lesser of two evils if you live somewhere where your vote matters, but recognize that the Democratic party is not an ally to the antifascist movement, because combating fascism conflicts with the interests of capital.
That can change, but until it does, don't put faith in them. Anything positive they do will be because power-players were replaced. And that starts in your own neighborhood.
Edit: Since this has been well received, I want to say a quick word on third parties: don't be afraid of them.
Without getting into a lot of details, there are a lot of myths about the risks that third parties present, but before we parrot all of that, we should just acknowledge that there is no harm in listening to their platforms. It doesn't make you a kook to hear ideas that often get suppressed by the mainstream, or to use third parties as a way to network and meet people. I think Jill Stein has a lot of useful things to say, and if a pollster asks me, I will gladly try to bump her numbers up so that she is harder to ignore. Don't be afraid to do that.
This is good, and I'm piggybacking so I can add on:
Get a passport, make friends in another country.
Vote to slow them down, yell at anyone who tries to say that it's better to not vote or that Trump would be better for Palestinians.
If you want to engage in electoral reform, you need to start years in advance.
If you live in Texas: Vote for Biden and encourage GOP voters to not vote for Trump. If you're in a place with lots of GOP weirdos, try publicly and loudly watch his rallies at 1.5x speed; I've heard it breaks the spell b/c his cadence gets disrupted. If Texas goes blue, Biden wins and all the DNC voters suddenly know they can win, making it immediately more likely.
If all else fails, remember someone might [Comment Cannot Legally Be Finished], which would solve multiple problems.
Texas was won by fewer than 633k votes. Considering Trump's popularity I'd say it's ripe for flipping but we can't lay down on the job. Also the GOP policies are pushing out liberals and people that are vulnerable (LGBTQ+ and families with LGBTQ+ kids) so the window is closing.
I believe this so strongly!!! Everywhere i go i beg people to vote. It was really only a few percentage points. We don't even have to flip people; just get the non-voters to go to the polls.
Think it's worth mentioning that U.S. politics sets the tone of politics in a lot of the west. When Trump won, the alt-right parties in more or less all of Europe grew significantly. Here in Sweden over the span of the almost 8 years since, our nazi party grew from a smaller party that the right wingers argued whether or not they should collaborate with in order to create a right-wing coalition and win majority, to the second largest party in Sweden.
Here in 2016 South Africa our online media spaces lit up like a fucking Christmas tree with all the white supremacists coming out of the woodwork to celebrate Trump's win. Since then, the second-largest of our (so-called) "opposition" parties - a party that can pretty much be described as the party of white liberalism - has dumped any black people they had in senior positions and began using GOP-esqe dog-whistling. All our parties - pretty much the entire formal political establishment - has been very receptive to violent, USian-style anti-immigrant narratives.
So yeah... you can flee the US - but you can't really escape US politics.
Last election we had here (2022) surveillance and stop and frisk were decently big talking points. Even the supposed Liberals are like "uwu so sad privacy is dying we have to be careful but big brother needs to sees you we nweed to be hawd on cwime!1!" I think the only party that's not OK with it is the leftists.
Lol! That reminds me... about three years ago I was notified of a "town meeting to discuss local problems" held at a local school here in middle-of-nowhere South Africa. It turns out it was just a shady PR attempt by the local branch of the "white liberal" party I described above (the so-called "Democratic Alliance"), and the suit there doesn't talk about our decrepit and failing water, electricity and sewage infrastructure or the fact that this mining town is being economically extinguished by privatized interests... instead, the only order of business was to brag about how they had set up surveillance in our main streets and handing off the data to the piggy for free.
I feel like strangling that particular suit every damn time I lay eyes on him.
I still don't quite get how these people make sense of the world. We recently had a big reveal that our nazi party is using "anonymous social media accounts" to try and influence popular opinion. They claim that they don't, and that the accounts aren't affiliated with the party, but there was a whole report on the thing and it's landed them in some hot water. The people voting for them are pretty much unfazed but the right-block alliance overall has taken quite a hit to their public support.
One of the things these people who supposedly really love Sweden discussed, was how they could perhaps create some sort of campaign website to try and incide violence among migrants, and possibly incite terror attacks. Like, how do you reconcile your "patriotism and love for your country" with wanting people to perform terror attacks?
Were I to play devil's advocate I'd say that it's possible that they were just shooting the shit, but even then? Isn't it a bit over the top? As a gay guy I'm not joking about conversion therapy or forcible sterilisations.
was how they could perhaps create some sort of campaign website to try and incide violence among migrants,
We had that exact thing here in South Africa in the late 80s and early 90s - the only difference was that it was actually enabled by the Apartheid-state through their terrorist proxies (ie, mainly the South African Police). When the anti-Apartheid groups didn't act "terroristic" enough for their taste, they just did it themselves and used the media to create a narrative of "black-on-black violence" to try and destabilize the country.
Like, how do you reconcile your “patriotism and love for your country” with wanting people to perform terror attacks?
They "love" their countries in the same way that a rapist "loves" his victims - the feel themselves entitled to it and deserving of holding the power of life and death over it. They do not actually care about the real people living in Sweden in any way whatsoever. That's pretty much standard fare when it comes to far right-wing ideology no matter what part of the world you find them in.
The reason they want to "incite" (so-called) "terror attacks" among migrants they see as not "white," "Swedish" or "Nordic" enough is two-fold.
Firstly, they want the Swedish people to see these migrants the way they see them - as a (supposedly) bloodthirsty and rapacious "other." Not much different from the way the Nazis portrayed the "Jewish-Bolshevik hordes" before and during WW2. A (supposed) "terror attack" that can be blamed on the "other" will essentially result in the media performing this function for them.
Secondly, they want an atmosphere of panic - such as existed right after 9/11 in the US. They know that such a state of things will allow their ideology to suddenly seem "relevant" in the same way that militarism suddenly became standard fare in the US afterwards.
As a person made utterly destitute and disabled by a series of crimes committed against me, well, I have SSDI and thats basically it.
Cost of living is way lower in Ecuador, i can relearn the Spanish I knew in high school, and theres a good number of affordable cities and towns there with considerably better crime statistics and public transportation than anywhere I can afford in the US.
I have done the math and it would be vastly more cost and time effective to move abroad... as I have been evicted, and basically that means I can't rent anywhere in the US for at least two years.
I am seriously considering noping the fuck out if Trump wins. Spent most of my adult life advocating for minorities, the poor, the disenfranchised, and now I am too fucking tired, in too much pain and too broke.
(Ironically my last job was at a non profit assisting the homeless, who didn't give a fuck about me becoming homeless.)
Not like anyone will miss me, every family member and friend I thought I had either committed crimes against me, told me to fuck off, or told me that they what was happening to me was too emotionally traumatic for them to deal with right now.
Of course this plan goes to shit if Trump and the Republicans somehow massively defund or cancel Social Security.
I used to think they would not be so stupid as to actually do that, as... an insane number of Trump's core voter base rely on SSI ot SSA or SSDI... but obviously with the MAGA crowd, anything is possible.
Guess I can always teach English. Maybe if I can ever walk again I can guide tours.
as I have been evicted, and basically that means I can't rent anywhere in the US for at least two years.
There are an increasing number of sublets and private rentals in my area, that don't check rental history. Everything is fairly under the table, month to month with no binding leases, for better or worse depending on your situation. Just bringing it up as a potential avenue to consider, maybe there are options in your area too.
I am basically bound to my current roach motel that just happens to allow month to month rent, without kicking you out after 3 weeks.
I have been using a shit tier 4g phone for months now trying to find no credit check apartments. Everything is a scam, and none the shady apartments seem to actually list online anywhere.
'Look for private rentals!' Is good advice but... with what search engine, what rental website actually has a private rentals filter that actually works? Ive not found one.
Craigslist is bone dry where I am, and the few times a listing pops up, either they don't respond or they don't allow evictions or , again, its a scam.
I bussed halfway across the country to find the cheapest motel rates I could.
Im not a resident of the state as I do not live in a residence.
I dont qualify for rental assistance as I do not live in a residence.
And I don't qualify for homeless assistance as I am not homeless.
I’m torn on this. I’m “white”-ish enough, no kids, can’t get pregnant (or anyone pregnant) and I’m in the top 10%… so would anything for me fundamentally change? No…. I could stick my head in the sand and ignore it, but that’s really not me and it freaking breaks my heart to see all the people it impacts.
So I see one of three things:
Try to ignore it and keep voting blue and on policies to help those where i can
go one step further and put my money where my mouth is and help run an Underground Railroad for those who need to get to blue states while they still have the rights
flee to another country
I don’t really want to think about it, but it’s been at the back of my head.