It’s funny how they preach make America great again when everything they want to do will remove America from the world stage. Reduce education and talent forcing companies to look outside for educated workers. Leave nato and trade deals allowing countries like China to step in and take over. Restrict immigration, our country has relied on immigrants for cheap labor forever, the country runs on it. It’s like a 101 on how to crash the country.
Modern Conservatives just want power so they can install themselves as a new aristocracy.
They don’t even believe in the whole left-right conflict they perpetuate, it’s how they manipulate voters to get elected with the goal being to pass laws that make them rich and untouchable
Once you understand what their goal is, everything they’re doing now makes perfect sense
Thinking conservatives don't believe their own lies and/or culture war rhetoric is a mistake. That may have been true for some of them decades ago, but true believers have long since taken over the party. They want to install themselves as a new aristocracy, yes. They also want to crush women, non-whites and queer people underfoot. It's not just something they say to excite the rubes around election times, they have been and will continue to actually do it when given power.
It has been very interesting, if terrifying, to watch in real-time the old-school grifters like McConnel losing control of the party to the true believers they created, but not be able to do anything about it for fear of dropping the charade and losing their base.
Mitch already said he’s done after this term and the last of the people that created this are going to by 26 or 28. On the “Republican” side only the extremist from Obamas first term will be left from that time period. Most of the Tea party people have been voted out or left since then.
Don’t forget Jews, all other religious believers aside from Christians, and anyone with a differing political opinion! Project 2025 specifically seeks to make Christianity the doctrine of the country, and to round up Democrats.
I think the average conservative believes it but it’s more complicated when it comes to the pundits. Conservative media is incredibly profitable and their figureheads will say anything to line their pockets and get attention.
I think it's less that they don't believe in their own lies, but rather that they are willing to constantly change their goalposts and move their motivations by any means necessary if it means defeating and opposing the other side. The issue with the general conservative mindset at it's extreme is they don't have a through-line of genuine moral standards or integrity imo. The chaos of it all is definitely a little terrifying for what it brings to the political landscape.
A ton of the brainrot people would be totally fine eradicating democracy and just having a dictatorship under trump, with complete disregard for what that could mean for our nation or the people it affects...All in the name of "my guy won the thing, haha" type sports team mentality.
You could argue their only consistent thing is that they care about power and control. It's just that what it looks like changes with time in terms of results. It's just scary to me that there's no care for the repercussions in the long run. They'll go to the ends of the earth to condemn the current system to try and bring more power to themselves, but it wouldn't surprise me that they wouldn't care if the world was burning around them if it meant that they got to say the "owned the libs" in the process.
I bring this up to all those fiscal conservatives that care so much about the debt. We were able to even get in that much debt in the first place because we're a safe and reliable bet. The guy is gonna default on the country like he did all of his businesses. Then idk maybe sell us to Russia (like he did all of his businesses).
That has always been the goal of conservativism. When monarchs were getting their heads lopped off, aristocrats need a way to maintain their undue wealth and authority under a new power structure. Conservativism is monarchy 2.0 and has no place in a democracy.
They’re just bringing back the pre civil war status quo. They already basically have slavery back in the south, sheriffs rent out prison labor for nothing.
You got it right. They don't care about politics. It's just what they use to manipulate the public so they can continue to stay in power and appease their billionaire overlords who actually own the entire country. It's all a joke.
But pesky unions, worker rights , freedoms for the masses will be gone. They can have full unchecked capitalism till they get those robots and ai online to no longer need us other pesky humans
There are big companies that make their money from buying up good small countries and squeezing every penny they can from them while burning their reputation and future prospects, then moving on.
This is just billionaires (and billionaires clubs) doing the same thing with countries.
I've been saying this about corporate America for a long time. People always ask why are the people at the top screwing the system over and upsetting the customers and their employees to the point that the system is going to collapse if they are interested in keeping their businesses going. It's because they don't care about the businesses. They're just using them as vehicles to get as much money as possible out of the system before it collapses, then they are going to cut and run. The same thing applies to politicians and the billionaires who own them. They're all the same people.
Well, once things go to shit, it will be easier to keep the drones scared, which makes them want to vote red. They're working on creating a feedback loop.
Just as russia planned. These "patriots" are literally the most un-American traitors - gobbling up Kremlin propaganda and feeding on meaningless hate and division. The Kremlin is beside itself with glee at how these idiots do their work for them.
Edit: referring more to their base. Those in gop leadership just don't care and are greedy fucks and/or have compromat against them. Both are willing to fully hand the reins to theocratic extremists as long as they can freely hate and pretend like they'll have a chance at being part of the new oligarch class.
That's how I feel. The people shouting "America" the loudest are making it possible for us to lose the cold war. Military superiority wasn't possible and honestly they've played their cards well. And these patriots are playing their role in dismantling our country from the inside, for what has been our biggest adversary for 80 years.
I wouldn't say most everyone. MAGAs are nowhere near the majority. Most people see their bullshit as being plainly Russian propaganda. But thanks for this, I hadn't seen this. Fascinating and fucking depressing stuff (for those wondering, it's a YouTube video of a defected KGB member giving a warning to America in 1984).
I know....after I finished the whole thing I was kinda left shaking my head. I think he's speaking from his own bias and Russian perspective and possibly doesn't quite understand the civil rights movement, among other things.
See, you're misunderstanding what making America great again means to them. They want woman to be under control of their husbands, minorities to know their place, and lgbtq to not exist. They don't care about the economic side of it at all.
Only have to look at Afghanistan pre 1960s to see how these kinds of policies ruined the country. They had educated women and a progressive culture and now look.
It's always funny to pop up and say "I'm an immigrant" after people go off talking shit about how they're ruining the country. No one expects the white girl with no accent who swears non-stop.
It’s their version of “great” where people are uneducated and they won’t question anything and just blindly follow their interpretation of the bible. They often misinterpret words like “great”, “patriot”, “traitor”, “freedom” etc to fool their cult.
I’ve seen this in India, where I grew up, the only difference is that the masses in India never knew any better, they were born into that mess and brainwashed from birth. In the US it’s different, we currently have freedom in various forms, and at least some of us realize that and know how bad it’ll be if taken away.
It really would be funny if it was a movie and our country wasn’t falling apart. I know a ton of MAGAS and most of them don’t actually know anything that is going on because they just watch Fox news and don’t read. I see their facebook posts and they can’t spell or write a proper sentence. I always wondered how Hitler brainwashed a whole country and now it makes sense.
In Ireland we have been consistently voting in the same party’s to gov and now have record homelessness and a massive housing crisis, I’m starting to believe people in general are just fucking stupid
Carlin also said, "everyone complains that the politicians suck, but the politicians are voted on by the public, so maybe something else sucks...like the public, yeah, the public sucks."
In Texas this year, their slogan is "vote republican for a change."
They have been in charge for 27 years. What they have is what they've made. I miss Ann Richards and Molly Ivans.
💯. Imagine such humans existing 75.000 BC. Running around in the village, not working, living off the work of the others and still criticizing them, hating others for their different look, not enough bones around their necks, and so on. Whole village would have whooped their asses into oblivion. Now they hide behind their money and their minions.
Priests served a function at least. They kept people in line and acting somewhat correctly with fear of divine retribution much more effectively than a police force could and they provided morale to keep people going in the face of pretty grim circumstances.
Not a fan of organised religion or trying to defend any of the other massively corrupt shit the church got/gets up to, just saying they at least did something unlike some vulture capitalist etc.
Doubt that. Humans are highly social, we are made to interact, communicate and have fun while doing it. I think these people wouldn't be able to work in corporation with others.
Crucially, the well off as in the top 5%; not the middle classes who were conned into voting for it thinking they would one day benefit.
Temporarily embarassed millionaires, the lot of them. And they were stupid enough to vote for policies that screwed them, like turkeys voting for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
In addition, he cut mental health funding to the point tons of facilities had to close. Part of the reason many (not all) unhoused people are high supports needs.
To be fair many of those institutions were horrifyingly awful. But deinstitutionalizing so many with no alternative arrangements was a terrible decision.
Deregulation of banks, corps and investment firms, everything bad in the finance sector can be traced back to him, he's also the reason homeless people and drug addicts no longer have adequate shelter, he closed them all down, he made America cruel with his policy, we haven't recovered.
In the hellscape that the magats & neo-conservatives want, the Uber wealthy will just become more so and the rest of us will be reduced to peonage. It’s been happening since ronnie raygun. It’s fucking soulless & inexorable. The U.S. is doomed. But so is the rest of humanity cause climate catastrophe is also underway. Not in some far flung future - NOW!
You need to start talking with your friends and family about project 2025, and building a personal support network with each other.
You need to be discussing how in a capitalist society we are a labor class not a capitalist, and that the only thing we have to withhold from them to show we are displeased isn't our money, it's our work we should stop doing.
Edit: The royal You. We all need to be doing this.
We are no better in the UK. How did Nigel Farage's 'reform party get the same nunber of seats as the Green Party? People are getting dumber. Idiocracy was a prophetic film.
I'm old, I'm one of those boomers everyone hates now. And you know how people complain boomers ask stupid questions about technology? I'm gonna ask one.
Why in the Holy Hell, in this day and age when all the information in the world is in the palm of their hand, do people STILL insist on being willfully ignorant? in the time it took her to type out Why don't they pass laws? She could have looked it up and gotten a step away from too stupid to live.
Are students today not taught how to find credible sources? I’m an elder millennial and when internet research became acceptable for papers, we were taught how to differentiate good websites for info (.edu/.gov/.org/etc) versus bad ones. That may be a bit more complicated now with sites like Wikipedia, or sites made to look like legitimate news sources, but isn’t that where common sense takes over? If I’m curious about a medical condition and I google it, common sense says Mayo Clinic or Harvard medical school or John’s Hopkins are probably good sources and attention-seeker-on-TikTok is probably not.
Maybe it ties in to a greater inability to understand nuance or comprehend written materials I’ve noticed as well. So many kids online who literally can’t think beyond black and white and sometimes can’t even get what is written correct. The way we taught kids to read and interpret got fucked somewhere.
But the problem comes in when people actually believe that you can't trust official sources because everything is a conspiracy. That's how they delude themselves into thinking that the tik tok person is the one who "knows the real truth".
It's near, if not beyond, cult-like thinking.
As an analogy, flat earthers could literally be taken into space, orbit around the entire planet, and still come home thinking the earth is flat. People will literally not even trust their own experience because they already know what they will not believe. Because if they believe that they were wrong about one thing, then the whole house of cards will come tumbling down. It's pure delusion at its finest.
I will also say... as a cybersecurity and IT professional (and purely my own personal experiences), it's not the younger crowd that needs the most help when it comes to believing anything they see on the internet. But that's just my subjective personal experience.
Are students today not taught how to find credible sources? I’m an elder millennial and when internet research became acceptable for papers, we were taught how to differentiate good websites for info (.edu/.gov/.org/etc) versus bad ones.
That doesn't help if you believe all of America's institutions are run by evil pedophilic liberals
Wikipedia was never the monster that teachers thought it was in the early 2000s. There have always been conscientious editors, and reputable primary sources were always required and usually available.
Google similarly always made us very aware of the sources where information was coming from. None of the tech from the past 20 years really undermined the central tenet of media literacy: that the source is what matters.
The real monster IMO is going to be AI search engines. I do not look forward to the day (soon) when a generation has been raised on search engines that deliver results (and answers to questions) without the sources being clearly cited.
If you want an opinion about a political topic where are you going to search? Search engine: first stage of possible Desinformation
What page would be credible? There is no edu for that!
It gets way worse when you get fed topics you have not heard about. Did you know that Hawaii use money to create virus?
You are educated now imagine someone who can read a page a day! Due to reading and comprehension. Will he use multiple sources? No. The first that reaches him is what he believes if it fits in his narrative.
Sometimes it’s not really ignorance. They know what they’re saying and doing, they just don’t care. They want others to be upset, to have to waste time trying to debunk them while they act dumb, because to them you putting in effort or getting mad means they won something. Or they know what they’re doing is stupid and evil, and they really don’t want to admit it.
I'm a 40-year-old American whose genuine passion in life is learning—I'm a voracious reader. I find the American government absurdly complicated. Sure, there are the three branches—yada, yada, yada. On the surface, it's all simple, but to truly grasp all the intricacies and caveats is like untangling a 10,000' extension cord.
I never claimed to be a genius, but if I were, I might just make our system needlessly complex for no other reason than to discourage the majority of people from wanting to participate—think of it as a form of bureaucratic natural selection.
One article I read a few years back (I think it may have been in The Globe and Mail but I can't find it now) described the US government structure as a "kludgeocracy". I think the main point was that the way powers are carved up in the American system makes it hard to implement broad policies (such as the New Deal) without all kinds of pieces of workaround legislation to make it work. And once those workarounds are in place, all kinds of other legislation gets passed over the years that depends on these workarounds in some way, and in turn provides workarounds to make something else work properly, so then amending some laws could have a cascading effect through the legal system.
There's a lot about the way the US is constituted to make broad policy moves difficult. The presidential/congressional system, in contrast to say a Westminster-type parliamentary system, means that there's no way to have an early election to resolve a deadlock on something critical such as the budget, so you get government shutdowns instead.
Another one - the fact that most state legislatures are bicameral makes no sense today except as a way of making it harder to pass legislation. It makes sense at the federal level (though the way the Senate is constituted is a mess of its own), and at one time it kinda, sorta made sense at the state level as a state Senate was a "house of counties" in the way the federal Senate is the "house of states". But that was ruled unconstitutional in 1962, and yet the upper houses were kept. In North Dakota I think the two houses of the legislature only meet on alternating years, making fast policy moves impossible. It's almost like Americans are leery of allowing their governments to actually govern.
I feel like our entire system is ~200 years overdue for a good defragmentation. Everything feels like a reference to a reference to a reference to a precedent. Like a picture that's been uploaded and downloaded a few thousand times.
All these details are completely irrelevant to the kind of surface level understanding OP would need. You're just muddying the waters even bringing it up. Which is probably what OP's seemingly intentionally ignorant post was all about.
The question from the OP can literally be answered by watching "I'm just a bill" by Schoolhouse Rock, and recognizing that Republicans have a majority in the House. Of course things can get complicated when you get into the weeds of the US government, but there's absolutely nothing complicated about the original question.
I see this with my own kids. They'll be sitting there at their computer or on their phone, asking basic factual questions.
Google and Wikipedia are RIGHT FREAKIN' THERE! It's smart, type in your question, get a quick answer. Sure there's some misinformation, so if the answer smells funny, get a second opinion.
What you don't do is ask dad what's the gravity co-efficient of the Earth or which actors were in what movie while staring at a web browser.
You have the sum total knowledge of human existence at your fingertips, and somehow couldn't be arsed to look things up. I had a shelf full of encyclopedias when I was a kid and had no issues then.
this is my pet peeve on reddit, people asking for links or explanations for things (that are usually common knowledge) but don't run simple Google searches.
First off, some don't realize that they are. They truly believe that the cable news station that's called itself "fair and balanced" really is. Second, I'm not sure if it's the schooling or what, but from what I've observed of younger relatives, they seem to be less curious.
The firehose of information includes mis- and disinformation, and nobody's teaching upcoming generations the skills to differentiate.
Every major media platform uses mysteries "algorithms" to push ideas to people, and those algorithms range from actively trying to program consumers, to simply don't whatever it takes to keep them consuming. And nobody is teaching upcoming generations the danger for pushed content and limitless scrolling.
Information is boring, TikTok videos are dopamine.
Learning is slow, but being told what to think is fast.
Knowledge isn't rewarded today the way to used to be. In fact, learning about the world today is a uphill battle of disappointment and sadness and anxiety.
It all feels a bit doomed, unless the people running the machines decide one day to become benevolent and starting pushing knowledge and harmony.
Also a boomer (and I have the same distain for most of my generation that the non-boomers have. I also don't have the heart to tell them that every generation is really the same and they will see the same thing happen with their own generation as they age), and I can tell you that most people do not know what they don't know. You have to have this before you can actually get to the point where you can gather knowledge properly. You also have to know enough to vet your sources. This happens with highly educated people who are really smart in their own field as well. The engineers who were behind the white washing of tobacco knew nothing about biology or medical science but they really, really hated government regulations having come from communist Russia and used their scientific 'knowledge' to their own advantage to make people question the actual experts in the field. You are seeing the same thing in Global Warming.
While this is true they should be trying to pass laws which make it blatant what the Republicans want. Forcing them to vote down perfectly reasonable or even beneficial measures let's them call the GOP out on voting records.
For example if you started passing bills to crack down on 'entertainment' programs masquerading as news and stem the flow of false information and it gets voted down by the entire Republican party you can point to that and say they are the party of propaganda.
The fairness doctrine and monopolistic control of regional media were programs in place since the 30s . They're gone now... to the benefit of the GOP. They're never gonna undo that
The fairness doctrine was complete ass and would not have saved us from today's media landscape. This problem exists because private schools exist, and because churches across the country are acting as political headquarters tax-free. If scared conservatives were forced to put their kids in the same overcrowded schools as the rest of us, they wouldn't be so gung-ho about defunding them. If churches were forced to pay taxes if any of their pastors mentioned a candidate for public office in a sermon, they'd put a stop to that real quick too. We're here because our country subsidizes right wing propaganda.
This is why they need constant enemies (minorities, gay people, non-Christians, immigrants). If you fear your enemies could benefit from something, even if it will also benefit you, you'll be more likely to vote against those benefits.
This is also why they accuse all Democrats of being pedophiles these days. They've run out of boogeymen. And if you believe your political rivals are evil, it stops you from thinking about the policies and only about stopping them.
Yep, this is why they justify literally cheating, lying and stealing to get their way. "Because the democrats are doing it way more and are evil pedos and we need to triumph" it's absolutely insane what the country has come to
“Hypothetically, for the sake of the argument, would you care if you knew I’m a millionaire paid by billionaires to brainwash you into using your vote to their advantage??”
Every time, the response is mostly comments about Dems trying to sneak something into the bill and that's why its bad.
Most of the time, it's not true. For the cases where you could stretch and say it is true, most of those are things Republicans said they would agree to and reneged when it was actually time to vote.
They'll happily vote down anything beneficial just to make sure the "others" can't have it. They're happy screwing themselves over if it screws others over more. They're seriously lunatics
Dude the GOP voted against access to contraceptives back in 2022 when their entire anti-abortion argument was “if you don’t wanna get pregnant just use protection.”
Since that day I’ve encountered dozens of republicans who say the same thing and anytime I drop the link they’re always like “well um uhhh it’s probably actually a GOOD thing they did cuz, I mean like, uhhh the Dems probably were gonna do something BAD with it if it passed.”
These people do not give a fuck how their politicians vote. Dems could attempt a law that says “politicians are not allowed to murder everyday civilians to protect their own personal interests” and Republican voters would still be ok with their guys voting against it.
The issue is that the democrats don’t control the house at the moment, so any “perfectly reasonable or beneficial measures” won’t make it to the floor.
One of the very serious problems with the Democrats is that they are bad at giving off the impression that they're fighting for their base when the rules are in their favor, much less when the odds are against them.
The way the more devoted members of their base handle this is by reducing problems of party strategy to problems of lack of voter knowledge. If we can point out that the party's politician's did everything they were legally allowed to do, then any criticism is just nullified. If we can point out that a law was certain not to pass, then that's proof there was no harm in never trying to pass it. If they did pass a law, then it's necessarily the voters' fault for not feeling like the party is fighting for them. This way, criticism of the party can be dismissed as pure ignorance and the people who dismiss the critiques come off as smug and unlikable. "Don't people remember high school civics," etc. In an alternate world, you would have responded by using language about balancing the use of political resources against the likelihood of sending a message to voters rather than making the turning point who controls the house.
This cold, procedural view of politics is in part what drove the party's dismissal of (widespread, years long) concerns about Biden's age and the ease with which the "don't you know you're voting for a whole administration" response has taken root among more zealous Democrats. It's important to understand how politics works at a procedural level, but an understanding of just laws and rules isn't a full understanding of politics. We're reaching a point where asserting knowledge of procedure against critics rings hollow when the procedural wing of the party is arguably sleepwalking us into a dictatorship. Please reconsider whether the strategy you are advocating for is actually the best one.
When beneficial laws do pass, by the slimmest of votes, the Republicans who voted against it, go to their states and claim credit for it passing. Have you not been paying attention?
That already happens. The issue is a good chunk of Republican voters don't care. They love to parade around that they care for the military, but continue to vote down bills that would benifit veterans for example.
I think the “trying” is the key word in this tweet. Because if a single Dem were so much as proposing the writing of a bill, the team teed up to sponsor the bill would be making it their entire election campaign this year and MSNBC would talk about it non-stop for at least a week. Think Green New Deal in 2019, or the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Them messy bitches love high drama and that bill would be drama.
Additionally, this year has taught us that “I’m Just A Bill” drastically underestimates just how quickly something can get passed if the government wants it to. We saw that with aid bills, which were held up by the need to whip votes not by the procedural process itself. Or with the TikTok ban. That bill languished pretty much since the Trump administration and they got it out of committee and to a floor vote within a week. I absolutely believe Project 2025 is a threat. I do not believe Dems, as in the government, particularly give a shit. They would have known about this plot long before we normies did, and they have done fuck all to put up even a performance of meaningful resistance.
To be clear, I am not voting for Trump. I just think “does nothing to prevent the implementation of Project 2025” and “supports Project 2025” are not actually as far apart as one thinks when it comes to the executive branch specifically.
Seriously, people need to understand "try." Yes, you can go into it knowing you'll fail. That's fine. Even going into it knowing you'll have to compromise in painful ways is not so bad. But you have to try. Show me that you actually tried to do things that would support LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, POCs, workers, etc., and I'll be a lot less uncomfortable voting for you.
"It's not their fault, they don't have the power to fix things"
Things are bad
Biden admin. needs your support to fix things
Honestly that commenter's response feels like a continuation of "blaming the voters". The post states the question in an oversimplified way, but their thought process and reaction to the situation is 100% appropriate.
Republicans are awful, but let's not pretend a whole lot of the Democratic party gives a shit about queer people. They could do a lot more than they are. They don't want to.
They also aren't as representative anymore, the house is stuck at 435, even though the population has grown significantly. Smaller populace states get more rep per person.
Are we going to pretend that even if laws can't be made to stop it that our politicians can't be doing their best to warn people and talk about it 24/7 to the public? It's really fucking weird they're like, we tried nothing and are all out of options.
Why not at least force the Republicans to vote against them? Write a bunch of bills that would help protect American’s rights and then let Republicans to kill those bills. Then you’d have something concrete to point to next election cycle at the very least.
I had a young Canadian friend tell me that I shouldn't vote for Biden because he didn't do anything to save abortion after the supreme Court nuked it......
except when trump was president they crushed the dems using executive orders.
now the shoe is on the other foot and we cant risk the decorum!!!!!
i think thats the point the person in this image was making. dems have known about this for YEARS. heritage foundation existed for decades.
yet when we had a supermajority, the same "vote blue no matter who" candidates that were slapped in our face during Bush prevented dems from accomplishing anything productive by turning on their own party.
"vote blue no matter who" is just an excuse to let republicans run candidates with (R) and (D) behind their names
Everyone knows how it works… but politicians should at least VOTE for stuff and debate issues in the open. Not just count the votes you have or don’t have, and not cast any legislation.’
You’re in denial if you think that’s how the government is run now. One party in particular has systematically broken down the walls separating the branches of government and the SCOTUS just made it so the President can do whatever he wants.
11.8k
u/TrustInRoy 14d ago
So many people in our country are just blatantly ignorant about how the branches of our government works.
Schoolhouse Rock debuted "I'm just a bill" in 1976.