I’m not who you were asking, but I’ve got at least two problems with this,

The biggest problem is cherry picking examples to reach a conclusion while ignoring contradicting evidence. We had plenty of more successful pop culture stuff that had overtly progressive and feminist themes, and conservative stuff doing well isn’t really a new phenomenon this year (the article even points this out where it talks about American Sniper and Passion of the Christ).

The second biggest problem is that the numbers underlying this are suspect - it’s easy to manipulate streaming numbers and book sales, and church groups are taking whole congregations to movies if they think it’s a culture war win. Also, reading Sydney Sweeney and hawk-tuah girl as conservative wins are stretches that the author never really justifies (not to mention seeing Beyonce getting shit out by the CMAs as anything other than a sign that country music executives don’t like independent black women who already have successful music careers beyond their influence).

Which gets to a problem that might only bug me, but this article has nothing to say about any of the art it’s bringing up and misses what I think could be an actually interesting conversation - what does the kind of art conservatives are getting into tell us about them? Like, the fact that they’ve meme-d around hawk-tuah girl, when did conservatives get “sex positive”? (rape positive if we’re being honest, but that’d be a conclusion an article could build towards by actually engaging with the material)

e; ttpos

Author of the article? Probably yes. OP? No, this is a fascinatingly wrong opinion (imo).

Meanwhile, the success of Chappell Roan, Inside Out 2, and the Fallout TV series tell us absolutely nothing /s

When a third party swoops into a negotiation and steals your leverage it has a significant impact on what that middle ends up being

Because placating the egos of the people in power make sense, same reason Zelensky congratulated Trump on winning

I got my numbers on sick days from here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_railroad_labor_dispute?wprov=sfla1

Unfortunately, it isn’t just the media, look through this article and you can see a bunch of Democratic lawmakers and campaign consultants pushing this narrative. These are all people we need to get out of elected offices and off campaign staffs or they’re going to continue to sabotage the Democratic party’s ability to win offices and govern effectively.

Also, the bullet that was dodged hit the radiator of the car that could’ve taken us to the hospital

They still have it coming. Unless they’re personally on Trump’s hit list they’re going to be too wealthy and insulated to feel any real consequences from a Trump administration. The people who are going to suffer the most are minorities and poor people.

A talking head who gets paid a six figure salary to go on TV and spout inane bullshit about immigrants eating pets shouldn’t be replied to. Cletus in the comment section who has a two year degree and makes an hourly wage to do skilled manual labor and honestly thinks the government will let any migrants who want to do so walk into the country whenever they want and give them a welfare check for their trouble does need to be spoken with.

That’s all a lot easier said than done, but I think that’s the general outline of the problem here.

Workers were asking for 15 days of sick leave, Congress and Biden gave them 1 with the act that ended the strike. Later, the railroads continued negotiating with some of the unions and gave them four days of sick leave. People from the Biden administration were present for those conversations and take credit for that.

So, no, the Biden administration did not give the unions what they asked for, and yes they likely did do material harm to them by stopping that strike.

Related article that’s not as good and on a crappier website, but has at least one passage that makes an important observation in passing - holy crap were there a lot of highly educated and highly paid legal experts who went on TV and said obvious bullshit

It was clear after Trump’s loss in 2020 — even before Jan. 6 — that his conduct warranted serious legal scrutiny by the Justice Department, particularly in the area of potential financial crimes. But that probe, which could and should have been pursued by Biden’s U.S. Attorney and aspiring attorney general in Manhattan, somehow never materialized.

…

Garland’s defenders over the years — including many Democratic lawyers who regularly appear on cable news — claimed that Garland and the department were simply following a standard, “bottom-up” investigative effort. Prosecutors would start with the rioters, on this theory, and then eventually get to Trump.

This never made any sense.

It did not reflect some unwritten playbook for criminal investigations. In fact, in criminal cases involving large and potentially overlapping groups of participants — as well as serious time sensitivity — good prosecutors try to get to the top as quickly as possible.

The Justice Department can — and should — have quickly pursued the rioters and Trump in parallel. The fact that many legal pundits actually defended this gross dereliction of duty — and actually argued that this was the appropriate course — continues to amaze me.

Archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/aWmXf

I don’t see how you could possibly see his attacks on migrants, trans kids, etc. as anything other than punching down.

Also, why are you holding the Democratic party accountable for down voters here or other randos online who say stuff about Trump supporters? They’re pretty distinct groups, and the fact is elected Dems bent over backwards to talk as nicely about Trump supporters as they could.

And I actually think that was a big part of what I think their real voter engagement problem was, which is that everything Dems say comes off like inauthentic over polished political bullshit to a lot of voters. I think simultaneously trying to say “Trump is an existential threat to democracy” and “Trump supporters are not garbage” sounds insane (like, if you’re supporting an existential threat to democracy you just inarguably are a garbage human being, sorry not sorry).

I don’t think we should make it a centerpiece of our message or waste a bunch of time on it, but if we get a direct question about Republican party supporters we have to respect our potential voters enough to say “Yes, they are garbage, roughly 35-40% of this country are bad people who are willing to hurt others to get what they want and that’s why it’s so important for the rest of us to put aside our difference and work together to stop them.”

Wanna bet the places and sectors that are doing worse than median wage growth and inflation are rural and manual labor things? That second one especially I think could explain why some gen z men voted the way they did.

Why do you think 11 million people sat out?

Like, if you’re walking down the street and one person calls you a horse they’re a jerk, if two people call you a horse they’re both jerks, but if everyone keeps calling you a horse maybe it’s time to go get fitted for a saddle. The Dems got called a horse 11 million times here.

I mean, no offense but the fact that you haven’t heard this just might mean you’re deep inside an echo chamber. It’s hard to have an exact measure of these thing, but Republican threats and celebrations of violence and sexual assault are at least as central to their party’s platform as being opposed to bigotry is to the Democrats party’s from where I’m sitting.

And I’m not sure why you think being opposed to bigotry is an attack on working class men. Like, if we want to talk about the working class and poor people, let’s talk about the fact that transgender people are more likely than the average American to be living in poverty because of the discrimination they fave.

I will say that’s an easy to miss fact because society in general doesn’t like to platform working class people because they’re not as eloquent or pretty and the Dems tend to behave the same way, so we hear more about wealthy celebrity members of queer communities and other marginalized groups. At the end of the day, tho, if you do really care about the working class you need to care about transphobic discrimination (among all the other kinds of discrimination) too, because it is absolutely a tool the capitalist class wields to keep us divided and oppressed.

Lecturing people about how we need to secure the border and give money to private land developers and other bullshit Republican policies failed, “lecturing” people about the economic and human rights policies our base wants wasn’t seriously attempted

That is a completely accurate depiction of what every member and supporter of the Democratic party has said, which has certainly been much more hurtful than Republicans’ repeated threats to rape and kill us /s

I think both things play a factor, but ditching shitty policies and messaging would be a lot more straightforward process than reducing the number of raging misogynists in America

Disagreed, the Democratic party suffering a temporary implosion does mean most Americans are on board with what the Republican party is proposing. Exit polls showed a lot of voters were basically at “I don’t believe the Democratic party when they say Trump is a threat to democracy and human rights because I think the system will protect us from that, but I do believe I’m spending more on groceries than I was four years ago and I think Republicans will fix that because they’re good at business stuff,” which I think we both know is a very wrong take on what’s about to happen, but that’s a population we can work with to resist fascism.

The average American isn’t ragingly hateful, they’re just profoundly uninterested in anything happening outside their own life (probably because they work 60+ hours a week and are still one car crash or medical event away from being destitute) and really need the “marginalized people will suffer and die” constantly shoved in their face for them to recognize that. That is not good, but I believe it is a solvable problem.

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