okay ill concede to the liberals that I dont think kamala harris would have put elon musk in charge of a government department called doge.

"how are the democrats so good at losing?" why don't you ask how the republicans are so good at winning?? stop acting like democrats are the only political party with agency. republicans do things on purpose.

^^ It seems to me that I haven’t seen many people acknowledging that republicans are good at winning because they lie and because they have a multimillion dollar industry committing to getting them elected and backing up their lies.

I’ve seen statistics correlating misinformed views to voting choice, a study about how respondents preferred Kamala’s policies over Trump’s when they weren’t told who had which set of policies, people discussing ‘vibes-based politics’—but in my opinion all this analysis is incomplete without confronting how republicans have a veritable propaganda machine working for them. It’s pretty hard for democrats to fight that. We have to rely on average donations from normal people when corporations/rich individuals can invest millions into networks who will try to get people elected who will give them tax breaks.

#seriously I want more people to talk about the sheer amount of damage rupert murdoch has done to this country#fox news is the most viewed cable news network in the country.#i remember a few months back harris’ campaign had success bringing project 2025 to the public’s attention#but democrats still don’t have anything comparable @choppywaterswiftboats

Fun fact that I will tell literally everyone all the time!!! A former Nixon staffer said they would have survived Watergate if they had their own news network. And that staffer's name was Roger Ailes!

Books to read:

Dark Money: An examination of the Koch Empire, and its patronage and entanglement in Right wing media, politics, and lobbying.

Messengers of the Right: A history of the conservative media landscape, beginning with talk radio (Clarence Manion, before the era of Rush Limbaugh), through periodicals like the National Review, and notable books, like God and Man at Yale. I'm sorry, but you don't know half as much as you think you do about American political history if you don't know who William F Buckley is. All of this walked, so Fox News could run.

Let Them Eat Tweets: A political synthesis of history, economics, and communication scholarship that posits wedge-issue-identity-politics as the method by which contemporary conservative parties drive their white working class bases away from class-based solidarity toward a party that serves only economic elites. That, Hacker and Pierson argue, is how you explain the escalation of billionaire oligopoly, rising economic inequality, and fanatic racism/other bigotries.

If you can understand these patterns and these histories, you'll begin to see why the GOP has nosedived into overtly fascist rhetoric, while STILL successfully courting voters who vote against their material economic interests.

There are no surprises here.

In this particular election, it seems there may have been nothing the Dems could realistically have done. Literally every single developed country that's had elections this year, the incumbent party (that is, the party in control at the time of the election) lost seats/power. Every. Single. Election.

This is extremely unusual! And the Dems got pretty darn close!

This is why I don't see a point in blaming anyone on the Democrat side running campaigns. The judicial side? Oh, absolutely. It's never been more obvious the US is in need of judicial reform in my lifetime. But the campaigns were in fact good and well-run. People around the world, however, are still angry about the Pandemic and its continuing effects, and don't care who specifically was responsible for what. They just wanted to elect someone new.

anyway my hot take is that the modern night-of live reporting model is bad and probably should be illegal. democracy is not a spectator sport and the fact that news outlets are allowed to exploit partial vote counts for ratings is ghoulish. there is nothing you can learn the night of a major election that has greater value than waiting the several days to a week that it will take, and always has taken, for the final vote totals to be established

the amount of harm the twenty four hour news cycle has done to the understanding of news and truth as concepts cannot be understated and it is never clearer than it is on election night where guesswork often becomes the word of the day and networks will race to be the first to call a state

Banging on the walls chanting "OPEN ENROLLMENT FOR ACA THRU JAN 15" like some deranged town crier. Election results aside, you have options to access healthcare as a RIGHT through the ACA. NO one can dismantle the Affordable Care Act in less than 4 years, so SIGN UP! GET YOUR CARE! USE THE SYSTEM!

You have options RIGHT NOW that will be stable thru the next year, the one after that, and I'd be shocked to see them shrink even the year after that. That means RIGHT NOW you can get signed up for next year to gain 100% covered preventative care (your annual check ups, pap smears, dental cleaning, vision check). You have the option to get checked and screened as you need, do NOT be dissuaded from exploring ACA choices. They are SOLID, LEGISLATED, and WORK BEST WHEN PEOPLE USE THEM.

I can't change most things around me, BUT I CAN tell everyone I know that THEY CAN GET LIFE SAVING CARE. THEY CAN GET PRESCRIPTIONS. THEY CAN GET PREGNANCY CARE. THEY CAN GET CANCER CARE. AND THEY WILL GET THAT CARE!!!!!!

SIGN UP BY DECEMBER 15, 2024 FOR COVERAGE TO BEGIN ON JANUARY 1, 2025. ENROLLMENT AFTER 12/15/24 WILL HAVE COVERAGE BEGINNING FEBRUARY 1, 2025.

If are living in America and are wondering what you can do now please consider contacting The White House and demanding a recount / revote!

Check out the ALCU -> The ACLU is an organization that specifically fights back against harmful laws and bills - they fought trump off RAPIDLY during his first presidency and theyre overall good for keeping track of resources and stuff!

Ensure your vote is counted through Vote Curing!

Sign this Petition : Jane Byson (the maker of petition) ;

"We need a recount and revote for the 2024 election. An investigation needs to be looked into after Trumps sudden rise after all favor was pointed towards Kamala Harris. This isn't superstition when there was proof that she was in the lead. Something is wrong and the people of the US shouldn't suffer for it."

For those who are contemplating suicide or self harm consider contacting these Hotlines! Keep Fighting Please, and to those who have more resources PLEASE add on.

And please. Do NOT give in to despair. That seems so very easy right now- but we didn't progress as far as we did by giving up. No matter the result- keep fighting. Please stay around and stand your ground.

Grieve AND organize.

Good article by David Hunter on how to survive the Trump presidency, both on the personal and on the political plane.

This is an excellent article. It talks about the psychology of tyranny, the history of resistance and the paths we have to take to rescue each other and recover.

my other grounding technique is remembering that the earliest abolitionists & the earliest suffragists had no proof that the world would ever make possible what they fought for and indeed many of them did not live to see it come to pass. and yet they did not succumb to despair so it would be disrespectful to their memory to let it overtake me

The discussions around whether or not to vote for Kamala keep being dominated by very loud voices shouting that anyone who advocates for her “just doesn't care about Palestine!” and “is willing to overlook genocide!” and “has no moral backbone at all!” And while some of these voices will be bots, trolls, psyops - we know that this happens; we know that trying to persuade progressives to split the vote or not vote at all is a strategy employed by hostile actors - of course many of them won't be. But what this rhetoric does is continually force the “you should vote for her” crowd onto the back foot of having to go to great lengths writing entire essays justifying their choice, while the “don't vote/vote third party” crowd is basically never asked to justify their choice. It frames voting for Kamala as a deeply morally compromised position that requires extensive justification while framing not voting or voting third party as the neutral and morally clean stance.

So here's another way of looking at it. How much are you willing to accept in order to feel like you're not compromising your morals on one issue?

Are you willing to accept the 24% rise in maternal deaths - and 39% increase for Black women - that is expected under a federal abortion ban, according to the Centre for American Progress? Those percentages represent real people who are alive now who would die if the folks behind Project 2025 get their way with reproductive healthcare.

Are you willing to accept the massive acceleration of climate change that would result from the scrapping of all climate legislation? We don't have time to fuck around with the environment. A gutting of climate policy and a prioritisation of fossil fuel profits, which is explicitly promised by Trump, would set the entire world back years - years that we don't have.

Are you willing to accept the classification of transgender visibility as inherently “pornographic” and thus the removal of trans people from public life? Are you willing to accept the total elimination of legal routes for gender-affirming care? The people behind the Trump campaign want to drive queer and trans people back underground, back into the closet, back into “criminality”. This will kill people. And it's maddening that caring about this gets called “prioritising white gays over brown people abroad” as if it's not BIPOC queer and trans Americans who will suffer the most from legislative queer- and transphobia, as they always do.

Are you willing to accept the domestic deployment of the military to crack down on protests and enforce racist immigration policy? I'm sure it's going to be very easy to convince huge numbers of normal people to turn up to protests and get involved in political organising when doing so may well involve facing down an army deployed by a hardcore authoritarian operating under the precedent that nothing he does as president can ever be illegal.

Are you willing to accept a president who openly talks about wanting to be a dictator, plans on massively expanding presidential powers, dehumanises his political enemies and wants the DOJ to “go after them”, and assures his supporters they won't have to vote again? If you can't see the danger of this staring you right in the face, I don't know what to tell you. Allowing a wannabe dictator to take control of the most powerful country on earth would be absolutely disastrous for the entire world.

Are you willing to accept an enormous uptick in fascism and far-right authoritarianism worldwide? The far right in America has huge influence over an entire international network of “anti-globalists”, hardcore anti-immigrant xenophobes, transphobic extremists, and straight-up fascists. Success in America aids and emboldens these people everywhere.

Are you willing to accept an enormous number of preventable deaths if America faces a crisis in the next four years: a public health emergency, a natural disaster, an ecological catastrophe? We all saw how Trump handled Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. We all saw how Trump handled Covid-19. He fanned the flames of disaster with a constant flow of medical misinformation and an unspeakably dangerous undermining of public health experts. It's estimated that 40% of US pandemic deaths could have been avoided if the death rates had corresponded to those in other high-income countries. That amounts to nearly half a million people. One study from January 2021 estimated between around 4,200 and 12,200 preventable deaths attributable purely to Trump's statements about masks. We're highly unlikely to face another global pandemic in the next few years but who knows what crises are coming down the pipeline?

Are you willing to accept the attempted deportation of millions - millions - of undocumented people? This is “rounding people up and throwing them into camps where no one ever hears from them again” territory. That's a blueprint for genocide right there and it's a core tenet of both Trump's personal policy and Project 2025. And of course they wouldn't be going after white people. They most likely wouldn't even restrict their tyranny to people who are actually undocumented. Anyone racially othered as an “immigrant” would be at risk from this.

Are you willing to accept not just the continuation of the current situation in Palestine, but the absolute annihilation of Gaza and the obliteration of any hope for imminent peace? There is no way that Trump and the people behind him would not be catastrophically worse for Gaza than Kamala or even Biden. Only recently he was telling donors behind closed doors that he wanted to “set the [Palestinian] movement back 25 or 30 years” and that “any student that protests, I throw them out of the country”. This is not a man who can be pushed in a direction more conducive to peace and justice. This is a man who listens to his wealthy donors, his Christian nationalist Republican allies, and himself.

Are you willing to accept a much heightened risk of nuclear war? Obviously this is hardly a Trump policy promise. But I can't think of a single president since the Cold War who is more likely to deploy nuclear weapons, given how casually he talks about wanting to use them and how erratic and unstable he can be in his dealings with foreign leaders. To quote Foreign Policy only this year, “Trump told a crowd in January that one of the reasons he needed immunity was so that he couldn’t be indicted for using nuclear weapons on a city.” That's reassuring. I'm not even in the US and I remember four years of constant background low-level terror that Trump would take offence at something some foreign leader said or think that he needs to personally intervene in some military situation to “sort it out” and decide to launch the entire world into nuclear war. No one sane on earth wants the most powerful person on the planet to be as trigger-happy and careless with human life as he is, especially if he's running the White House like a dictator with no one ever telling him no. But depending on what Americans do in November, he may well be inflicted again on all of us, and I guess we'll all just have to hope that he doesn't do the worst thing imaginable.

“But I don't want those things! Stop accusing me of supporting things I don't support!” Yes, of course you don't want those things. None of us does. No one's saying that you actively support them. No one's accusing you of wanting Black women to die from ectopic pregnancies or of wanting to throw Hispanic people in immigrant detention centres or of wanting trans people to be outlawed (unlike, I must point out, the extremely emotive and personal accusations that get thrown around about “wanting Palestinian children to die” if you encourage people to vote for Kamala).

But if you're advocating against voting for Kamala, you are clearly willing to accept them as possible consequences of your actions. That is the deal you're making. If a terrible thing happening is the clear and easily foreseeable outcome of your action (or in the case of not voting, inaction), in a way that could have been prevented by taking a different and just as easy action, you are partly responsible for that consequence. (And no, it's not “a fear campaign” to warn people about things he's said, things he wants to do, and plans drawn up by his close allies. This is not “oooh the Democrats are trying to bully you into voting for them by making him out to be really bad so you'll feel scared and vote for Kamala!” He is really bad, in obvious and documented and irrefutable ways.)

And if you believe that “both parties are the same on Gaza” (which, you know, they really aren't, but let's just pretend that they are) then presumably you accept that the horrors being committed there will continue, in the immediate term anyway, regardless of who wins the presidency. Because there really isn't some third option that will appear and do everything we want. It's going to be one of those two. And we can talk all day about wanting a better system or how unfair it is that every presidential election only ever has two viable candidates and how small the Overton window is and all that but hell, we are less than eighty days out from the election; none of that is going to get fixed between now and November. Electoral reform is a long-term (but important!) goal, not something that can be effected in the span of a couple of months by telling people online to vote third party. There is no “instant ceasefire and peace negotiation” button that we're callously overlooking by encouraging people to vote for Kamala. (My god, if there was, we would all be pressing it.)

If we're suggesting people vote for her, it's not that we “are willing to overlook genocide” or “don't care about sacrificing brown people abroad” or whatever. Nothing is being “overlooked” here. It's that we're simply not willing to accept everything else in this post and more on top of continued atrocities in Gaza. We're not willing to take Trump and his godawful far-right authoritarian agenda as an acceptable consequence of feeling like we have the moral high ground on Palestine. I cannot stress enough that if Kamala doesn't win, we - we all, in the whole world - get Trump. Are you willing to accept that?

And one more point to address: I've seen too many people act frighteningly flippant and naïve about terrible things Trump or his campaign want to do, with the idea that people will simply be able to prevent all these bad things by “organising” and “protesting” and “collective action”. “I'm not willing to accept these things; that's why I'll fight them tooth and nail every day of their administration” - OK but if you're not even willing to cast a vote then I have doubts about your ability to form “the Resistance”, which by the way would have to involve cooperation with people of lots of progressive political stripes in order to have the manpower to be effective, and if you're so committed to political purity that you view temporarily lending your support to Kamala at the ballot box as an untenable betrayal of everything you stand for then forgive me for also doubting your ability to productively cooperate with allies on the ground with whom you don't 100% agree. Plus, if the Trump campaign gets its way, American progressives would be kept so busy trying to put out about twenty different fires at once that you'd be able to accomplish very little. Maybe you get them to soften their stance on trans healthcare but oh shit, the climate policies are still in place. But more importantly, how many people do you think will protest for abortion rights if doing so means staring down a gun? Or organise to protect their neighbours from deportation if doing so means being thrown in prison yourself? And OK, maybe you're sure that you will, but history has shown us time and time again that most people won't. Most people aren't willing to face that kind of personal risk. And a tiny number of lefties willing to risk incarceration or death to protect undocumented people or trans people or whatever other groups are targeted is sadly not enough to prevent the horrors from happening. That is small fry compared to the full might of a determined state. Of course if the worst happens and Trump wins then you should do what you can to mitigate the harm; I'm not saying you shouldn't. But really the time to act is now. You have an opportunity right here to mitigate the harm and it's called “not letting him get elected”. Act now to prevent that kind of horrific authoritarian situation from developing in the first place; don't sit this one out under the naïve belief that “we'll be able to stop it if it happens”. You won't.

If your opinions on U.S. politics are not grounded in the understanding that a conglomeration of evangelical religious fascist cults are currently trying to eliminate every advancement in human rights since the 1910s (the origin of every anti trans and other targeted repressive bill in every legislature and every lawsuit scotus has used to repeal landmark case decisions is the same policy thinktank funded by evangelical money) then I simply do not take your dedication to antifascism and human rights particularly seriously.

Oh, she was thisclose to calling him something very impolite. 😂

Wouldn't it be pretty great if we had a way of avoiding the need to go through the effort of organizing and participating in protests in order to pressure our representatives to do the things we want? Like, a simple way of getting- or at least trying to get- people into office who already want to do the same things we want them to do?

... Wait. Wait, Anon, I think we do have that! And it's called voting! The thing you're advocating we should skip doing!

Huh. To me, deliberately setting ourselves up to have an even harder job of getting our levels of government to do what we want seems like a very SILLY idea, not a very GOOD one. Maybe you hadn't actually thought your opinion through?

(Assuming it's actually your opinion, and you're not just uncritically parroting the rhetoric of someone else on the internet whose words make you feel righteous?)

Not to be a debbie downer but Tim Walz was in the military for 24 years, including during the Iraq war. He called the national guard on protestors following the George Floyd murder. He supports Israel. He's approved an oil pipeline across indigenous lands that break treaties.

It's weird to celebrate a man who goes against all leftist values

Elbit System, a top international arms manufacturer, who's weapons have been found in Israel, is also located in Tim Walz's state. People have protested for him to divest. Nothing.

Sigh, alright, guess I'm actually going to defend a politician for once, let's do this I guess:

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"Tim Walz was in the military for 24 years, including during the Iraq war" - Half True.

Tim Walz was in the military for 24 years. As a member of the national guard. He was never deployed overseas.

The man left the military in May of 2005 in order to run for public office. The unit of the NG he served with, the 125th Field Artillery, weren't mobilised for a deployment order until July of the same year, and people he worked with have come forward to confirm that one of the reasons he left was because he was morally opposed to the war.

Tim Walz never went to Iraq, the man didn't step onto foreign soil as a military man apart from a brief deployment to Italy in 2003 as part of the security forces during Operation Enduring Freedom. The man himself openly says that he never saw direct combat, ever.

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"He called the national guard on protestors following the George Floyd murder" - This is such a gross oversimplification of the role a state governor plays during times of unrest that it's just fully a misrepresentation.

(It's also a misrepresentation of what the National Guard even is, but that's a whole other can of worms.)

Tim Walz didn't make the singular decision to mobilise the national guard. He did not singlehandedly call the national guard. The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, contacted Walz' office on the evening of the 27th of May to formally request the deployment of the Minnesota National Guard to the city.

This request by the mayor was immediately followed up with a written request by the Minneapolis Police Chief, Medaria Arradondo, who sent it through a couple of hours later.

Once that happened, there was no way for Tim Walz to ignore those requests. He was the governor of a state.

Tim Walz did not dispatch the National Guard to the city until the next evening. His hesitation and delay to call in the Guard even once he was formally requested to do so by the mayor of a city is one of the things he was slammed for, and was a black stain on his tenure as governor.

I'm not defending the actions of the National Guard once they were deployed, not by any means, but I am defending the idea that Tim Walz went all in on savage crackdowns when he verifiably did the opposite. In fact, during the strategising phase of the mobilisation, the governor's office filed numerous requests with the city for a list of defensive priorities, so that the guard would be protecting federal property.

But the actions of the National Guard once they were there, were not in Tim Walz' hands. The governor of a state is not a Commander In Chief like the president is.

(What was up to Tim Walz was his decision to make sure the state's Attorney General led the prosecution during the case against the police officers involved in the George Floyd trial, which resulted in the convictions. This move by Tim Walz was praised by civil rights groups.

I'll also point out that his decisions, reforms, and rulings in regards to police brutality were praised by Reverand Al Sharpton of the National Action Network, who said; "We don't want a guy who's wildly radical -- we want someone with an open mind, he has shown that with how he addressed police brutality in his own state,"

And also by Jotaka Eaddy, the founder of Win With Black Women, who said "Governor Walz’s tenure has also been marked by his steadfast commitment to advancing social justice and protecting vulnerable communities and communities of color.")

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"He Supports Israel" - True, completely true. ,But I hate to break this to you; every single institutional "In Crowd" Democrat supports Israel. The Venn Diagram of "Democrats who don't support Israel" and "Democrats who will end up near the White House" has no overlap. I'm sorry.

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"He's approved an oil pipeline across indigenous lands that break treaties." - Also entirely true, and indefensible. Fuck him for that one. Absolutely.

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And finally, "Elbit System, a top international arms manufacturer, who's weapons have been found in Israel, is also located in Tim Walz's state. People have protested for him to divest. Nothing." -

Elbit System isn't located in Minnesota, it's located in Texas, but why let a bit of googling and research get in the way of some good outrage.

They don't list any facilities or operation centers being in Minnesota. I have spent half an hour trying my best to find any evidence of any connection Minnesota has with Elbit System at all, but apart from one single f*cking petition that claims that the Minnesota retirement funds own 10,000 shares of Elbit Systems, but lists no sources for its outrage I can't find anything.

Elbit Systems have operational facilities in Texas, New Hampshire, Alabama, Virginia, and Florida. Their administration offices are in Alabama, Utah, Georgia, Florida, Virginia, and Maryland.

Those are all also currently Republican states, with the only exception being Maryland.

They are a publicly owned company, this is all information you can find with a bit of simple googling.

But again, hey, why let a bit of basic fact checking get in the way of some good outrage.

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So yeah, there's all that. Jesus Christ, you're all fucking unbearable.

Regarding indigenous issues, I also want to point out Walz's lieutenant governor is White Earth Nation Ojibwe. If Walz gets elected, she would be the first Native American governor of a US state. I can't speak to the oil pipeline stuff, it sounds like that sucks. But it's not like Walz isn't committed to the welfare of indigenous people in the state.

I know this is a little out of left field, but here is Walz's speech at a GIS user conference where he talks about how geographic literacy is important and how the state of Minnesota uses GIS to support environmental and social initiatives.

Minnesota's goal is have the lowest rate of child poverty in the nation. They do this with a tax credit. But you can't get a tax credit if you don't file taxes. So they used GIS to pinpoint to the street level where they needed to target filing initiatives, going door to door in some places.

I'm telling you this because it is a lot of work trying to attack big problems from multiple angles, and it's not always going to be as clean and morally pure as people hope. But it is evident Walz is setting the tone for a state that is trying hard to do right by its residents.

There is no such thing as a morally pure politician that can get things done. It is the nature of politics that sometimes you have to compromise. But that's where the bus metaphor comes in. You use politicians to get you closer to where you want to be, instead of not getting on the bus because it's not going on the path you want it to take.

I would also add to the excellent fact-checking here: we should always be asking questions when we see posts and statements like this.

In this case, the answer to all three questions is no. And I would actually say that it doesn’t pass the disinformation sniff test: https://instituteforpr.org/10-ways-to-spot-disinformation/

Every time this comes around I will point out that @decolonize-solidarity is standing on Republican talking points and is ACTIVELY Pro-George W Bush and that everyone needs to know it before you listen to them