Another big difference is that the right wing Tea Party movement was astroturfed by assholes like the Koch Brothers while the progressive movement is grassroots fueled by people power. The Tea Party movement was out to trick people while the progressive movement is out to build a better future. The Tea Party was fake as shit while the progressive movement is genuine.

It could be the meat the EU refused for September. It could be horse meat. It could be random raccoons RFK Jr. has been collecting.

Yeah, that’s Borough Park, famous for the Orthodox Jewish community doing stuff like diverting public education funds towards private religious schools or having a private bus system that used to require women to sit in the back until an investigation in 2011.

The small red area just northeast is Crown Heights, famous for the hilarious synagogue tunnel story back in 2024. Basically, that area has some very pro-Zionist areas.

here’s a map from a few weeks ago of Mamdani’s approval ratings. All the wealthy areas have red dissapproval ratings. Something I like to note is the red rectangle just off Central Park is Epstein Alley, the area where the richest assholes own property.

Our major disagreement is on analysis. I agree with the idea that we should be talking to voters and trying to convince them to vote Democrat, but your analysis leads you to ignore or avoid talking about the DNC because you don’t think they are the main concern. I think we should be protesting the Establishment Dems outside their public offices and disrupting public events they are at to be more in their faces about how they are screwing up the moment. Candidates and people in positions of power should be speaking out against the Establishment the way David Hogg did. He took the scandal of being ejected from the DNC to propel the progressive movement forward with his Leaders We Deserve organization that helps get progressive candidates like Mamdani in NY or Alawieh in Michigan through the primaries.

But what I think should happen or am advocating for is not the core of the issue in our discussion. You think it is safe to ignore the DNC and Establishment Democrats because they do not represent a majority. I think it is unsafe to ignore the DNC and Establishment Democrats because they still have sizeable influence and power despite not representing the majority. You seem to think that the Establishment Democrats will learn their lesson if enough voters tell them what they want. I have seen Establishment Democrats run the same neoliberal playbook for almost 20 years and I know the current leadership will never learn. The Democratic party is hemorrhaging voters faster than you or I can stop the bleeding specifically because the leadership loves shooting themselves in the foot. You think we should focus on the voters and the leadership will come around. I think we should focus on the leadership and the voters will come around.

Your original claim was to ignore what the DNC is doing and to stop talking about them because what they are doing does not matter. I am saying that people should focus on the DNC and continue to talk about what they are doing because they are the biggest obstacle to getting Democrats elected.

I think it is important that Abdul almost lost because of stories like Francesca Hong who almost won. Money plays an outsized role in these elections and the money the DNC is spending is most definitely being focused on raising Establishment Democrat candidates. Sure they are raising money and contributions are up, but they are spending money faster than they are raising it to the point where they are in debt.

Spending money is important to increase influence. I think it’s a good thing to spend money to try and unseat Republicans. But when we hear stories of Establishment Dems getting endorsed by other Establishment Dems, like Gov Tony Evers endorsing David Crowley in Wisconsin or Gov Gretchen Whitmer endorsing Haley Stevens in Michigan, this comes with fundraising and financial contributions from the establishment. This comes with buying ads for the establishment pick. It is a signal from the DNC to the voter base to unify behind a preferred “electible” candidate.

Abdul’s victory is a good thing because it means that people can beat out money. It is also a cautionary tale of how far the Establishment Democrats will go to fight their progressive wing. They already know what the people want which is why Ken Martin released that anemic 2024 autopsy report that was clearly edited to omit key progressive issues.

I am disputing your original claim that it doesn’t matter what the DNC wants. It absolutely matters what they want when they are the ones running the races and influencing elections to get their preferred candidates theough the primaries. They are actively trying to direct the voters instead of listening to the what the voters want. The DNC is absolutely the biggest problem that leads to depressing voter turnout. My problem with your original claim is the idea that we can tell people to vote for who they like without talking about what the DNC is doing. The reason people don’t vote Democrat is directly a result of the DNC spending all their time and energy putting up terrible candidates.

To put it more simply, the Establishment Dems are attacking us. We ought to be defending ourselves.

We all know the DNC works to suppress candidates they don’t like. Most famously, the DNC worked directly with the Hillary Clinton campaign to crush the Bernie Sanders campaign. So when Ken Martin claims “We are investing in a year-round distributed organizing operation capable of supporting races at every level of the ballot.”, I feel it’s pretty obvious what he means. The Establishment Democrats have historically been very weak opposing the Republicans while fighting tooth and nail against their own progressive wing. They are not spending money raising up candidates like Abdul El-Sayed or Francesca Hong, but neither are they simply waiting for the candidate that wins the primary. The DNC has a type and they are spending money to get that type of candidate through primaries into the general.

Abdul almost lost the primary despite very obviously being the best candidate for Michigan. This is because his opponent had an absurd amount of money. Money does influence elections and the DNC is beholden to their donors. The common voter can very clearly see these relationships and it depresses voter turnout whenever money wins. I agree with you that it is important to vote for progressives that are on the ballot, but you are framing these races as if the common voter has the same amount of influence as the establishment neoliberal. The DNC is the referee and it is blatantly bought and paid for.

“Just go vote” is not good advice because the opposition is spending absurd amounts of money to place obstacles in front of the populace. People like you and me who spend time talking about politics on lemmy are more politically active than the common voter. We need to help remove those obstacles so that everyone can vote for who they’d like instead of trip over manufactured concerns like electability.

The Establishment Democrats have a lot of power. Haley Steven’s only lost the Michigan primary by 1% after outspending Abdul El-Sayed over 10x. That means roughly, Haley Steven’s spent over $10 for every vote compared to Abdul El-Sayed $1 per vote. She absolutely was being propped up by both the Israel lobby as well as Establishment Dems and that money went to waste. That money could have been way more useful in the general, but the DNC has been burning all their cash on fighting progressives instead. It’s gotten to the point where the DNC is millions of dollars in debt and had to put up their physical building as collateral while the RNC has over $100 million in their warchest leading up to the midterms.

It is very important to talk about the Establishment Democrats because they are doing their best to lose all political power by dunking on their left flank instead of combating the Republicans. They would truly rather rule in hell than serve in heaven and they’re gonna drag us all down to party with Lindsey Graham. As much as it sucks, the DNC still has a lot of power they are exerting that needs to be addressed before they cause the situation to become unsalvageable.

Buddy, gas and eggs are $5; ain’t nobody give a fuck about a minuscule amount of people winning 4th place in a swim meet.

I think Bernie would trade himself to get rid of the rest of the fossils. That’s why he’s been focusing on uplifting the next generation of progressives instead of clinging to power like Mitch McConnell.

School Days

People forget very quickly. Trump’s COVID policies killed over a million people in this country and people straight up forgot about those terrible times and elected him into office a second time. I agree that it’s super annoying to see the news basically go, “Idiot president says idiot things” everyday, but I genuinely think that if the news stopped reporting Trump’s stupid shit, people would forget he’s stupid.

I don’t disagree that news reporting helped spread Trump’s message, but far more consequential was the intentional Democratic national strategy of uplifitng Donald Trump because they thought he would be easy to beat. The Pied Piper strategy is well documented now with Democratic leadership working with the Hillary Clinton campaign to uplift Trump and tear down Bernie Sanders. Trump would not have become the Republican nominee if he was not being artificially inflated by the DNC.

I don’t think ignoring people like MTG or Trump really works because the people they advertise to aren’t gonna join the majority. Systemic action needs to be taken against them. Nick Fuentes, for example, waned in popularity after action was taken against him and he was banned from the internet. He is rising in popularity again because those actions have been reversed. These people know their ideas and policies are unpopular and rely upon regular folks not really knowing how disgusting they are. I think shining a light on them and directly calling them disgusting is an important step in actively banning them from public spaces.

I agree with the sentiment that voting is very important, so it’s vital to come up with ways increase voter turnout. In an ideal society, everyone would make informed voting decisions, but we don’t live in that world. We’ve seen from recent races that people are coming out in droves to vote for candidates with progressive policies with primary races having higher turnout than even general presidential elections. The key takeaway from this summer seems to be that progressive policies fuel voter turnout, especially amongst younger voters, so the Democratic Party should lean further in that direction.

Democrats have an incredibly easy opportunity right now, just like in 2020 and 2024. They could simply point to all the bad stuff the Republicans have done and promise to do better things. The Dems should be winning by outstanding margins by promising very simple things, like not shooting immigrants or making groceries cheaper. Instead, the Dems promise nothing and as a result, what should be really easy races become down to the wire nail biters.

The Democrat party simply needs to follow the playbook of the most successful Democrat in history, FDR. Promise progressive policies and then actively work towards those policies and you get elected so often they gotta change the rules to stop you from getting re-elected. We can see this with the most popular modern Dem president Obama. He did half the equation, promise progressive change, and even though he didn’t follow through, dude got elected twice and is still a household name in the Dem party. Clinton, Biden, and Kamala weren’t even willing to lie about enacting positive changes and Biden only won because Trump’s COVID policies killed over a million people. Even then, Biden won by a tiny margin when, again, he should have won by an incredible margin.

Can’t be a candidate until you are at least 35, pretty much. Millennials are just now getting to the right amount of experience in politics and age group to run for political positions.

Maybe someone else wouldn’t bomb elementary schools. Sure it’s a maybe, but maybe that’s a worthy dice roll.

This is such nonsensical bullshit. A tweet Hong made about Thanksgiving 6 years ago is not indicative of her actual policies today. She was never going to use the power of Governor to cancel Thanksgiving or whatever.

David Crowley’s policies are far more likely to cancel Thanksgiving, what with him being friendly and open to opening data centers in the state. Data centers are highly unpopular in Wisconsin and Hong was the only Dem candidate willing to promise a moratorium on them like the people want. People making a big stink about “electability” or “Woke 1.0” are shifting attention away from important current day politics to nonsensical culture war distractions.

AI isn’t real, but it’s gonna ruin society anyway. There is absolutely zero possibility for genAI to develop intelligence because it’s just a probablistic chatbot. It doesn’t know anything; it’s just rolling dice to guess what word to spit out each time. A high school student who copies his friend’s calculus homework will eventually learn a little calculus. A chatbot will never learn any calculus. Claiming these genAI models will develop intelligence with better compute technology is like claiming a puppet will develop intelligence with better string technology.