conservative

Trump must of really enjoyed his jokes.

The shift toward Donald Trump in the Rio Grande Valley in 2020 grew into a sweep for the GOP in many border counties on Tuesday.

I started this article a couple months before the election when I posted analysis warning that Kamala was a very weak candidate for president and a bunch of people on here said I was out of touch, living in an alternative universe, and full of shit. I figured a record of what probably happened would make sense, and I'm finally releasing it on the week we know who won (I've already posted a similar post on my main fediverse account, hence the separation into sections since this is one of the longest posts I've ever written on the Fediverse and I know it wouldn't federate well there). A bunch of the electorate will be totally confused because they fail the important axiom of Sun Tzu: "Know your enemy and know yourself and you will win 1000 battles" -- they don't know their enemy and they don't know themselves, so they lose.

There's a chance it doesn't even federate properly because this is by far the longest single post I've written on the fediverse, it should be alive on the original site.

It should be obvious that I didn't really bother adding new information about the last couple weeks of the campaign in this, because the fundamentals are enough. I didn't talk about Rogan, I didn't talk about McDonalds, I didn't talk about garbage trucks. That's all tactical, I'm speaking in the sort of terms I was talking about 2 months ago. Deep strategic talks that remain without discussing individual tactics.

I already kind of expect a certain response to a post like this. The right won't really be that interested in what I have to say here because they already know, and the left will want to downvote and report it into oblivion because that's what they've become. As for the center? Well, I guess it depends how they lean. The real chads will see what I've got to say to see if it actually helps describe what happened just now at all. I mean, if I'm wrong, I'm just an idiot on the Internet, so who cares?

On the fediverse I've been cast down from the good graces of the wokerati for my wrongthink, but I wasn't so different from them not so long ago. In 2008 I hoped Obama would win like most people my age, and in 2015 I hoped Trudeau would win like most people my age. I'm not a US citizen, didn't vote in this or any US election (though I've joked about illegally immigrating to vote since a certain political party down there seems to think illegal immigrants voting is the best thing ever), so this is a view from someone who doesn't really have a direct horse in the race. I have my opinions about each option and I'll be clear with those, but keep in mind at the end of the day I'm not a Republican, it's not physically possible. (Oh, but if you're thinking of moving up here to get away from the maga chuds, don't bother. By this time next year there'll be a huge majority government headed by Pierre Poilievre, who is a J.D. Vance type character on the right. If you think he can't be that bad, Alex Jones specifically called him out as good people. If you want to go somewhere 'friendly', England just voted in a Labour majority, go hang out with them)

For those keeping track, in the 2024 election, Joe Biden won the Democratic primary, and the entire media claimed he was "sharp as a tack" (they all used the exact same phrase oddly enough), until the first debate which showed the world that wasn't really the case anymore. There was a palace coup, and Joe "stepped down", and Kamala Harris was coronated the new candidate. They didn't run a primary at all, she got the position through backroom deals (which we'll talk about in a bit).

Starting at -1 (because it isn't really a point as to why Kamala lost), moving onto 0 (because it's just our backdrop), and then from there on we'll discuss all the reasons Kamala just lost the presidential election.

-1 of 17. Trump isn't a very good candidate

Reality is, Donald Trump isn't a very good candidate.

Most Republicans will admit that. He's boorish, he's got a lot of personal moral failings. His ideology is all over the map, and self-contradictory. You can't achieve all the things he promises, many of the bullet points he's talking about are mutually exclusive, like balancing the budget but increasing spending and cutting taxes. We saw that in his first term, that obviously the real world doesn't match with flapping your jaw.

Fiscal conservatives hate the way Trump dealt with budgets and they're going to continue to be disappointed. He's proposed a lot of specific tax cuts he'll likely deliver on, but he's also talking about new ways of spending money.

Libertarians don't like him for not pardoning Assange and Snowden, seeing their charges as overreach by the state, as well as some of his decisions such as his bump stock ban following the Los Vegas shooting.

New right folks are upset about many of his appointments such as John Bolton who most Trump supporters consider a real swamp creature as his secretary of state.

Religious conservatives don't like his stance on abortion or IVF because it's far too moderate and he's said he won't ban either at a federal level. It turns out murdering innocents isn't really something you can negotiate, people who believe abortion is murder won't like it being legal in any capacity, certainly not in the wide range blue states will allow it.

A lot of conservatives don't like that he brought in a rapper to the RNC. She raps about being a prostitute, which is not in any way in line with traditional moral values, upsetting social conservatives.

And then there's all the reasons for people on the left to hate Trump, which I don't need to list because the media has listed all the reasons and many more they invented.

So if Trump wins, it's a harsh indictment on anyone who is running against him. You ran against someone with this many weakness, and you lost. Joe Biden ran a campaign from his basement and won. that's how weak you can be and still beat Trump.

0 of 17. The 2008 Election

In 2008, something unusual happened: The Republicans got absolutely destroyed, and rightfully so.

The Republicans won a lot of support after September 11, 2001, and they used that support to implement a lot of policies and push for a lot of things. They pushed for the USAPATRIOT act and the surveillance state. They brought hawkish neoconservatism to its peak invading two nations with the assumption that they would be greeted as liberators and would magically implement democracy in an unstable region without much democracy. They pushed economic policies which had some short-term growth but ultimately led to the 2008 financial crisis, which was the biggest financial crisis since the great recession, and given how much institutional power the Republicans had at that time, it very much appeared that they owned the recession.

The Democrats ended up winning big after that. They won the presidency. They had a supermajority in the senate for a short time. They had a healthy majority in congress, and as we know they had a majority on the supreme court. Among millennials, surveys at the time suggested that 70% of millennials leaned progressive, and even in businesses, many thought they'd spend more on brands that supported political causes.

This represented a tectonic shift in politics at the time, and the Democrats were at a huge advantage. The Republicans had no choice, they had to start working on new strategies. We saw the tea party strategy come out, snagged from Ron Paul imo, but it was shut down pretty quickly by namecalling ("Teabaggers"), they tried doubling down on neoconservatism, and that was a non-starter. The Democrats had a full 8 years of essentially steamrolling the competition. Since there was essentially no competition out of the Republican field, it looks like that was going to be the case indefinitely.

However, in 2015, something highly unusual happened: a new candidate emerged with new ideas. Donald Trump was described as a bull in a china shop. The Democrats didn't like him, not so much because they thought he could win but because he represented chaos that could mess up their plans, and so after initially supporting him thinking he was the weakest candidate, they went to work putting their full attack machine into action.

Someone once described Donald Trump as a 90s democrat, and I tend to agree with that summary. Mean tweets aside, there are a lot of policy positions where Donald Trump is to the left of Bill Clinton.. Bill Clinton implemented workfare, trying to get people off of federal welfare programs, where Trump didn't really touch those programs. Bill Clinton signed the defense of marriage act which defined marriage as between one man and one woman, and other than a couple times where he was blustering, Donald Trump is the first elected president to openly support gay marriage on the day of his inauguration. Many people forget that Elian Gonzalez was taken from his uncle under Bill Clinton and returned to Cuba by force. Bill Clinton worked with the Republicans to dramatically reduce spending and almost balanced budgeting by his final year.

It turns out that for a lot of Republicans, and a lot of Independents, the MAGA platform had a lot to like. Of course, it was tough to know what was true or not (Trump is a master of innane bluster, and so said a lot of things that were never going to be true such as getting Mexico to pay for his border wall, or paying down the federal debt by the end of his first term)

In an upset victory, Donald Trump won the 2016 election, changing all the assumptions held since 2008.

1 of 17. The fraudulent media machine ever since 2016

The headlines read: "FBI in agreement with CIA that Russia aimed to help Trump win White House"

It's a headline that had lots of people very mad, resulted in multiple congressional investigations, and sent at least one member of Trump's campaign to jail.

But the problem is, the headline was totally fake.

By 2018, the author of the Steele dossier admitted the dossier was fake, created solely to help Hillary Clinton dispute the 2016 election. Ultimately, the Clinton Campaign was charged by the election commission with the illegal act and fined over $100,000.

This wasn’t a simple case of poor reporting; it was a deliberate push of disinformation.

The headlines read: "Trump On Charlottesville Neo-Nazis: 'You Had People That Were Very Fine People'"

It's a headline that had lots of people up in arms, lots of people ready to fight against Trump, ready to vote against Trump.

But the problem is, the headline was totally fake.

"And I don't mean neo nazis and white supremacists, those people should be condemned totally" - the actual words, the exact opposite of the story.

This is not up for debate—the transcript is there for anyone to read. The fact that this lie continues to circulate years later is nothing short of shameful.

The headline said: "Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say"

It's a headline that had a lot of people up in arms, thinking that Donald Trump would produce something false like that, attacking family of a sitting president with made up information from a foreign power!

But the problem is, the headline was totally fake.

In the end, Hunter Biden was convicted of at least one crime as a result of the data on the laptop and ultimately it was proven to be real.

The media and social platforms actively interfered in the democratic process by burying a story that could have impacted the election, all based on a lie.

In the west, there's a story of "the boy who cried wolf". It's the story from our pastoral past, and a young boy who a couple times screamed "Wolf! Wolf!" and the village came to protect against the wolves, but the child was lying. Eventually, the child actually sees a wolf, scream and hoots and hollers, and is eaten by wolves. The lesson is that you must be very careful no to lie, because eventually people stop paying attention to you. The press kept on publishing stories that were false to help "their side", and chipped away at their credibility. Today, the establishment media is suffering because people stopped believing them.

The political establishment has responded by stepping up threats to violate the law of the land by "regulating misinformation and disinformation", which is in fact code for "shutting down any story we don't like". For all the politicians who call for such illegal laws who pushed the above disinformation, what punishment would they accept today for their transgressions? (I'm guessing none?)

This probably felt like the right thing to do to "fight Trump", but it's a strategy which is damaging the establishment media's ability to report, and importantly, it's reducing their power as a tool to help push elections in one direction or another.

This election cycle continued with these themes, with a statement that without Trump's proposed tariffs the a bloodbath in the auto industry being mischaracterized by the establishment media as a threat of political violence. In an election cycle where the press is pushing against other currents, they need credibility and keep spending it unwisely.

2 of 17. Joe Biden's cognitive decline

There were already concerns in 2020 about Joe Biden, but the character of the COVID election and the hysteria of the media helped him run a campaign essentially "from his basement". The press ran Joe Biden's campaign in 2020, and used massive amounts of long built-up credibility to get him elected. Joe Biden also had a strong halo effect due to his association with the popular Obama Campaign. With the media attacking the Trump administration non-stop, as well as establishment factions with the Republican party actively attacking the Trump faction (Trump had the executive, the house, and the senate in his first half, but faced high levels of pushback from within the Republican party), as well as the COVID-19 pandemic and more importantly the global response to COVID, he was in a prime position to lose 2020, and he did. Now he and his team think there were voting irregularities that contributed to that loss, I tend to think the situation itself was more than enough.

For the next 3 and a half years the Biden Administration with Harris as VP continued going along, and there were a lot of challenges. To be fair to this Administration, there was no way to avoid the consequences of the COVID lockdowns. Inflation was inevitable. Supply chain disruptions were inevitable. This was going to be a tough 4 years no matter who was in charge.

Going into the 2024 election, the media was claiming Joe Biden was "sharp as a tack". There's a video on YouTube of dozens of news anchors using the same exact phrase, as if they were getting fed lines from a common source. The plan was for Joe to run in 2024, beat Trump again (The line of thought being that it's easier fighting a defensive battle from the presidency), and by 2028 Trump wouldn't really be capable of running for President again so the threat would be over and MAGA would be defeated.

The obvious problem was that even in 2020, Joe Biden wasn't the same man he was when he was Vice President 4 years earlier. Verbal slips like "I'll take immediate steps to deploy shuanamanaprezure" or "batacathcare" suggested a mind that wasn't firing right. Moments like Biden biting his wife's finger out of nowhere suggested something going on with impulse control circuitry in his brain. Biden would eventually go on to take more vacation days than any President before him, and the gaffes seemed to get more numerous.

The final straw was the first debate with Donald Trump. He seemed confused, and barely there. He mumbled through sentences, and overall he displayed the worst thing he could have displayed: The suggestion that Trump had been telling the truth about Joe Biden since 2020 and the media and the Democratic Party had been covering it up.

At that point, Joe was already selected in the primaries as the candidate, so something happened that was unexpected, except to people who have been paying close attention since 2020.

3 of 17. The palace coup

Once it became impossible to cover up Joe's condition any longer, Party elites and major donors immediately started pushing for his ouster. According to some (admittedly unconfirmed at this time and unlikely to be confirmed fully) sources, Joe Biden was given an ultimatum: Step down as the presidential candidate "willingly", or face the disgrace of being removed using the 25th amendment of the constitution which allows an unfit President to be removed from office.

The way Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president was Joe Biden won the primaries, but after the first debate the Democrats had a palace coup and forced him to step down from the presidential campaign, anointing Kamala Harris in his place. She won 0 votes in the primaries, but was nonetheless selected as the Presidential nominee through backroom deals.

The major factual elements here are not up for debate, though they could be interpreted differently than I presented it. If you believe the official narrative, Joe (who that Friday said he'd never surrender) suddenly released a suspicious letter on his X account, stepping down despite being the primary winner. Without any new primary being run, Kamala was crowned the candidate by the delegates. Maybe it really was like that, nothing decietful or backroom about it. (But it's politics -- do you really believe that?)

Now the match-up was Kamala Harris vs. Donald Trump.

Kamala Harris was the lowest rated vice president of all time in a recent survey, but now the press had their new mission: Pump up the new candidate as if it's not just a 4 year presidential term. Without really even showing up anywhere, the entire establishment media machine went to work talking about how great and wonderful Kamala Harris is.

4 of 17. Kamala Harris is thoroughly unlikable

The problem with Harris is that she's totally unlikable. Her few instances of talking during her vice presidency provide some examples of bizarre lizardman traits like the clip where she explains "Ukraine is a small country and Russia is a big country and Russia is invading Ukraine and that's bad" like she's describing global politics to a toddler.

Most new political candidates want to get out there and tell the world about who they are, but Harris started trying the Biden basement strategy only to discover that It isn't 2020 anymore, and people aren't going to accept an absentee political campaign. It also isn't 2016 anymore, even people who were previously on the same page of accepting the media spin at face value are much more cynical, especially living through tough times while the media breathlessly tells them about how good everything is. You can't lie about so many big things and keep most people's trust.

About half way through October, A video montage of Kamala Harris giving the same speech over and over again went viral. She's a Papier Mache candidate.

In some ways, she reminds me of John McCain and Mitt Romney. Those two may have had opinions and stances of their own at one point, but once they became the presidential candidates, they became mindless avatars of the party. Anything you might have liked or disliked about them went away because they were just the walking talking Republican party. In the same way, Kamala Harris hasn't shown any sort of personal capacity to be the chief executive. She comes off as someone who won't be leading, she'll be taking orders. Who does the president take orders from? This, combined with her status as an installed candidate by party elites suggests she'll be working for those who installed her through backroom deals, and her poor articulation of actual policies she as an individual running for president wants suggests she won't really have any.

5 of 17. Kamala Harris has never had to legitimately win anything in her life

Harris has never had to win an election that wasn't demographically rigged and with the full support of an overwhelming political machine. Her entire career was within California, a single party state, with the backing of powerful interests. When she had to win something on her own when she tried to become the presidential candidate in 2020, she failed in her presidential candidacy in 2020 before anyone else, so was essentially appointed to the vice presidency on Joe Biden's victory. The Biden administration has kept her hidden away for 3 and a half years because they know she's unlikable and looks poor to the public.

When you run for president you have an establishment behind you, but so does your opponent. You don't have an automatic demographic advantage -- there have been Republican presidents and Democrat presidents, and the winner needed to win over not just the base but the center swing voters. All of this bodes very poorly for someone who has never had to win a contest like that.

6 of 17. Trump's Conviction

Where do I start with Trump's conviction? Well, how about I start in 2016 when the Democrats were saying that locking up your political opponents was the epitome of evil and anyone who did it was clearly Hitler. Now, Donald Trump never actually locked up Hillary Clinton, as far as any of us can tell he never even tried. In interviews he says that for the unity of the country he decided not to. But you know what happened after that? A bunch of prosecutors ran for office saying explicitly that they would if elected lock up Donald Trump. And unlike Donald trump, they tried to follow through on their promise.

People have come up with salacious descriptions of what Donald Trump was charged for, that's not really accurate. Ultimately, what he was charged with is mislabeling a line item on an accounting ledger. Mislabeling a line item on an accounting ledger is typically not even a felony on it's own, it's a misdemeanor that is outside of the statute of limitations, but the attorney general in New York found a way to make the fact that he mislabeled line item on an accounting ledger into a felony because he's the president, and that the statute of limitations didn't apply because he's the president.

A lot of people are cheering for the conviction of Donald Trump, and I think that those people should really think about what they're cheering for. Back in 2016, people correctly said that it was not good behavior to be locking up political opponents, but apparently losing a single election is enough to throw all morals and ethics and principles to the wind.

The left are deeply hypocritical. They all cheered when Trump was arrested and convicted of trumped up charges, but supported violent riots for 6 months in opposition to police. Everyone saw it, and nobody believes it was actually the good guys in action except for extremist monsters or people who don't see individuals as worth anything so it doesn't matter if innocent people are harmed in pursuit of the platonic greater good.

I wonder if the same people who cheer for Donald Trump's arrest over having the wrong label on an accounting document and happily call him a felon would cheer the same as Nelson Mandela was arrested? Do they happily call Mandela a felon? It seems to me like these people will hate whoever they're told to hate, so I'm sure that the answer would be yes if they were told to.

I have a personal hypothesis that this railroading of Donald Trump helped him with the black vote. Black voters don't like crime, they hate being harassed by police and railroaded into convictions they feel their family and friends didn't deserve. Seeing a presidential candidate harassed and railroaded like they saw their friends and family being railroaded in my estimation is part of the reason why a historic 26% of black voters are now saying they're interested in Trump.

7 of 17. The assassination attempt

If you could go back in time and assassinate Hitler, would you?

Most people would say yes. Hitler was the head of an evil government that triggered a world war and participated in genocide collectively killing tens of millions of people, and so killing Hitler would prevent all that from happening. It would be just.

What about someone who is constantly compared to Hitler by his political enemies? Would it be just to assassinate someone like that?

Everyone knows about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. But from many people's point of view, it was another example of the hatred oozing from the Democrats having real-world consequences. The rightfully elected president in 2016, and nearly elected in 2020, and on track to win 2024, and the rhetoric would make you think he'd gotten the opportunity to run by skinning babies instead of running in the primaries and winning them.

Trump isn't Hitler. He isn't Caesar. He's a relatively moderate political candidate who is mean on twitter sometimes. However, the same week he was shot, some partisans made a video "Skibidi Biden" which tried to tie Trump to Hitler by saying "Trump is using Hitler's language!". Fact check: Trump doesn't use Hitler's language. Hitler speaks German, Trump speaks English. There may be similarities in the rhetoric the two use at times, but I'd like to point out that the same can be said of most political rhetoric. When Justin Trudeau says Canadians have "no culture", Hitler said the same about the Jews. He also said that the unvaccinated shouldn't be allowed to "take up space", which Hitler also said about the Jews. The left in general treated the unvaccinated as "unclean" in a way that appeals to the disgust response in a way that is directly related to Hitler's rhetoric. But today's leftists aren't German national socialists, so perhaps we should calm the rhetoric down.

That rhetoric was perceived as being a direct causal element in the first (and the later) assassination attempts, and it doesn't help the Democrats.

After being shot, while still gushing blood, Trump raised his fist and screamed "Fight! Fight! Fight!" which was great optics, and generated a photo which became iconic of the campaign.

The media response to all this is typical and expected. After expressing rhetoric that led to the assassination attempt for years straight, when Trump said "Fight! Fight! Fight!" the first thing the press did was pooh pooh him for not turning down the political temperature. That's just another example of the broken media. With one hand endorsing assassination because after all Trump is Hitler, and with the other demanding a man still bleeding from the assassination attempt that nearly killed him and did kill one other innocent person act like a buddhist monk who has lost all attachment to the physical world.

8 of 17. Inflation

Inflation was always going to be the outcome of the response to COVID. I predicted as such in June of 2020. How could I possibly predict such a thing when nobody else was? I remembered first year economics: If you cut off supply by fiat and increase the money supply, prices will increase. Normally markets will adjust by bringing new production online, but the production was shut down by fiat, and so prices will rise without any real feedback.

According to the CPI, prices for the average person have gone up 20% over the past few years. That fails to account for the fact that food, energy, vehicles, and shelter have been rising faster and for an increasing number of people have been priced out of having one or several of those key things. Cities that used to be beautiful and prosperous have growing tent cities of people who used to be doing ok but have fallen off the treadmil.

Inflation is likely a key piece of this election, and it's one of many things the media has to lie about in order to try to get their preferred candidate elected. When people feel existential terror because they can see they might have to choose between different things on the bottom of maslow's hierarchy of needs, you can't tell people they're actually fine. "don't worry! Lots of people have to pick between food and shelter and heat when they're rich!"

9 of 17. Keep lying to me about how my personal finances are.

Just before the election, there was a growing trend of videos online of smug newscasters talking to Americans who were suffering telling them "actually, inflation was 0 this month!"

Listen here -- I know how hard it is to put food on my table, don't sit there and try to convince me that I'm lying or wrong about it. They're doing this because they're receiving marching orders from the DNC, which is a disgrace. Life is hard, and it's getting harder. It's harder to get food, it's harder to get shelter, it's harder to buy fuel you need to heat your home or get to work. Anyone looked at the price of a new or even used car lately? It's insane! Ancient used cars are going for prices that would have been premium vehicles not long ago, but "No, you're wrong Mr. John Q. Public, things are perfectly fine."

Around the world, the smug condescention is failing progressive, center-left, and even some center-right parties, and we're seeing a rise in far right parties gaining power where they never did before. The people in charge are asking "Why? Why are they doing this unthinkable thing?" but the reality is that they're doing it out of desperation -- they're watching their way of life disappear, and they can see the gutter they'll be living in rapidly approaching, and if someone on the previously unthinkable far right says "I'm here to help", they'll go there because survival is more important than political correctness.

10 of 17. Reverse-potemkin villages

Potemkin villages refer a story about Grigory Potemkin, a Russian official who, in the 18th century, supposedly constructed fake prosperous villages along a route to impress Empress Catherine II during her visit to Crimea.

It's a term typically used to describe making things look better than they are by having a small piece that looks really good to demonstrate how great things are going.

In reality, around the world but particularly in a shocking number of cities in the US, there are growing tent cities -- reverse potemkin villages standing as monuments not to how great the US is doing, but how terribly it is doing. You can't handwave that away, but the media will try.

11 of 17. People are sick of the hatred

You can't just call yourself "anti-hate" and be so. If you're a progressive, who are you supposed to hate? We all know the answer, it's open, it's honest, it's clear as day. I've never seen more open hatred of my life. Hatred of political opponents, hatred of acceptable targets of hate with respect to race, with respect to sex, with respect to sexuality, with respect to many things. You might be able to bully people into pretending it isn't happening in public, but in a voting booth where there's nobody but yourself and God (It's ok to openly hate Christians by the way) to judge, people are choosing to vote against hate.

The media claims the Trump campaign is racist, but it's making more headway with blacks than any Republican president in recent history. It's already made huge progress with latinos. There's a reason: The media is lying.

The media claims the Trump campaign hates workers, but it's made huge headway among union workers, typically a democrat stronghold. There's a reason: The media is lying.

They put their names on the line to attack this candidate, and unlike previous years, not only is it not helping the Democrats, it's also damaging the media establishment who have lost massive amounts of credibility.

It's funny, people don't care anymore. Most people aren't in favor of open bigotry, but how long did anyone think you can scream the same 7 words at everyone you disagree with and for people to keep believing you? Most people aren't in favor of open bigotry and eventually it comes back to bite you in the ass.

12 of 17. The worst election strategy I've ever seen -- "Vibes election"

The past 4 years have really been a divide between those who own stocks and assets, and those who sell their labor.

Even people who got respectable raises for the past 4 years haven't gotten raises to cover the increased costs in food, shelter, transportation, and fuel. You can blame companies for that, but they can't just massively increase everyone's pay in the same way you can't fly just by denying gravity exists. Moreover, CPI shows 20%, but that's cumulative and a lot of things that didn't go up or went way down by CPI's measure. Smart phones went way down, but ever since phone companies stopped giving out free phones, a lot of people are still using their old phones. I'm personally rocking a Galaxy S10, released 6 years ago, and I'm not looking to upgrade any time soon. Personal computers went down, but I'm still rocking the gaming PC I bought pre-pandemic.

Stonks, on the other hand? They've been doing great in general! My (modest) retirement account has gone up double digits, and there were months where I made more on stonk increases than on my actual wages. (It's all set aside for the future so it isn't like that changed my quality of life for the better today, but it's something worth knowing). I'm not even invested in stuff like the AI trade, which has in some cases seen more than triple digit increases.

If you realize this scenario, then it perfectly explains how the Democrats (who are mostly elite multi-millionaires themselves and whose closest allies are at least that too) thought they could run on vibes and joy. If you're already rich, then it has been vibes and joy. The problem is most people don't live off of stonks, they live off of selling their labor, and those people have seen material drops in their quality of life.

Don't get me wrong, the Republicans are mostly multi-millionaires (Trump is a multi-billionaire) with at least multi-millionaire friends, but one other key thing of the past 8 years is that the Democrats reject anyone who doesn't agree with them as racist sexist homophobic transphobic fascist nazis, as deplorables, and the Republicans haven't taken to this strategy. I think that's one reason why despite their historical disadvantage with the poor, the Republicans won big among the masses including union workers.

People are feeling stressed. Single people are feeling stressed not knowing how they can advance to the next phase of life and get married or have kids. Middle-aged people are feeling stressed being uncertain about how they'll support their families at the rate things are going. Old people are deferring retirement because their retirement plans assumed prices 20% lower than they are right now. If we do a vibe check, the vibe isn't good.

So of course, the Democrats decided to try to call it a "vibes election". I thought women were supposed to be emotionally intelligent and empathetic, but the party led by a woman has rolled a 1 on the vibe check.

The other thing we saw at the DNC was trying to associate Kamala Harris as the personification of "joy". It isn't 2001, things aren't going good for a lot of people. Thinking that you can get away with branding like that is nutty, but even if you could, it's hypocritical to claim Trump supporters are in a cult while trying to make your political candidate the personification of Joy. You don't get much cultier than "I am joy!"

People need real policies right now, and the Democrat strategy seemed to presume it was 2000 and everyone had a great job and a house and a growing 401(k) so they could just ride the wave of how great things were, which was totally tone deaf.

13 of 17. The other worst election strategy I've ever seen -- "I'm a man"

It isn't a secret that the Democrats demonize men, particularly "straight white men" as they love to hatefully proclaim as if the phrase is a slur.

So it's little surprise that the Harris campaign had huge problems with attracting men. "Vote for me, you demon rapist, then sit down and shut up because the age of men is over!" isn't really a winning message. Most of the way into the election, some allies of Harris released an advertising with 4 "men". There were many problems with the ad.

Just on the face of it, it looked like a satirical ad. The producer was one of the producers for Jimmy Kimmel's show, and it shows. The ad oozes non-seriousness.

Next, ad just comes off as more patronizing hate from a party everyone has become used to patronizing hate from. It's a lecture going "We're manly men who are manly, and you're a piece of crap for not supporting our candidate and talking points!"

Overall, the strategy of trying to waggle your finger at men who are choosing who to vote for after most men are sick and tired of being preached at is just a terrible election strategy. Trump can't win without winning some women, but Kamala can't win without winning at least some men.

14 of 17. We're proud to announce the endorsement by Dick Cheney

Sometimes I wonder if the Democratic party is just stupid. 2008 showed that the American people didn't care for neoconservative war hawks, definitively, case closed. So of course they spent an entire news cycle bragging about it, because apparently they're allergic to winning?

I haven't seen an endorsement so radioactive since Osama bin Laden endorsed John Kerry in 2004 -- and Kerry didn't make that the centerpiece of the news cycle when he got that endorsement!

Perhaps it was meant to show that the current Democrats have bipartisan support on their ticket, but I think that's a really bad kind of bipartisanship to be focusing on. Trump's campaign this year has support of many people who were Democrat darlings. Elon Musk was once the darling of the left until he started speaking out against policies he strongly disagreed with (many people on the left call him a nazi for (checks paper) working to stop government censorship, but that's because they're literally stupid). Tulsi Gabbard was Vice-chair of the DNC and a rising star in the party. Robert F. Kennedy is part of the revered Kennedy Family with deep roots in the Democratic party. Of course these people all became "nazis" the moment they crossed the aisle, but that's because the people lobbing those insults are literally stupid. Cheney didn't stop being Cheney and magically become respected just because he crossed the aisle, and neither did Gabbard or Kennedy stop being the people who were respected when they were democrats. Note that progressives didn't have a bad word to say about Musk when he was single-handedly creating the electric vehicle market.

15 of 17. Nazis! Fascists! Everywhere!

World War II was effectively a clash between four different ideologies: liberalism, class socialism, State socialism, and racial socialism.

One of the major powers didn't really have any of these ideologies. Although imperial Japan aligned with the axis, their story was much different. After the sengoku period in the 1600s, the newly established tokogawa shogunate shut the borders of Japan for 200 years, only engaging in a small amount of trade using some small outposts. Effectively, Japan became an insular feudalist regime headed by a military dictator. This was the status quo until America send a fleet of ships commanded by Commodore Perry who forced Japan's borders open with the threat of at the time highly advanced ironclad battleships centuries more advanced than anything Japan had. This, combined with the reality of China's century of humiliation resulted in the Meiji restoration of the emperor as the head of government, and the adoption of imperial policies intended to protect the islands of Japan from the same sort of disgrace that China had faced. Japan adopted the "Line of Advantage" strategy which sought to protect itself against the imperialism of the west by capturing an entire empire, and so if they were attacked by imperialist powers then it would be their holdings in oceana and mainland asia that would be affected rather than the actual islands of Japan. In World War 1, Japan sided with the allies, and had done quite well building their empire, but in world war 2 they chose to ally with the axis powers, sensing the chance to further increase the power of their empire.

There were elements of fascism and racial socialism in japan, but it was not either. Instead, it was a truly conservative state trying to maintain the power structures that had existed for millennia to whatever extent they could while they modernized to deal with a world filled with powers such as the Europeans who had effectively taken over the entire world through colonialism. The Meiji restoration restored the power of the emperor, but the emperor had long been a position in Japan, and despite the shogunate being the central power after sengoku, continued to exist since the 1600s. The Japanese were racist in the same as racial socialists, but this did not make them racial socialists per se. They were an imperial state with an emperor at the head. The Japanese had a somewhat totalitarian regime similar to the state socialists, but they were not State socialists because they were instead a mostly feudal state made up of an earlier organization of power. They were most certainly not class socialists in any way because Japan was still a highly hierarchical society, with the emperor on top and certainly poor and powerless people on the bottom. And while there were bits and pieces of liberal society from the reforms after the Meiji restoration, Japanese society was in no way a liberal society. It was its own thing separate from the ideological trappings of the early 20th century west.

The reason that I focus on the Japanese is to show that in spite of a civilization sharing aspects of various forms of socialism and even liberalism, they did not actually practice socialism or liberalism. Logically, all cars have wheels, but not all things with wheels are cars. In the same way, accusations of being a Nazi or a fascist have flown around for the last 80 years, most of the time using the same logic as cars have wheels, therefore everything with wheels is a car.

Different societies shared attributes of one another. Racial socialism is racist, but liberal societies were racist for most of their existence too. Class socialism was invented by a surprisingly racist man, with Karl Marx being shockingly racist even for his day. State socialism shared the totalitarian attributes of racial socialism and class socialism, but anyone who was one of the three would strongly disagree that they were the other things.

The end of the war was largely a victory for liberalism and class socialism (the west and the soviet union), but not completely. In many ways the war destroyed liberalism, because every state that once practiced it ended up taking on many of the aspects of a total war state. The high levels of bureaucracy, high levels of control of the populace, in the United States even the food supply was changed forever because advances in the production and storage of rations led to advances that were implemented by food companies, so today you can't even eat a piece of bread without eating a piece of military technology lying in wait for the next Total War. The same ended up being true of class socialism, which also took on any of the aspects of their Total War society, which is one of the reasons why the Soviet Union ultimately fell, and today even communist China isn't really class socialist in the sense that it would have been under Mao.

The thing is, the total war affected version of liberalism isn't state socialism, and it isn't racial socialism. It's a different thing. All cars have wheels, but not everything with wheels is a car.

In the same way, Democrats love accusing Republicans of being racial socialists or state socialists (Nazis and Fascists). Even by the most generous interpretation of facts, it may be that the Republicans share aspects of their platform with those ideologies, but not everything with wheels is a car. If we were to use the same standards, the Democrats share policies with racial socialists and state socialists as well, and certainly with class socialists, but not everything with wheels is a car.

The other problem is that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and the racial socialists or state socialists may have ideas that once separated from the bad ideas of the ideology. As an example, most people love the volkswagen beetle despite the fact that Adolf Hitler was directly involved with the creation of both Volkswagen and the Beetle. As another example, the Autobahn was a Nazi project which Adolf Hitler was directly involved with the creation of, but nobody is proposing we tear up the Autobahn.

The constant accusations of being the bad guys from World War 2 is actually dangerous for several reasons. First, it's "the boy who cried wolf" -- If every time you see someone you don't like they're a nazi or a fascist, then eventually nobody thinks there's any actual nazis or fascists out there anymore. Second, it's not productive making accusations like this, it's the same as calling the other side "Satan" -- it might feel good, but it just says you think the other side is bad which isn't persuasive to anyone who doesn't already fully agree with you. Thirdly, it is anti-persuasive -- if you claim someone is a Nazi or a Fascist and they obviously aren't, then it discredits you so if you have real arguments they become less persuasive.

The increasing use of these attacks against Trump actually served to help his campaign, because it's so petty and so obviously incorrect. It ends up being the only attack that the Democrats can run against the guy, and it's pathetic. Everyone who is called Donald Trump a Nazi or a fascist should be ashamed of themselves, because they only showed how juvenile they are. None of the people calling Trump a Nazi or a fascist ever did an analysis like I have here, they're just reaching for the worst insult they can.

16 of 17. Hypocrisy and lies

Streamer Vaush has a line about being unethical to promote socialism that goes something like "of course I'll do it because I want to win as a socialist and not lose as a socialist". It's a Machiavellian way of looking at the world, and frankly politically it's a bad way of looking at the world. Even tyrants generally try to create some sort of pretext for arbitrary decisions. Eventually people notice you're just a hypocrite who will pick whatever is best for yourself in that nanosecond.

The Democrats sued to keep RFK off the ballot before they sued to keep him on the ballot.

The Trump campaign offered Harris 3 debates, she only accepted 1 until after that 1 was over, then suddenly the Harris campaign wanted more.

Joe Biden was sharp as a tack, sharp as a tack, sharp as a tack and not going anywhere nevermind he's been forced to step down because he's not fit to be president.

The Harris campaign took every opportunity to attack young men until it was clear they needed those young men to win (followed by the lamest most cringe attempt to appeal to young men I've ever seen...)

The Democrats claimed that Trump would use the legal system against his political opponents while they used the legal system against him, their legal opponent. They claimed he was inciting violence against Democrats while bullets whizzed by his head. They attacked him for childish namecalling in the same sentence they call him childish names.

Independents can see what's happening, and the self-serving lack of principles might be tactically advantageous, but it's strategically weak.

What's one word you associate with Trump? I'll tell you one thing I don't associate with Trump, and that's the word "Stealth". He's not the sort of guy who will quietly stealth into a position without being noticed. You know exactly what his positions are because he won't shut up about them.

So the idea that Project 2025, a book created by some thinktank somewhere, is actually Trumps secret publicly published and available for purchase at a reasonable price evil plan is really stupid. He said it isn't his plan, he didn't fund the plan, stop it. Lying about this thing makes you look bad.

Project 2025 also isn't the Democrat messiah that contains every message the Democrats really wish Trump was running on but isn't. It doesn't say anything about ending social security or banning abortion. The Democrats would know that, but they don't care to read it, they just need a boogeyman. Lying about this thing makes you look bad.

Trump is running on not signing a federal abortion ban. Maybe he's lying, but without any evidence that he's lying, why do the Democrats keep saying he's going to sign a federal abortion ban? Lying about this thing makes you look bad.

The fact that the Democrats have so fully infiltrated media has made them arrogant and stupid in this regard. And they're loudly complaining about the parts of communication they don't directly control. It's a bad look for "liberals".

I know every politican lies. Trump says things that are arguably false all the time. The thing is, the level of bad faith lying here is not going to win any friends. It's important to at least try to appear principled in some way, and hypocrisy and lies will lose the election -- at least try to look like you intended to keep your promise until after the votes are counted and you've won!

17 of 17. Coda So where do we go from here?

Well, first, since I'm writing this before the election let's cover what it would have meant if Kamala won: It means democracy is over. Now don't you worry your pretty little retarded head, they would have still pretended to have elections, but the powers that be would have proven that they can take a complete idiot whose entire political career was fabricated, fabricate them into an executive position, and despite nobody liking that politician somehow giving them the keys to the most powerful nation on Earth. It will mean the machine has won. Mandatory celebrations would then commence. There would be adequate levels of glee or it gets the hose again.

Ok, now let's talk about a Trump win. I have faith in the American people. They can be unrefined at times, but Americans aren't actually stupid. The country became a superpower on many people's great decisions. I'm hoping it's even a popular vote win, because the Democrats need their 2008 moment. They've grown complacent with a strategy that worked in 2008, but it's not 2008 anymore. It's time for them to stop doubling down on something only a tiny but vocal minority of people agree with and work to find a new platform that actually works for people. Also, they need to stop relying on a friendly media that will lie for them. They need a message that actually resonates with people besides "Vote for me, I'll let you kill your babies!"

Really, I hoped they'd get that lesson in 2020 but obviously it didn't happen, but the sooner they learn that they're on the wrong track, the sooner they might be able to get on the right track. The world isn't the same as 2008. Trump isn't George W. Bush, or even George H. W. Bush.

At the moment, it looks like the Optimates vs. the Populares from ancient Rome, but under a democracy you can't have elitism like that. Everyone ought to be trying to do what's best for the people because very few people are interested in voting for elites. Hopefully that's the next step we see, the Democrats remember they work for the people and not for a small number of elites or elite adjacents and we can have two parties with real visions that people can get behind. It's what I want to see. I'm not a partisan, I don't want to see a Republican monoparty forever. I know the dangers of too much Republican power. They'll have to take the correct lessons from this cycle, and with a strong Trump win, I think they will at least have to admit it's not just that Russia cheated.

Well. I guess you could call it a bloodbath.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21606730

Now all that's left is for kamala and walz to go on.

It's an anarcho-capitalist perspective, but he leans right on the political spectrum.

With so many options on Rumble or Spotify, who do you listen to and why?

Archive link

See paragraph 3.3(a)(2)( c).

a. Secretary of Defense Approval.
(1) he Secretary of Defense may approve any type of requested permissible assistance described in Paragraph 3.2.
(2) he decision to approve requests for these types of permissible assistance described in Paragraph 3.2. to law enforcement agencies and other civil authorities are reserved to the Secretary of Defense:
( c) Assistance in responding with assets with potential for lethality, or any situation in which it is reasonably foreseeable that providing the requested assistance may involve the use of force that is likely to result in lethal force, including death or serious bodily injury. It also includes all support to civilian law enforcement officials in situations where a confrontation between civilian law enforcement and civilian individuals or groups is reasonably anticipated. Such use of force must be in accordance with DoDD 5210.56, potentially as further restricted based on the specifics of the requested support.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21213328

Russia has helped amplify and spread false and misleading internet claims about recent hurricanes in the United States and the federal government’s response, part of a wider effort by the Kremlin to manipulate America’s political discourse before the presidential election, new research shows.

The content, spread by Russian state media and networks of social media accounts and websites, criticizes the federal response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton, exploiting legitimate concerns about the recovery effort in an attempt to paint American leaders as incompetent and corrupt, according to research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. The London-based organization tracks disinformation and online extremism.

In some cases, the claims about the storms include fake images created using artificial intelligence, such as a photo depicting scenes of devastating flooding at Disney World that never happened, researchers say.

Text of the tweet:

After having dealt with hundreds of reporters in my legal career, this is unfortunately the first time I have to go on record and call out Jeffrey Goldberg@the Atlantic: not only did he misrepresent our conversation but he outright LIED in HIS sensational story. More importantly, he used and exploited my clients, and Vanessa Guillen’s murder… for cheap political gain.

I would like to also point out that the timing of this “story” is quite suspicious, as this supposed conversation that Trump had would have occurred over 4 years ago! Why a story about it now?!

As everyone knows, not only did Trump support our military, he also invited my clients to the Oval Office and supported the I Am Vanessa Guillen bill too.

I’m grateful we were successful in getting bipartisan support of the I Am Vanessa Guillen Act, and because of everyone’s hard work and efforts our service members now have more protections and rights while serving our country.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/7YArq

Archive link.

A ridiculous number of the recent posts to this sub are me trying to convince conservatives not to vote for Trump.

Anyway, here are this guy's reasons:

[The] Republican relationship to truth and knowledge has gone to hell. MAGA is a fever swamp of lies, conspiracy theories, and scorn for expertise. The Blue World, in contrast, is a place more amenable to disagreement, debate, and the energetic pursuit of truth.

I’ve come to appreciate the Democrats’ long-standing tradition of using a pragmatic imagination. I like being around people who know that it’s really hard to design policies that will help others but who have devoted their lives to doing it well [...] Over the past four years, I’ve watched the Biden administration use pragmatic imagination to funnel money to parts of America that have long been left behind.

Another set of qualities now drawing me toward the Democrats: patriotism and regular Americanness.

But ultimately what’s pulling me away from the Republican Party and toward the Democrats is one final quality of Blue World: its greater ability to self-correct. Democrats, I’ve concluded, are better at scrutinizing, and conquering, their own shortcomings than Republicans are.

I'm not a conservative myself, but I defy any conservative intending to vote for Donald Trump to read this comparison of Washington and Trump, and to honestly tell themselves afterwards that that they believe in America and its ideals.

Worth a watch. Good interviews with locals.

Some towns have gotten 50% bigger in less than 2 years as new people moved in. Schools and infrastructure were not prepared.

Why is this happening? And - as seen in the comments on this thread - why are you a racist if you ask about it?

To be clear: immigration is important, and necessary, but I had not heard or seen the impact that this huge surge of people have had on many small towns until I saw this.

If your reaction to someone asking this simple question is anger: that's a problem. Feel free to treat me like an idiot and back up your opinion with data. Otherwise, I don't understand why we should be obligated to treat this massive influx of people better than our own citizens. No other country does it.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/13549956

A conservative explaining why Trump and Vance's lies are indefensible.

Several prominent members of Donald Trump's MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement are urging the former president to cut ties with controversial activist Laura Loomer, with one ally in Congress accusing the former Florida House candidate of making "appalling and extremely racist" remarks.

The anger came after Loomer was pictured with Trump at two 9/11 memorial events on Wednesday after she posted a racially charged diatribe aimed at Vice President Kamala Harris on X, formerly Twitter.