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?
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.
That explains the “virtue signaling” accusations.
I rmember stephen colbert’s face lol
Seriously, how the f*** is this guy still in the race?
Some very deep pockets.
People want to say it’s just racism, but we have to stop ignoring how much of this is happening because of obscenely wealthy media moguls who don’t give a damn about the future of the country and are only worried about ratings, and holy shit, Trump brings in ratings. The crazy fucks who vote for him are deeply influenced by this media, like Trump, they believe everything they see on TV.
-Leslie Moonves, CBS CEO in 2016, on Trump
I worked in local television news from 2000-2010ish. I watched it spin out of control during the Bush years. I remember the President of Dinsey-ABC (waaaaaaaay prior to Disney+) claiming she would nail a TV to her child’s dorm room wall since her child had expressed she didn’t need a TV because she had a laptop.
“You’re going to have a television if I have to nail it to your wall,” she told her daughter, according to comments she made at a Reuters event this week. “You have to have one.”
-Anne Sweeney, President of Disney-ABC in 2009
These fucking dinosaurs did fuck nothing for twenty fucking years while the internet ate their lunch. The only idea they ever had was doubling down on insane shit to grab views. They never once considered becoming a better source of news or providing any kind of real local value to communities.
It’s the money, especially the money in traditional radio and television media, that is propping him up. He’s truly the last gasp of a dying generation, desperate to keep control over people who are way more informed than ever before and the only tool they have in their toolchest to fight that is misinformation and disinformation.
The same deep pockets that were able to kick Joe Biden off the ticket. They didn’t give a fuck when people like you and I said Biden was too old, but once the folks with the money started talking about it being an issue, Biden got curbed.
Unlike Biden, conservatives are in a cult and losing Trump would lose their voters. They’re attached at the hip and they can’t dump him in the same way without essentially just admitting they will lose hard this year.
This is the right answer. Money. There’s plenty of the rest of the stuff mentioned, but cults of any sort are useful tools for the powerful. And actually, it’s not even money, it’s POWER.
It’s about power and pursuit of power, yes. That’s why there’s so much racism and xenophobia, because those who desire power need people to lord their power over, or they don’t feel powerful.
The money is just a path to that power.
There’s a reason plenty of them are legitimate rapists, because rape is also about power. Power is literally the only thing that means anything to them. That’s why you get freaks like Weinstein who can’t even use their fucking dick raping people. Because at the end of the day it all boils down to these freaks getting off on using power over others.
It’s also why they lean so hard on misogyny, racism, anti-lgbtq and general xenophobia, because all of them are rooted in having power over other groups.
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’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.
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.
Have an updoot, Offspring-fan.
Have an updoot, recognizer of Offspring-fans.
Offspring?
Yeppers, peppers! 🫑
“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.
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.
don’t forget rush limbaugh
Yes thank you, and for some time Glenn Beck as well. Also a dishonorable mention to Jeanine Pirro.
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.
You made me remember! Yes, this was on a HUGE TV, probably 70", and that in a time when those were insanely expensive, had never seen one in a home. It was like the house walls in Fahrenheit 451.
“Come look! The White Clown is talking!”
An LSD party back in college taught me a thing I’ll never forget. There were 3 TVs in the living room and my best friend and I were tripping balls. He pulls me over to where I can see all 3 screens.
He said, “Notice who the number of people watching is directly proportional to the size of the screen?”
Mind. Blown.
Two party system, some would vote for party x no matter what.
Conservatism is a social cancer that primarily affects unintellectual people and sociopaths.
This cancer metastasizes as fascism. Social progress is sometimes an effective treatment, but a permanent cure is long overdue.
Trump could be rolled out drooling and leaking brain fluid from his ears and 40% of voters will fully go behind him cause he’s a republican. And the “undecided” voters will somehow see it as a strength. By the way, anyone still claiming to be undecided on Donald Trump in 2024 is full of shit
Your mistake is to consider an election is a rational competition. It’s not. Not anymore, because medias make it impossible to know the truth. So it is more like a football match. People have the team they support, and for most nothing will change their mind because there’s too much propaganda. When almost everything is propaganda, you get to choose the reality you “prefer”.
So the point of the campaign is more about convincing people to vote in order to defeat the opposing team. Or to persuade the other team to concede.
Winning, or perhaps losing, is existential to Donald Trump. If he loses, he will most certainly have to face down his legal issues.
I honestly think he’ll flee to Russia if he loses.
Depends on how the Coup part Deux goes.
It’s as if this nation has deep internal divisions following a badly wrapped up civil war that have metastasized into irreconcilable worldviews.
The Overton window has shifted dramatically in the last 10 years. He represents aversion to that
Propagandizing a proclaimed shift, and there being an actual shift are two different things.
Trump’s side have proclaimed a shift which isn’t actually a significant reality. Things change over a decade, but nothing notably significant has changed in terms of the over all running of the system, or the reproduction of culture/society.
It’s mild progress being pushed by right wing propaganda as “civilization ending chaos”.
I would be cautious about writing off an entire side’s viewpoint as overdramatic. When they do that to the left, does anyone change their mind?
This is all about division.
We need to work on understanding the root cause of issues and working towards fixing that.
I think economics is actually at the core of the problem.
A lot of people don’t have the basics right now, and they lash out at anything they can to try to fix it.
I didn’t write them off as overly dramatic, nothing of the sort. They’re dangerous (for some of the reasons you point to, division), and it’s a very well organized, well funded, and well oiled machine that keeps them dangerous. Funded by technocratic and Libertarian billionaires.
So I agree with you, that it’s an economic issue, but we can’t just all sit down and “fix it” (that’s a pipe dream) - you can’t sit down with those invested think tank billionaires to solve the problem any more than you can play Jenga with someone who wants to smash the tower before it’s built.
It doesn’t work that way.
Thanks! Good response. I think it is always worth the effort to try and understand and talk to people and use words to convince them. I think everyone can be convinced, we just have to pull the right levers.
But if it’s the community’s opinion that that is not an option, and only violence is the answer. I have very low hopes for our country’s future.
— sorry for the wall of text — (Up to you whether you can be bothered reading it)
No offense, but when you say you believe in talking sense to people, have you been specifically occupying their rightwing spaces and trying to talk sense into them for the past ten years?
Most people haven’t, those who have in an ongoing/consistent way, will understand it’s not the community controlling the ideological messaging being posted repeatedly EVERY SINGLE DAY, the community is complicit in its brainwashing, but they’re not the majority stakeholders or main sources of the crypto-fascist extremist economic Libertarianism currently posing as conservativism and “Classical (free speech) British Liberalism”.
Ergo, violence isn’t necessarily a constructive answer where you’d essentially be attacking people who are merely complicit in their own brainwashing (often self-indoctrinating for very personal and individual reasons) - leaving the question of: well what is the answer to these groups then?
I don’t have a single answer or silver bullet, and it’s probably upon the genuine left to now layout many answers on the table, including violent revolution, and parallel governments of mutual aid, but also, extending to culturally corrective efforts (consistent generational brigading/infiltration)… and even all the way down to the solutions of the establishment left.
But I think the big problem is that all of these can and will be folded back into the system. Incorporated. Worked back in, either by tyrants, profiteers, democrats, or PR agencies… So it becomes a question of - what parts of the system will proposed solutions necessarily extend, and will those extensions aid us to think outside the system, beyond it, beyond the current limitations of our own lives and societal limitations.
I would say mutual aid, and parallel governments/services probably do this. The system’s responses to these tend to generate more rights, more service responsibilities, a better system, with more empathy.
Violence is better in times of direct fascist/reactionary violence, this might be more appropriate if Trump’s fascism becomes violent again…
…and cultural solutions beyond PR campaigns, they can be valuable but without solid education in far left discourses, around unionism, marxism, anarchism, mutual aid, black liberationism and civil rights, labor history, schools like the Frankfurt school, ect. then people end up as establishment leftists…
…so it’s also important to figure out how to extend resistances there too (resistances towell meaning but moderate leftists drifting right into centrism or further)…
But ultimately I figure it has to be about knowing how the system will react (and fold/co-opt answers presented into its self), and predicting how those reactions either extend problems or extend solutions/further possibilities…
…with the goal being the liberation of as many people from the struggles of class oppression under capitalism, as possible.
It’s not an easy task, nor can it easily be thought about. Anyways, that’s all I have.
Sorry again for the length, thanks and congrats if you got this far.
This is great suff and I agree for the most part.
I have not been occupying right spaces online. Don’t have the time / energy. And I don’t really put in the effort to try to change anyone’s mind Online because people are change resistant online.
But
I do argue politely IRL for things that would help. Better infrastructure, trains, good jobs, love everyone, let people do what they want as long as it doesn’t hurt others, transparency in money and government, and make good things in America. Still unlikely to change minds but at least making friendships with people different from me.
I guess my overall thesis would be: online discourse is has proven unproductive. I’m tired of reading vitriol and “other side is so dumb wow.”
Disappointed to see the echoiness of the echo chamber on Lemmy
What keeps him in the race? The lack of alternatives. No Republican candidate but Trump has even a chance to win. The GOP has no viable political program that could create a victory, all they have are the blind and dumb masses of Trump followers.
Why is he still in the race or why are his supporters?
For him I think it’s obvious. Narcissism and the fact that he has a lot of federal crimes in the courts that he can stop when he is elected.
His supporters are more complicated. He pretty decently still owns the GOP so even if they are getting cold feet, they don’t seem to have a plan to overthrow him. I feel like they are planning on just stonewalling for 4 more years and then try to win the next one and cut the checks to the billionaires then.
I got nothing on his base though. I haven’t understood them for 10 years now. Not sure I ever will.
Part of the checks cut get reinvested in the propaganda that gets more checks cut. It’s a whole corrupt system, as attested to by this list of think tanks backing someone like a Jordan Peterson:
https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/yl29i2/jordan_peterson_and_the_think_tanks/
…you can research most rightwing media and personalities and make lists and connections (some if Trump’s for instance run through Roy Cohn, the original red scare and the mafia for instance).
It’s likely the same for some leftwing individuals to. It’s the reproduction of this culture, and the economic loops that perpetuate the toxicities of the current systems.
…and it will keep going long after Trump is gone.
I’m not buying it this time around. Sure, that was the explanation for 2016, and I’m sure a bunch of people who thought like that got some good laughs. But surely they could see what happened. Surely they lived through the following four years. Surely they can see that breaking glass might be cathartic but now they’re surrounded by broken windows
Surely they saw our liberal outrage was directed at how easily they were manipulated into making their own lives worse? Surely they saw further divisiveness as “liberal elites” just shook their heads in sadness and started giving up on their brethren in less successful places. Surely they see those same cities they wanted to wreck are doing better than ever while they’re stuck with the consequences of their votes?
The billionaires behind the think tanks are doing better than ever, that’s the point of the think tanks. None of this is going away even if ut lulls. It’s a sustained effort.
Tim Pool, David Rubin, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro (whose daily wire was started with fracking money from Dan and Ferris wilks), Andy Gno, (whose post-millenial was started by an Israeli real estate billionaire)… They all made money, huge amounts of money. Tim Pool was making $400,000 an episode twice a month for years… And these are thevlow level defenders of the billionaire Libertarian think tanks.
Trump officials probably made so much more.
So it doesn’t really matter what happens, we can be sure efforts will not go away. Dwindle, but this is what they know how to do, and they’ve been handed massive wealth in the process… They’ll use that wealth to continue thier efforts.
You can “not buy” that viewers would be that dumb (many are) but that’s not the point. The machine has been paid, the political apparatus to produce the far right media will continue in many different forms.
What’s keeping him in the race is the delusional nature of his supporters. Think about all those points you wrote about what a horrible person he is. How many other candidates could survive even one of those controversies? He lives in an imaginary world of his own creation where whatever he says he believes to be true, and his cult like followers are so brainwashed that their perfectly smooth grey matter just soaks it up like a sponge. There’s precious little he could do or say at this point that would have his base leave him.
I think a lot of Americans like to feel special/different/superior and Trump helps feed that addiction
I’m not from the US and so it’s officially not my business. But from what I’ve seen around the webs is that he has gathered a loyal following all around the US. Seems he has enough loyals on his side to stay in the race. But I don’t know a lot about the political system in the US. Excuse me if I’m wrong here.
