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hiriajuu-suffering · 2 years

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Texas Midterm Elections 2022

Disclaimer: I'm Libertarian, not a Democrat. You saying I'm a snowflake liberal just shows your internalized notions of white supremacy, whether you, yourself are white-passing or not.

it's been awhile since Texas Democrats have put forward a gubernatorial candidate that could really challenge the redness of the state.

too bad the smear campaign against him seems to be effective. Abbot, Patrick, and Paxton have too much corporate fascist money. all riding on the prosperity Rick Perry is really responsible for. the state government is growing more Islamophobic day-by-day.

The DFW area is a little too misogynistic for a female liberal to take the helm, that's the mistake left-leaning politics made last time

Lizzie probably represents more of what I want to see out of Texas policy than other major political race going on, but the smear campaigns and tough on crime puffing chest rhetoric are really infuriating. calling Hidalgo and her office out as enabling criminal behavior when they're using non-enforcement and nullifying status as a political tool is just disingenuous. I feel much safer in Houston than I did 4 years ago, not to mention how much I respected Lina when we were both high schoolers in Debate on how she competed in Student Congress.

I know the gubernatorial race indicates the lieutenant and attorney general races as well. I actually have less problems with crony Abbott than the Islamophobic Patrick and Paxton, I need Collier and Garza to win to preserve my rights, personally.

The races that are really important for rights preservation in general: turn our courts bluer to show Texans aren't crazy fetus-worshiping zealots like Abbott is.

As a Libertarian, I've always supported Tom Oxford, but he's going against the better judge in his race in Erin A. Nowell

Who else matters to me? Well, I hate Dan Crenshaw with a passion, since he represents all the concentrated racism in Montgomery County. The Nehls brothers represent everything wrong with Texas because they've tried to arrest people for exercising free speech against Republican rule. I had hope Jacey Jetton would be decent, but he's just another Republican puppet, so vote for Daniel Lee on that alone. However, my state district got rezoned to one of the few Republicans I actually agreed with, Phil Stephenson, but he got primaried by the neoNazi Stan Kitzman and won, so I'll be voting for Larry Baggett since Mike Miller has no chance of getting my district because of how anti-3rd party my local politics have gotten.

Is it so much to ask for Republican candidates that respect my 1st Amendment rights, as a non-white Muslim American? or ones that don't want to actively control women's bodies as an extension of toxic patriarchy? Beto O'Rourke stands for something, and even though I don't totally agree with his policy leanings, it's better than treating brown, black, and feminine bodies as less than. Fletcher stands for the rational Texan that I feel represents the informed political consensus of the greater Houston area. Lina Hidalgo has been unafraid to enact the right policies for Houston in spite of the predictable backlash she knew she would get for it and I trust her more than Mayor Turner at this point.

Dan Crenshaw, the Nehls brothers, and Stan Kitzman would prefer we go back to a pre-Civil Rights era Texas, with white supremacy as the law of the land. People like Jacey Jetton enable that behavior through their loyalty and worship of Republican institutionalism.

Local politics are ruled by extremists and cushy moderates, we might never achieve real directional consensus if don't hold Republicans accountable for the anti-American values they've co-opted during the Trump administration.

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liberalsarecool · 1 year

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Voter fraud and election fraud are unilaterally Republican mission statements.

They admit it.

#texas #election fraud #voter suppression

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jackass-democrats · 3 months

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#election fraud #nwo #wef #joe biden #illegal immigration #border wall #transgender #socialism #texas #trump 2024

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mostlysignssomeportents · 11 days

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The Pizzaburger Presidency

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

The corporate wing of the Democrats has objectively terrible political instincts, because the corporate wing of the Dems wants things that are very unpopular with the electorate (this is a trait they share with the Republican establishment).

Remember Hillary Clinton's unimaginably terrible campaign slogan, "America is already great?" In other words, "Vote for me if you believe that nothing needs to change":

https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/758501814945869824

Biden picked up the "This is fine" messaging where Clinton left off, promising that "nothing would fundamentally change" if he became president:

https://www.salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-biden-to-rich-donors-nothing-would-fundamentally-change-if-hes-elected/

Biden didn't so much win that election as Trump lost it, by doing extremely unpopular things, including badly bungling the American covid response and killing about a million people.

Biden's 2020 election victory was a squeaker, and it was absolutely dependent on compromising with the party's left wing, embodied by the Warren and Sanders campaigns. The Unity Task Force promised – and delivered – key appointments and policies that represented serious and powerful change for the better:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/10/thanks-obama/#triangulation

Despite these excellent appointments and policies, the Biden administration has remained unpopular and is heading into the 2024 election with worryingly poor numbers. There is a lot of debate about why this might be. It's undeniable that every leader who has presided over a period of inflation, irrespective of political tendency, is facing extreme defenstration, from Rishi Sunak, the far-right prime minister of the UK, to the relentlessly centrist Justin Trudeau in Canada:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-three-barriers-biden-reelection/

It's also true that Biden has presided over a genocide, which he has been proudly and significantly complicit in. That Trump would have done the same or worse is beside the point. A political leader who does things that the voters deplore can't expect to become more popular, though perhaps they can pull off less unpopular:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-left-is-not-joe-bidens-problem

Biden may be attracting unfair blame for inflation, and totally fair blame for genocide, but in addition to those problems, there's this: Biden hasn't gotten credit for the actual good things he's done:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoflHnGrCpM

Writing in his newsletter, Matt Stoller offers an explanation for this lack of credit: the Biden White House almost never talks about any of these triumphs, even the bold, generational ones that will significantly alter the political landscape no matter who wins the next election:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-does-the-biden-white-house-hate

Biden's antitrust enforcers have gone after price-fixing in oil, food and rent – the three largest sources of voter cost-of-living concern. They've done more on these three kinds of crime than all of their predecessors over the past forty years, combined. And yet, Stoller finds example after example of White House press secretaries being lobbed softballs by the press and refusing to even try to swing at them. When asked about any of this stuff, the White House demurs, refusing to comment.

The reasons they give for this is that they don't want to mess up an active case while it's before the courts. But that's not how this works. Yes, misstatements about active cases can do serious damage, but not talking about cases extinguishes the political will needed to carry them out. That's why a competent press secretary excellent briefings and training, because they must talk about these cases.

Think for a moment about the fact that the US government is – at this very moment – trying to break up Google, the largest tech company in the history of the world, and there has been virtually no press about it. This is a gigantic story. It's literally the biggest business story ever. It's practically a secret.

Why doesn't the Biden admin want to talk about this very small number of very good things it's doing? To understand that, you have to understand the hollowness of "centrist" politics as practiced in the Democratic Party.

The Democrats, like all political parties, are a coalition. Now, there are lots of ways to keep a coalition together. Parties who detest one another can stay in coalition provided that each partner is getting something they want out of it – even if one partner is bitterly unhappy about everything else happening in the coalition. That's the present-day Democratic approach: arrest students, bomb Gaza, but promise to do something about abortion and a few other issues while gesturing with real and justified alarm at Trump's open fascism, and hope that the party's left turns out at the polls this fall.

Leaders who play this game can't announce that they are deliberately making a vital coalition partner miserable and furious. Instead, they insist that they are "compromising" and point to the fact that "everyone is equally unhappy" with the way things are going.

This school of politics – "Everyone is angry at me, therefore I am doing something right" – has a name, courtesy of Anat Shenker-Osorio: "Pizzaburger politics." Say half your family wants burgers for dinner and the other half wants pizza: make a pizzaburger and disappoint all of them, and declare yourself to be a politics genius:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/17/pizzaburgers/

But Biden's Pizzaburger Presidency doesn't disappoint everyone equally. Sure, Biden appointed some brilliant antitrust enforcers to begin the long project of smashing the corporate juggernauts built through forty years of Reaganomics (including the Reganomics of Bill Clinton and Obama). But his lifetime federal judicial appointments are drawn heavily from the corporate wing of the party's darlings, and those judges will spend the rest of their lives ruling against the kinds of enforcers Biden put in charge of the FTC and DoJ antitrust division:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers

So that's one reason that Biden's comms team won't talk about his most successful and popular policies. But there's another reason: schismogenesis.

"Schismogenesis" is a anthropological concept describing how groups define themselves in opposition to their opponents (if they're for it, we're against it). Think of the liberals who became cheerleaders for the "intelligence community" (you know the CIA spies who organized murderous coups against a dozen Latin American democracies, and the FBI agents who tried to get MLK to kill himself) as soon as Trump and his allies began to rail against them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Part of Trump's takeover of conservativism is a revival of "the paranoid style" of the American right – the conspiratorial, unhinged apocalyptic rhetoric that the movement's leaders are no longer capable of keeping a lid on:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

This stuff – the lizard-people/Bilderberg/blood libel/antisemitic/Great Replacement/race realist/gender critical whackadoodlery – was always in conservative rhetoric, but it was reserved for internal communications, a way to talk to low-information voters in private forums. It wasn't supposed to make it into your campaign ads:

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/05/27/texas-republicans-adopts-conservative-wish-list-for-the-2024-platform/73858798007/

Today's conservative vibe is all about saying the quiet part aloud. Historian Rick Perlstein calls this the "authoritarian ratchet": conservativism promises a return to a "prelapsarian" state, before the country lost its way:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-my-political-depression-problem/

This is presented as imperative: unless we restore that mythical order, the country is doomed. We might just be the last generation of free Americans!

But that state never existed, and can never be recovered, but it doesn't matter. When conservatives lose a fight they declare to be existential (say, trans bathroom bans), they just pretend they never cared about it and move on to the next panic.

It's actually worse for them when they win. When the GOP repeals Roe, or takes the Presidency, the Senate and Congress, and still fails to restore that lost glory, then they have to find someone or something to blame. They turn on themselves, purging their ranks, promise ever-more-unhinged policies that will finally restore the state that never existed.

This is where schismogenesis comes in. If the GOP is making big, bold promises, then a shismogenesis-poisoned liberal will insist that the Dems must be "the party of normal." If the GOP's radical wing is taking the upper hand, then the Dems must be the party whose radical wing is marginalized (see also: UK Labour).

This is the trap of schismogenesis. It's possible for the things your opponents do to be wrong, but tactically sound (like promising the big changes that voters want). The difference you should seek to establish between yourself and your enemies isn't in promising to maintaining the status quo – it's in promising to make better, big muscular changes, and keeping those promises.

It's possible to acknowledge that an odious institution to do something good – like the CIA and FBI trying to wrongfoot Trump's most unhinged policies – without becoming a stan for that institution, and without abandoning your stance that the institution should either be root-and-branch reformed or abolished altogether.

The mere fact that your enemy uses a sound tactic to do something bad doesn't make that tactic invalid. As Naomi Klein writes in her magnificent Doppelganger, the right's genius is in co-opting progressive rhetoric and making it mean the opposite: think of their ownership of "fake news" or the equivalence of transphobia with feminism, of opposition to genocide with antisemitism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

Promising bold policies and then talking about them in plain language at every opportunity is something demagogues do, but having bold policies and talking about them doesn't make you a demagogue.

The reason demagogues talk that way is that it works. It captures the interest of potential followers, and keeps existing followers excited about the project.

Choosing not to do these things is political suicide. Good politics aren't boring. They're exciting. The fact that Republicans use eschatological rhetoric to motivate crazed insurrectionists who think they're the last hope for a good future doesn't change the fact that we are at a critical juncture for a survivable future.

If the GOP wins this coming election – or when Pierre Poilievre's petro-tories win the next Canadian election – they will do everything they can to set the planet on fire and render it permanently uninhabitable by humans and other animals. We are running out of time.

We can't afford to cede this ground to the right. Remember the clickbait wars? Low-quality websites and Facebook accounts got really good at ginning up misleading, compelling headlines that attracted a lot of monetizable clicks.

For a certain kind of online scolding centrist, the lesson from this era was that headlines should a) be boring and b) not leave out any salient fact. This is very bad headline-writing advice. While it claims to be in service to thoughtfulness and nuance, it misses out on the most important nuance of all: there's a difference between a misleading headline and a headline that calls out the most salient element of the story and then fleshes that out with more detail in the body of the article. If a headline completely summarizes the article, it's not a headline, it's an abstract.

Biden's comms team isn't bragging about the administration's accomplishments, because the senior partners in this coalition oppose those accomplishments. They don't want to win an election based on the promise to prosecute and anti-corporate revolution, because they are counter-revolutionaries.

The Democratic coalition has some irredeemably terrible elements. It also has elements that I would march into the sun for. The party itself is a very weak institution that's bad at resolving the tension between both groups:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

Pizzaburgers don't make anyone happy and they're not supposed to. They're a convenient cover for the winners of intraparty struggles to keep the losers from staying home on election day. I don't know how Biden can win this coming election, but I know how he can lose it: keep on reminding us that all the good things about his administration were undertaken reluctantly and could be jettisoned in a second Biden administration.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/29/sub-bushel-comms-strategy/#nothing-would-fundamentally-change

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scarletcarmensmith · 2 months

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😹😹😹🤡🤡🤡

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madamepestilence · 7 months

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2024 US Election Information

We have roughly 1 year until the 2024 US election. I've put in some research, and here are my conclusions.

TLDR for those of you who don't have time or focus: Cornel West (Democratic Socialist running as People's Party -> Green Party) is the ideal candidate to vote for - normally I wouldn't advocate voting third party, but we may actually have a shot for once, and he has excellent policies. Jill Stein (Green Party) is a potential backup, though if West drops out, our best option for Democratic party is Marianne Williamson.

Please spread this information, especially to residents of Texas, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada. Detailed information under the cut.

Current Fascist and Republican Candidates

Donald Trump, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Asa Hutchinson, Tim Scott, Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie, Ryan Binkley, and Doug Burgum.

I'm not going to entertain their details, but I will note that the information I picked up while being exposed to alt-right communities from the inside via my fascist parents earlier this year shows strong evidence that Republicans are likely going to split between Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis (viewed as a betrayal by Trump supporters), and openly fascist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (I'll cover him later).

My guess is a 6/3/1 Republican vote split between Trump/DeSantis/Kennedy, Jr..

Current Democratic Candidates

Joe Biden, Marianne Williamson, and Dean Philips.

Biden has overall failed to complete the majority of his campaign promises, and has been directly supporting Israel during the genocide of Palestine, as well as deferring to Republicans to be "bipartisan" (I don't think I have to stress enough that a bipartisan democrat is not a democrat) - do not vote for him.

Williamson is a high-school educated 71-year-old author from Los Angeles, California. She is known for being Oprah Winfrey's, "spiritual advisor," (double red flag), and dropped out during the 2020 election (another red flag).

While she supports the reinstatement of Roe v. Wade, the decriminalization of cannabis and psychedelic drugs, the reduction of CO2, and moving to 100% renewable energy by 2035, her advocacy for the outright banning of assault and semi-assault weapons for civilians without military reform of the same is a slight red flag when combined with her relationship with Oprah Winfrey (an Obama supporter, the president who authorized quite a lot of drone strikes in West Asia) and drop-out makes her not a great candidate.

Philips is a Bachelor's (Brown University) and Master's Business (University of Minnesota) educated 54-year-old three-term congressman who is noted for criticizing Biden running for a second term on account of both political moderacy and medical concerns.

Philips unfortunately wants to increase police funding for some reason, but advocated for better training, including mental health training. He also advocates for what he calls, "comprehensive immigration reform," in the form of increased border security and streamlining legal entry (this ignores the problem outlined by the UN that people seeking asylum are likely to have to enter a country illegally before they can seek support), and the only real good stance he has is giving reproductive rights to patients, rather than politicians.

Philips is essentially a moderate Republican, and is a bad candidate. Do not vote for him.

Current Independent Candidates

Fascist (not his stated political stance, but it's what he is)

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a fascist that has openly quoted Nazi propaganda in his political campaigns, is an anti-vaccine activist, and has spread anti-science conspiracy theories such as vaccines causing autism and the non-existence of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. I cannot stress this enough, do not fucking vote for Kennedy, Jr.

Democratic Socialist

Cornel West is a Bachelor's (Harvard University), Master's, and Ph.D. (both Princeton University) educated 70-year-old progressive activist that switched his running party from the People's Party to the Green Party, despite being a both public- and self-described democratic socialist.

When asked why he wasn't running as a Democrat against Biden, he stated that, "Neither party is speaking to the pressing needs of poor and working people."

His party plans are a wealth tax on the rich, a national $27 minimum wage, a federal Universal Basic Income, 6 months of paid family leave, a 4-day work week, national free Pre-K childcare, "Immediate cessation of all oil and gas leasing projects on federal lands and waters," "Federal moratorium on fracking, carbon capture, and direct air capture technologies, geoengineering, and other false climate solutions," putting abortion rights in the Constitution, and nationalized healthcare.

Here's where I want to lay out something important. I normally wouldn't advocate for voting for a third party candidate due to the Spoiler Effect, but

Considering the United States' Democratic majority, popular vote records showing a common Republican minority, the absolutely incredible policies West stands for,

The growing support for third parties in the United States, and his policies aligning with public opinion,

Cornel West is the ideal candidate to vote for. Spread this information like wildfire - we may have one shot at the first third party win in US history in the upcoming 2024 election, and

If successful the dominant parties will be Fascist vs. Socialist, denying most, if not all, future Republican wins.

Our target toss-up states are Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada.

Converting Texas to third party, or even just Democrat, will throw the Republican vote entirely and all but guarantee a Democrat, or hopefully third party, 2024 election win,

Which is absolutely possible, as Texas is majority Democrat and wins Republican votes via gerrymandering despite public opinion, which is why it swings occasionally.

Democrat states also need to be switched to majority third party votes, with particular emphasis on California, New York, and Illinois.

GET PEOPLE TO VOTE FOR CORNEL WEST!

Reference map of polling for the future 2024 election:

Libertarian (slightly Conservative to alt-right, really depends on the person)

Chase Oliver is a surprisingly progressive high school educated 38-year-old anti-war Libertarian that left the Democratic party after witnessing Obama's aggressive anti-West Asian war policies who has expressed desires for criminal justice reform and ending wars abroad, though hasn't elaborated on either.

Green Party

Jill Stein is a Bachelor's (Harvard University) and Medical (Harvard Medical University) 73-year-old Jewish doctor who previously ran for and represented the Green-Rainbow Party as the governor of Massachusetts.

Stein is notable for being an activist and protestor who has both protested outside buildings and testified before legislative and other government bodies against coal plants, mercury leaks, and unclean and unsafe groundwater.

Presumably, her stances will focus on environmental protections, trans rights, and Jewish protections, making her a potential alternative should West drop out.

Conclusions:

Again, don't fucking vote for Trump, Haley, Ramaswamy, Hutchinson, Scott, DeSantis, Christie, Binkley, Burgum, Biden, Philips, or Kennedy, Jr..

Our potential backup Democratic candidate is Williamson.

The ideal candidate is West, with Stein as a viable backup.

As absurd as it sounds, I want you to vote third party for Cornel West.

If you want a wealth tax on the rich, a national $27 minimum wage, a federal Universal Basic Income,

6 months of paid family leave, a 4-day work week, national free Pre-K childcare,

"Immediate cessation of all oil and gas leasing projects on federal lands and waters," "Federal moratorium on fracking, carbon capture, and direct air capture technologies, geoengineering, and other false climate solutions,"

putting abortion rights in the Constitution, and nationalized healthcare,

VOTE FOR CORNEL WEST AND GET OTHER PEOPLE TO DO THE SAME.

WE HAVE A CHANCE AT THE FIRST THIRD PARTY WIN IN THE UNITED STATES AND THE DENIAL OF FUTURE REPUBLICAN WINS.

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