Tinidril

So, establishment Republicans,who everybody hates, including most right leaning voters, made sure everybody understood that they hate Trump. Gosh, that almost seems like something that could backfire.

Being hated by the political establishment is Trump's entire brand. Americans loathe the political establishment. Were it not for Trump's bungling of COVID, he would have won with Biden's help in 2020. People thought I was crazy to say we might ultimately wish he had won, but I think it's pretty clear now that it would have been better.

If attacking Trump was going to help Democrats, it would have happened a long time ago. For a lot of voters it might as well be an endorsement. All the worst things Trump actually did in his 2016 term were standard Republican shit. Biden should have called that out and tied them to each other. Trump is an anchor on establishment Republicans, and establishment Republicans are an anchor on Trump. That's how you use narrative to win elections. Voters don't work the simplistic way Democrats seem to believe.

I'm sorry, did you sleep through the 2020 primary? Obama brokered the deal behind the scenes where right before super Tuesday every single establishment friendly candidate dropped out simultaneously and endorsed Biden, even though most were well ahead of him at that point.

The only other candidate that stayed in besides Sanders was Warren. Warren was at that point too far behind to have a chance and had effectively shut down her campaign, but she held onto enough of the progressive vote to be an anchor on Sanders. She is the only candidate that it hasn't been confirmed that Obama pressured, but I'll go to my grave with the pretty much obvious assumption that he did.

Voters might not care who Obama wants them to vote for, but black voters in North Carolina care very much who Jim Clyburn wants them to vote for. Clyburn has tremendous pull over the black churches that are the social hubs of the black community there. Clyburn had announced he would stay neutral but, the same time everything else happened, he got a call from Obama and immediately gave Biden his enthusiastic endorsement. Just in case you think I'm exaggerating his influence, watch Bill Clinton's speech at RBG's funeral. He takes that opportunity to publicly thank Clyburn for "settling the dispute" in the Democratic party.

Biden won North Carolina with overwhelming support from black voters, despite being attacked by Harris early on for his former stance against bussing for school integration. That was the only moment where Harris momentarily became relevant in the race, but voter interest in her lasted about three days before she crashed back to the bottom. Yet, we ultimately got her as the nominee anyways, despite overwhelming rejection in the only primary she was in. Kinda makes you wonder how she got on Biden's ticket in the first place, but that's a whole other deal.

Despite the fact that less than a quarter of the country had voted after Super Tuesday, the Democratic party and their media talking heads immediately started treating Biden as the presumptive winner. Whether people do it consciously or not, as soon as that happens in a primary the remaining votes shift massively towards the presumptive winner. Obama's machinations didn't directly shift enough votes to lock the race for Biden, but they provided the window for the media to steer the narrative. Narratives are everything in politics, a fact that Democrats understand in primaries but somehow forget in general elections.

There is a whole lot more I could say on the subject, but I don't want to write a book here.

Obama was instrumental in orchestrating Biden's rise over Sanders in 2020, which was exactly the moment a fascist victory became inevitable. No, he doesn't get to play the fucking "retired" card now. This is a fucking war with actual casualties and the future of nations and the world at stake. What's going on right now is arguably more impactful than even WW2. It's all hands on fucking deck - even shitty former Presidents, if they have anything to offer.

They know how to fight. We've seen how they consistently fight dirty against progressives, especially Bernie Sanders. They know how to play the game, they just don't do it against Republicans. Republicans get invited to speak at DNC conventions.

Not all oligarchs are intent on cutting their own taxes until the guillotines come out. That doesn't put them on the side of working Americans, it just makes them the marginally more benevolent tyrants. Even among slave owners there better and worse individuals.

It's not all about taxes. Under Democrats corporate consolidation has generally moved just as fast as under Republicans. Democrats have been almost as bad as Republicans on deregulation. They work in lockstep on feeding the military industrial complex.

It was Bill Clinton who said "The era of big government is over" right before dismantling much of the federal safety net programs. Bill won with the support of unions, then fucked unions over every chance he got.

Obama's first actions on taking office were to rescue Wall Street on the backs of workers. Then his singular major domestic accomplishment was to implement a healthcare plan that was designed by the same Heritage Foundation that wrote project 2025. That plan was explicitly designed to derail actual reform efforts, and Democrats have used if like a cudgel to do exactly that ever since it was passed. It was also arguably the biggest wealth transfer to the elites from a single law in US history.

Biden was a breath of fresh air in that he generally tried to nudge things in the right direction. He was pathetically the most progressive President since FDR, which doesn't make him a progressive President. Even Biden used executive orders to accelerate the privatization of Medicare, which is nothing but a government handout to insurance companies at the expense of vulnerable retirees.

Even Biden's most extreme tax reforms would have only clawed back a portion of Trump's tax cuts, and he made up for that with the oligarchs by handing them even more government power and wealth.

Trump ain't running things. I think he might have pushed the thing on paper straws, but I'm sure someone else wrote even that executive order. He's like little Tommen in Game of Thrones happily scribbling his name on whatever they put in front of him.

arguing that you can’t isn’t a defence

And then what happens?

Plug for the Socialist Rifle Association.

It didn't help my kids growing up to have Trump in the Whitehouse either.

That door can be made to swing both ways.

Anyone can be a pedophile, regardless of other characteristics. The major champions of actual sexual abuse of minors today are politically right wing. Compare age-of-consent laws in red states to blue, or advocacy/performance of child marriages, and a pattern appears.

The conflation of evidence-based methods of sexual education with "sexualizing children" is a bald faced attempt to make kids more vulnerable. Kids trained in the importance of consent are far less likely to keep quiet when dealing with an abuser.

I would not concede, as you have here, that there was ever any appreciable link between trans advocacy and sexual abuse advocacy. The fact that some people somewhere advocated for both is true of any movement of sufficient size.

I've devoted years of my life to dealing with these motherfuckers rhetorically. The problem is that they don't care about winning logical arguments, they just want to muddy the waters. The average fan of these idiots doesn't want to do the work of educating themselves, or considering logical arguments. The dumb arguments are the path of least resistance, so that's the path they take.

I literally just ended a 40 year friendship with a guy who let himself fall for this crap. We were each-other's best-man, but I haven't been able to have a single conversation with him in years without the anti-woke bullshit ruining it.

At this point, it's clear that rhetoric has failed. I'm not happy about it, but I have no problem whatsoever with violence happening to these freaks. I see no reason to struggle with it. What they do is violence to society and it results in suffering and death on a difficult to comprehend scale.