Based on the 2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf
Via a former conservative on Reddit:
- The government won’t allow you to get an abortion even if giving birth would kill you (p.449 - 503)
- The government won’t let you buy condoms or plan b (p.449)
- The government will give more free money to the ultra-rich and the largest corporations (p.691)
- The government will not allow for workers to be protected at work (p.581)
- The government will steal your social security (p.691)
- The government will take away Medicare (p.449)
- The government will not let you find affordable healthcare (p.449)
- The government will refuse to help educate our children (p.319)
- The government will give your tax money to private schools for christians (p.319)
- The government will force public schools to become religious schools for christians (p.319)
- The government will fire you for the color of your skin (p545 - 581)
- The government will tell you what you’re allowed to think (p319)
- The government will sell our land to be permanently destroyed (p417)
- The government will sell the arctic to oil companies (p363)
- Big business and oil will be allowed to do whatever they want without consequences (p.363)
- The government will tell you what a family is supposed to look like. Anything else is a crime. (p.545 - 581)
- The government will make us deaf/blind to attack by destroying the FBI and Homeland Security (p.133)
- The government will build concentration camps to get rid of anyone deemed un-American (p.133)
- If you’re born in the United States you are not automatically a citizen (p.133)
- The government will make it legal for food to be poison (p.363 - 417)
Claims without a citation yet:
- The government will not let you get a divorce without “proof” of wrongdoing
- Your taxes will go up
- The government will not let you retire
- Drugs will cost more
- The government will let your kids go hungry while they are forced to attend these schools
- The government will tell you what you’re allowed to read and burn the rest
- The government will freely kill citizens they disagree with
- The government will attack single mothers because that’s not a “traditional” family
- The government will order our active-duty military to attack us if we protest
- The government will make being muslim on American soil a crime
- The government will make sure all judges are more loyal to the party than they are to the country
This is what the bots here don’t want you voting against. Vote like lives depend on it!
I’m the OP, and I also post in [email protected]. I’m a human who’s been called a bot, and an advocate for Ukrainians and Russians against colonization and tyranny who has been called a Russian puppet.
Whether you vote or not isn’t important to me as long as whoever gets elected, you continue to fight for a better world via direct action. We’re in exactly this situation because people’s political resistance begins and ends with voting, and that means the people who get the ‘progressive’ vote merely have to be the least worst fascist on the ballot. Totalitarian tyranny isn’t built on the virtues of the tyrants, but the failures of the liberals. The Democrats created this situation, and they deserve to face consequences for it.
Blaming bogey-men like Russian bots and scapegoating politically ‘unsophisticated’ leftists only puts off the self-reflection that needs to happen so that if the United States survives this election, they won’t be back in exactly this situation with a new fascist threat in another 4 years.
We’re in this situation because people don’t vote.
All other forms of political activism, aside from murder, exist to convince people to vote.
Activism without voting is worthless.
You want more progressive candidates? Vote for Democrats until Republicans are forced to move to the left, and then Democrats will be able to move to the left as well.
That’s how the Overton window works.
The Overton window is a measurement of acceptable political discourse. You shift it by vocally expressing unpopular public opinions in the public sphere, not by voting. Voting is supposed to be an expression of popular public opinion, not the other way around.
Sometimes the most effective way to change things is by threatening not to vote and convincing other people to do likewise. The most famous use of this tactic was by the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
In the 1960s black people were much more actively discriminated against on a systemic level, practically prevented from voting in many of the states in the southern United States. The president at the time was the Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson, and was facing the much more racist Republican challenger Barry Goldwater. While the black vote was suppressed in the south, there was a significant voting block in the north of black people and their allies whose main issue was civil rights. Civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, met several times with LBJ, who coaxed them to tone down the direct action protests and criticism until after the election, as he claimed to we willing to negotiate with them once the threat to his power was diminished. Instead, civil rights protests increased. The leaders, probably correctly, determined that once the election was over, they would have less leverage. Even though losing the election meant having an enemy in the white house, having a ‘friend’ who continued to delay essential concessions did not further their cause. People were actively being murdered by the ‘Jim Crow’ apartheid regime, and delays and half-measures were not sufficient.
Thanks to the pressure of millions of people engaged in direct action and open criticism of the president, the Civil Rights Act was passed before the 1964 election. LBJ won by a landslide due to the popularity of the legislation, but suffered the severe political consequences Democrats were trying to avoid through their strategy of placation and delay. The 1964 election was the last where Democrats got the majority of the white vote, and electing politicians in the southern states became much more difficult for their party. Palestinian Americans and their allies now face a similar situation. Democrats will continue to ignore the genocide in Gaza unless there are real political consequences to their actions. While Donald Trump would be a significantly worse candidate, the logic of a two-party system requires that they be willing to risk a worse political situation if they are to hold any political power at all.
Civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King are regarded as heroes today, but at the time, they were reviled by both Democrats and Republicans as a force of chaos that acted out of ignorance of the political system. If LBJ had lost the election to Goldwater, perhaps their legacy would be considered differently. But it would not change the fact that the cause they were fighting for was just, and they were able to wield political power in a system that was designed to marginalize them.
If Trump gets elected, you may start getting shot for fighting for a better world via direct action. Or for many other things.
100% true
Along with millions or potentially billions of others, who didn’t do anything wrong?
I’m OP; I posted the list. Yeah, I know. We’re already dodging tear-gas canisters fired at head-level, I expect bullets next.
So you know that Trump has plans to start shooting protestors on purpose with live ammunition, but you also think that whether you vote or not isn’t important? Not just “accidentally” crush some eyes or testicles or skulls from time to time, but just outright gun people down en masse, and you’re okay with not doing anything to stop that escalation until the Democrats clear your bar for goodness?
(Actually, more accurately, he has plans to remove the things that stopped the order from getting carried out, when last time he said he wanted them to shoot protestors with live ammunition.)
I’m not trying to be rude about it or harp on this one thing when we seem like we should be allies, but your viewpoint on that sounds shockingly naive. You also didn’t answer my question. If you (or I) are one of the people getting shot, a year from now, because you want to organize for a better world, will you in your words deserve to face those consequences?
I’ve written in another thread about why someone who thinks Donald Trump is significantly worse than Joe Biden would still choose not to vote for Joe.
This part doesn’t seem totally crazy to me. Actually, Ralph Nader, who has quite a history of getting good outcomes to pop out of the pig’s ear (to put it pretty fuckin charitably) that is Washington, expressed his anger and frustration with people who were seeing injustices like Gaza and not doing anything to threaten the Democrats into better behavior about it. Like I say, not totally crazy.
I feel like the needed additional part for that, though, is some concrete action to induce the change you are aiming for from the Democrats. That’s the part that the civil rights movements had. If you’re just saying “not good enough yet” as a general thing, and encouraging others to do the same, then I think that ramps up the unlikeliness of it producing any good policies, and also ramps up significantly the likeliness of it producing death camps instead.
Not saying you’re doing that; I haven’t gone back and taken any kind of deep dive. But I’ve been conversing with you and I haven’t happened to run across anything that stuck out that looked like “I don’t want to vote for the Democrats unless X Y Z and you shouldn’t either.”
Thanks, I appreciate you taking the time to listen to me.
This reads a lot like bothsidesism. And frankly it’s utter horse shit. And the clowns in Notvoting need to open a history book and try and find a single moment in history where NOT voting in an election created positive change.
I’ll save you some time:
Not once has it happened. If you don’t vote- you don’t get to influence any part of any change you’d like to see, but others do. And if you don’t vote, you have no control over what changes. It probably fits without saying, but maybe let everyone over there know that the election is going to happen with or without their influence.
So folding your arms and pouting is going to do nothing at all- and it’s going to say nothing at all- to no one that cares or is even willing you pay attention.
All you’re doing is removing the power you have to ever see the changes you want.
Lastly…
So you’re openly admitting that you’re withholding your vote- for the purpose of getting Trump elected to punish democrats?
That makes YOU the problem here. Not voters. So go back to your echo chamber and pretend you’ve doing something good here. When Trump takes over, it’s going to be very interesting to see how you spin this into being the fault of the voters.
Yeah. That’s not how this works. If your argument is that both sides are the same- you get accused of arguing for both sides.