This has not been my experience growing up in a rural America. Sure leftists might try to cancel you online.
But I got my face punched multiple times for not preforming masculinity in a way that they found acceptable or for standing up for someone smaller and weaker.
If you think Taiwan shouldn't cease to exist, how else can you guarantee that? It's either nukes or US protection and nobody trusts the Americans anymore.
Taiwan makes some of the most complex devices humans have ever constructed! They can figure out the almost 100 year old technology to make a gun bomb nuke.
I'm Australian and I already don't trust the US to help us.
I've literally never thought that the US wouldn't help us before Trump came to shit on everything.
Now I imagine we'd have to buy Trump off with "raw earth" or something in exchange for not being abandoned to China, and our head of state would quite possibly be berated publicly for wanting some kind of security guarantee for his people's future.
It's sad, I still feel like the US and UK people are closest to our values, but Trump only works for himself and his billionaire crony parasites.
He will end up with the loyalty he has earned.
Everyone around Trump hates him, and the US is heading in the same direction.
so your alternative of inaction involves a likely outcome of raping and murdering thousands of civilians in the name of peace for thousands of soldiers.
the us can do plenty of things without spending billions of dollars that are short of this, and yes, i have personally donated to the Ukrainian effort.
An obvious alternative is to increase support to Ukraine to give them what they need to expel Russia. The good old USA has the resources to do that but Republicans have blocked increasing aid at the orders of Donald Trump for years now. And now that he is in power he is finally blocking it altogether.
Not to stir anything up, but my own observations have been that it is mostly men falling for the political conspiracy theories and _often, but not always,_ their wives follow them.
>It is heartbreaking what happened to a generation of men.
Uh-huh. Which of these predictions made in 2015/2016 came true by 2020 when Donald Trump left office?
* Donald Trump will cause a stock market crash.
* Donald Trump will start WWIII.
* Donald Trump will kill or jail journalists, leftists, and members of the LGBTQ community.
* Donald Trump will ban all Muslims from entering the country.
* Donald Trump will never allow another election to occur as he will become dictator for life.
* Donald Trump will create internment camps for immigrants.
* Donald Trump will outlaw gay marriage.
* Donald Trump will ban abortion nationwide and institute a Handmaid's Tale-type dystopia.
The answer? None of them. I await the replies that these aren't the same thing and they all Really Happened or are Totally About to Happen:
>"I'm going to admit I was wrong about the timeline on all 10 things," he assured me.
>"See how you prefaced it?" I said. "You're just saying that you're wrong about the timeline."
>"Why am I going to abandon the truth?" he insisted. "I can't abandon the truth."
You can also see the mirror-image of Q-anon currently alive and fermenting at /r/somethingiswrong2024 on reddit.
This isn't a male issue (or female) or a right wing (or left) issue or a social media (or mass media) issue. It's a perennial human issue. It preceded mass media. It succeeded mass media. It will succeed social media.
One apocalypse or another has been at hand for more 2,500 years, always heralded by mouth-foaming prophets with dire predictions of imminent disaster. And their failure to materialize always blindly waved away by certain demographics of the earnest and gullible. And there's always a Qoholeth to every Jeremiah shouting as loudly "Nothing ever happens."
Babylon didn't fall for centuries after its prediction of imminent destruction. Jesus didn't come back in that generation's lifetime. The Mashiach is absent. The Mahdi is missing. Capitalism is still around and the Proles still in chains. There has been no Malthusian Great Starvation. There are still snows on Kilimanjaro. Obama remains an American citizen. Trump remains an American rather than Russian liability. JFK Jr is still dead. Kamala Harris still lost.
If there's one lesson to be perennially learned, it's that there's nothing perfectible about humans and their relation to culture. The delusional will always be with us and they'll always claim it's really the other side that is deluded, akshually.
These things all seemed like possibilities, but not certainties. And some of them did at least partly come to be: there was an attempted Muslim travel ban, and abortion was banned in vast swaths of the US. The internment camps are definitely being talked about seriously.
Further, the 2016 list wouldn't have possibly guessed "will badly mishandle a pandemic, turning the US into one of its worst victims", but that is indeed what happened. He didn't outlaw gay marriage, but he did ban trans people from the military.
We did benefit from one important thing: his incompetence prevented him from accomplishing much of anything in his term. He has now had time to prepare -- or rather, the right-wing think tanks have had time to prepare. He's implementing their priorities as fast as he can.
Look past what he says and into what is actually happening.
He is actively helping take health care from poor people. He is firing thousands of people with families, mortgages and medical bills without cause. He is closing our national parks. All so he can personally have a tax cut.
His ex-wife is frantically posting for him to help with the healthcare of their own son in his replies. He can't even manage his family I don't think he has the betterment of humanity on his mind.
I believe it's quite easy to look at any humans actions and cherry pick a narrative of malfeasance or malice if that's what you're looking for.
Musk does a lot of things at a very high level publicly so I think it's an even easier task. I'm sure you'll disagree but I believe it's this false narrative and who's creating it that you should be doubting.
Many people don't have a problem with a lot of what Musk has done. He's not perfect and does make mistakes which he openly admits like any sane rational person should. I do believe his good intent is there and he generally tries to right wrongs.
I'm watching closely what he does and sometimes I have my doubts. If I ever see him actually cross a line I'll change my mind. For now, most of the narrative has been pretty typical fake news and timeless partisan disagreement on methods of governance.
So ... Because people who could bear families, but could not earn a living are being "left on dire straits", and Elon is against upkeeping such an unearned situation, Elon's the bad guy?
The vision that sees this as bad is obviously tainted by corruption, and is so not worth of care especially as the people leaving their jobs will have a damn good golden parachute.
Simplifying the tax code is about tax prep. The simpler the tax code, the simpler to file. Though what you say about him wanting to lower taxes is possibly true, none of those posts are about that.
How so? You don't pay TurboTax per regulation. You pay them a flat fee to file your taxes.
I might buy that line of thinking for a corporation but the direct file program was about individuals. Elon gleefully tweeted about how that had been deleted. That's a direct give away to TurboTax and H&R Block.
The far left proves over and over again that they don't turn out to vote or have too many conflicting litmus tests.
If the just move more left strat worked, I would expect to see an AOC style candidate in at least one red state. But the truth is that style of politics isn't popular outside of a few very blue districts.
Dan Osborn gave of a glimpse of what a left populist campaign in a red state might look like but he still lost. And half of his positions would get you cancelled by the AOCs of the world. The reality is a 2012 Obama platform is about as far left as you can go and hope to win a nationwide general election in the current US political climate.
That's incorrect - or, at least, not seriously tested with a true far-left candidate with the DNC'S full backing. Dan Osborn was decidedly not that.
Bernie Sanders is, of course, the quintessential example, as he polled better against Trump than all 3 of Trump's eventual Democratic opponents. Katie Porter flipped a red district and was well known for taking corporate stooges to task; the DNC undermined her latest election, and now she's out of politics, IIRC.
Then there's the case in Kentucky, where Charles Booker had a real chance to unseat Mitch McConnell in 2020; he was exceptionally charismatic and had poll numbers that were rising terrifically fast because he was home-grown and made a point of trying to unite people through shared interest. The DNC shoveled millions into primary opponent Amy McGrath's campaign, and even locked black Kentuckians out of their sole voting center in Louisville, suppressing the vote; right-of-center McGrath won, but it's hard to overstate by how narrowly.
She was trounced in the general, and it's important to point out why: because she represented too little difference from McConnell. She was never going to peel voters off the real thing with a milquetoast knock-off. Booker growth in the polls before it was cut short was so pronounced becaus he offered a real choice to Kentuckians. But the problem, for the DNC, isn't that far-left policies aren't popular (they are, wildly, and particularly among the demos that stay home if not activated with a promise of positive change); it's that those policies are anathema to the elite within the party and party donors.
That's the actual reality. Which is sobering, because it means that the left's best chance to make real progress would be when an economic reckoning robs that elite of the funding to buy their preferred candidates.
Your example of a leftist that can win in a red state is...Bernie Sanders? Kamala won Vermont by 30+ points. That's not a red state.
Everything else you said was hypotheticals and wish casting. The DNC cleared the way for Dan Osborn and he still lost. I'm sorry that the state senator you like got beat in the primary. That's politics. Leftist got beat in SF in 2025. If you can't win SF I don't think there is hope for Kentucky.
Bernie Sanders won against Trump in h2h polls in 2016 and 2020, quite strongly. Booker was on his was to something similar. Even 2008 Obama campaigned left of Clinton (we made the correct choice as far as an electoral victory goes, then, if not necessarily policy-wise).
These are realities that the DNC won't face because it threatens their donors. SF is a bad example as a region on a neoliberal stranglehold that is only nominally leftist, but much more concerned with money. The political machine there is adept at crushing upstarts. Nancy Pelosi had a serious challenger several years ago; she refused to debate him, and bad actors with Pelosi connections torpedoed his efforts with specious harrasment campaigns.
Which is all to say that the DNC and its local arms go out of their way to actively scuttle anything that doesn't have their seal of approval. Hope in SF, Kentucky, and elsewhere is not a function of progressive electoral capability, but of establishment Democrats' willingness to play fair or dirty.
Harris beat Trump in H2H polls against Trump in 2024. What matters is likely voters in swing states. Sanders gets crushed across the board when it comes to people actually voting, which is why he lost the primaries. Pelosi gets donors, and her primary opponents don't. No smoke-filled rooms needed.
>Harris beat Trump in H2H polls against Trump in 2024.
Not as consistently, not by the same margins, and with a large amount of ambivalence from swing voters. They liked Sanders in a way that Harris could never emulate. Every election over the last generation, save 2012, was determined by answering the question, "Are you sufficiently different from the last guy?" Obama, Trump, Biden, and, yes, Sanders were. McCain, Romney, Clinton, Trump (ironically), and Harris were not.
Sanders lost Democratic primaries (sometimes in dubious fashion), but kicked our milquetoast candidates' butts with swing voters in swing states, which I agree is what matters (other than not losing the progressive base, which is also something he was good at). He peeled off independents and Republicans who were fed up with Democratic centrism; as with Trump, ANY change would do for them, as long as it was unequivocal. And Sanders had the advantage of not having a history of raping women. Our loss, sabotogating his campaign (literally).
Getting donors isn't a virtue. Several successful Democratic candidates have run on eschewing the wrong kinds of donors. Regardless, she uses the smoke-filled rooms anyway. And then lies about basic stuff like, "This will be my last time running for office." It's no wonder that people on both sides of the aisle hate her. She represents many of the reasons Democrats lose, and only wins herself through momentum and subterfuge.
But I got my face punched multiple times for not preforming masculinity in a way that they found acceptable or for standing up for someone smaller and weaker.