A very cogent piece. Thank you. The Biden years put us on a track toward less income inequality, and a Harris administration would no doubt have continued that course. But that has now been halted by this kakistocracy. And it looks like it will be another four years before a change in administration can even begin to move the ship of state back to that course. The changes that would get those curves to trend upwards will not be made; we'll be lucky if the situation does not worsen to the point of open revolt. Four years? I give us four months.
Tomorrow's Congressional address will be something to see, but I'm going to watch Timothy Snyder instead, and get the recap from MSNBC after all the shouting is over. I do not have enough antacid in the house.
I'm going to have to read your piece a couple more times. Thank you for your analysis.
And did the propaganda outlet, MSNBC, cover the Congressional address to your satisfaction? Did it show the Dems with their silly auction signs violating decorum, and acting like petulant children?
You might might want to turn that garbage off, and get out into the real world.
And you might want to hold off on your lazy unfounded kakistocracy insults, until after you look in the mirror.
All solid ideas ... My question is this: In the current media environment how can any of this ever penetrate any outside the various substacks here? The trumpets are consistently bombarded with Democracy= Demon..
The Republicans have mastered manipulation and propaganda. I think first we to figure out how to pop the bubble....
Exactly. Democrats keep focusing on changing the message and never focus on building a new MESSAGE DELIVERY SYSTEM. See my other post.
It could be car stickers because they repeat over and over and are inexpensive. Make the messages simple and not obnoxious and removable so people will use them. https://wedidntwantthis.com. It could be a new communication system based on the 2 way communication of the internet because Democrats want to be heard. Silo Bridge.
Many Democrats will have better ideas. But DEMOCRATS NEED A NEW MESSAGE DELIVERY SYSTEM.
(1) Open borders and infinite illegal immigration.
(2) Men are women, even in changing rooms and sports.
(3) USAID fraud and corruption is good because 2% of it went to a noble causes.
(4) It is OK to politically prosecute your opposition using obviously gross lies.
(5) The people censoring ideas they don't like - are the good guys.
(6) The middle class should have to pay for the poor decisions of grievance-studies college majors, so that Democrats can blatantly buy more votes.
(7) Racism like affirmative action and DEI is not racism - even though it clearly is.
And it is the message SYSTEM and not the messages that are the problem?
I don't think so. I think the left just didn't scream their moral superiority at the normals loudly enough. You should have called me a racist 104 times - not 97. That would have won me over.
Some of these points are simply very nasty ways of arguing for or against positions that reasonable people can hold. I can debate immigration policy with you all day if you want me to, and I will happily agree with you that censorship is bad (with narrow exceptions, such as libel and fraudulent advertising) and that there are DEI programs that have become fairly ridiculous, although we probably draw the line at different places.
(And can we call a truce on language policing? I've seen plenty of it from both the left and the right. I'll tell the people who complain when someone says "pregnant woman" instead of "pregnant person" to shut up, and you tell the people who complain when people say "pregnant person" instead of "pregnancy woman" to shut up. Deal?)
Others are actually complete bullshit. Specifically, no, there really isn't a huge pile of "fraud and corruption" at USAID, and Trump was being prosecuted because *he really did break the law in some pretty blatant ways.* The people who are telling you otherwise are either deliberately lying or repeating what a liar told them.
So forgive me if I find it hard to believe that you're arguing in good faith here...
"I'll tell the people who complain when someone says "pregnant woman" instead of "pregnant person" to shut up, and you tell the people who complain when people say "pregnant person" instead of "pregnancy woman" to shut up. Deal?"
(A) Normal language for roughly 200 years or more.
(B) Invented, forced, and heavily leftist coded, language for roughly 5 years.
You: B is just as good as A. Deal?
Me: No. Not REMOTELY equivalent.
Me: How about this? Let's allow (A) transgender and (B) mentally ill - to be equivalent language constructs. Deal?
I can see why my proposal won't fly, ever.
But you, honestly, thought you were being centrist.
It displays massive arrogance, and cluelessness, and lack of empathy to not even be able to begin to see where other people are coming from.
There's someone in this thread who has displayed massive arrogance and cluelessness, and lack of empathy" by assuming that anything beyond their own perspective is radical and abnormal. I don't think it was Doug, though.
Language changes. "Negro" and "colored person" was also normal language for a long time. (As far as I know, the other N-word was always an insult.) As were "moron", "idiot", "mentally retarded", and "cripple". In the 1990s people complained about "political correctness" instead of "wokeness". It's the same shit, different decade. If you're going to keep up the fight, well, good luck with that. :P
It is puzzling why Dem party has not understood this and put money into that versus big ads. In part they are academia influenced and not salespeople who are used to merchandising stuff. Look at thebackgrounds of those in leadership positions. maybe not so puzzling afterall.
The closer I got to candidates and political strategists, the more I realized this is job and a networking opportunity for them. That is not a bad thing but its not the same mindset as me who's primary focus is on the political issue.
They focus on the issue, but also their paycheck and their next job or consulting gig. It's probably a lot easier to sell a candidate (employer) on some enhanced version of the same playbook, than a totally new playbook.
It would be easier to sell the candidate on the idea that a different message is what is needed because that is what has always been done before. It would be hard to sell the candidate on a concept that says the message is not nearly as important as the message delivery system. "Boss, forget about the message and focus on a new message delivery system". Tougher sell.
And then add to that calculation, that the primary billionaire donors who are paying all the party leaders and political strategists what something out of the game also. What billionaires want is probably pretty different than what I want.
Covid could not possibly have been developed in a Chinese lab.
Children need covid shots.
Cloth masks will substantially reduce covid spread.
I won't pardon Hunter.
Blasey Ford wasn't a giant obvious Dem plant and blatant liar.
Jussie Smollet was a victim of a hate crime.
Hunter laptop was a Russian disinformation campaign.
Elizabeth Warren is a Native American.
George Floyd didn't overdose even though the coroners report said he did, until it was re-issued for no good reason.
The 2020 riots were "mostly peaceful" while only 24 people died.
1/6 was an "insurrection" even though not a single person was ever charged with that, and they were charged with all sort of crap the S.C. struck down as farcical.
The polar ice caps will be gone by 2013 - Al Gore.
The only possible way to stop the flood of illegals in 9/2024 was by passing a crrp amnesty bill - but magically by 2/2025 - it wasn't necessary.
USAID funding of transgender operas in Peru are not an indication of fraud and waste and a politically corrupted and insane bureaucracy.
etc...
When you try to do this back to me, you are going to make up a list things that you incorrectly think I believe are true, but which I don't.
Leftist ignorance of conservatives is infinitely deep.
Under current law, someone can turn themselves in to the Border Patrol and say they want to apply for asylum, and they can't actually be deported until their asylum case is taken care of. And there are far too few immigration judges compared with the number of people filing asylum claims to actually take care of these cases in a reasonable length of time. Yes, there are things the President can do about it anyway, but this particular problem is a mess that Congress caused and it's Congress's responsibility, not the President's, to fix it.
> Covid could not possibly have been developed in a Chinese lab.
Could Covid have been a naturally occurring virus that originally existed in some cave somewhere until someone took a sample from that cave to a lab in Wuhan that happened to have the virus in it, where it then infected people before the Wuhan lab became aware that the virus even existed? Maybe.
Was Covid a virus genetically engineered by humans? Hell no.
> Even if WIV did try to create COVID, they couldn’t have. As Yuri said, COVID looks like BANAL-52 plus a furin cleavage site. But WIV didn’t have BANAL-52. It wasn’t discovered until after the COVID pandemic started, when scientists scoured the area for potential COVID relatives. WIV had a more distant COVID relative, RATG-13. But you can’t create COVID from RATG-13; they’re too different. You would need BANAL-52, or some as-yet-undiscovered extremely close relative. WIV had neither.
>
> Are we sure they had neither? Yes. Remember, WIV’s whole job was looking for new coronaviruses. They published lists of which ones they had found pretty regularly. They published their last list in mid-2019, just a few months before the pandemic. Although lab leak proponents claimed these lists showed weird discrepancies, this was just their inability to keep names consistent, and all the lists showed basically the same viruses (plus a few extra on the later ones, as they kept discovering more). The lists didn’t include BANAL-52 or any other suitable COVID relatives - only RATG-13, which isn’t close enough to work.
>
> Could they have been keeping their discovery of BANAL-52 secret? No. Pre-pandemic, there was nothing interesting about it; our understanding of virology wasn’t good enough to point this out as a potential pandemic candidate. WIV did its gain-of-function research openly and proudly (before the pandemic, gain-of-function wasn’t as unpopular as it is now) so it’s not like they wanted to keep it secret because they might gain-of-function it later. Their lists very clearly showed they had no virus they could create COVID from, and they had no reason to hide it if they did.
>
> COVID’s furin cleavage site is admittedly unusual. But it’s unusual in a way that looks natural rather than man-made. Labs don’t usually add furin cleavage sites through nucleotide insertions (they usually mutate what’s already there). On the other hand, viruses get weird insertions of 12+ nucleotides in nature. For example, HKU1 is another emergent Chinese coronavirus that caused a small outbreak of pneumonia in 2004. It had a 15 nucleotide insertion right next to its furin cleavage site. Later strains of COVID got further 12 - 15 nucleotide insertions. Plenty of flus have 12 to 15 nucleotide insertions compared to other earlier flu strains.
>
> Sometimes insertions happen because of a mistake in viral replication. Other times the virus gets confused between its own RNA and its host’s, and splices a bit of the host RNA into the virus. This would neatly explain why the insertion used the unusual coding CGG for arginine, which is common in animals but rare in viruses. On the other hand, it’s not that rare in viruses - COVID uses CGG for arginine about 3% of the time. And human engineers don’t necessarily use it any more than that - Peter was able to find one example of humans adding arginine to a virus, and 0 out of the 5 arginines added were CGG.
>
> COVID’s furin cleavage site is a mess. When humans are inserting furin cleavage sites into viruses for gain-of-function, the standard practice is RRKR, a very nice and simple furin cleavage site which works well. COVID uses PRRAR, a bizarre furin cleavage site which no human has ever used before, and which virologists expected to work poorly. They later found that an adjacent part of COVID’s genome twisted the protein in an unusual way that allowed PRRAR to be a viable furin cleavage site, but this discovery took a lot of computer power, and was only made after COVID became important. The Wuhan virologists supposedly doing gain-of-function research on COVID shouldn’t have known this would work. Why didn’t they just use the standard RRKR site, which would have worked better? Everyone thinks it works better! Even the virus eventually decided it worked better - sometime during the course of the pandemic, it mutated away from its weird PRRAR furin cleavage site towards a more normal form.
>
> Further, COVID’s furin cleavage site was inserted via what seems to be a frameshift mutation - it wasn’t a clean insertion of the amino acids that formed the site, it was an insertion of a sequence which changed the context of the surrounding nucleotides into the amino acids that formed the site. This is a pointless too-clever-by-half “flourish” that there would be no reason for a human engineer to do. But it’s exactly the kind of weird thing that happens in the random chance of evolution.
> 1/6 was an "insurrection" even though not a single person was ever charged with that, and they were charged with all sort of crap the S.C. struck down as farcical.
Well, it's hard to prove the formal legal definition of insurrection in a court of law, but for informal usage the events of 1/6 came close enough, and several leaders of the Proud Boys were indeed charged and convicted of the similar crime of "seditious conspiracy".
Wow what a list of grievances! Some of these are so minor and petty I can't even recall what it is about them that you're so resentful about.
I'd love to hear what you're assuming others will claim "incorrectly" about your beliefs. You included long lists of grievances in multiple posts in which you imply quite a few dubious beliefs. So far all I can tell is that you're angry at everyone who doesn't think just like you, and you somehow think this is the venue for finally getting your "point" across.
First time I heard of him is when he was accused of having staged one. I don't think anyone continued to insist that the attack was real after he was indicted for filing a false police report.
Maybe they don't absolutely need them, but it's still a good idea. Children don't "need" flu shots either, but if a child does happen to get exposed to the flu, they'll be better off if they've gotten the shot than if they didn't, and they'll also have less of an opportunity to pass it on to others. Japan makes the annual flu vaccine mandatory for all schoolchildren because even though the flu isn't usually that dangerous to children, vaccinating them does reduce the spread of the flu to more vulnerable people (such as those children's grandparents).
So, yeah, get your kids vaccinated against both Covid and seasonal influenza.
I'll give you half credit for this one. Russia helped Trump pretty much on its own; nobody found anything especially solid linking the Trump campaign to the Russian "assistance". The problem is that, although (as far as I can tell) Trump didn't actually break any laws during the campaign, during the investigation he acted very much like someone with something to hide and ended up doing things that, if he were not President, could very well have led to him being charged with the crime of obstruction of justice.
There was absolutely "collusion". between the campaign and Russian sources. This included sharing polling data, colluding on the release of Wikileaks documents, etc. The problem is that "collusion" wasn't a crime. It didn't involve criminal conspiracy, so it wasn't illegal. Pretending it didn't happen is silly.
(And by the way, using the "Steele Dossier" as the evidence that it was a "hoax" is silly too. That report was always presented as raw unvetted intelligence. And it was never officially released by any politico. It was leaked through Buzzfeed. It was never intended as 100% true claims, though many things in it turned out to be true.)
Excellent analysis! I vote for "Forgotten Majority," as that takes into account the grievance and the sympathy. I also think that changes cannot be made w/o tax reform. Amazon paid no taxes last year on $11 billion profit.
Amazon passes every single cent of the taxes it pays, or doesn't pay, on to its customers.
It makes an 8% profit no matter what.
So, that failed leftist solution of taxing Amazon more, just taxes the middle class more.
"More taxes on magic money springs that don't actually exist" has failed relentlessly forever. And still leftists repeat it and think they are rocket scientists.
There's no way for you to determine if "Amazon passes every single cent of the taxes it pays, or doesn't pay [?], on to its customers.
Unless the elasticity of demand for Amazon's goods is perfectly inelastic, it's unlikely that Amazon can pass on all the taxes it pays. Tax obligations are based on aggregate net income (i.e. profit) which isn't known until well after the prices have been set and the goods have been sold.
Thank you for this piece, Kathleen. It cleared up a question I often asked myself: Why are people so despondent if statistics show that real wages keep on rising? The graphics you posted show: Yes, they are rising, but only for a certain group of people, the college-educated professional managerial class, who are in the minority. These are the people that the Democratic party catered to in the last years, especially in messaging and culture and this message does not really land with a large group of the electorate, especially young heterosexual white men among them. These are the people Democrats need to win back in order to win national elections again. I'm not sure that they have got the message and adjusted accordingly, but I really hope they do, or they will hand the Republicans a majority for the foreseeable future.
considering the shitshow that fascist AmeriKKa's educational system currently is, such a revamp in education will require a HUGE shift in social and corporate policies, economics, curricula and especially in teaching philosophies. the lag time between the decision to implement such sweeping changes and the time when society sees the benefits is something that i doubt most people will tolerate.
This is an excellent assessment of the American economic condition and the fever dreams it has created.
Senators Chris Murphy and Elizabeth Warren would align with your thinking. Warren has been VERY vocal about this for years.
Tonight, Murphy and others like Schatz and Markey will hold a "rebuttal" on MoveOn.org.
Murphy has called for Democrats to claim a banner of economic fairness. Economic Justice can be the center pole for a tent to house people with many views.
I am all in for your job reeducation program. But I am also in favor of a clearly defined new Democratic tax plan that fairly taxes the rich and corporations. And...killing the cap on Social Security. NO CAP. Same percentage on ALL income. And...kill the carried interest scam. See Patriotic Millionaires for details.
This is a substantive window on reality, Kathleen. Your simple charts tell the story in a way almost anyone could understand in a glance. This description of our reality could be widely used as a launch point for realistic consideration of our plight and development of strategies to reverse the path we are on. Thank you for distilling the message to its essence. Now it is up to all of us who care to amplify and spread this insight as motivation to do what we can to elect leaders who will do something constructive about it.
I will be sharing this among my circle of contacts with this basic message: "Here is our reality. Let's use it to put candidates on the spot to tell us what they intend to do about it. Then vote accordingly." Batters up in less than two years!
I read recently somewhere on Substack that Germany has been supporting education for the trades and still has a vital manufacturing sector. The U.S. went in the direction of technology. For my dad, the GI bill got him into the boom times of cold war defense. But other vets went to work in the factories that their children could no longer rely on for a good living due to cheap Asian labor.
Sometimes I wonder if the British part of our cultural legacy predisposed us to underestimation of the value of educating for manual skills, along with the hands-on math and English that could easily go along with these.
But ultimately it’s going take some kind of economic carrots and sticks to prod American business (and international firms doing business here) to give employees their fair share.
Thank you for writing this. It is refreshing to see people begin to think outside the Democrat box. Substack is a great venue for new ideas and I hope to see them become more mainstream. I didn’t subject myself to watching the 100 minute, “I am so awesome and you Dems are total frauds” speech last night. I already have PTSD from too much Trump these days. He is going to alienate more and more people with his misinformation and economic insanity.
I do like Flyover Majority. It is a very visual metaphor. I have flown across this country many times. There is so much of this country we east and west coasters don't really relate to. It’s time to pay attention.
!OO%, Kathleen. Why? As the Dem strategist Dan Pfeiffer put it a few days after the election, the reason the Dems lost in ’24 is the Dem brand. For the working class, that reads as the Dems don’t care about people like them. Your free and supported lifetime job training policy is exactly the right move to show them the system is no longer rigged against them. The only sticky wicket I see is how AI will reduce future jobs.
My vote for a name is the Post-Industrial Majority. Not because it’s a good name – it isn’t, it’s much too academic – but because this is the cause of the decline in US men’s weekly wages and the “slow but steady immiseration since 198O” as you put it. It is the answer to the 7O% that feel there is some dynamic making it all but impossible to get ahead – IF you don’t have a college degree, that is. The decline of good paying manufacturing/industrial jobs, with benefits, raises, and steady employment that didn’t require a college education, that made you good marriage material – that’s the post-Industrial reality.
This has been known for decades, at least since the 9Os when I worked in IT. Why the Democrats have NOT yet taken up this remedy to this reality mystifies me.
Also agree that ALL wages should be subject to payroll deduction. [Now I’m curious as to the reasoning behind that limit.]
At the time the limit was imposed, it helped make SS look more like an insurance program and less like a wealth redistribution program. Just as you paid a fixed amount to buy a retirement annuity.
Also, back then Social Security benefits were quite modest, so that making the well off pay a large chunk of their earnings meant it would obviously not function like an insurance program.
Thanks for the article. I saw one of your comments on Noahpinion and came to check out yours. I've been reading a lot of economic thoughts and started reading Noah because of links from Brad Delong. I feel like Noah misses quite a few things, and I feel like this captures a big part of the story that he seems to miss. Why do people feel like their lives are getting worse? From your charts you can see that their lives are indeed getting worse. So, they have reason to feel pessimistic. I know you went into much more than this, but if you can't even get a solid understanding of the situation, you will not be able to make valuable contributions on how to fix things. Even Noah's assumption that a person should expect to see his lifestyle improve four-fold in his/her lifetime is unsupportable. I assume that he believes this because real per capita GDP growth is about two percent. If I do a quick look at real per capita median income growth on Fred, I see about 0.8 percent growth. Less than half of what he is saying. If I look at real per capita median household income, I see about the same. I like that you break it out even further into regions. If I were one of the people living in those regions with even worse growth and I couldn't or didn't want to leave, I would feel pretty bad too. Why support someone who says you are doing great?
How about refocusing MAGA to define what it should REALLY be . . . REALLY MAGA. REALLY Make America Great Again -- Rmaga (emphasis on R and not on MAGA). Not this false trump MAGA. Let us return to when:
truth mattered
science meant something
the Golden Rule ruled
manners were respected
teamwork didn’t just apply to those who thought like us
we fought for justice for all people
we respected the law
everyone lives by the same rules
we treated friends (allies) friendly
Let’s add to this list and turn the tables. Let’s show who REALLY wants to make America Great.
I don't think it's a positioning of "I'm right and you're wrong" to emphasize what it is that we have lost. The (in many cases) norms that have been broken.
MAGA is not emphasizing the other side of these aspects; it is their actions that have caused these aspects to be crushed. In turn, we need to emphasize that these aspects are important. I expect the majority of American's agree with them. We are being brought down by the vocal minority. It is time for the majority to vocalize what we want back.
Biden recognized the forgotten group and made advances like the infrastructure act and the CHIPs act. You acknowledged it but then passed over it because the effect was not immediate.
Hillary Clinton also recognized it. Both Clinton and Biden stressed retraining and the need to bring good non college jobs to the US.
The Democrats are doing what you suggest already. The problem isn't the message, it's the message delivery system. I've harped on this many times.
Democrats do great things for the US people and it's in the NYT for a couple days and goes away. The Republicans talk about nonsense like CRT or WOKE, that will help absolutely no-one, and their message is repeated over and over, day after day and month after month.
It starts on Fox News and conservative radio. People listen to these stations all day long, literally. Then the mainstream media picks it up and we talk about it more.
The messages are designed by Republican billionaires and delivered by Republican billionaire media outlets.
Democrats need to stop focusing on the message and start developing a new message delivery system. I suspect it will be based on the 2 way communication capability of the internet. Democrats need to call out the billionaires creating and delivering the message and start a campaign against them.
My suggestions are removable car stickers because they repeat over and over and are inexpensive and internet 2 way communication because Democrats need to be heard. https://billionairessuck.me for billionaire stickers and I'm also working on a concept called Silo Bridge that would be a way for internet groups to discuss between each other.
I'm sure there are much better ideas, but focusing on the message is worthless if you don't have a way to deliver that message over and over, all day long, all month long, all year long. DEMOCRATS NEED A NEW MESSAGE DELIVERY SYSTEM.
Sorry Joe, but I totally agree with you that democrats have not been fighting fire with fire. I don't recommend fighting lies with lies, but like you pointed out the Democrats delivery system is outdated and not as pervasive as the Repubs' system is. They get their message out to their base (and others because they are inundated with the message) faster, better and more effectively because they are using the advantages of the internet, (un)social media, apps, etc. Too many old men and women in their ivory towers and country clubs lounging in their money pits! Those "leaders" need to start listening to their educated staff members who know these new media formats like the backs of their hands, who can help them recognize the benefits they could provide the Democratic party if used effectively, and the imminent dangers of of allowing billionaire oligarchs to control them with virtually no real U.S. or international government oversight, limits or antitrust protection!
"We just need to sell our failed terrible ideas a new way !"
"I am sure nobody will ever remember our failed prior execution, and current numerous urban failures that stare in their faces - if we just had a different SYSTEM!"
"If only people could hear our wonderful idea - they would adopt them. Well - except, for Trump, Rogan, Musk, Gabbard, RFK, and every other prior Democrat who jumped ship from our cult of hate with arrogance icing on top."
Well, it's also a matter of saying things in a way that actually makes sense to people. From over here, MAGA looks an awful lot like a cult of hate too. :(
Yes, viewed from the eyes of a leftist, anything they disagree with is fascism, and "a threat to OUR DemocracyTM", and bigotry, and a cult.
We are well aware that leftist struggle with things like reality (men are not women) and common sense (flooding a country with uneducated immigrants and unvetted criminal is a massive burden and socially disruptive).
I am not remotely surprised by your stats. You on the other hand will be apoplectic when you learn that most homicides per person is most directly correlated with the black or American Indian percentage of the population of a state.
And within any state, homicide rates correlate even more closely with Dem governance.
NYC is not safe at all. Just because the murder and rape is not prosecuted, or reported to the FBI any more) does not make it safer there.
Everybody else has moved well past the lame leftist talking points you eagerly swallowed in high school from your indoctrinators. Up your game, or lose.
A very cogent piece. Thank you. The Biden years put us on a track toward less income inequality, and a Harris administration would no doubt have continued that course. But that has now been halted by this kakistocracy. And it looks like it will be another four years before a change in administration can even begin to move the ship of state back to that course. The changes that would get those curves to trend upwards will not be made; we'll be lucky if the situation does not worsen to the point of open revolt. Four years? I give us four months.
Tomorrow's Congressional address will be something to see, but I'm going to watch Timothy Snyder instead, and get the recap from MSNBC after all the shouting is over. I do not have enough antacid in the house.
I'm going to have to read your piece a couple more times. Thank you for your analysis.
And did the propaganda outlet, MSNBC, cover the Congressional address to your satisfaction? Did it show the Dems with their silly auction signs violating decorum, and acting like petulant children?
You might might want to turn that garbage off, and get out into the real world.
And you might want to hold off on your lazy unfounded kakistocracy insults, until after you look in the mirror.
All solid ideas ... My question is this: In the current media environment how can any of this ever penetrate any outside the various substacks here? The trumpets are consistently bombarded with Democracy= Demon..
The Republicans have mastered manipulation and propaganda. I think first we to figure out how to pop the bubble....
Exactly. Democrats keep focusing on changing the message and never focus on building a new MESSAGE DELIVERY SYSTEM. See my other post.
It could be car stickers because they repeat over and over and are inexpensive. Make the messages simple and not obnoxious and removable so people will use them. https://wedidntwantthis.com. It could be a new communication system based on the 2 way communication of the internet because Democrats want to be heard. Silo Bridge.
Many Democrats will have better ideas. But DEMOCRATS NEED A NEW MESSAGE DELIVERY SYSTEM.
The messages you want to send are something like:
(1) Open borders and infinite illegal immigration.
(2) Men are women, even in changing rooms and sports.
(3) USAID fraud and corruption is good because 2% of it went to a noble causes.
(4) It is OK to politically prosecute your opposition using obviously gross lies.
(5) The people censoring ideas they don't like - are the good guys.
(6) The middle class should have to pay for the poor decisions of grievance-studies college majors, so that Democrats can blatantly buy more votes.
(7) Racism like affirmative action and DEI is not racism - even though it clearly is.
And it is the message SYSTEM and not the messages that are the problem?
I don't think so. I think the left just didn't scream their moral superiority at the normals loudly enough. You should have called me a racist 104 times - not 97. That would have won me over.
Some of these points are simply very nasty ways of arguing for or against positions that reasonable people can hold. I can debate immigration policy with you all day if you want me to, and I will happily agree with you that censorship is bad (with narrow exceptions, such as libel and fraudulent advertising) and that there are DEI programs that have become fairly ridiculous, although we probably draw the line at different places.
(And can we call a truce on language policing? I've seen plenty of it from both the left and the right. I'll tell the people who complain when someone says "pregnant woman" instead of "pregnant person" to shut up, and you tell the people who complain when people say "pregnant person" instead of "pregnancy woman" to shut up. Deal?)
Others are actually complete bullshit. Specifically, no, there really isn't a huge pile of "fraud and corruption" at USAID, and Trump was being prosecuted because *he really did break the law in some pretty blatant ways.* The people who are telling you otherwise are either deliberately lying or repeating what a liar told them.
So forgive me if I find it hard to believe that you're arguing in good faith here...
I would like to focus on this:
"I'll tell the people who complain when someone says "pregnant woman" instead of "pregnant person" to shut up, and you tell the people who complain when people say "pregnant person" instead of "pregnancy woman" to shut up. Deal?"
(A) Normal language for roughly 200 years or more.
(B) Invented, forced, and heavily leftist coded, language for roughly 5 years.
You: B is just as good as A. Deal?
Me: No. Not REMOTELY equivalent.
Me: How about this? Let's allow (A) transgender and (B) mentally ill - to be equivalent language constructs. Deal?
I can see why my proposal won't fly, ever.
But you, honestly, thought you were being centrist.
It displays massive arrogance, and cluelessness, and lack of empathy to not even be able to begin to see where other people are coming from.
There's someone in this thread who has displayed massive arrogance and cluelessness, and lack of empathy" by assuming that anything beyond their own perspective is radical and abnormal. I don't think it was Doug, though.
::shrug::
Language changes. "Negro" and "colored person" was also normal language for a long time. (As far as I know, the other N-word was always an insult.) As were "moron", "idiot", "mentally retarded", and "cripple". In the 1990s people complained about "political correctness" instead of "wokeness". It's the same shit, different decade. If you're going to keep up the fight, well, good luck with that. :P
Yo buddy , exactly right.
It is puzzling why Dem party has not understood this and put money into that versus big ads. In part they are academia influenced and not salespeople who are used to merchandising stuff. Look at thebackgrounds of those in leadership positions. maybe not so puzzling afterall.
The closer I got to candidates and political strategists, the more I realized this is job and a networking opportunity for them. That is not a bad thing but its not the same mindset as me who's primary focus is on the political issue.
They focus on the issue, but also their paycheck and their next job or consulting gig. It's probably a lot easier to sell a candidate (employer) on some enhanced version of the same playbook, than a totally new playbook.
It would be easier to sell the candidate on the idea that a different message is what is needed because that is what has always been done before. It would be hard to sell the candidate on a concept that says the message is not nearly as important as the message delivery system. "Boss, forget about the message and focus on a new message delivery system". Tougher sell.
And then add to that calculation, that the primary billionaire donors who are paying all the party leaders and political strategists what something out of the game also. What billionaires want is probably pretty different than what I want.
The man hurling insults says people who disagree with him just haven't been propagandized sufficiently.
What's the difference between propaganda, persuasion, information, bullshit, The New York Times, and Fox News?
Well propaganda is when it is not true. Like:
Russian collusion hoax.
Biden is mentally fit.
Covid could not possibly have been developed in a Chinese lab.
Children need covid shots.
Cloth masks will substantially reduce covid spread.
I won't pardon Hunter.
Blasey Ford wasn't a giant obvious Dem plant and blatant liar.
Jussie Smollet was a victim of a hate crime.
Hunter laptop was a Russian disinformation campaign.
Elizabeth Warren is a Native American.
George Floyd didn't overdose even though the coroners report said he did, until it was re-issued for no good reason.
The 2020 riots were "mostly peaceful" while only 24 people died.
1/6 was an "insurrection" even though not a single person was ever charged with that, and they were charged with all sort of crap the S.C. struck down as farcical.
The polar ice caps will be gone by 2013 - Al Gore.
The only possible way to stop the flood of illegals in 9/2024 was by passing a crrp amnesty bill - but magically by 2/2025 - it wasn't necessary.
USAID funding of transgender operas in Peru are not an indication of fraud and waste and a politically corrupted and insane bureaucracy.
etc...
When you try to do this back to me, you are going to make up a list things that you incorrectly think I believe are true, but which I don't.
Leftist ignorance of conservatives is infinitely deep.
> The only possible way to stop the flood of illegals in 9/2024 was by passing a crrp amnesty bill - but magically by 2/2025 - it wasn't necessary.
You mean that bill that Trump killed because he didn't want someone else getting the credit for doing something regarding immigration?
What? It is massively clear, that NO bill at all was required.
Biden could have had all the "credit" he wanted on that issue.
He just had to close the border.
This is a FACT.
Trump killed the amnesty bill because it was an amnesty bill.
Nobody is honestly this stupid. I don't believe it.
Under current law, someone can turn themselves in to the Border Patrol and say they want to apply for asylum, and they can't actually be deported until their asylum case is taken care of. And there are far too few immigration judges compared with the number of people filing asylum claims to actually take care of these cases in a reasonable length of time. Yes, there are things the President can do about it anyway, but this particular problem is a mess that Congress caused and it's Congress's responsibility, not the President's, to fix it.
https://www.factcheck.org/2024/02/unraveling-misinformation-about-bipartisan-immigration-bill/
And wtf lead you to believe it was an amnesty bill? As far as I can tell it would have given amnesty to exactly nobody.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/future-of-dhs/this-years-bipartisan-immigration-bill-offers-a-border-blueprint-for-2025/
> Covid could not possibly have been developed in a Chinese lab.
Could Covid have been a naturally occurring virus that originally existed in some cave somewhere until someone took a sample from that cave to a lab in Wuhan that happened to have the virus in it, where it then infected people before the Wuhan lab became aware that the virus even existed? Maybe.
Was Covid a virus genetically engineered by humans? Hell no.
An excerpt from a fifteen hour debate on Covid's origins, taken from https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim :
> Even if WIV did try to create COVID, they couldn’t have. As Yuri said, COVID looks like BANAL-52 plus a furin cleavage site. But WIV didn’t have BANAL-52. It wasn’t discovered until after the COVID pandemic started, when scientists scoured the area for potential COVID relatives. WIV had a more distant COVID relative, RATG-13. But you can’t create COVID from RATG-13; they’re too different. You would need BANAL-52, or some as-yet-undiscovered extremely close relative. WIV had neither.
>
> Are we sure they had neither? Yes. Remember, WIV’s whole job was looking for new coronaviruses. They published lists of which ones they had found pretty regularly. They published their last list in mid-2019, just a few months before the pandemic. Although lab leak proponents claimed these lists showed weird discrepancies, this was just their inability to keep names consistent, and all the lists showed basically the same viruses (plus a few extra on the later ones, as they kept discovering more). The lists didn’t include BANAL-52 or any other suitable COVID relatives - only RATG-13, which isn’t close enough to work.
>
> Could they have been keeping their discovery of BANAL-52 secret? No. Pre-pandemic, there was nothing interesting about it; our understanding of virology wasn’t good enough to point this out as a potential pandemic candidate. WIV did its gain-of-function research openly and proudly (before the pandemic, gain-of-function wasn’t as unpopular as it is now) so it’s not like they wanted to keep it secret because they might gain-of-function it later. Their lists very clearly showed they had no virus they could create COVID from, and they had no reason to hide it if they did.
>
> COVID’s furin cleavage site is admittedly unusual. But it’s unusual in a way that looks natural rather than man-made. Labs don’t usually add furin cleavage sites through nucleotide insertions (they usually mutate what’s already there). On the other hand, viruses get weird insertions of 12+ nucleotides in nature. For example, HKU1 is another emergent Chinese coronavirus that caused a small outbreak of pneumonia in 2004. It had a 15 nucleotide insertion right next to its furin cleavage site. Later strains of COVID got further 12 - 15 nucleotide insertions. Plenty of flus have 12 to 15 nucleotide insertions compared to other earlier flu strains.
>
> Sometimes insertions happen because of a mistake in viral replication. Other times the virus gets confused between its own RNA and its host’s, and splices a bit of the host RNA into the virus. This would neatly explain why the insertion used the unusual coding CGG for arginine, which is common in animals but rare in viruses. On the other hand, it’s not that rare in viruses - COVID uses CGG for arginine about 3% of the time. And human engineers don’t necessarily use it any more than that - Peter was able to find one example of humans adding arginine to a virus, and 0 out of the 5 arginines added were CGG.
>
> COVID’s furin cleavage site is a mess. When humans are inserting furin cleavage sites into viruses for gain-of-function, the standard practice is RRKR, a very nice and simple furin cleavage site which works well. COVID uses PRRAR, a bizarre furin cleavage site which no human has ever used before, and which virologists expected to work poorly. They later found that an adjacent part of COVID’s genome twisted the protein in an unusual way that allowed PRRAR to be a viable furin cleavage site, but this discovery took a lot of computer power, and was only made after COVID became important. The Wuhan virologists supposedly doing gain-of-function research on COVID shouldn’t have known this would work. Why didn’t they just use the standard RRKR site, which would have worked better? Everyone thinks it works better! Even the virus eventually decided it worked better - sometime during the course of the pandemic, it mutated away from its weird PRRAR furin cleavage site towards a more normal form.
>
> Further, COVID’s furin cleavage site was inserted via what seems to be a frameshift mutation - it wasn’t a clean insertion of the amino acids that formed the site, it was an insertion of a sequence which changed the context of the surrounding nucleotides into the amino acids that formed the site. This is a pointless too-clever-by-half “flourish” that there would be no reason for a human engineer to do. But it’s exactly the kind of weird thing that happens in the random chance of evolution.
> 1/6 was an "insurrection" even though not a single person was ever charged with that, and they were charged with all sort of crap the S.C. struck down as farcical.
Well, it's hard to prove the formal legal definition of insurrection in a court of law, but for informal usage the events of 1/6 came close enough, and several leaders of the Proud Boys were indeed charged and convicted of the similar crime of "seditious conspiracy".
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/25/us/what-is-seditious-conspiracy-insurrection-treason.html
Wow what a list of grievances! Some of these are so minor and petty I can't even recall what it is about them that you're so resentful about.
I'd love to hear what you're assuming others will claim "incorrectly" about your beliefs. You included long lists of grievances in multiple posts in which you imply quite a few dubious beliefs. So far all I can tell is that you're angry at everyone who doesn't think just like you, and you somehow think this is the venue for finally getting your "point" across.
Jeff, that guy is a troll I eventually banned from commenting. I don't think he's worth your time or attention. Thanks for reading!
> Jussie Smollet was a victim of a hate crime.
First time I heard of him is when he was accused of having staged one. I don't think anyone continued to insist that the attack was real after he was indicted for filing a false police report.
Some of the reaction to the reveal of the hoax: https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/21/politics/kamala-harris-disappointed-jussie-smollett/index.html
> Elizabeth Warren is a Native American.
Yeah, you can legitimately call bullshit on that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/elizabeth-warren-apologizes-for-calling-herself-native-american/2019/02/05/1627df76-2962-11e9-984d-9b8fba003e81_story.html
> Blasey Ford wasn't a giant obvious Dem plant and blatant liar.
[citation needed]
(It wasn't obvious to me!)
> Children need covid shots.
Maybe they don't absolutely need them, but it's still a good idea. Children don't "need" flu shots either, but if a child does happen to get exposed to the flu, they'll be better off if they've gotten the shot than if they didn't, and they'll also have less of an opportunity to pass it on to others. Japan makes the annual flu vaccine mandatory for all schoolchildren because even though the flu isn't usually that dangerous to children, vaccinating them does reduce the spread of the flu to more vulnerable people (such as those children's grandparents).
So, yeah, get your kids vaccinated against both Covid and seasonal influenza.
> George Floyd didn't overdose even though the coroners report said he did, until it was re-issued for no good reason.
https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/the-retconning-of-george-floyd-part
https://newrepublic.com/article/176956/medical-examiners-shield-violent-cops-scrutiny
> Russian collusion hoax.
I'll give you half credit for this one. Russia helped Trump pretty much on its own; nobody found anything especially solid linking the Trump campaign to the Russian "assistance". The problem is that, although (as far as I can tell) Trump didn't actually break any laws during the campaign, during the investigation he acted very much like someone with something to hide and ended up doing things that, if he were not President, could very well have led to him being charged with the crime of obstruction of justice.
There was absolutely "collusion". between the campaign and Russian sources. This included sharing polling data, colluding on the release of Wikileaks documents, etc. The problem is that "collusion" wasn't a crime. It didn't involve criminal conspiracy, so it wasn't illegal. Pretending it didn't happen is silly.
(And by the way, using the "Steele Dossier" as the evidence that it was a "hoax" is silly too. That report was always presented as raw unvetted intelligence. And it was never officially released by any politico. It was leaked through Buzzfeed. It was never intended as 100% true claims, though many things in it turned out to be true.)
> USAID funding of transgender operas in Peru are not an indication of fraud and waste and a politically corrupted and insane bureaucracy.
https://www.factcheck.org/2025/02/sorting-out-the-facts-on-waste-and-abuse-at-usaid/
I'll get back to you about more things later.
If by "current media environment" you mean cable news, my answer is no.
Great question.
Excellent analysis! I vote for "Forgotten Majority," as that takes into account the grievance and the sympathy. I also think that changes cannot be made w/o tax reform. Amazon paid no taxes last year on $11 billion profit.
Amazon passes every single cent of the taxes it pays, or doesn't pay, on to its customers.
It makes an 8% profit no matter what.
So, that failed leftist solution of taxing Amazon more, just taxes the middle class more.
"More taxes on magic money springs that don't actually exist" has failed relentlessly forever. And still leftists repeat it and think they are rocket scientists.
There's no way for you to determine if "Amazon passes every single cent of the taxes it pays, or doesn't pay [?], on to its customers.
Unless the elasticity of demand for Amazon's goods is perfectly inelastic, it's unlikely that Amazon can pass on all the taxes it pays. Tax obligations are based on aggregate net income (i.e. profit) which isn't known until well after the prices have been set and the goods have been sold.
Your rebuttal is that I didn't write a 40 page exposition carefully delineating the problem and all its delicate intricacies, so I don't have a point.
Which, of course, is just leftist dodging. Address the core point. Does amazon mostly pass taxes through to the middle class - or does it not?
Thank you for this piece, Kathleen. It cleared up a question I often asked myself: Why are people so despondent if statistics show that real wages keep on rising? The graphics you posted show: Yes, they are rising, but only for a certain group of people, the college-educated professional managerial class, who are in the minority. These are the people that the Democratic party catered to in the last years, especially in messaging and culture and this message does not really land with a large group of the electorate, especially young heterosexual white men among them. These are the people Democrats need to win back in order to win national elections again. I'm not sure that they have got the message and adjusted accordingly, but I really hope they do, or they will hand the Republicans a majority for the foreseeable future.
I formed a similar argument in my thoughts about the US elections back in November: https://ruminationspace.substack.com/p/trump-didnt-win-the-election-the
considering the shitshow that fascist AmeriKKa's educational system currently is, such a revamp in education will require a HUGE shift in social and corporate policies, economics, curricula and especially in teaching philosophies. the lag time between the decision to implement such sweeping changes and the time when society sees the benefits is something that i doubt most people will tolerate.
sadly.
This is an excellent assessment of the American economic condition and the fever dreams it has created.
Senators Chris Murphy and Elizabeth Warren would align with your thinking. Warren has been VERY vocal about this for years.
Tonight, Murphy and others like Schatz and Markey will hold a "rebuttal" on MoveOn.org.
Murphy has called for Democrats to claim a banner of economic fairness. Economic Justice can be the center pole for a tent to house people with many views.
I am all in for your job reeducation program. But I am also in favor of a clearly defined new Democratic tax plan that fairly taxes the rich and corporations. And...killing the cap on Social Security. NO CAP. Same percentage on ALL income. And...kill the carried interest scam. See Patriotic Millionaires for details.
Regardless. A great letter!
This is a substantive window on reality, Kathleen. Your simple charts tell the story in a way almost anyone could understand in a glance. This description of our reality could be widely used as a launch point for realistic consideration of our plight and development of strategies to reverse the path we are on. Thank you for distilling the message to its essence. Now it is up to all of us who care to amplify and spread this insight as motivation to do what we can to elect leaders who will do something constructive about it.
I will be sharing this among my circle of contacts with this basic message: "Here is our reality. Let's use it to put candidates on the spot to tell us what they intend to do about it. Then vote accordingly." Batters up in less than two years!
Thanks for this Kathleen. You are right-this needs to be the focus for Dems.
I think ‘The Flyover Majority’ as a condemnation of the Democrats who claimed to represent them but instead ‘flew iver’ or ignored them.
I'm from Ireland and now live in Australia. Here its the centre-left and far-left (Labor and Greens) who ignore the quiet majority.
I’ve been going with “The Precariat”.
I read recently somewhere on Substack that Germany has been supporting education for the trades and still has a vital manufacturing sector. The U.S. went in the direction of technology. For my dad, the GI bill got him into the boom times of cold war defense. But other vets went to work in the factories that their children could no longer rely on for a good living due to cheap Asian labor.
Sometimes I wonder if the British part of our cultural legacy predisposed us to underestimation of the value of educating for manual skills, along with the hands-on math and English that could easily go along with these.
But ultimately it’s going take some kind of economic carrots and sticks to prod American business (and international firms doing business here) to give employees their fair share.
Until recently, the assumption was that American businesses would train within their own companies. Not true anymore.
Thank you for writing this. It is refreshing to see people begin to think outside the Democrat box. Substack is a great venue for new ideas and I hope to see them become more mainstream. I didn’t subject myself to watching the 100 minute, “I am so awesome and you Dems are total frauds” speech last night. I already have PTSD from too much Trump these days. He is going to alienate more and more people with his misinformation and economic insanity.
I do like Flyover Majority. It is a very visual metaphor. I have flown across this country many times. There is so much of this country we east and west coasters don't really relate to. It’s time to pay attention.
the late great middle class? IDK do some focus groups and find out what works.
I had never read the other half of Hillary's speech beyond the deplorables part. Reckon that was by design.
!OO%, Kathleen. Why? As the Dem strategist Dan Pfeiffer put it a few days after the election, the reason the Dems lost in ’24 is the Dem brand. For the working class, that reads as the Dems don’t care about people like them. Your free and supported lifetime job training policy is exactly the right move to show them the system is no longer rigged against them. The only sticky wicket I see is how AI will reduce future jobs.
My vote for a name is the Post-Industrial Majority. Not because it’s a good name – it isn’t, it’s much too academic – but because this is the cause of the decline in US men’s weekly wages and the “slow but steady immiseration since 198O” as you put it. It is the answer to the 7O% that feel there is some dynamic making it all but impossible to get ahead – IF you don’t have a college degree, that is. The decline of good paying manufacturing/industrial jobs, with benefits, raises, and steady employment that didn’t require a college education, that made you good marriage material – that’s the post-Industrial reality.
This has been known for decades, at least since the 9Os when I worked in IT. Why the Democrats have NOT yet taken up this remedy to this reality mystifies me.
Also agree that ALL wages should be subject to payroll deduction. [Now I’m curious as to the reasoning behind that limit.]
At the time the limit was imposed, it helped make SS look more like an insurance program and less like a wealth redistribution program. Just as you paid a fixed amount to buy a retirement annuity.
Also, back then Social Security benefits were quite modest, so that making the well off pay a large chunk of their earnings meant it would obviously not function like an insurance program.
Thanks for the article. I saw one of your comments on Noahpinion and came to check out yours. I've been reading a lot of economic thoughts and started reading Noah because of links from Brad Delong. I feel like Noah misses quite a few things, and I feel like this captures a big part of the story that he seems to miss. Why do people feel like their lives are getting worse? From your charts you can see that their lives are indeed getting worse. So, they have reason to feel pessimistic. I know you went into much more than this, but if you can't even get a solid understanding of the situation, you will not be able to make valuable contributions on how to fix things. Even Noah's assumption that a person should expect to see his lifestyle improve four-fold in his/her lifetime is unsupportable. I assume that he believes this because real per capita GDP growth is about two percent. If I do a quick look at real per capita median income growth on Fred, I see about 0.8 percent growth. Less than half of what he is saying. If I look at real per capita median household income, I see about the same. I like that you break it out even further into regions. If I were one of the people living in those regions with even worse growth and I couldn't or didn't want to leave, I would feel pretty bad too. Why support someone who says you are doing great?
How about refocusing MAGA to define what it should REALLY be . . . REALLY MAGA. REALLY Make America Great Again -- Rmaga (emphasis on R and not on MAGA). Not this false trump MAGA. Let us return to when:
truth mattered
science meant something
the Golden Rule ruled
manners were respected
teamwork didn’t just apply to those who thought like us
we fought for justice for all people
we respected the law
everyone lives by the same rules
we treated friends (allies) friendly
Let’s add to this list and turn the tables. Let’s show who REALLY wants to make America Great.
This all is true and good, but it's hard to sell the proposition, “you're wrong and I'm right.”
I don't think it's a positioning of "I'm right and you're wrong" to emphasize what it is that we have lost. The (in many cases) norms that have been broken.
MAGA is not emphasizing the other side of these aspects; it is their actions that have caused these aspects to be crushed. In turn, we need to emphasize that these aspects are important. I expect the majority of American's agree with them. We are being brought down by the vocal minority. It is time for the majority to vocalize what we want back.
DEMOCRATS NEED A NEW MESSAGE DELIVERY SYSTEM.
Biden recognized the forgotten group and made advances like the infrastructure act and the CHIPs act. You acknowledged it but then passed over it because the effect was not immediate.
Hillary Clinton also recognized it. Both Clinton and Biden stressed retraining and the need to bring good non college jobs to the US.
The Democrats are doing what you suggest already. The problem isn't the message, it's the message delivery system. I've harped on this many times.
Democrats do great things for the US people and it's in the NYT for a couple days and goes away. The Republicans talk about nonsense like CRT or WOKE, that will help absolutely no-one, and their message is repeated over and over, day after day and month after month.
It starts on Fox News and conservative radio. People listen to these stations all day long, literally. Then the mainstream media picks it up and we talk about it more.
The messages are designed by Republican billionaires and delivered by Republican billionaire media outlets.
Democrats need to stop focusing on the message and start developing a new message delivery system. I suspect it will be based on the 2 way communication capability of the internet. Democrats need to call out the billionaires creating and delivering the message and start a campaign against them.
My suggestions are removable car stickers because they repeat over and over and are inexpensive and internet 2 way communication because Democrats need to be heard. https://billionairessuck.me for billionaire stickers and I'm also working on a concept called Silo Bridge that would be a way for internet groups to discuss between each other.
I'm sure there are much better ideas, but focusing on the message is worthless if you don't have a way to deliver that message over and over, all day long, all month long, all year long. DEMOCRATS NEED A NEW MESSAGE DELIVERY SYSTEM.
Sorry Joe, but I totally agree with you that democrats have not been fighting fire with fire. I don't recommend fighting lies with lies, but like you pointed out the Democrats delivery system is outdated and not as pervasive as the Repubs' system is. They get their message out to their base (and others because they are inundated with the message) faster, better and more effectively because they are using the advantages of the internet, (un)social media, apps, etc. Too many old men and women in their ivory towers and country clubs lounging in their money pits! Those "leaders" need to start listening to their educated staff members who know these new media formats like the backs of their hands, who can help them recognize the benefits they could provide the Democratic party if used effectively, and the imminent dangers of of allowing billionaire oligarchs to control them with virtually no real U.S. or international government oversight, limits or antitrust protection!
even old media like radio. It's a way of hooking the uncomitted passerbys. The rightwing has 5 radio station in St Louis area. We have none.
I did not know that but it makes total sense, leave no proverbial stone unturned.
"We just need to sell our failed terrible ideas a new way !"
"I am sure nobody will ever remember our failed prior execution, and current numerous urban failures that stare in their faces - if we just had a different SYSTEM!"
"If only people could hear our wonderful idea - they would adopt them. Well - except, for Trump, Rogan, Musk, Gabbard, RFK, and every other prior Democrat who jumped ship from our cult of hate with arrogance icing on top."
Well, it's also a matter of saying things in a way that actually makes sense to people. From over here, MAGA looks an awful lot like a cult of hate too. :(
And you might be surprised that the five US states with the most homicides per person are Louisiana, New Mexico, Alabama, Tennessee, and Arkansas, none of which are "blue states"... (Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/232561/murder-and-non-negligent-manslaughter-rate-in-the-us-by-state/?__sso_cookie_checker=failed )
Many large "blue" cities, and New York City in particular, are a lot safer than many Republicans are willing to believe.
Yes, viewed from the eyes of a leftist, anything they disagree with is fascism, and "a threat to OUR DemocracyTM", and bigotry, and a cult.
We are well aware that leftist struggle with things like reality (men are not women) and common sense (flooding a country with uneducated immigrants and unvetted criminal is a massive burden and socially disruptive).
I am not remotely surprised by your stats. You on the other hand will be apoplectic when you learn that most homicides per person is most directly correlated with the black or American Indian percentage of the population of a state.
And within any state, homicide rates correlate even more closely with Dem governance.
NYC is not safe at all. Just because the murder and rape is not prosecuted, or reported to the FBI any more) does not make it safer there.
Everybody else has moved well past the lame leftist talking points you eagerly swallowed in high school from your indoctrinators. Up your game, or lose.
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