A Left Wing Cannot Flap Alone, Which Is Why We Needed Dick Cheney's Endorsement

[Dark Jaguar]

I suppose I'm lucky. My family are all pretty firmly liberal, grew up watching Bill Maher (good god has he fallen from grace, though - his recent sane-washing of Trump was enough for us to ditch him). My mother's side of the family are all also mostly Democrat, save for a cousin who loves Trump. We usually just don't bring up politics on our yearly visits.

I've got a couple of friends I grew up with who, for reasons I will never understand, love Trump. It's really bizarre - one of them excoriated the Song of Ice and Fire book series, insisting to me that they were offensive to her as a woman. Years later, she's posting Trump's inauguration speech, saying how inspirational he is. She's also an evangelical Christian tradwife who's on like her sixth child. So it's not completely out of nowhere, but again, I don't understand these people's philosophy.

The other fell down some antivax rabbit holes and loves RFK Jr. He's just icing on the cake, though: she voted for Trump twice before 2024. It's really bizarre, because she otherwise seems like an intelligent, well-read, well-reasoned, charitable, open-minded person - not racist or homophobic. She's always been a Republican, or libertarian, whatever, but Trump?

I'm just completely perplexed in what these people see in him. I've earnestly tried to keep an open mind and see things from their perspective, listened to what they had to say. One of them linked this Cracked piece which honestly helped a lot. But I'll never 100% get there. 

I really want to know what they think of him now, after everything that's happened, but I refuse to have a conversation about it. It's just going to make my blood boil. I don't keep in touch with the first friend, and the second friend, if politics comes up, I just try to be deferential and steer things to common ground. There's no point in losing friends/family to politics (for me personally, at least). I've made that mistake before.

I think one key factor here is... the liberals don't have the answers to our problems.  They just aren't willing to go far enough to actually do what's needed, waffling about how they are focused on things like "making health insurance available", which you will note... it always has been, it just isn't AFFORDABLE.  They're too in bed with the donors funding their campaigns to want to rock the boat.  It's old school Thatcherism.  Just remember all the times liberals would speak out against gay people (including Obama and Hillary), only to have a "change of heart" the very instant public opinion was deemed to have shifted enough, but they'll only do that for things that don't threaten the bottom line.

So, the republicans promise THEY'LL fix everyone's actual problems.  They make them far far worse, and they create brand new problems instead.  We're in a state where there's a lot of people who vote for "the other one this time", nothing changes, and next cycle, they vote for "the other one this time".

You'll note I'm talking about a whole lot of different groups of people and their mindsets, but it all feeds into the Trump fundamentalist, who doesn't live in a vacuum, just a semi-isolated information silo.  They do GET visions of the outside world, filtered down through their social media feeds, and so they see some of this and it feeds their decision to worship this one golden man.

Bill Mayer's turn makes complete sense as well, when seen from the outside.  He supported his OWN status quo, the one he grew up in, fed this notion that the US had already solved all the major problems.  The man literally believes there isn't a problem with poverty in the US because he didn't see any poor people outside his LIMO driving in the rich side of town.

That's why I've shifted so far left over the years.  I don't consider myself an extremist, certainly not a violent one, but I understand that by U.S. politics, I am very far left.  By global politics, liberals, the leadership of the democratic party, are firm centrists.  The dream that a semi-free market and merely regulating against active discrimination would solve all our issues, but that dream hasn't been realized.  Corporations found ways around all of that stuff, and of course, they've never been our friends either.  Why did Target SUDDENLY turn against black people and the LGBTQIA alliance?  It's because they were never on their side in the first place.  They sided with the money, and that's it.  It's why Cracker Barrel changed their logo.  It's why Land O Lakes got rid of their mascot.  That's the only reason they make any decision.  Oh, and as to that Cracker Barrel thing?  That one's hilarious to me, because I LIKE their old logo.  No one I knew found anything offensive about it whatsoever.  They didn't even change it to appeal to any sort of progressive values.  They literally did it for the same reason every company has been sand blasting their logos into generic bland versions of their old symbols.  Just look at what Mozilla did to their Firefox logo.  All the identifiable details are brushed away into a generic hint of the original intent, like they're almost embarrassed at having an identifiable animal and planet in their logo.  That's why Cracker Barrel did it, and you got a whole bunch of weirdos screaming about "wokeness" or whatever.  But, back to my point, corporations make these choices to appeal to the widest audience and gain the most money, so of course they will ALWAYS go full racist if they think it'll be the biggest boon to their profits.  If they thought they could get away with it, they'd sell snuff films in Target.  That's just the reality.  They, like all gigantic corporations, are MERCENARY.  Sometimes more literally.  Walmart's got no problem selling guns in their sporting goods section for example.  They got rat poison in the same aisle as their candy, because they know how ridiculously oversugared their treats are and don't have an issue selling it.

They sold vapes to kids right up until the moment a law was passed restricting that, and of course now we know just how deadly vaping actually is... except the upcoming zoomers and alphas are already coming up with the same defensive attitudes about it that my grandparents and parents did for smoking...  "Well, those studies are biased and we should wait for ALL the evidence", you know, lines they got FROM advertising reps hiding around online, and that's not even a secret.  These companies are open about spreading their propaganda through "unique channels" like engaging with the youth online.

Sorry, I'm getting off track here.  Back onto my point, when you have the motive, you can predict the result.  I'm rarely surprised these days, once I realized just what motivates a lot of people and institutions.  You want to find someone honest?  Find someone who's got a motive to BE honest.  Find someone who doesn't take donations from corporations.  They are RARE, but they exist.

With that said, survival is also a good motivator, and right now, there are a lot of democrats worried about whether or not they might just be executed right now.  MSNBC had a very VERY late moment of finally acknowledging the death of democracy in our country, long after the experts who'd been warning us on the signs of fascism for years had already fled the country, and they're starting to see just what's at state, such as their own lives, and that seems to push out concerns of funding so more and more are actively calling Trump the dictator he is at this point.