Good HCR post election column

[PAL]

I do watch Fox News and Newsmax at times. As I said in another post they were going on and on about Biden's picks for his Cabinet. Who cares?
They twist things but sometimes they actually report what I call "straight news" without opinionated comments. Depends on which segment.
Overall, they still are on the attack.

[dorankj]

Stupid, willfully ignorant people watch “news” that lies and distorts truth (or ignores it completely) and still vote based on those lies! Stop absolving yourself while only condemning others.

[just-jim]

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More today from HCR……,

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.c ... er-14-2024

One excerpt:

“At the same time, a new study out today from Data for Progress showed that people who paid “a great deal” of attention to political news voted for Vice President Kamala Harris +6, while those who paid “none at all” went +19 for Trump.”

I think we knew this all along…,stupid, willfully ignorant people are voting…
.

[PAL]

Oh, those Leftists are at it again! No, where would this be coming from?

[mister_coffee]

[Rideback]

First Significant Step in trump's voiding of the Constitution. He is insisting that the Senate leader allow recess appointments. Meaning the Senate closes down for ten days to let him make all of his appointments and then they don't have to be confirmed. You heard him, Dictator on Day One. Cancel the Constitution. The Fascists are running America. they didn't need to dissolve congress It appears Congress is just gonna take the money and run.

[dorankj]

Such rubes! Maybe you’re furthering lies that nobody believes but your own tiny group echo chambers.

[mister_coffee]

But when I read that Google searches for "Project 2025" and "Trump tariffs" spiked after the election it is hard not to see a species of dark humor in it all.

It may be cold comfort, but I know that 99 percent of the people who voted for Trump hurt themselves far more than they will hurt me.

[PAL]

Yes, but the Dems are accused of being college educated and turned their noses up at those that are below "middle class." (The worker bees) It was the non-college educated that carried the vote and yep, they voted against their interests. Many a college educated Dem was/is a worker bee, however.
If the Dems are so smart, why didn't they win? (rhetorical here)
No bending at the knee. People really will rise up against oppression. We're seeing it all over the world now. "They" can't stop people that are oppressed. Yeah, kill them, imprinson them, but it won't stop the oppressed.

[Rideback]

As Tim Snyder notes in his rule of fascism: Don't bend a knee before you're asked.
Giving up is not an option.

The day after the election I was talked with someone in town. She proudly told me she'd voted for Trump. I asked why and she replied: 'because THAT LADY (she apparently didn't know our sitting VP's name) went on stage and told us that she was going to raise our taxes to pay for all her stuff'

When I corrected her she was startled and said, I didn't know that. But I guess we're screwed no matter who we vote for.

The many levels of ignorance on her statement haunts me. She had no idea that she'd voted against her own interests based on a lie. She didn't even know the name of THAT LADY.

That's the problem. Ignorance.

[pasayten]

Ray, we have elections in 2026 where there will be a chance to take the House and the Senate.

Then that will drive a successful performance even more….

[Rideback]

Ray, we have elections in 2026 where there will be a chance to take the House and the Senate.

[PAL]

Now vee vait. Following is a good, concise over view of what Trumps visions are, and how it could really be. It's not a doom and gloom report.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/gK6MD_8S01o?autoplay=1

[pasayten]

Well the trumpsters and their followers won big time... President, senate, and most likely the house. They have up to 4 years of mostly uncontested governing to prove their policies and themselves correct for the direction of the country. I do hope that the USA will be a better place to live by 2028. We shall see...

[PAL]

Thanks, good article.

[just-jim]

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https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.c ... ber-8-2024

Social media has been flooded today with stories of Trump voters who are shocked to learn that tariffs will raise consumer prices as reporters are covering that information. Daniel Laguna of LevelUp warned that Trump’s proposed 60% tariff on Chinese imports could raise the costs of gaming consoles by 40%, so that a PS5 Pro gaming system would cost up to $1,000. One of the old justifications for tariffs was that they would bring factories home, but when the $3 billion shoe company Steve Madden announced yesterday it would reduce its imports from China by half to avoid Trump-promised tariffs, it said it will shift production not to the U.S., but to Cambodia, Vietnam, Mexico, and Brazil.

There are also stories that voters who chose Trump to lower household expenses are unhappy to discover that their undocumented relatives are in danger of deportation. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked Indiana Republican senator-elect Jim Banks if undocumented immigrants who had been here for a long time and integrated into the community would be deported, Banks answered that deportation should include “every illegal in this country that we can find.” Yesterday a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a policy established by the Biden administration that was designed to create an easier path to citizenship for about half a million undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens.

Meanwhile, Trump’s advisors told Jim VandeHei and MIke Allen of Axios that Trump wasted valuable time at the beginning of his first term and that they will not make that mistake again. They plan to hit the ground running with tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, deregulation, and increased gas and oil production. Trump is looking to fill the top ranks of the government with “billionaires, former CEOs, tech leaders and loyalists.”

After the election, the wealth of Trump-backer Elon Musk jumped about $13 billion, making him worth $300 billion. Musk, who has been in frequent contact with Russian president Vladimir Putin, joined a phone call today between President-elect Trump and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky.

In Salon today, Amanda Marcotte noted that in states all across the country where voters backed Trump, they also voted for abortion rights, higher minimum wage, paid sick and family leave, and even to ban employers from forcing their employees to sit through right-wing or anti-union meetings. She points out that 12% of voters in Missouri voted both for abortion rights and for Trump.

Marcotte recalled that Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them. An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats. Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends and family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters put it: “We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.”

In The New Republic today, Michael Tomasky reinforced that voters chose Trump in 2024 not because of the economy or inflation, or anything else, but because of how they perceived those issues—which is not the same thing. Right-wing media “fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win,” Tomasky wrote. Right-wing media has overtaken legacy media to set the country’s political agenda not only because it’s bigger, but because it speaks with one voice, “and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.”

Tomasky noted how the work of Matthew Gertz of Media Matters shows that nearly all the crazy memes that became central campaign issues—the pet-eating story, for example, or the idea that the booming economy was terrible—came from right-wing media. In those circles, Vice President Kamala Harris was a stupid, crazed extremist who orchestrated a coup against President Joe Biden and doesn’t care about ordinary Americans, while Trump is under assault and has been for years, and he’s “doing it all for you.”

Investigative reporter Miranda Green outlined how “pink slime” newspapers, which are AI generated from right-wing sites, turned voters to Trump in key swing state counties. Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, who studies focus groups, told NPR, “When I ask voters in focus groups if they think Donald Trump is an authoritarian, the #1 response by far is, ‘What is an authoritarian?’”

In a social media post, Marcotte wrote: “A lot of voters are profoundly ignorant. More so than in the past.” That jumped out to me because there was, indeed, an earlier period in our history when voters were “pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.”

In the 1850s, white southern leaders made sure that voters did not have access to news that came from outside the American South, and instead steeped them in white supremacist information. They stopped the mail from carrying abolitionist pamphlets, destroyed presses of antislavery newspapers, and drove antislavery southerners out of their region.

Elite enslavers had reason to be concerned about the survival of their system of human enslavement. The land boom of the 1840s, when removal of Indigenous peoples had opened up rich new lands for settlement, had priced many white men out of the market. They had become economically unstable, roving around the country working for wages or stealing to survive. And they deeply resented the fabulously wealthy enslavers who they knew looked down on them.

In 1857, North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper wrote a book attacking enslavement. No friend to his Black neighbors, Helper was a virulent white supremacist. But in The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, he used modern statistics to prove that slavery destroyed economic opportunity for white men, and assailed “the illbreeding and ruffianism of the slaveholding officials.” He noted that voters in the South who did not own slaves outnumbered by far those who did. "Give us fair play, secure to us the right of discussion, the freedom of speech, and we will settle the difficulty at the ballot-box,” he wrote.

In the North the book sold like hotcakes—142,000 copies by fall 1860. But southern leaders banned the book, and burned it, too. They arrested men for selling it and accused northerners of making war on the South. Politicians, newspaper editors, and ministers reinforced white supremacy, warned that the end of slavery would mean race war, and preached that enslavement was God’s law.

When northern voters elected Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 on a platform of containing enslavement in the South, where the sapped soil would soon cut into production, southern leaders decided—usually without the input of voters—to secede from the Union. As leaders promised either that there wouldn’t be a fight, or that if a fight happened it would be quick and painless, poor southern whites rallied to the cause of creating a nation based on white supremacy, reassured by South Carolina senator James Chesnut’s vow that he would personally drink all the blood shed in any threatened civil war.

When Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, poor white men set out for what they had come to believe was an imperative cause to protect their families and their way of life. By 1862 their enthusiasm had waned, and leaders passed a conscription law. That law permitted wealthy men to hire a substitute and exempted one man to oversee every 20 enslaved men, providing another way for rich men to keep their sons out of danger. Soldiers complained it was a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”

By 1865 the Civil War had killed or wounded 483,026 men out of a southern white population of about five and a half million people. U.S. armies had pushed families off their lands, and wartime inflation drove ordinary people to starvation. By 1865, wives wrote to their soldier husbands to come home or there would be no one left to come home to.

Even those poor white men who survived the war could not rebuild into prosperity. The war took from the South its monopoly of global cotton production, locking poor southerners into profound poverty from which they would not begin to recover until the 1930s, when the New Deal began to pour federal money into the region.

Today, when I received a slew of messages gloating that Trump had won the election and that Republican voters had owned the libs, I could not help but think of that earlier era when ordinary white men sold generations of economic aspirations for white supremacy and bragging rights.



This is appropriate, I think…
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