The left don't have to any soul searching to do when again the so called middle literally voted for a man who to their face told them that he doesn't care about them he just wants their votes, who yes is a criminal that has swindled, lied and now rug pulled.
Well if the left wants to lead, it should never stop doing soul searching. Why not ask ourselves, "What have we done that may have contributed to people in our lives wanting to support such vengeful behaviors? How might have we and other people like us hurt these people over the years?"
You're more than welcome citing where I stated the left should never do any soul searching, I specifically said that when it comes to people being so gullible to vote for Trump despite his character is no argument for democrats having to do any soul searching because there is nothing to be reflecting about that.
Yes and im saying if we have people we love in our lives who were gullible to that, should we give up on them or fight harder to love them? I choose the latter and that requires me to do soul searching, of mine and theirs.
Please actually read what I wrote because you say that, but at the same time you've now twice projected assumed positions of mine that only would make sense in your mind if I was some progressive liberal stereotype.
Because no, I have never said that I would ignore those gullible people.
Ontop of this I fail to see what supposed soul searching we need to do, for example if I believe in free speech and the gullible voter voted for a president because they promised to flattered them while also promising to remove free speech and jail anyone who speak unfavorablely about them.
Or how about a real example, what soul searching did the republicans have to do when the south seceed? Or how about the social democrats, liberals and the few conservatives who were executed by the nazis, they should've have been more antisemitic? While Hitler took control via technicality rules?
What I'm saying is that it sounds like you're saying there's nothing people can do, that it's other people's behaviors that need to change, that nothing we can do will change their behaviors regarding this specific instance. Is that what you're saying? That it is the other people's responsibility to fix this, not ours?
Okay, well my brother voted for Trump because he believes ~affirmative action~ I mean DEI is ruining the world and hurting him specifically.
He gets extremely angry when NFL players do "N*** behavior", like get in a bar fight, and has never once talked about a white football player doing things like, IDK, stealing from charities.
Any time he drinks whiskey at all, he uses it as an excuse to get very very very aggressive and attack strangers in bars.
He thinks the solution to school shootings is for teachers to be armed. My mother, a teacher of 35 years who has had to literally break up two large teenage boys trying to kill each other, explained that she doesn't get paid enough to learn how to operate a firearm safely around kids, and that's asking for more trouble than it would help. She also used to make daily jokes about running over the bad kids in the school parking lot, so I think it's not a great idea either.
He used to fly a confederate flag as "honoring his heritage". He is french canadian from northern maine, so his heritage is: Marrying native americans princesses because you left the wife at home, murdering those slaving bastards from the south for the glory of the union, and being oppressed by the KKK restarting in our state because we are french catholic
He insists he has never been sicker than since he has gotten the COVID vaccine. In high school he spent a month shitting blood due to a rare medical defect and didn't go to the hospital because he thought he was dying from being an alcoholic. Before COVID existed, he was infamous in our family for exhibiting the worst "man colds" we have ever known of periodically.
He insists that education is liberal brainwashing despite never setting foot in an education institution past high school, which he spent failing biology and learning how to repair cars instead in the vocational wing, and his own mom being a college adjunct professor for decades.
He TAUGHT my nephew to hate Biden. He didn't tell my nephew "here's some things biden and democrats have done that make life worse for people", he just says, multiple times a day in front of the child, "democrats are evil". For reference, our mother did not tell us basically any political opinion for our entire life. He was allowed to go listen to absurd AM radio without anyone telling him what was right or wrong. I thought she DID teach us empathy though.
He thinks Unions are evil.
My sister runs one of the most successful childcare program businesses in the southern part of the state, and has been successfully running businesses involving childcare since 2006. My brother has run zero business other than buying stuff off Facebook marketplace and flipping it to a dumber buyer for a profit. He tried to give her business advice, and became extremely hostile to her when she told him that his advice didn't make sense and was wrong.
He believes we need to strengthen the US border with Mexico to keep out immigrants for our national safety and that immigrants are taking our jobs. His lifelong best friend, who has the same opinion and voting history, is the heir and operator of one of the largest farms in northern maine. Every year they bus in hundreds of people who don't speak english, sleep 50 to a shack, and get paid under the table to pick crops. They've never committed crime while in town.
During the BLM protests, he informed my mother that there were violent protests in my city. The protest was 12 young adults silently laying on the ground in front the entrance to the police station. Our state has high requirements for being a police officer, and even progressives around here have faith in the police, possibly without reason as the shooting with Robert Card showed.
His explicit opinion is that spending $25 to give a junkie a second chance with Narcan is wrong because "it's your choice to ruin your life with drugs". He has had a nicotine addiction since 14 that his wife has begged him to stop for a decade and he has promised he doesn't have anymore.
My brother does not believe women and black people are his equal, full stop. He admits he doesn't like Trump and admits that Trump did not win the 2020 election and people saying he did are nuts. He genuinely believes himself to be "centrist", not republican, and claims he only votes for republicans because of Gun Rights.
He has firsthand experience, multiple times of getting stuff stolen from him and the police basically giving him a shrug because they don't feel like doing their job. He is FRIENDS with most of the police that do this. He believes that crime is going up and not being reported because of democratic scheming. Our state had a republican governor at the time the cops didn't want to do their jobs.
He's "NEVER wrong", and he believes that 100%. I don't know any other way to say this, but that statement is incredibly incorrect.
He is wrong, or lying. The story is identical with 80% of my family. They believe themselves the best thing since sliced bread, and believe that a few diversity programs trying to get black people and women into jobs they have never wanted have irreparably damaged the country and their lives. They have, not an exaggeration, never ever ever been in competition with black people or women for any position, any job, any task, etc.
The only difference between my fairly empathetic liberal reality and his "Democrats should be shot" (exact quote) one is that I grew up reading books and having my open minded friend asking me how gay marriage ACTUALLY hurts me and admiring my single mom for being such a powerful force despite the deck stacked against her and learning how science actually works, and he grew up hanging out with people who told N-word jokes and meant it and insisted the civil war was "the war of northern aggression", and claimed science doesn't work, without evidence mind you.
I won't pretend your brother is great and reasonable, but just want to point out a couple things that again, point to why your favorite side lost.
> DEI is [...] hurting him specifically.
He's not wrong on this, since DEI promotes hiring based on skin color and not on merit. There isn't much room to dispute this. Considering race when making your hiring decisions may in some people's value systems be justifiable to right wrongs perpetrated hundreds of years ago (I disagree) but the effect on the people now factually is: to harm people below some arbitrary level of melanin by pushing everyone else to the front of the line. It assumes that everyone making hiring decisions would otherwise hire racistly, which is absurd and offensive to anyone not stupid enough to judge people based on color.
> My brother does not believe women and black people are his equal, full stop
With that, he agrees with the DNC too, since they believe women and black people are automatically better than him. The only difference between their flavors of racism is which color is fantasized to be inherently morally superior at birth.
> He's not wrong on this, since DEI promotes hiring based on skin color and not on merit.
DEI does not promote hiring based on skin color and not on merit, DEI promotes tracking hiring demographics, and identifying and rectifying/mitigating issues that result in perpetuating existing underrepresentation, such as inadequate exposure of traditionally underrepresented communities in the hiring funnel.
Hiring based on “skin color” (or race, which is not the same thing, though some races have names that come from color words, or ethnicity, or sex, or many of the other axes of concern for DEI) remains explicitly and blatantly illegal, and DEI proponents do not oppose such laws, and in fact tend to prefer extending them to additional axes of concern (DEI opponents, OTOH, are more likely top both expose such extensions and to oppose existing anti-discrimination laws.)
But name calling works goddamit! Why shouldnt everyone do that??
Trump is 100% about names, holy shit.
I think the left needs to get better at name calling, and match the winning strategy. Maybe it needs to keep coming up with new funny names.
TO be serious - nthing the left does will likely work, because they have to somehow appeal to everyone. Be polite and strong, firm and flexible, forgiving and retributive.
When the left called the right "weird" that had more effect at driving liberal enthusiasm than any PDF of a policy ever has. Because it worked pretty well.
One problem is that the "left" has NO media at all. Republicans opt in to a completely controlled media platform, on Truth Social which is owned by Trump, on Fox News which multiple times has had to argue in court that nobody would take anything they say seriously, and also was knowingly lying to their audience, on AM radio which is used to yell at you 24/7 about how the dems are going to destroy you ANY DAY NOW, on Joe Rogan the podcast viewed by a hundred million people as it talks about how oppressed and cancelled it is and also if Biden said that it's evidence of brain damage but if Trump said that he didn't mean it, on our local news which is bought and paid for by a conglomerate that contractually obligates it's stations to pretend they came up with a story on their own and run identical pieces all across the country about how "damaging to our democracy" democrats are".
What do liberals have to push whatever message they want pushed?
Reddit? Nah, it's half dead, most activity is literally bots reposting year old threads comment for comment to build up karma, it has the cultural pull of HN if HN didn't have YC behind it.
Facebook? You can call people mentally disabled on there now for the crime of being born with genitals that don't match your brain.
CNN? Give me a break. Nobody has trusted CNN since at least the original gulf wars. After that Malaysian airlines plane vanished they asked a aviation expert if it could have been a black hole that swallowed up the plane. They were bought recently by new people, who want to be more pro Trump, mostly because it's just outright more profitable. People watched more CNN during Trump's first term because shit was always being broken, while nobody watched during Biden's term, because nobody expected biden to do anything.
MSNBC? Weirdly popular with "liberal" celebrities and hollywood, but nobody on the east coast cares about it. Even on a good day it has HALF the viewership of Fox News. It's also more like "Laugh at republicans doing stupid things" than actually about liberal policy. MSNBC will tell you that what Trump is doing is illegal, but they wont comprehensively explain why
Liberals and progressives don't seem to be even remotely as willing to opt in to a purposely ideological media stream. I guess AOC does well when she goes on twitch, but even on that platform, the big """leftist""" streamer is a bad person and Noam Chomksy style "america bad" concern troll, and there are multiple much more popular streamers who teach literal children that if video games don't have hyper exaggerated overly sexualized anime women in them, they're "woke". The "I'm a child who likes video games, I'm going to watch video game content" to "I hate women" pipeline is truly insane. Even the people who are part of it don't seem to understand the part they are playing. A group of 12 year old boys met one of their favorite streamers from the Fresh and Fit podcast, and after getting a selfie with him, chanted "I hate women, kill all women", as the podcaster went "what, no no don't hate women!"
90% of the Fresh and Fit podcast is the hosts, men, complaining about how women are inherently less rational than men, complaining that women overreact, complaining that women are shallow on a podcast ostensibly about "gains", bringing very very drunk women on to argue with them about, anything, and shouting them down if the women try to make a point, and threatening them with legal action if they argue too much by claiming the women (who have been invited onto the show) are "trespassing", complaining that women are less accepting of outright facts than men like the fact "women are inherently less rational than men", complaining that women are whores and use sex as a weapon...
But he had a shocked pikachu face when his 12 year old fan said he hates women.
The left don't have to any soul searching to do when again the so called middle literally voted for a man who to their face told them that he doesn't care about them he just wants their votes, who yes is a criminal that has swindled, lied and now rug pulled.