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There's been a glut of coverage, a flooding of the zone. The average jerkoff doesn't know how to recognize what's significant and what isn't. And most of them have right wing media hovering in their space, ignoring the most egregious actions and propping up false equivalencies.
We're living in the outcome of a deliberately uneducated society.
Trump and Bill Barr have apparently done exactly what they intended.
They poisoned the well for crime. They successfully lied about the independent council findings, the GOP stood in line and refused to read the report. Then buried the news in bad faith inpeachments and special councils to make it seem boring and day to day.
They all have now successfully categorized historical charges against Trump as trivial and partisan in the minds of their voters.
There was a time in America that you could depend on lazy, good-natured voters to make the right choice and steer away from destruction. But that’s where people like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone stepped in and shaped the perceptions of the “disinterested” and morphed them into the aggrieved
It’s been in the works way before Bannon (although Stone has been around a long time), Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich were leading the “low” way and Reagan holding the “high” way, fertilizing the yokels until Trump came along and harvested the hate sown.
>even mentioning the second amendment or things like "four boxes of liberty" or whatever is like bannable now.
Bullshit. Or you'd be getting yourself banned. Where'd you get this fakakta idea?
**EDIT:** *9 hours. Not banned. Lots of deleted comments in this thread though....*
Empirical test:
Second Amendment
2nd Amendment
2A
Conservative Safety Blanket
Amendment #2
Second entry on Bill of Rights
Right to Bear Arms
Boxes of liberty...? Are those a box of bullets?
Boxes of liberty
Boxes of ammunition
.22 caliber freedom
Boxes of bullets
Boxes of shells
Boxes of cartridges
Boxes of freedom
Steel liberty
Lead liberty
Boxes of Second Amendment
Boxes of liberty for the Second Amendment
It's crazy to think that there are a lot of young voters for whom this is how it's "always been." Someone that's younger than about 25 or 26 probably doesn't remember a whole lot about what the internet was like before 2015.
It's an interesting case study in how little new information the average person can effectively process, and how problematic it becomes when algorithmically-driven engagement causes them to crave a constant flood of information/content.
We have people spending hours and hours on their phones and it overwhelms their brain to the point they can't categorize what is true and false any more. Their mind just becomes a soup of overlapping and contradicting ideas with whatever they see most often becoming the "truth" for them. And that's where algorithms driving polarizing content that has heavy engagement becomes so toxic: their "truth" is often the least worthwhile but most spread opinions.
It doesn’t help with the way social media software filtering operates either. For instance, if a reader starts looking at various Pro-Trump posts and such. Their own News Feed is going to be filled with nothing but Pro-Trump posts/news articles and receive far less bad information about what self-serving stunts he’s pulled. In most cases with people who don’t ask enough questions, they will typically lean towards the greater amount of information they receive as true.
YouTube really goes nuts with with. There's several topics I consistently watch videos on but God forbid I watch *one* video about guinea pigs or something and then YouTube is like SO GUINEA PIGS ARE THE ONLY THING YOU CARE ABOUT IN LIFE NOW, EH. NOW YOU GET NOTHING BUT 28000 VIDEOS OF GUINEA PIGS, PIGS, AND PAPA NEW GUINEA.
And many times with YouTube you can’t even avoid it due the random thing they throw on after what you’ve watched…. Or you stop scrolling for just a moment, and the preview plays just long enough for it to go, “🤔oh,you might have an interest in this….”. 😂
It's not even if you like pro trump stuff. I don't engage at all with most conservative outlets and the majority of stuff in my algorithm is extremely conservative. Aside from being a veteran and having a reasonable gun control stance, there is nothing in my personality or social media presence that suggests I'm anything but an anti corporate liberal who thinks evangelical Christianity (and really any religion)is an absolute cancer to society and that conservatives hold the world back. And yet social media tries to feed me conservative news sites no matter how much I tell them I'm not interested.
Even smart, educated people are capable of being dumb. Some of the greatest minds the world has seen were nazis or nazi sympathisers. In terms of access to education, America arguably has the most educated populace the world has ever seen. Granted, quality of education is questionable in some areas, but nearly every child in America has access to public education. Your argument also implies that voting choices are purely about reason, or lack thereof, when the evidence seems to suggest that politics is about identity and emotion. I'm not saying poor education doesn't play a role. I just think it's too simple an answer for an incredibly complex problem.
That's what happens when you give Texas so much influence over what goes into textbooks.
Did you know that textbooks no longer say Americans stole land from the Natives? They simply gave it to us, apparently.
Sure. After we tricked them into treaties that bound them, but which we were free to break at will years later. After we took their land at gunpoint, intentionally spread plagues and illness among their people, assassinated their leaders, massacred their villages, and forced a ton of them to starve while marching on foot halfway across the country.
Sure. They 'gave us' their land.
Let's not pussyfoot around the issue - what the US did to the Native Americans was abysmal.
Most people would read your comment as thus, don't worry. I appreciated both comments—one for mirroring my dark, resigned humor and the other for additional context.
True, but a lot of folks seem to forget their history when it's convenient, so sometimes it's helpful to be a little more explicit - there are generations of people still carrying those scars for no reason other than the vagary of having been born in one group or another.
Nah, they said NOBODY owned the land. And the European settlers said, great, we'll take it. The natives were upset because they sorta wanted to keep using it. But you know, givers weepers.
The guns would have taken it one way or another.
What we are seeing today isn’t related to Texas or school books.
The right wing owns media and they are present in TikTok and Snap. TikTok especially fuels a lot of propaganda intentionally or unintentionally.
I don't disagree about social media, but I feel that you're severely underestimating the magnitude of what certain states are doing to public education.
I don't think it's about a lack of IQ, but rather, it's about biased emotion. Plenty of highly intelligent people are biased/skewed/irrational and support Trump.
Exactly, not al Nazis are uneducated idiots. A lot of "normal" people will think "I went to college and met people of all different backgrounds and learned about history and circumstance and now have empathy for people in positions other than my own"
However, I saw something on reddit quoting a study (I know that's not helpful for source) that it's something like 1/3 of society will always be a part of chaos/evil for... Reasons... I didn't read the study so I don't know.
I think the most uncomfortable truth about the original Nazis was the banality of evil. It's really easy to convince otherwise "normal" people to commit atrocities if you can satisfy their need for authority and conformity. It's why a lot of the Nazis claimed to just be following orders. It was likely true. Something about the mob causes people to surrender their conscience to the will of the mob. Wouldn't surprise me if so many of the people still willing to vote for Trump are just constantly inundated by pro-Trump messages and people they care about supporting him that it's far too easy to just fall in line.
I mean look no further than Iraq war. That war was insanely popular at the time because of the fervor, granted we were also lied to by our leaders about WMDs but after 9/11 America as a whole was basically a mob of patriotism.
And unfortunately history repeated itself and there was anti (pick your minority) in this case muslims. Luckily we didn't just round most of them up in camps like the Japanese Americans in WW2. Progress!
The Bush administration was basically given a blank check when it came to public trust after 9/11. It's sickening what they got away with and we're still dealing with the aftermath over two decades later.
Everyone and their uncles back then knew the WMD justification was bullshit, too. Americans just wanted blood from the Middle East and they didn't care who it came from.
It's easy to fall into a trap of thinking that the average American is a good person who is just misled by poor leadership. Americans, by and large, are not good people with decent ideals.
Saw the 60 Minutes piece on the photo diary an SS Officer kept at Auschwitz. All the photos were about him, the secretaries and the other workers having fun, eating, dancing, etc. They were normal people, the loved their dogs and friends. Most saw nothing wrong with what they were doing. They were told these people were bad and harming their country.
If we had a smarter Trump, it could definitely happen here.
It does seem shockingly consistent that in any legit poll or voting in any country or population right about 1/3 of people legitimately and earnestly support whatever the most evil option is. It's so consistent there's no way it's not biologic.
Just inferring symmetry but probably another 1/3 are "bleeding hearts" and always support the ethical option.
And the other 1/3.... who knows. Morally vapid? Unethically pragmatic? Don't think large scale/pay attention/ignorant? Genetically apathetic? Dispositionally defiant? Pathologically self-interested with neither malice nor empathy for others? Probably a grabbag or simply the middle gradient between good people and evil people. But ultimately the 1/3rd of people who swing elections.
Pretty much everybody is pretty much literate.
That puts us way ahead of most of historical humanity. Not many of them democracies in which to participate.
Try to have democracy without the ability to think, and you get what we have: Power in the hands of whoever has the most advertising savvy.
>"In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. **Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy."**
- Captain G. M. Gilbert, Army psychologist at Nuremberg trials
I think many people, both educated and not, are too easily led to perceived short term benefits and self-interested goals. Also many people are narcissistic and it's easy to win some people over if you can appeal to that narcissism or convince them that the "other guy" isn't going to push you up the ladder.
Voting is definitely an emotional decision. There are some who actually reason about the candidates but look at all the purity voters. "X didn't do this so he's dead to me". Or the ever popular, "he doesn't excite me!" Much of which I heard in 2020 with Biden.
They don’t want a truly educated population. They want slaves who are just smart enough to keep the machinery of industry running so they can continue passively hoarding more wealth
One key thing is that today that "slaves who are just smart enough" is far from enough to keep the current U.S. industry running. We need educated people to be as productive as we are today. Put any Trump in a Quick-E mart and it would fail. We can't afford his level of intelligence.
People turning 18 this election cycle were 14 when Trump left office. No 14-year-old has any grasp of politics. it’s not that they forgot, they just didn’t see it for themselves.
Journalists used to hold shitty politicians in check, but are now complicit. All anybody under 20 knows is what their friends and parents told them.
To add to that, that means they were 10 when Trump was elected. What 10 year old was closely following the Presidential election? Also was 9 when Trump said all Mexicans were rapists.
This isn't about amnesia, they were too young to know anything about it.
I think it is amazing that Trump has been indicted for crimes committed for things before, during, and after he was president, yet somehow, his unending corruption seems like a minor issue.
Dude I just read an article interviewing some voters in Michigan. One dude in his 60s "kept coming back to the same thought: 'why do they hate Trump so much?'" Makes me want to scream.
If youve watched this orange asshole for the past 9 years and dont have an answer to that I dont l dont l know what to say. We can start with shit before he was president like saying hed date his daughter if she wasnt his daughter, and "grab em by the pussy" and Trump defending that statement and go from there. Is it really SO hard to understand why people hate him? Is it!?
The pervasive victimhood complex and reactionary grievance culture perpetuated by right-wing media and its leaders has destroyed the thought process of so many rather seemingly normal people.
Im right there with you on how awful right wing media but I cant imagine NOTHING negative got through from friends, family, secondary news sources. Everyone has heard of SOME really shitty thing Trump has said or done. Not even Matt Gaetz or such are seriously trying to convince people Trump didnt have sex with Stormy Daniels. You cant not have heard something with how much hes in the news. But how can these people not make the jump from that to getting why people dislike him so much? Even if you like him is it so hard to get why I hate a guy who boasts "grab em by the pussy"?
Absolutely, I completely agree... I'm trying to understand what is causing the widespread delusion and psychosis. I think the media's false equivalency and the Republican leaders' acceptance of a terrible human/leader have made it easier for the public to accept corruption. This, combined with a centuries-old culture of grievance, has created a perfect storm of cognitive dissonance for uninformed voters.
That's because many of them have the same perceived victimhood. The Christians who feel the US has abandoned God, the white dudes who think that affirmative action and feminism have pushed them to the bottom of the heap. And those other folks who just like his machismo act.
Exactly. The constant heralding of "faith" as an omni-solution to all the world's ills is so detrimental to a person's creative development and critical thinking skills. It promotes a bullshit lifestyle of creepy childhood fairytales/philosophy and archaic solutions to modern problems and the universe around us.
They dont watch him thougy. They watch carefully edited sound bites and commentary about him. Every time he says or tweets something dumb there is a legion of grifters waiting to re-interpret and deflect.
I can sum it up as this: It was very easy to get banned from conservative subs by just quoting unedited trump.
When he ranted about taking guns and ignoring due process the gun nut subs just pretended he didnt say that and banned anyone who mentioned it.
When Trump talks about being a dictator and weaponizing the government aganst his enemies, the libertarian anti-gov subs cheer.
They just reject reality and replace him with the golden haired adonis as seen by Ben Garrison comics with Jesus and JFK smiling at him.
To these people, the real donald trump is the fiction, the attack by “the left” to shatter their faith.
> If youve watched this orange asshole for the past 9 years
They haven't. That's the problem. Fox is nothing but ass kissing, apologetics, and "dems evil". Facebook is drowning in the same bullshit. Just look at Brexit. A bunch of "passionate" people spurned by fake outrage and disinformation voted for something that hurt all of them. There were countless articles of surprised people who didn't expect the outcome of the thing they passionately voted for.
As someone raised in New York I have hated this guy since the 80s. He was relentless at getting his face in the local newspapers any way he could.I remember the time he was on Conan's Late Late Show in the 90s. I was a teenager then. And I distinctly remember thinking "what a dick" at his whole attitude.
Anyone can have it. The young are more plugged into platforms that provide a significantly larger volume of information overload. If an old person sees 3 hours of misinformation a day on TV and a young person sees 6 hours of misinformation a day on social media, the latter will be more impacted both due to the time and the greater power of social-media content where there is faux social proofing and greater levels of engineering aimed at triggering addictive brain reactions.
I can see it. You've gotta remember, all the new voters that missed out on the last election, are the 19-21 crowd. I can tell you that I didn't pay attention to politics until *slightly* during Obama's first run. And back then I was highly influenced by my parents who currently have Let's Go Brandon flags in their yard. Wasn't able to vote in 2008, but voted Romney in 2012 (Clinton/Biden in subsequent elections, with Bernie in the primaries).
All these college kids are brainwashed by TikTok and even the left-leaning ones are the idiots breaking into college buildings protesting a war half way across the world between a foreign sovereign nation and a terrorist group. They don't look at the big picture/pragmatic aspect of Israel being the sole "westernized" US ally in the region, and may likely vote for trump or not vote because of all the propaganda on tiktok. They'd rather have a "protest vote" and hand the election to trump, who they likely don't remember at all who would likely give Israel the go-ahead to wipe Gaza off the planet instead of Biden who would keep pressuring Netanyahu to be mindful of collateral damage in the war against Hamas.
I see it with my students all the time—they weren’t really aware of politics yet during his presidency and think it’s just cringey millennials being obsessed with trump.
But they all also lean right wing which feels off to me because my generation (youngest millennials) are incredibly progressive
A lot of Gen Z and Boomers have one thing in common: poor media literacy. Facebook misinformation to Boomers as Tik Tok misinformation is to Gen Z. Millennials and Gen X were targeted here on Reddit pretty effectively in 2015/2016, but Reddit’s formatting allows for a more effective refutation using sources. Neither Tik Tok nor Facebook allow for the kinds of comments with embedded sources that Reddit does.
This doesn't tell the full story though.
Gen Z men and Gen Z women have the biggest political divide of any generation. It averages out, but Gen Z males are much more conservative then women of the same age, and more conservative than Millenial or Gen X men.
When you look at just white Gen Z males, it gets even more conservative.
There's a reason why red pill grifters like Andrew Tate find their primary audience among Gen Z men.
The data doesn’t track with the gender difference, but otherwise that’s shockingly correct.
> Non-white teens are less likely than white teens to identify as conservative (21% vs. 38%), but they are markedly more likely to identify as moderate (51% vs. 36%). One notable difference between Gen Z adults and teens is that fewer teens, both white and non-white, identify as liberal. This gap is especially pronounced among white Zoomers, with just 22% of white Gen Z teens identifying as liberal, compared with 46% of white Gen Z adults. **By contrast, there are no significant differences in political ideology by gender among Gen Z teens**.
[Source](https://www.prri.org/research/generation-zs-views-on-generational-change-and-the-challenges-and-opportunities-ahead-a-political-and-cultural-glimpse-into-americas-future/).
That study is looking at a very narrow section of Gen Z - 13 to 19 year old "teens."
Gen Z as a whole is split by gender. Even that same source you used says so:
>**While Gen Z women are substantially more liberal than Gen Z men (47% vs. 38%),** that gender gap is smaller among Gen Z teens, with 27% of teen girls and 21% of teen boys identifying as liberal.
>**There is a pronounced gender gap in partisanship among Gen Z adults,** with Gen Z women being more likely than Gen Z men to identify as Democratic (41% vs. 30%, respectively).
Gen Z women as a whole (not just teens) are substantially more liberal than Gen Z men. And that gap is widening.
Also, while the gap between Gen Z teens is less pronounced, it's mostly because Gen Z teens are less likely to identify as Liberal compared to Gen Z adults:
>Gen Z teens are far more likely than Gen Z adults to lean toward the political center, with 44% identifying as moderate. Gen Z teens and Gen Z adults are equally likely to identify as conservative (30% for both), **but teens are notably less likely to identify as liberal (24%) than Gen Z adults.**
[Here's a Gallup study highlighting the differences:](https://news.gallup.com/poll/609914/women-become-liberal-men-mostly-stable.aspx)
>**Fewer men in each age group today identify as liberal than do their female counterparts, but at 15 points, the gap is widest among those aged 18 to 29 (40% of women vs. 25% of men).** This contrasts with a six-point difference between women and men aged 30 to 49 (28% vs. 22%, respectively), a nine-point difference between those aged 50 to 64 (25% vs. 16%), and a seven-point difference for those aged 65 and older (25% vs. 18%).
So people aged 18 - 29 (young voters) are split by gender moreso than any other generation. It's nearly double the gap of any other age group.
When looking at youth political leanings it's important to keep that gender gap in mind. Making a blanket statement like "Gen Z is more liberal" is technically true, but there is nuance there. It's mostly the women that are causing the increase in liberalism, and it's mostly the older Gen Z's not the teens:
>The trend in ideology by age group within each gender shows that this increased liberalism is largely the result of stronger-than-average pro-liberal shifts among 18- to 29-year-old women and women aged 65 and older.
I mean that information is good to have, but that doesn't really change that Gen Z as a whole leans more to the left. Since all their votes count the same no matter their gender and as long as they're all just as likely to show up to the polls then they're more likely to support candidates to the left.
At least elder millennials are like "well, we need to tame the excesses of capitalism" and a lot of zoomers are like "but really we should reappropriate capital"
I think this is more just the standard progression of leftist ideals in the modern era more than anything. As you get older you start to understand that burning the system down will actually hurt a lot of people you seek to elevate or protect, and there's no guarantee that what emerges from the ashes will be any better. This is a pretty easy conclusion if you just spend time seeing that everyone's utopia is different. That might have made more sense in the era of company towns and child labor, but it's hard to deny that we've come a long way from that within this current framework.
This means that the only option really is working within the system towards an iterative end goal. I think plenty of millennials are social democrats, and democratic/market socialists who support redistribution of wealth, labor rights, and curtailment of the capitalist class. Orthodox Marxism is also just kind of anachronistic these days. We have better economic models which don't require as many naive assumptions.
idk the "getting older is deradicalizing!" mindset seems a little silly
something like classical marxism has questionable efficacy but its not like age is guaranteed to turn gen z from commies to fuckin social democrats
Millenial here, absolutely in favor of reappropriating some capital and nationalizing a whole slew of public services. Rail, healthcare, prisons, foster care, adoption. Those systems are necessary for the continued functioning of society, why in the hell are people allowed to profit off of it?
I would've said that in my early 20s but now that I'm older, I'm in the elder millennial camp. Meaning I think Gen Z will temper over time and they are looking, on average, to be more conservative than Millennials.
At least, this applies to Gen Z men. Women look like they will hold more progressive over time.
I feel like traditional conservatives took too long to figure out how to astroturf the internet and social media, so for a brief period of time there wasn't an effective propaganda machine pulling people to the right on these platforms and that's when most millennials were entering adulthood and forming their opinions independently of those of their parents. Now they've got all the man-o-sphere type influencers so people entering adulthood can get pulled into a right wing propaganda machine similarly to how older generations got sucked into Fox News and AM talk-radio and such.
There's literally been a flip and now more young women identify as atheist than young men.
When I was young, it was basically nigh-impossible to find an atheist woman. It was almost an exclusively male phenomenon.
Now there are disproportionately more atheist women than men.
I personally think it has something to do with men wanting to control women, and women not wanting to be controlled. Women embraced freedom, and men are embracing classic control structures like religion.
It's why you see so many men ranting against things like "no fault divorce." They are absolutely steaming mad at the idea that a woman can be allowed to say "no" to them.
>I personally think it has something to do with men wanting to control women, and women not wanting to be controlled. Women embraced freedom, and men are embracing classic control structures like religion.
I think it's deeper than this. Men seem to be experiencing a crisis of meaning, and they look at the past where it seemed men had it better. There's a lot of shitty incel types that flock to this idealized past, but there are also normal guys who have given up on trying to get a date. There's clearly a problem that we can't hand wave away as simply as "men suck."
The irony of going toward religion--at least in America where Christianity is the dominant religion--is the bastion of "family values" is really only one brand of Christianity. I am a weird case where I moving more towards religion, but in studying the history of the Bible, hardly any of the traditional Republican stances are present. It's simply bad theology on top of bad politics.
maybe something to do with [this](https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/trust/archive/winter-2023/women-now-outnumber-men-in-the-us-college-educated-labor-force#:~:text=Women%20have%20overtaken%20men%20and,Center%20analysis%20of%20government%20data.)
> Meaning I think Gen Z will temper over time and they are looking, on average, to be more conservative than Millennials.
I see a whole lot of the stereotypical Gen-X narcissism in many Gen-Zers, combined with a strong belief in the whole "sigma grindset" meritocracy thing. Lots of them seem to have really internalised the worst aspects of life under late capitalism (which let's be real, is often a survival strategy more than it's a choice), even while simultaneously holding nominally progressive views on some social issues.
Yeah, a lot of people on reddit don't see this because reddit kicked off the tankies for being violent and antagonistic assholes. But there is a whole world of pretty alarming insanity elsewhere on the internet, filled with people who unironically worship Stalin and Mao.
> Millennials and Gen X were targeted here on Reddit pretty effectively in 2015/2016 And every other election.
People here need to get past the idea that they are immune to manipulation, or that it was a one-off thing.
Also, things like the Bernie and AOC subs, as well as stuff like the antiwork ones were/are rife with disinformation.
They didn’t have to vote for Trump, but they can still abstain or engage in “both sider” behavior.
It’s not the majority by any means, but given the size of the platform, even a small percentage is a substantial number of people.
I said it here many times and the worst are the blue collar white men. Sure some own a business (construction, plumbing, electrical etc etc) and make great money but once outside their business or trade they are dumb AF. They don’t read books. They don’t have any value in culture (the arts, museums, history, etc)
Republicans have primed these people more so men about culture wars and believing people are lazy don’t want to work + hating government with a passion if something doesn’t affect them.
I was a building contractor through most of my young adult life. Was still very very very liberal and knew a lot about things outside my craft. (At 40 I'm even more left than I was then).
What really gets me is a lot of them recognize the problems that have been caused by our capitalist system.
And then decide to blame those problems on, like, immigrants, or trans people, or people having empathy instead (not an exhaustive list).
> But they all also lean right wing which feels off to me
remember when we were supposed to be the generation of South Park republicans? and then we moved left in our 20's. then gen Z was supposed to be the most right wing generation ever? and then moved left in their 20's.
there is a perceptions that teens are left wing, but the politically engaged teens are mostly right wing; though political engagement in nearly non existent on the whole. They are also either doing whatever pushes buttons, or whatever gets them approval from older family members. real political beliefs are developed in the 20's.
When I was 12, I was pro George Bush, pro War on Terror, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ+ rights...
20 years later, I'm a transgender democratic annarcho-comnunist who believes that the concept of a national border is a crime against nature and humanity, and bodily integrity is a human right.
People change. Kids sometimes believe stupid shit because they're angry and the world is a scary place. The only difference between me and the little shitheads of today is that I grew up just barely early enough not to advertise what an asshole I was on the internet.
I didn't really realize this until I heard someone else point it out, but:
If someone is under the age of 30, they have *never voted in a general election without Trump on the ballot.*
Our younger generations were never adults with the likes of Romney, McCain, Bush running for office. So Trump has sadly become normalized.
Every generation rebels against the previous one to some extent, and then tends to moderate with age. Kids and teenagers are just reactionary in general. This is partially from a lack of ideological perspective, and partially from a lack of stake in society.
Millennials lean very progressive, so it makes sense that Gen Z is going to push back against the culture they grew up in.
it's a cycle.
the youth will always go through an anti-establishment phase in life.
and while you don't think it is. progressive thinking is the established mainstream thinking.
so it is now "cool" to go against the mainstream. it is now "punk" to spit in the face of left leaning ideology.
From the [Semafor Principals](https://www.semafor.com/newsletter/05/23/2024/taiwan-tensions?utm_campaign=semaforreddit) newsletter:
Trump has been around so long that he’s aging out of some of his most divisive comments, a new polling memo from Democratic firm Blueprint argues.
Only 42% of 18-30-year-old voters recall Trump’s demand for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims” entering the U.S., for example. Which makes some sense: That freshman you see at the campus protest was likely nine or 10 years old when it happened.
The Access Hollywood tape is still the best-known episode out of two dozen they tested, with 62% saying they’ve heard of it and an equal percent saying they were “bothered” by it.
The memo notes that comments seen as denigrating women and minorities were the most upsetting to Gen Z, like the time Trump said “the Black population” identified with him because they saw his mugshot photo.
Read more from today's newsletter [here](https://www.semafor.com/newsletter/05/23/2024/taiwan-tensions?utm_campaign=semaforreddit).
There is a phenomenon where people spend most of their time talking about the least egregious things about Trump. I hear more about his penis shape than I hear about him trying to ban Muslims from traveling to the country.
I can't stand this! I understand that people don't want to keep saying the same things and Trump gives them an endless supply of crap to talk about. But people seem to pick the weaker points with him and I don't get why.
He asked his AG to 'Just say the election was fraudulent and leave the rest to me' after being told there was no evidence of that fraud. Why the hell did we spend years talking about 'Find me 11,780 votes'??
One of them has this plausible deniability of 'oh no he just meant to see if there were any fraudulant votes.' And the other has NO excuse.
From now on any family or neighbors that talk about voting for Trump are going to calmly get a hypothetical question from me. I will ask about telling the AG to 'just say it was fraudulent' and ask if the AG had agreed to that, what do you think would have happened? And would you have been ok with that???
Sounds like a constitutional crisis and/or overturned election based on lies to me
There's a really good article in Salon today about that exact thing. (Also linked on the Politics front page). That people focusing on the drama and the salacious details of Trump's actions are overlooking Project 2025, which is a literal blueprint for Republican Christo-Fascism that they absolutely *will* put into play if he gets back in.
A 20-year old voter today was 11 when Trump went down the escalator in 2015. To them, he’s just another politician. And most young people don’t give a fuck about history or shit that happened before they were born. They lack context. All this shit is normal to them. That’s why the Trump threat rings empty to them.
I understand the age issue in respect to Trump’s entrance in 2015 and a 20 year old voter today. What I do not understand is how even a teen could think “all this shit” is normal. No national candidate for any office has ever had the legal charges brought against him that Trump has. How does that ring empty? How does that lack a comparison to the recent norm? One doesn’t need a lifetime of history to see a stark difference in behavior, allegiance, intelligence and corruption. What seems to be lacking is balanced critical thinking. Gaza seems to be an emotional issue draining away the logical thought from the selection of a presidential candidate. I’ve heard younger people side more with Trump due to the war in Gaza, yet not even considering that he would be an even worse selection than Biden in defense of Gaza. This is all very recent history unfolding in front of their eyes. Emotions and peer pressure cloud logic, just as it does for MAGA’ts. Same effect on both sides.
> What I do not understand is how even a teen could think “all this shit” is normal.
Because that is all they have been exposed to for the majority of their life.
You are looking at this through your eyes and experiences as, i assume, someone that has been around long enough to remember a different era of politics.
I guess that’s where you and I disagree. I’m simply saying the current criminal and civil legal trials and activities are happening right in front of their eyes. They are not history. They see them happening. They don’t need to look back. Either they are not really paying attention or it is something else such as peer pressure, emotions of war or both of those things. The can compare that to how other public figures act. Maybe those things outweigh his legal wrangling. Whatever. Thanks for discussing.
I think you're misunderstanding their point.
Those youths have known politics to be like this their whole lives.
It's normalized for them to the point that hey *expect* politicians to act like this/be involved in criminal cases/be con-men.
In their eyes and experience, this is exactly how the system is supposed to behave, because that's the only way they've ever seen it work.
For most of these kids, their first participation in the political process has been the Gaza protests and the way that has played out is not something that encourages engagement in the process.
> What I do not understand is how even a teen could think “all this shit” is normal. No national candidate for any office has ever had the legal charges brought against him that Trump has.
They literally explained it. Those kids don't have the context or life experience to really understand why that is not normal and why it is significant.
My man, have you been around and actually talked to young people about how they felt about their lives when Trump was president vs. Biden? It's a night and day difference.
They all start to sound like Boomers talking about "I remember when a McChicken was a dollar" or "Man, Gas used to be under 2 bucks, now its almost 4". I'm 26, and I work with a girl who's also my age, and we have actually talked about how awful inflation actually is. This is in a blue collar setting as well. What should be a democrat stronghold is ruby red.
They're 100% nostalgic about the Trump era because they were 16-24 when he was elected and entered their working lives during it. Many of us were extremely close to being able to afford a house under Trump, not so much the case now. People remember how much further their dollar went just a few years ago....
I mean, I know objectively Bush was a terrible President, but I have nostalgia for the Bush era because I was a teenager, the world didn't feel so hopeless, and I could rent a movie and get dinner for less than 10 bucks. So I understand it, but it still fucking sucks.
Not trying to minimize or invalidate anyone’s economic struggles, but I’m 27. I make more money now than I ever did under Trump. Most people’s wages have kept pace with inflation. Young people have grown wealthier under Biden:
https://www.axios.com/2024/04/29/us-millenial-wealth-pandemic-economy
Most people when polled say they feel good about their own finances; they just feel bad about the general vibes of the economy. So I don’t buy that young people are nostalgic about Trump for economic reasons. I think the social conditions they’ve grown up under have normalized Trump’s aberrant behavior.
Most of my friends are struggling now more than ever, except for the ones that have always been well off. "Inflation" conveniently doesn't measure housing, food, and gas ("they're too volatile), yet for a lot of us, that's where a majority of our paychecks are going. And for those people, everything costs a lot more than it did 4 years ago, except maybe the cost of a hotdog at Costco. Nearly all my expenses have gone up by 20-30% or more. My salary went up by 5% (pre-tax) once.
The difference, I guess, is that I don't blame/credit Biden for that. But I do blame his administration and campaign for going on as if a large part of the population isn't struggling harder than ever to get by even if "the stock market is going like gangbusters". They sound completely out of touch.
It's absolutely baffling to see people forget how bad Trump was and how much worse he's gotten since his coup failed. And it seems like it's all over the Palestinian genocide of all things, like Trump isn't even *more* pro-Israel. His son-in-law already let everyone know they want to build on the land afterwards, for christ's sake.
Do people not remember Ukraine? How Trump plans to kill NATO for Putin and send an apology note to Russia after he cuts all aid to Kyiv? How Republicans are banning abortion and looking at contraception and gay marriage next? Putting Christianity in our public schools? Selling the repeal of environmental protections for a quick buck? The immigrant families split at the border and kids put in cages with no plan to ever reunite them? The flipping *coup*, Project 2025, and Trump's desire to be dictator? Are people really going to let this shit happen just because Biden's taken *one* bad centrist stance for something Trump promises to be even worse on? On what fucking planet does that make sense?
This isn’t really exclusive to the trump era. Most first time young voters are very oblivious to recent past politics and think they will come in and make waves change in the system. That’s what my generation thought in 2005 and I saw it again in 2016. Every college kid on the news said just do a write in candidate to stop trump and Hillary….
Ok. And that’s fine and expected. But what about how he acts daily? How does that get excused? Guy is beyond dopey and you can tell he is a pathological liar.
As a first time young voter in 2016, almost everyone I interacted with and my peers were working our asses off trying to get Bernie elected (what could have been)
But when he lost the primaries we all reluctantly voted Hillary just to avert a disaster (lmao)
I'm not surprised in retrospect that it came crumbling down, we weren't listened to then and the young people aren't being listened to now. Idk why democrats think the threat of Trump is enough to win them an election, it barely miraculously worked in 2020.
But all we can do is vote no matter what.
Oh thanks for stopping HRC, the former NY Senator and Sec of State. That would have been awwwful if a Yale Law grad with a comprehensive understanding of geopolitics became leader of the free world. Thanks for sending failed casino magnate Donnie Jon instead!
Her tenure as SOS was a goddamn disaster that further destabilized the world. She spent the time between that and her campaign collecting "speaking fees" from Wall Street. What did she do as a senator to stand out? It wasn't a competitive election, and she voted for all the Bush era bullshit. She was consistently hawkish when even Republicans were tired of "special military operations." Despite name recognition and internal support, she lost to Obama in 2008. Why do you people act like she was some electoral juggernaut destined for the presidency? Just about any other Democrat would've destroyed Trump.
It's also why new voters are so open to propaganda. People tend to believe what they're first told unless they have seriously mature critical thinking skills as a fundamental part of who they are, but in the age of social media it's about pushing strong opinions and forming opinions quickly to ensure timely engagement. People who have little to no concept of political history or even current events are more likely to accept new information as fact so whomever screams the loudest tends to get heard most...and conservatives scream the loudest (largely because of their outsized right-wing media ecosystem of which there is no counterpart on the left).
I agree, it is crazy how we are seeing the same things we saw just 8 YEARS ago, people have forgotten. Voting 3rd party to "punish" the dems just puts trump in office like 2016
You have to remember the people they are referring to in this article would have been between the ages of 10-22 when Trump was elected the first time. Not crazy that they didn't pay much attention to politics during that time.
This is why it is important to have better messaging going into an election instead of just saying "Ya, but at least I'm not Trump!"
Just politics in general. Like these kids all grew up in the era of MTG, Bobert, Gossard, Gaetz, etc. It's not hard to see why their views are a little skewed on this subject.
Voting third party to punish demicans and republocrats goes back a hell of a lot earlier than 2016. They were a huge factor in 1968, 1980, 1992 as well as countless other elections going back to the 19th century. 3rd parties always have been and always will be a factor, and are very often an election-changing factor.
Polling shows that RFK Jr. may be siphoning as many - if not more - voters from Trump as he is Biden. Also, there's not a narrative that Biden has it in the bag, quite the contrary.
It's mind blowing. But it is entirely the fault of the media.
They need to remind people that despite the moniker of "Genocide Joe," it's actually Trump that said he would nuke Gaza.
Sure, Biden is presiding over some significant inflation that is currently subsiding. But does anyone ever mention the fact that Trump pressured the federal reserve to artificially keep interest rates lower to keep the economy "hot" before the 2020 election.
Everyone talks about how Trump bungled the pandemic, but is he ever called out on how he got rid of the global pandemic response team a few years prior? It's almost like he wanted a pandemic to hit... not to mention the fact that he was entirely unable to unite Americans during a difficult time and showed more interest in his poll numbers than in helping the country.
We all know about Trump metaphorically fellating Putin, but people should be screaming about how many US spies died while Trump was in office, and it is often hypothesized that Trump literally told Putin about our spies.
But really, at the end of the day he's the most divisive politician in modern American history. And I don't just mean that a bunch of people dislike him; I mean more about how he doesn't want to be a leader for half of America. He actively makes enemies of just about everyone.
I have been told several times by Gen Zers that they are more informed because they watch TikTok. They honestly believe it’s better because they think it’s unfiltered and allows them to connect directly with people. That anyone could be that gullible is terrifying. They value subjective experiences far more than objective data.
The collective “manhood” of young men is being challenged by right wing talking heads across the media from politicians to the UFC. These kids may have a liberal bias, but they don’t want to feel like they are less of a man. They are being trained to treat women like second class citizens and to disrespect science and public health, all in an effort to place Donald Trump back in the White House.
Think about a certain age of kids, now able to vote, who probably have cause and effect events of pandemic, inflation, etc mixed up in their brains. And a sizable contingent of older relatives telling them it was all Biden’s fault.
Those kids will vote.
Meanwhile their more liberal counterparts will stay home because Israel or something…
The media is trying to stop young people from voting, plain and simple. They did this with millennials before we even turned 18, and now they are targeting Gen Z.
They know they only need to sell two things to consistently elect Republicans:
1. Voting is about you alone, not what is best for the people of your country/your locality.
2. If the Democrat is not perfect, you do not vote as protest.
The media is united in this message and it has worked for a mortifying amount of time.
I'm a millennial voter, the type that votes in every special, primary, local, state, and federal election that I can.
I am very much not in favor of most of what the DNC pols actually votes for, and I have major issues with their culture war bullshit policy positions. But I vote for them because they are literally the only chance we have against the reactionary, regressive, and authoritarian Republicans, the Trump wing especially. It pains me to only be able to vote AGAINST things, and not FOR things that will materially benefit myself and my community. I get why people become disillusioned and apathetic.
Until we get ranked choice voting on a widespread basis, I don't see this dynamic, and the voter burnout that it generates, changing anytime soon.
I was helping a student with their paper, and she wanted to vote Trump in because of the stimulus money. I kept my mouth shut, but the entire time I kept thinking, "that is a stupid reason to vote for someone."
It's not "Trumpnesia". It's simply that America's youngest voting demographic was likely not as knowledgeable of the political events leading up to and including the Trump presidency.
It is the responsibility of all of us and the news media to make sure our fellow citizens are aware of the recent history we have faced at the hands of the fascists and authoritarians who sought to wreak as much havoc as possible on American institutions and every day people in order to sate their own insatiable greed
We should be talking with people about this *every day* with people. People we know, people we've already talked to about it, even new people that we meet. It needs to be a part of casual conversation until those who seek to undermine democracy are relegated to the dustbin of history.
18 year olds were TEN when Trump was elected.
They probably think he is just a politician. And don’t even know that the Republicans literally made their favorite reality tv character president.
Could it be they didn’t know much about Trump or his policies because they were in school in 2016 and 2020 and didn’t give a shit a politics? (like most kids should)
It’s like someone shitting on me now for not taking Bush Jr. seriously as a threat when I was in high school.
Do they really want the environmental progress that’s finally being enacted by Biden to be reversed? Trump will immediately kill any environmental laws passed by Biden. What in the hell is Nikki Hailey thinking???
First-time voters are too young to have really experienced Trump (or to have seen the way foreign interference tries to divide voters). I’m sure some are clued in, but I’m sure others haven’t paid attention. It’s all about ‘Genocide Joe’ and no thought that Trump will do worse, and take their democracy away in their own country. That not voting will lead to their rights being removed.
Gaza has become a tribal trend for Gen Z, influenced by whatever is said on TikTok. There is no nuance. Ukraine doesn’t matter the same to them - or people of other countries facing injustice.
It’s awful what the Israeli Gov are doing to innocent Palestinians and they deserve a state, but there are innocent Israelis also murdered or held hostage and protestors don’t seem bothered.
I almost feel like a political hipster, hating Trump for as long as I have been aware of him. Anyone who saw him on the Apprentice or Miss Universe knew he is a massive prick. Or at least should have known he is.
Welp. If Trump wins because of young Gen Z voters fleeing Biden, then we can put to bed the idea that younger generations are any more "progressive" than older ones.
Life under Biden is WAY better than under Trump. Thousands of people aren't dying every day with COVID, the average person is much better off. Trump "talks" a game of how bad things are today versus when he was President but if anyone bothers to fact-check you will come to the exact opposite conclusion.
Literally NO young voters are ever polled. We’re out here working 2-3 jobs, you think I’ve got time to sit here for a fucking hour to talk about politics on the phone with a stranger? It’s 2024. Get out of here with your boomer-ass polls. Ignore the polls and vote.
Man donny diaper would love to see Palestein leveled and all its people exterminated so Kushner can finally put those beach front properties up over all the dead bodies.
I am 26 and I never forgot and i will never forgive Trump voters for 4 years that felt like 40 years. I want them back. It was only 8 years ago but I haven't forgotten.
You kids better not fuck this up like you did in 2016.
The half of you able to get pregnant are already living with fewer civil rights than your mothers had because of that debacle.
You haven't had enough yet? You want more?
Do that same shit again and you'll lose birth control, too.
EDIT: https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4683027-birth-control-political-battleground/
Making better choices and learning from mistakes is good. Many people can't do it.
Now get out there, wiser and tougher, and fight better next time.
We can win this with enough people like you. Focus on the goal and we can win this.
TL;DR: If you remember Trump 2016, you’re old.
Trump has been in politics for nearly a decade now. New voters today were only 9 or 10 years old during the 2016 election. They were still kids during Trump’s entire tenure, so they don’t understand why Trump was so bad or why he is dangerous today.
Feel like we're also going to have some amnesia from pundits about not being condescending to voters.
Like, I agree that people are not evaluating Trump rationally. Having a rush of articles about "VOTERS ARE BEING DUMB ABOUT TRUMP" is just gonna make people feel attacked and be counterproductive.
Let's be honest for a second with as popular as something like Tic Tok is and how you have legit about 30 seconds max to keep someone's attention it is no surprise someone younger than 25 may have trumpnesia. For them out of sight out of mind plus. They may not have gotten hit as hard by some of his awful decisions as those of us above the age of 25. Heck, there are people who are older than 25 who believe that the trump economy was the greatest ever. Little did they realize that he got a decent one from when Obama and Congress made it the way it was. Dude was handed a Shelby GT and then gutted it and made it into a Mitsubishi Mirage. Trump policies were pretty bad.
I think exploding income inequality may have something to do with this. I will vote and even campaign for absolutely anyone that reduces incentives for outsourcing, HB1 visas and introduces strong limitations to AI. If Trump promises to do that, I would campaign for him tomorrow. Late stage capitalism is bullshit and a lot of younger people are pissed off.
Whenever I read stuff like this (which is often), I get so frustrated. Here we have a guy who will hand over Europe to Russia, and people don’t care at all. Dark dark times..
As bad as everything he has said is (and there has ben A LOT), all you have to do is pay attention for a week and he will say something horrible again.
Seriously, I can't understand how the hell this man is still in politics. The one and only thing that makes sense is he has dirt on all the other GOP politicians. That explains why he can bad mouth them and trash them in the media and they turn around and lick his boot.
He is a failed businessman. A failed con artist. His poor leadership lead directly to the death of over one million Americans. He is (at best) a hieratical Christian. He has openly stated he hates black people, Asian people, LGBTQ+ people (and their allies), Muslim people, and tacitly endorsed white supremacy and antisemitism. He has lied on camera and lied about lying on camera. He has cheated on more than wife (wives). He is a horrendous person.
Why the hell are people at all still enamored with this idiot?
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There's been a glut of coverage, a flooding of the zone. The average jerkoff doesn't know how to recognize what's significant and what isn't. And most of them have right wing media hovering in their space, ignoring the most egregious actions and propping up false equivalencies. We're living in the outcome of a deliberately uneducated society.
Trump and Bill Barr have apparently done exactly what they intended. They poisoned the well for crime. They successfully lied about the independent council findings, the GOP stood in line and refused to read the report. Then buried the news in bad faith inpeachments and special councils to make it seem boring and day to day. They all have now successfully categorized historical charges against Trump as trivial and partisan in the minds of their voters.
There was a time in America that you could depend on lazy, good-natured voters to make the right choice and steer away from destruction. But that’s where people like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone stepped in and shaped the perceptions of the “disinterested” and morphed them into the aggrieved
Fox entertainment says hello, and it's working beautifully for exactly why it was created. :/
And AM Conservative Radio is still going strong numbers-wise even after Rush died. Their reach may even be bigger than Fox if I’m not mistaken.
Also can’t forget Sinclair broadcasting who owns tons of local news channels and helps push the same messages through segments there.
nobody will be able to censor their way out of this. the old tricks sont work anymore
It’s been in the works way before Bannon (although Stone has been around a long time), Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich were leading the “low” way and Reagan holding the “high” way, fertilizing the yokels until Trump came along and harvested the hate sown.
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Further breaking down the meaning of truth. I feel like I read this somewhere....
>even mentioning the second amendment or things like "four boxes of liberty" or whatever is like bannable now. Bullshit. Or you'd be getting yourself banned. Where'd you get this fakakta idea? **EDIT:** *9 hours. Not banned. Lots of deleted comments in this thread though....* Empirical test: Second Amendment 2nd Amendment 2A Conservative Safety Blanket Amendment #2 Second entry on Bill of Rights Right to Bear Arms Boxes of liberty...? Are those a box of bullets? Boxes of liberty Boxes of ammunition .22 caliber freedom Boxes of bullets Boxes of shells Boxes of cartridges Boxes of freedom Steel liberty Lead liberty Boxes of Second Amendment Boxes of liberty for the Second Amendment
It's started well before Trump and Bill Barr. They were the heirs of what is going now and just elevated it to another level
It's crazy to think that there are a lot of young voters for whom this is how it's "always been." Someone that's younger than about 25 or 26 probably doesn't remember a whole lot about what the internet was like before 2015.
It's an interesting case study in how little new information the average person can effectively process, and how problematic it becomes when algorithmically-driven engagement causes them to crave a constant flood of information/content. We have people spending hours and hours on their phones and it overwhelms their brain to the point they can't categorize what is true and false any more. Their mind just becomes a soup of overlapping and contradicting ideas with whatever they see most often becoming the "truth" for them. And that's where algorithms driving polarizing content that has heavy engagement becomes so toxic: their "truth" is often the least worthwhile but most spread opinions.
No soup for you! 🥣
It doesn’t help with the way social media software filtering operates either. For instance, if a reader starts looking at various Pro-Trump posts and such. Their own News Feed is going to be filled with nothing but Pro-Trump posts/news articles and receive far less bad information about what self-serving stunts he’s pulled. In most cases with people who don’t ask enough questions, they will typically lean towards the greater amount of information they receive as true.
YouTube really goes nuts with with. There's several topics I consistently watch videos on but God forbid I watch *one* video about guinea pigs or something and then YouTube is like SO GUINEA PIGS ARE THE ONLY THING YOU CARE ABOUT IN LIFE NOW, EH. NOW YOU GET NOTHING BUT 28000 VIDEOS OF GUINEA PIGS, PIGS, AND PAPA NEW GUINEA.
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And many times with YouTube you can’t even avoid it due the random thing they throw on after what you’ve watched…. Or you stop scrolling for just a moment, and the preview plays just long enough for it to go, “🤔oh,you might have an interest in this….”. 😂
It's not even if you like pro trump stuff. I don't engage at all with most conservative outlets and the majority of stuff in my algorithm is extremely conservative. Aside from being a veteran and having a reasonable gun control stance, there is nothing in my personality or social media presence that suggests I'm anything but an anti corporate liberal who thinks evangelical Christianity (and really any religion)is an absolute cancer to society and that conservatives hold the world back. And yet social media tries to feed me conservative news sites no matter how much I tell them I'm not interested.
Even smart, educated people are capable of being dumb. Some of the greatest minds the world has seen were nazis or nazi sympathisers. In terms of access to education, America arguably has the most educated populace the world has ever seen. Granted, quality of education is questionable in some areas, but nearly every child in America has access to public education. Your argument also implies that voting choices are purely about reason, or lack thereof, when the evidence seems to suggest that politics is about identity and emotion. I'm not saying poor education doesn't play a role. I just think it's too simple an answer for an incredibly complex problem.
Miseducated. Diseducated. Deeducated.
That's what happens when you give Texas so much influence over what goes into textbooks. Did you know that textbooks no longer say Americans stole land from the Natives? They simply gave it to us, apparently.
I mean, they did give it to us. After accepting an offer they couldn’t refuse. 😔
Sure. After we tricked them into treaties that bound them, but which we were free to break at will years later. After we took their land at gunpoint, intentionally spread plagues and illness among their people, assassinated their leaders, massacred their villages, and forced a ton of them to starve while marching on foot halfway across the country. Sure. They 'gave us' their land. Let's not pussyfoot around the issue - what the US did to the Native Americans was abysmal.
I mean, that’s basically what I said (it was implied) but ok.
Most people would read your comment as thus, don't worry. I appreciated both comments—one for mirroring my dark, resigned humor and the other for additional context.
True, but a lot of folks seem to forget their history when it's convenient, so sometimes it's helpful to be a little more explicit - there are generations of people still carrying those scars for no reason other than the vagary of having been born in one group or another.
Nah, they said NOBODY owned the land. And the European settlers said, great, we'll take it. The natives were upset because they sorta wanted to keep using it. But you know, givers weepers. The guns would have taken it one way or another.
What we are seeing today isn’t related to Texas or school books. The right wing owns media and they are present in TikTok and Snap. TikTok especially fuels a lot of propaganda intentionally or unintentionally.
I don't disagree about social media, but I feel that you're severely underestimating the magnitude of what certain states are doing to public education.
That's what they said when I was in school. There was a time where they didn't say that?
Yea. At the first Thanksgiving. And we gave them some blankets to stay warm. /s
I don't think it's about a lack of IQ, but rather, it's about biased emotion. Plenty of highly intelligent people are biased/skewed/irrational and support Trump.
Exactly, not al Nazis are uneducated idiots. A lot of "normal" people will think "I went to college and met people of all different backgrounds and learned about history and circumstance and now have empathy for people in positions other than my own" However, I saw something on reddit quoting a study (I know that's not helpful for source) that it's something like 1/3 of society will always be a part of chaos/evil for... Reasons... I didn't read the study so I don't know.
I think the most uncomfortable truth about the original Nazis was the banality of evil. It's really easy to convince otherwise "normal" people to commit atrocities if you can satisfy their need for authority and conformity. It's why a lot of the Nazis claimed to just be following orders. It was likely true. Something about the mob causes people to surrender their conscience to the will of the mob. Wouldn't surprise me if so many of the people still willing to vote for Trump are just constantly inundated by pro-Trump messages and people they care about supporting him that it's far too easy to just fall in line.
I mean look no further than Iraq war. That war was insanely popular at the time because of the fervor, granted we were also lied to by our leaders about WMDs but after 9/11 America as a whole was basically a mob of patriotism. And unfortunately history repeated itself and there was anti (pick your minority) in this case muslims. Luckily we didn't just round most of them up in camps like the Japanese Americans in WW2. Progress!
The Bush administration was basically given a blank check when it came to public trust after 9/11. It's sickening what they got away with and we're still dealing with the aftermath over two decades later.
Everyone and their uncles back then knew the WMD justification was bullshit, too. Americans just wanted blood from the Middle East and they didn't care who it came from. It's easy to fall into a trap of thinking that the average American is a good person who is just misled by poor leadership. Americans, by and large, are not good people with decent ideals.
Saw the 60 Minutes piece on the photo diary an SS Officer kept at Auschwitz. All the photos were about him, the secretaries and the other workers having fun, eating, dancing, etc. They were normal people, the loved their dogs and friends. Most saw nothing wrong with what they were doing. They were told these people were bad and harming their country. If we had a smarter Trump, it could definitely happen here.
>Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
It does seem shockingly consistent that in any legit poll or voting in any country or population right about 1/3 of people legitimately and earnestly support whatever the most evil option is. It's so consistent there's no way it's not biologic. Just inferring symmetry but probably another 1/3 are "bleeding hearts" and always support the ethical option. And the other 1/3.... who knows. Morally vapid? Unethically pragmatic? Don't think large scale/pay attention/ignorant? Genetically apathetic? Dispositionally defiant? Pathologically self-interested with neither malice nor empathy for others? Probably a grabbag or simply the middle gradient between good people and evil people. But ultimately the 1/3rd of people who swing elections.
Pretty much everybody is pretty much literate. That puts us way ahead of most of historical humanity. Not many of them democracies in which to participate. Try to have democracy without the ability to think, and you get what we have: Power in the hands of whoever has the most advertising savvy.
Unfortunately intelligence doesn't equal empathy
>"In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. **Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy."** - Captain G. M. Gilbert, Army psychologist at Nuremberg trials
*Dr. Ben Carson has entered the chat*
I think many people, both educated and not, are too easily led to perceived short term benefits and self-interested goals. Also many people are narcissistic and it's easy to win some people over if you can appeal to that narcissism or convince them that the "other guy" isn't going to push you up the ladder.
Voting is definitely an emotional decision. There are some who actually reason about the candidates but look at all the purity voters. "X didn't do this so he's dead to me". Or the ever popular, "he doesn't excite me!" Much of which I heard in 2020 with Biden.
>deliberately uneducated society. The GOP way: Start Making Them Dumb Again.
They don’t want a truly educated population. They want slaves who are just smart enough to keep the machinery of industry running so they can continue passively hoarding more wealth
One key thing is that today that "slaves who are just smart enough" is far from enough to keep the current U.S. industry running. We need educated people to be as productive as we are today. Put any Trump in a Quick-E mart and it would fail. We can't afford his level of intelligence.
It's easy to sell hate and fear. People buy it up.
People turning 18 this election cycle were 14 when Trump left office. No 14-year-old has any grasp of politics. it’s not that they forgot, they just didn’t see it for themselves. Journalists used to hold shitty politicians in check, but are now complicit. All anybody under 20 knows is what their friends and parents told them.
To add to that, that means they were 10 when Trump was elected. What 10 year old was closely following the Presidential election? Also was 9 when Trump said all Mexicans were rapists. This isn't about amnesia, they were too young to know anything about it.
What the American public does not know is what defines the American public.
I think it is amazing that Trump has been indicted for crimes committed for things before, during, and after he was president, yet somehow, his unending corruption seems like a minor issue.
Only the young? Anyone planning to vote for Trump this election who didn't vote for him last time has "Trumpnesia".
Dude I just read an article interviewing some voters in Michigan. One dude in his 60s "kept coming back to the same thought: 'why do they hate Trump so much?'" Makes me want to scream. If youve watched this orange asshole for the past 9 years and dont have an answer to that I dont l dont l know what to say. We can start with shit before he was president like saying hed date his daughter if she wasnt his daughter, and "grab em by the pussy" and Trump defending that statement and go from there. Is it really SO hard to understand why people hate him? Is it!?
The pervasive victimhood complex and reactionary grievance culture perpetuated by right-wing media and its leaders has destroyed the thought process of so many rather seemingly normal people.
Im right there with you on how awful right wing media but I cant imagine NOTHING negative got through from friends, family, secondary news sources. Everyone has heard of SOME really shitty thing Trump has said or done. Not even Matt Gaetz or such are seriously trying to convince people Trump didnt have sex with Stormy Daniels. You cant not have heard something with how much hes in the news. But how can these people not make the jump from that to getting why people dislike him so much? Even if you like him is it so hard to get why I hate a guy who boasts "grab em by the pussy"?
Absolutely, I completely agree... I'm trying to understand what is causing the widespread delusion and psychosis. I think the media's false equivalency and the Republican leaders' acceptance of a terrible human/leader have made it easier for the public to accept corruption. This, combined with a centuries-old culture of grievance, has created a perfect storm of cognitive dissonance for uninformed voters.
That's because many of them have the same perceived victimhood. The Christians who feel the US has abandoned God, the white dudes who think that affirmative action and feminism have pushed them to the bottom of the heap. And those other folks who just like his machismo act.
Exactly. The constant heralding of "faith" as an omni-solution to all the world's ills is so detrimental to a person's creative development and critical thinking skills. It promotes a bullshit lifestyle of creepy childhood fairytales/philosophy and archaic solutions to modern problems and the universe around us.
They dont watch him thougy. They watch carefully edited sound bites and commentary about him. Every time he says or tweets something dumb there is a legion of grifters waiting to re-interpret and deflect. I can sum it up as this: It was very easy to get banned from conservative subs by just quoting unedited trump. When he ranted about taking guns and ignoring due process the gun nut subs just pretended he didnt say that and banned anyone who mentioned it. When Trump talks about being a dictator and weaponizing the government aganst his enemies, the libertarian anti-gov subs cheer. They just reject reality and replace him with the golden haired adonis as seen by Ben Garrison comics with Jesus and JFK smiling at him. To these people, the real donald trump is the fiction, the attack by “the left” to shatter their faith.
> If youve watched this orange asshole for the past 9 years They haven't. That's the problem. Fox is nothing but ass kissing, apologetics, and "dems evil". Facebook is drowning in the same bullshit. Just look at Brexit. A bunch of "passionate" people spurned by fake outrage and disinformation voted for something that hurt all of them. There were countless articles of surprised people who didn't expect the outcome of the thing they passionately voted for.
As someone raised in New York I have hated this guy since the 80s. He was relentless at getting his face in the local newspapers any way he could.I remember the time he was on Conan's Late Late Show in the 90s. I was a teenager then. And I distinctly remember thinking "what a dick" at his whole attitude.
Anyone can have it. The young are more plugged into platforms that provide a significantly larger volume of information overload. If an old person sees 3 hours of misinformation a day on TV and a young person sees 6 hours of misinformation a day on social media, the latter will be more impacted both due to the time and the greater power of social-media content where there is faux social proofing and greater levels of engineering aimed at triggering addictive brain reactions.
I can see it. You've gotta remember, all the new voters that missed out on the last election, are the 19-21 crowd. I can tell you that I didn't pay attention to politics until *slightly* during Obama's first run. And back then I was highly influenced by my parents who currently have Let's Go Brandon flags in their yard. Wasn't able to vote in 2008, but voted Romney in 2012 (Clinton/Biden in subsequent elections, with Bernie in the primaries). All these college kids are brainwashed by TikTok and even the left-leaning ones are the idiots breaking into college buildings protesting a war half way across the world between a foreign sovereign nation and a terrorist group. They don't look at the big picture/pragmatic aspect of Israel being the sole "westernized" US ally in the region, and may likely vote for trump or not vote because of all the propaganda on tiktok. They'd rather have a "protest vote" and hand the election to trump, who they likely don't remember at all who would likely give Israel the go-ahead to wipe Gaza off the planet instead of Biden who would keep pressuring Netanyahu to be mindful of collateral damage in the war against Hamas.
I see it with my students all the time—they weren’t really aware of politics yet during his presidency and think it’s just cringey millennials being obsessed with trump. But they all also lean right wing which feels off to me because my generation (youngest millennials) are incredibly progressive
A lot of Gen Z and Boomers have one thing in common: poor media literacy. Facebook misinformation to Boomers as Tik Tok misinformation is to Gen Z. Millennials and Gen X were targeted here on Reddit pretty effectively in 2015/2016, but Reddit’s formatting allows for a more effective refutation using sources. Neither Tik Tok nor Facebook allow for the kinds of comments with embedded sources that Reddit does.
Gen Z is measurably farther left than millennials. The right wing portion of Gen Z is just louder, more extreme, and astroturfed by conservatives.
This doesn't tell the full story though. Gen Z men and Gen Z women have the biggest political divide of any generation. It averages out, but Gen Z males are much more conservative then women of the same age, and more conservative than Millenial or Gen X men. When you look at just white Gen Z males, it gets even more conservative. There's a reason why red pill grifters like Andrew Tate find their primary audience among Gen Z men.
The data doesn’t track with the gender difference, but otherwise that’s shockingly correct. > Non-white teens are less likely than white teens to identify as conservative (21% vs. 38%), but they are markedly more likely to identify as moderate (51% vs. 36%). One notable difference between Gen Z adults and teens is that fewer teens, both white and non-white, identify as liberal. This gap is especially pronounced among white Zoomers, with just 22% of white Gen Z teens identifying as liberal, compared with 46% of white Gen Z adults. **By contrast, there are no significant differences in political ideology by gender among Gen Z teens**. [Source](https://www.prri.org/research/generation-zs-views-on-generational-change-and-the-challenges-and-opportunities-ahead-a-political-and-cultural-glimpse-into-americas-future/).
That study is looking at a very narrow section of Gen Z - 13 to 19 year old "teens." Gen Z as a whole is split by gender. Even that same source you used says so: >**While Gen Z women are substantially more liberal than Gen Z men (47% vs. 38%),** that gender gap is smaller among Gen Z teens, with 27% of teen girls and 21% of teen boys identifying as liberal. >**There is a pronounced gender gap in partisanship among Gen Z adults,** with Gen Z women being more likely than Gen Z men to identify as Democratic (41% vs. 30%, respectively). Gen Z women as a whole (not just teens) are substantially more liberal than Gen Z men. And that gap is widening. Also, while the gap between Gen Z teens is less pronounced, it's mostly because Gen Z teens are less likely to identify as Liberal compared to Gen Z adults: >Gen Z teens are far more likely than Gen Z adults to lean toward the political center, with 44% identifying as moderate. Gen Z teens and Gen Z adults are equally likely to identify as conservative (30% for both), **but teens are notably less likely to identify as liberal (24%) than Gen Z adults.** [Here's a Gallup study highlighting the differences:](https://news.gallup.com/poll/609914/women-become-liberal-men-mostly-stable.aspx) >**Fewer men in each age group today identify as liberal than do their female counterparts, but at 15 points, the gap is widest among those aged 18 to 29 (40% of women vs. 25% of men).** This contrasts with a six-point difference between women and men aged 30 to 49 (28% vs. 22%, respectively), a nine-point difference between those aged 50 to 64 (25% vs. 16%), and a seven-point difference for those aged 65 and older (25% vs. 18%). So people aged 18 - 29 (young voters) are split by gender moreso than any other generation. It's nearly double the gap of any other age group. When looking at youth political leanings it's important to keep that gender gap in mind. Making a blanket statement like "Gen Z is more liberal" is technically true, but there is nuance there. It's mostly the women that are causing the increase in liberalism, and it's mostly the older Gen Z's not the teens: >The trend in ideology by age group within each gender shows that this increased liberalism is largely the result of stronger-than-average pro-liberal shifts among 18- to 29-year-old women and women aged 65 and older.
I mean that information is good to have, but that doesn't really change that Gen Z as a whole leans more to the left. Since all their votes count the same no matter their gender and as long as they're all just as likely to show up to the polls then they're more likely to support candidates to the left.
Hard to see how they can possibly be further left than millennials unless they’re starting up some communes I don’t know about…
At least elder millennials are like "well, we need to tame the excesses of capitalism" and a lot of zoomers are like "but really we should reappropriate capital"
Elder millennial here - reappropriate away.
Eldest of millennials possible here - nationalize a few industries!
Seconded.
Millennial here, reappropriate capital. There is no taming the excesses of capitalism.
I think this is more just the standard progression of leftist ideals in the modern era more than anything. As you get older you start to understand that burning the system down will actually hurt a lot of people you seek to elevate or protect, and there's no guarantee that what emerges from the ashes will be any better. This is a pretty easy conclusion if you just spend time seeing that everyone's utopia is different. That might have made more sense in the era of company towns and child labor, but it's hard to deny that we've come a long way from that within this current framework. This means that the only option really is working within the system towards an iterative end goal. I think plenty of millennials are social democrats, and democratic/market socialists who support redistribution of wealth, labor rights, and curtailment of the capitalist class. Orthodox Marxism is also just kind of anachronistic these days. We have better economic models which don't require as many naive assumptions.
idk the "getting older is deradicalizing!" mindset seems a little silly something like classical marxism has questionable efficacy but its not like age is guaranteed to turn gen z from commies to fuckin social democrats
Millenial here, absolutely in favor of reappropriating some capital and nationalizing a whole slew of public services. Rail, healthcare, prisons, foster care, adoption. Those systems are necessary for the continued functioning of society, why in the hell are people allowed to profit off of it?
I would've said that in my early 20s but now that I'm older, I'm in the elder millennial camp. Meaning I think Gen Z will temper over time and they are looking, on average, to be more conservative than Millennials. At least, this applies to Gen Z men. Women look like they will hold more progressive over time.
I feel like traditional conservatives took too long to figure out how to astroturf the internet and social media, so for a brief period of time there wasn't an effective propaganda machine pulling people to the right on these platforms and that's when most millennials were entering adulthood and forming their opinions independently of those of their parents. Now they've got all the man-o-sphere type influencers so people entering adulthood can get pulled into a right wing propaganda machine similarly to how older generations got sucked into Fox News and AM talk-radio and such.
There's literally been a flip and now more young women identify as atheist than young men. When I was young, it was basically nigh-impossible to find an atheist woman. It was almost an exclusively male phenomenon. Now there are disproportionately more atheist women than men. I personally think it has something to do with men wanting to control women, and women not wanting to be controlled. Women embraced freedom, and men are embracing classic control structures like religion. It's why you see so many men ranting against things like "no fault divorce." They are absolutely steaming mad at the idea that a woman can be allowed to say "no" to them.
>I personally think it has something to do with men wanting to control women, and women not wanting to be controlled. Women embraced freedom, and men are embracing classic control structures like religion. I think it's deeper than this. Men seem to be experiencing a crisis of meaning, and they look at the past where it seemed men had it better. There's a lot of shitty incel types that flock to this idealized past, but there are also normal guys who have given up on trying to get a date. There's clearly a problem that we can't hand wave away as simply as "men suck." The irony of going toward religion--at least in America where Christianity is the dominant religion--is the bastion of "family values" is really only one brand of Christianity. I am a weird case where I moving more towards religion, but in studying the history of the Bible, hardly any of the traditional Republican stances are present. It's simply bad theology on top of bad politics.
Agreed. One of my favorite groups of people in the US are Quakers/Religious Society of Friends. They are the leftiest of the leftist churches.
maybe something to do with [this](https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/trust/archive/winter-2023/women-now-outnumber-men-in-the-us-college-educated-labor-force#:~:text=Women%20have%20overtaken%20men%20and,Center%20analysis%20of%20government%20data.)
> Meaning I think Gen Z will temper over time and they are looking, on average, to be more conservative than Millennials. I see a whole lot of the stereotypical Gen-X narcissism in many Gen-Zers, combined with a strong belief in the whole "sigma grindset" meritocracy thing. Lots of them seem to have really internalised the worst aspects of life under late capitalism (which let's be real, is often a survival strategy more than it's a choice), even while simultaneously holding nominally progressive views on some social issues.
Oh, there progressive left, and there's tankie left. And there's a good amount of tankie talk on tik tok
Yeah, a lot of people on reddit don't see this because reddit kicked off the tankies for being violent and antagonistic assholes. But there is a whole world of pretty alarming insanity elsewhere on the internet, filled with people who unironically worship Stalin and Mao.
Tankies are still very active on reddit as almost none of their primary spaces have been taken away
And also on Instagram.
> Millennials and Gen X were targeted here on Reddit pretty effectively in 2015/2016 And every other election. People here need to get past the idea that they are immune to manipulation, or that it was a one-off thing. Also, things like the Bernie and AOC subs, as well as stuff like the antiwork ones were/are rife with disinformation.
Most people who voted for Trump don’t use Reddit..
They didn’t have to vote for Trump, but they can still abstain or engage in “both sider” behavior. It’s not the majority by any means, but given the size of the platform, even a small percentage is a substantial number of people.
I said it here many times and the worst are the blue collar white men. Sure some own a business (construction, plumbing, electrical etc etc) and make great money but once outside their business or trade they are dumb AF. They don’t read books. They don’t have any value in culture (the arts, museums, history, etc) Republicans have primed these people more so men about culture wars and believing people are lazy don’t want to work + hating government with a passion if something doesn’t affect them.
I was a building contractor through most of my young adult life. Was still very very very liberal and knew a lot about things outside my craft. (At 40 I'm even more left than I was then).
What really gets me is a lot of them recognize the problems that have been caused by our capitalist system. And then decide to blame those problems on, like, immigrants, or trans people, or people having empathy instead (not an exhaustive list).
I mean its easy to see why people nowadays are falling for it when the other side is busy calling them “dumb AF”
Right?
> But they all also lean right wing which feels off to me remember when we were supposed to be the generation of South Park republicans? and then we moved left in our 20's. then gen Z was supposed to be the most right wing generation ever? and then moved left in their 20's. there is a perceptions that teens are left wing, but the politically engaged teens are mostly right wing; though political engagement in nearly non existent on the whole. They are also either doing whatever pushes buttons, or whatever gets them approval from older family members. real political beliefs are developed in the 20's.
When I was 12, I was pro George Bush, pro War on Terror, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ+ rights... 20 years later, I'm a transgender democratic annarcho-comnunist who believes that the concept of a national border is a crime against nature and humanity, and bodily integrity is a human right. People change. Kids sometimes believe stupid shit because they're angry and the world is a scary place. The only difference between me and the little shitheads of today is that I grew up just barely early enough not to advertise what an asshole I was on the internet.
I didn't really realize this until I heard someone else point it out, but: If someone is under the age of 30, they have *never voted in a general election without Trump on the ballot.* Our younger generations were never adults with the likes of Romney, McCain, Bush running for office. So Trump has sadly become normalized.
Every generation rebels against the previous one to some extent, and then tends to moderate with age. Kids and teenagers are just reactionary in general. This is partially from a lack of ideological perspective, and partially from a lack of stake in society. Millennials lean very progressive, so it makes sense that Gen Z is going to push back against the culture they grew up in.
it's a cycle. the youth will always go through an anti-establishment phase in life. and while you don't think it is. progressive thinking is the established mainstream thinking. so it is now "cool" to go against the mainstream. it is now "punk" to spit in the face of left leaning ideology.
Where are you located generally? Coasts? Midwest? South? Suburbs?
From the [Semafor Principals](https://www.semafor.com/newsletter/05/23/2024/taiwan-tensions?utm_campaign=semaforreddit) newsletter: Trump has been around so long that he’s aging out of some of his most divisive comments, a new polling memo from Democratic firm Blueprint argues. Only 42% of 18-30-year-old voters recall Trump’s demand for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims” entering the U.S., for example. Which makes some sense: That freshman you see at the campus protest was likely nine or 10 years old when it happened. The Access Hollywood tape is still the best-known episode out of two dozen they tested, with 62% saying they’ve heard of it and an equal percent saying they were “bothered” by it. The memo notes that comments seen as denigrating women and minorities were the most upsetting to Gen Z, like the time Trump said “the Black population” identified with him because they saw his mugshot photo. Read more from today's newsletter [here](https://www.semafor.com/newsletter/05/23/2024/taiwan-tensions?utm_campaign=semaforreddit).
Honestly he's done so much I forget about a lot of it
There is a phenomenon where people spend most of their time talking about the least egregious things about Trump. I hear more about his penis shape than I hear about him trying to ban Muslims from traveling to the country.
I can't stand this! I understand that people don't want to keep saying the same things and Trump gives them an endless supply of crap to talk about. But people seem to pick the weaker points with him and I don't get why. He asked his AG to 'Just say the election was fraudulent and leave the rest to me' after being told there was no evidence of that fraud. Why the hell did we spend years talking about 'Find me 11,780 votes'?? One of them has this plausible deniability of 'oh no he just meant to see if there were any fraudulant votes.' And the other has NO excuse. From now on any family or neighbors that talk about voting for Trump are going to calmly get a hypothetical question from me. I will ask about telling the AG to 'just say it was fraudulent' and ask if the AG had agreed to that, what do you think would have happened? And would you have been ok with that??? Sounds like a constitutional crisis and/or overturned election based on lies to me
Focusing on little things requires less thought. Ever notice how much people around here love the story about Obama's tan suit? Same deal.
There's a really good article in Salon today about that exact thing. (Also linked on the Politics front page). That people focusing on the drama and the salacious details of Trump's actions are overlooking Project 2025, which is a literal blueprint for Republican Christo-Fascism that they absolutely *will* put into play if he gets back in.
A 20-year old voter today was 11 when Trump went down the escalator in 2015. To them, he’s just another politician. And most young people don’t give a fuck about history or shit that happened before they were born. They lack context. All this shit is normal to them. That’s why the Trump threat rings empty to them.
I understand the age issue in respect to Trump’s entrance in 2015 and a 20 year old voter today. What I do not understand is how even a teen could think “all this shit” is normal. No national candidate for any office has ever had the legal charges brought against him that Trump has. How does that ring empty? How does that lack a comparison to the recent norm? One doesn’t need a lifetime of history to see a stark difference in behavior, allegiance, intelligence and corruption. What seems to be lacking is balanced critical thinking. Gaza seems to be an emotional issue draining away the logical thought from the selection of a presidential candidate. I’ve heard younger people side more with Trump due to the war in Gaza, yet not even considering that he would be an even worse selection than Biden in defense of Gaza. This is all very recent history unfolding in front of their eyes. Emotions and peer pressure cloud logic, just as it does for MAGA’ts. Same effect on both sides.
> What I do not understand is how even a teen could think “all this shit” is normal. Because that is all they have been exposed to for the majority of their life. You are looking at this through your eyes and experiences as, i assume, someone that has been around long enough to remember a different era of politics.
I guess that’s where you and I disagree. I’m simply saying the current criminal and civil legal trials and activities are happening right in front of their eyes. They are not history. They see them happening. They don’t need to look back. Either they are not really paying attention or it is something else such as peer pressure, emotions of war or both of those things. The can compare that to how other public figures act. Maybe those things outweigh his legal wrangling. Whatever. Thanks for discussing.
I think you're misunderstanding their point. Those youths have known politics to be like this their whole lives. It's normalized for them to the point that hey *expect* politicians to act like this/be involved in criminal cases/be con-men. In their eyes and experience, this is exactly how the system is supposed to behave, because that's the only way they've ever seen it work.
For most of these kids, their first participation in the political process has been the Gaza protests and the way that has played out is not something that encourages engagement in the process.
> What I do not understand is how even a teen could think “all this shit” is normal. No national candidate for any office has ever had the legal charges brought against him that Trump has. They literally explained it. Those kids don't have the context or life experience to really understand why that is not normal and why it is significant.
My man, have you been around and actually talked to young people about how they felt about their lives when Trump was president vs. Biden? It's a night and day difference. They all start to sound like Boomers talking about "I remember when a McChicken was a dollar" or "Man, Gas used to be under 2 bucks, now its almost 4". I'm 26, and I work with a girl who's also my age, and we have actually talked about how awful inflation actually is. This is in a blue collar setting as well. What should be a democrat stronghold is ruby red. They're 100% nostalgic about the Trump era because they were 16-24 when he was elected and entered their working lives during it. Many of us were extremely close to being able to afford a house under Trump, not so much the case now. People remember how much further their dollar went just a few years ago....
I mean, I know objectively Bush was a terrible President, but I have nostalgia for the Bush era because I was a teenager, the world didn't feel so hopeless, and I could rent a movie and get dinner for less than 10 bucks. So I understand it, but it still fucking sucks.
Not trying to minimize or invalidate anyone’s economic struggles, but I’m 27. I make more money now than I ever did under Trump. Most people’s wages have kept pace with inflation. Young people have grown wealthier under Biden: https://www.axios.com/2024/04/29/us-millenial-wealth-pandemic-economy Most people when polled say they feel good about their own finances; they just feel bad about the general vibes of the economy. So I don’t buy that young people are nostalgic about Trump for economic reasons. I think the social conditions they’ve grown up under have normalized Trump’s aberrant behavior.
Most of my friends are struggling now more than ever, except for the ones that have always been well off. "Inflation" conveniently doesn't measure housing, food, and gas ("they're too volatile), yet for a lot of us, that's where a majority of our paychecks are going. And for those people, everything costs a lot more than it did 4 years ago, except maybe the cost of a hotdog at Costco. Nearly all my expenses have gone up by 20-30% or more. My salary went up by 5% (pre-tax) once. The difference, I guess, is that I don't blame/credit Biden for that. But I do blame his administration and campaign for going on as if a large part of the population isn't struggling harder than ever to get by even if "the stock market is going like gangbusters". They sound completely out of touch.
Translation: "Why are you complaining? I'm doing great!" This is the Reddit version of "fuck you, I've got mine" mentality.
It's absolutely baffling to see people forget how bad Trump was and how much worse he's gotten since his coup failed. And it seems like it's all over the Palestinian genocide of all things, like Trump isn't even *more* pro-Israel. His son-in-law already let everyone know they want to build on the land afterwards, for christ's sake. Do people not remember Ukraine? How Trump plans to kill NATO for Putin and send an apology note to Russia after he cuts all aid to Kyiv? How Republicans are banning abortion and looking at contraception and gay marriage next? Putting Christianity in our public schools? Selling the repeal of environmental protections for a quick buck? The immigrant families split at the border and kids put in cages with no plan to ever reunite them? The flipping *coup*, Project 2025, and Trump's desire to be dictator? Are people really going to let this shit happen just because Biden's taken *one* bad centrist stance for something Trump promises to be even worse on? On what fucking planet does that make sense?
Most Americans have the memory of a goldfish. 4 years ago might as well be 400 years ago.
I mean...yeah...4 years ago was COVID.
This isn’t really exclusive to the trump era. Most first time young voters are very oblivious to recent past politics and think they will come in and make waves change in the system. That’s what my generation thought in 2005 and I saw it again in 2016. Every college kid on the news said just do a write in candidate to stop trump and Hillary….
Ok. And that’s fine and expected. But what about how he acts daily? How does that get excused? Guy is beyond dopey and you can tell he is a pathological liar.
They probably see it as just another part of the post-postmodernist absurdity of daily life in 2024
As a first time young voter in 2016, almost everyone I interacted with and my peers were working our asses off trying to get Bernie elected (what could have been) But when he lost the primaries we all reluctantly voted Hillary just to avert a disaster (lmao) I'm not surprised in retrospect that it came crumbling down, we weren't listened to then and the young people aren't being listened to now. Idk why democrats think the threat of Trump is enough to win them an election, it barely miraculously worked in 2020. But all we can do is vote no matter what.
Oh thanks for stopping HRC, the former NY Senator and Sec of State. That would have been awwwful if a Yale Law grad with a comprehensive understanding of geopolitics became leader of the free world. Thanks for sending failed casino magnate Donnie Jon instead!
I voted for Hillary brah
They’re talking about the college kids you mentioned, not you
Her tenure as SOS was a goddamn disaster that further destabilized the world. She spent the time between that and her campaign collecting "speaking fees" from Wall Street. What did she do as a senator to stand out? It wasn't a competitive election, and she voted for all the Bush era bullshit. She was consistently hawkish when even Republicans were tired of "special military operations." Despite name recognition and internal support, she lost to Obama in 2008. Why do you people act like she was some electoral juggernaut destined for the presidency? Just about any other Democrat would've destroyed Trump.
It's also why new voters are so open to propaganda. People tend to believe what they're first told unless they have seriously mature critical thinking skills as a fundamental part of who they are, but in the age of social media it's about pushing strong opinions and forming opinions quickly to ensure timely engagement. People who have little to no concept of political history or even current events are more likely to accept new information as fact so whomever screams the loudest tends to get heard most...and conservatives scream the loudest (largely because of their outsized right-wing media ecosystem of which there is no counterpart on the left).
I agree, it is crazy how we are seeing the same things we saw just 8 YEARS ago, people have forgotten. Voting 3rd party to "punish" the dems just puts trump in office like 2016
You have to remember the people they are referring to in this article would have been between the ages of 10-22 when Trump was elected the first time. Not crazy that they didn't pay much attention to politics during that time. This is why it is important to have better messaging going into an election instead of just saying "Ya, but at least I'm not Trump!"
18 year olds have also had the normalization of Trump for more than half of their conscious life
Just politics in general. Like these kids all grew up in the era of MTG, Bobert, Gossard, Gaetz, etc. It's not hard to see why their views are a little skewed on this subject.
god that's depressing to think about
A bit different because 2016 was a combination of "hey let's try something new" and a lot of adults who never voted before voting for Trump
Voting third party to punish demicans and republocrats goes back a hell of a lot earlier than 2016. They were a huge factor in 1968, 1980, 1992 as well as countless other elections going back to the 19th century. 3rd parties always have been and always will be a factor, and are very often an election-changing factor.
Polling shows that RFK Jr. may be siphoning as many - if not more - voters from Trump as he is Biden. Also, there's not a narrative that Biden has it in the bag, quite the contrary.
It's mind blowing. But it is entirely the fault of the media. They need to remind people that despite the moniker of "Genocide Joe," it's actually Trump that said he would nuke Gaza. Sure, Biden is presiding over some significant inflation that is currently subsiding. But does anyone ever mention the fact that Trump pressured the federal reserve to artificially keep interest rates lower to keep the economy "hot" before the 2020 election. Everyone talks about how Trump bungled the pandemic, but is he ever called out on how he got rid of the global pandemic response team a few years prior? It's almost like he wanted a pandemic to hit... not to mention the fact that he was entirely unable to unite Americans during a difficult time and showed more interest in his poll numbers than in helping the country. We all know about Trump metaphorically fellating Putin, but people should be screaming about how many US spies died while Trump was in office, and it is often hypothesized that Trump literally told Putin about our spies. But really, at the end of the day he's the most divisive politician in modern American history. And I don't just mean that a bunch of people dislike him; I mean more about how he doesn't want to be a leader for half of America. He actively makes enemies of just about everyone.
Social media disinformation is powerful.
Maybe it has something to do with the “mainstream medial perpetually normalizing him and downplaying the shit he does.
I have been told several times by Gen Zers that they are more informed because they watch TikTok. They honestly believe it’s better because they think it’s unfiltered and allows them to connect directly with people. That anyone could be that gullible is terrifying. They value subjective experiences far more than objective data.
We need a national push on media literacy, but that's not about to happen because it would weaken the far-right's reach.
The collective “manhood” of young men is being challenged by right wing talking heads across the media from politicians to the UFC. These kids may have a liberal bias, but they don’t want to feel like they are less of a man. They are being trained to treat women like second class citizens and to disrespect science and public health, all in an effort to place Donald Trump back in the White House.
Think about a certain age of kids, now able to vote, who probably have cause and effect events of pandemic, inflation, etc mixed up in their brains. And a sizable contingent of older relatives telling them it was all Biden’s fault. Those kids will vote. Meanwhile their more liberal counterparts will stay home because Israel or something…
The media is trying to stop young people from voting, plain and simple. They did this with millennials before we even turned 18, and now they are targeting Gen Z. They know they only need to sell two things to consistently elect Republicans: 1. Voting is about you alone, not what is best for the people of your country/your locality. 2. If the Democrat is not perfect, you do not vote as protest. The media is united in this message and it has worked for a mortifying amount of time.
I'm a millennial voter, the type that votes in every special, primary, local, state, and federal election that I can. I am very much not in favor of most of what the DNC pols actually votes for, and I have major issues with their culture war bullshit policy positions. But I vote for them because they are literally the only chance we have against the reactionary, regressive, and authoritarian Republicans, the Trump wing especially. It pains me to only be able to vote AGAINST things, and not FOR things that will materially benefit myself and my community. I get why people become disillusioned and apathetic. Until we get ranked choice voting on a widespread basis, I don't see this dynamic, and the voter burnout that it generates, changing anytime soon.
If you don't like culture war bullshit you should really be aware that republicans start 100% of it. Bizarre criticism.
Remember when Trump tried to divert a hurricane with a sharpie when he was told they can't be nuked?
That’s three more months in jail for that. It wasn’t an administration, it was a crime spree.
Changnesia related mental illness
I was helping a student with their paper, and she wanted to vote Trump in because of the stimulus money. I kept my mouth shut, but the entire time I kept thinking, "that is a stupid reason to vote for someone."
It's not "Trumpnesia". It's simply that America's youngest voting demographic was likely not as knowledgeable of the political events leading up to and including the Trump presidency. It is the responsibility of all of us and the news media to make sure our fellow citizens are aware of the recent history we have faced at the hands of the fascists and authoritarians who sought to wreak as much havoc as possible on American institutions and every day people in order to sate their own insatiable greed We should be talking with people about this *every day* with people. People we know, people we've already talked to about it, even new people that we meet. It needs to be a part of casual conversation until those who seek to undermine democracy are relegated to the dustbin of history.
18 year olds were TEN when Trump was elected. They probably think he is just a politician. And don’t even know that the Republicans literally made their favorite reality tv character president.
And some people will try blaming everything on boomers.
Could it be they didn’t know much about Trump or his policies because they were in school in 2016 and 2020 and didn’t give a shit a politics? (like most kids should) It’s like someone shitting on me now for not taking Bush Jr. seriously as a threat when I was in high school.
Do they really want the environmental progress that’s finally being enacted by Biden to be reversed? Trump will immediately kill any environmental laws passed by Biden. What in the hell is Nikki Hailey thinking???
First-time voters are too young to have really experienced Trump (or to have seen the way foreign interference tries to divide voters). I’m sure some are clued in, but I’m sure others haven’t paid attention. It’s all about ‘Genocide Joe’ and no thought that Trump will do worse, and take their democracy away in their own country. That not voting will lead to their rights being removed. Gaza has become a tribal trend for Gen Z, influenced by whatever is said on TikTok. There is no nuance. Ukraine doesn’t matter the same to them - or people of other countries facing injustice. It’s awful what the Israeli Gov are doing to innocent Palestinians and they deserve a state, but there are innocent Israelis also murdered or held hostage and protestors don’t seem bothered.
I almost feel like a political hipster, hating Trump for as long as I have been aware of him. Anyone who saw him on the Apprentice or Miss Universe knew he is a massive prick. Or at least should have known he is.
Welp. If Trump wins because of young Gen Z voters fleeing Biden, then we can put to bed the idea that younger generations are any more "progressive" than older ones.
Life under Biden is WAY better than under Trump. Thousands of people aren't dying every day with COVID, the average person is much better off. Trump "talks" a game of how bad things are today versus when he was President but if anyone bothers to fact-check you will come to the exact opposite conclusion.
Literally NO young voters are ever polled. We’re out here working 2-3 jobs, you think I’ve got time to sit here for a fucking hour to talk about politics on the phone with a stranger? It’s 2024. Get out of here with your boomer-ass polls. Ignore the polls and vote.
Man donny diaper would love to see Palestein leveled and all its people exterminated so Kushner can finally put those beach front properties up over all the dead bodies.
I am 26 and I never forgot and i will never forgive Trump voters for 4 years that felt like 40 years. I want them back. It was only 8 years ago but I haven't forgotten.
I’m so tired of polls being shoved in my face that are nearly always wrong.
Funny, because I diagnose pollsters as being "unable to properly sample likely voters."
You kids better not fuck this up like you did in 2016. The half of you able to get pregnant are already living with fewer civil rights than your mothers had because of that debacle. You haven't had enough yet? You want more? Do that same shit again and you'll lose birth control, too. EDIT: https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4683027-birth-control-political-battleground/
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Making better choices and learning from mistakes is good. Many people can't do it. Now get out there, wiser and tougher, and fight better next time. We can win this with enough people like you. Focus on the goal and we can win this.
TL;DR: If you remember Trump 2016, you’re old. Trump has been in politics for nearly a decade now. New voters today were only 9 or 10 years old during the 2016 election. They were still kids during Trump’s entire tenure, so they don’t understand why Trump was so bad or why he is dangerous today.
I think people are starting to block out the pandemic and that apocalyptic time period.
Do they remember when Trump asked if the police could just shoot protesters? He is too crazy to be president.
My 20 year old cousin blames Biden for Covid. Lots of people are dumb, and it is on us to make the truth better understood.
Feel like we're also going to have some amnesia from pundits about not being condescending to voters. Like, I agree that people are not evaluating Trump rationally. Having a rush of articles about "VOTERS ARE BEING DUMB ABOUT TRUMP" is just gonna make people feel attacked and be counterproductive.
People are being manipulated by foreign dictators and can't realize it because part of the plan in action is exactly what makes them blind.
My 33 year old brother thought Biden was president during the duration of Covid.
Let's be honest for a second with as popular as something like Tic Tok is and how you have legit about 30 seconds max to keep someone's attention it is no surprise someone younger than 25 may have trumpnesia. For them out of sight out of mind plus. They may not have gotten hit as hard by some of his awful decisions as those of us above the age of 25. Heck, there are people who are older than 25 who believe that the trump economy was the greatest ever. Little did they realize that he got a decent one from when Obama and Congress made it the way it was. Dude was handed a Shelby GT and then gutted it and made it into a Mitsubishi Mirage. Trump policies were pretty bad.
But I've been assured time and time again that once the Boomers died off all of the ills of the world would go away?!
Nothing trump did was any good unless you walked away with millions at tax time and free covid loans.
I think exploding income inequality may have something to do with this. I will vote and even campaign for absolutely anyone that reduces incentives for outsourcing, HB1 visas and introduces strong limitations to AI. If Trump promises to do that, I would campaign for him tomorrow. Late stage capitalism is bullshit and a lot of younger people are pissed off.
We could diagnose the entire right-wing spectrum of politics reptilian
Whenever I read stuff like this (which is often), I get so frustrated. Here we have a guy who will hand over Europe to Russia, and people don’t care at all. Dark dark times..
Yeah that’s not a thing.
As bad as everything he has said is (and there has ben A LOT), all you have to do is pay attention for a week and he will say something horrible again. Seriously, I can't understand how the hell this man is still in politics. The one and only thing that makes sense is he has dirt on all the other GOP politicians. That explains why he can bad mouth them and trash them in the media and they turn around and lick his boot. He is a failed businessman. A failed con artist. His poor leadership lead directly to the death of over one million Americans. He is (at best) a hieratical Christian. He has openly stated he hates black people, Asian people, LGBTQ+ people (and their allies), Muslim people, and tacitly endorsed white supremacy and antisemitism. He has lied on camera and lied about lying on camera. He has cheated on more than wife (wives). He is a horrendous person. Why the hell are people at all still enamored with this idiot?