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Citizens United is the cause of our lobby issues generally, yes, but the Democrats are still responsible for allowing their members to take AIPAC money.

They stopped members taking NRA money when the NRA was trying to play bothsides, they can do it with Israeli money too. Swearing off money from AIPAC and other Israeli groups should be a requirement to run in the party.

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In regards to Musk’s businesses it might be considered a mercy for his kids to not inherit them…

The thin silverlining to that scenario is he’s not president/commander in chief and can’t have his goons lower security so his rioters can get in.

Israeli fascism is not a result of democracy…it’s a colonial project born from the pre-war mentality of Europe and the preceding centuries of monarchy and despotism. It is, fundementally, anti-democratic.

Israel and the US are indeed different. The US, regardless of its problems with its right-wing and the right’s support of Israel, is not an apartheid state and there is meaningful internal opposition to the far-right in the US (unlike Israel, or Russia, or China).

You’re trying to conflate democracy and capitalism, which really makes me question your motives.

What little life he has left. I’ll never understand how people get to that age and are still behaving like they’re going to live forever. If someone has a forward-looking sense of duty that motivates them to make a better future for others I understand that, but Trump is clearly just in it for himself so I don’t really understand the motivation if it’s not just straight up denial of his own mortality.

The end is right around the corner for old Dumpy, you’d think he’d want to spend it sitting on a beach drinking pina coladas that he got other people to pay for.

Potentially, yeah, I’m not exactly pinning all my hopes on it or anything, but I feel like even with the people who are fully in the cult, a lot of them are mostly just kind of dim and easily manipulated. They’re ordinary people laboring under a lie, not necessarily the people who actually fabricate the lies themselves intentionally (though some of them certainly might be that type, as you say).

It creates a short circuit in the system when those ordinary people have the direct access to the truth without Fox or Trump or whoever else being able to act as a middleman and spin it. It’s harder to lie to yourself when you’re the one faced with the decision to tear up the ballots or whatever they would have to do to make things fit their world view.

I don’t think people are all good, most are a mixed bag at best, but I do have faith in average people to admit the truth to themselves when it’s presented to them in a way that they can accept it. With some those conditions under which they’ll accept it are just especially extreme.

We can only hope that literally being the ones to be involved in counting the votes and seeing the results for themselves first hand is enough to get them to accept reality.

A long shot, but if these people genuinely believe that there was election interference and they aren’t simply looking to knowingly commit fraud, there’s a chance they might acknowledge the facts in the end if the results really are just undeniable.

Edit: This American Life did an episode back before the 2020 election about an election administrator who basically made it his priority to make the process as transparent as possible so that election deniers could see under every stone and explore every nook of the process.

And I think it both speaks to the power of transparency as an antidote, but is also a bit sad how this guy bends over backwards to accommodate these people and is still treated with suspicion. Really interesting listen and highlights how fair elections really do rest on the shoulders of these lower level workers.

“The what? The Meritage Federation? What did you say? Carriage Fumigation, what? Can’t hear you. Never heard of it, is that like a Cracker Barrel thing?”

This is illustrative of why I have no faith in Israel to actually behave as a liberal democracy the way its allies pretend it is.

It’s not just that they temporarily have a far-right administration as part of some cycle between liberalism and conservativism, the population itself is overwhelmingly far right and supports apartheid. The only thing that upsets them about what’s happening in Gaza is that the Israeli government clearly doesn’t care about getting the hostages back. The wholesale slaughter of innocent people does not bother most Israelis in the least, many of them see it as a positive.

There is no internal opposition to the far right in Israel, and the country should be geopolitically categorized the same as we categorize Russia, China or any other hardcore authoritarian state. It’s not a democracy.

https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2018/11/nyc-purged-200000-voters-in-2016-it-wasnt-a-mistake/177964/

Then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman would eventually reveal that they were among 200,000 New York City voters who had been illegally wiped off the rolls and prevented from voting in the presidential primary. But by January of 2017, when Schneiderman announced that he would intervene in a federal lawsuit against the New York City Board of Elections, along with the U.S. Department of Justice, the news fell on deaf ears.

[…]

As the candidates entered the New York race, Clinton was leading Sanders by 209 pledged delegates. Although The New York Times, the Daily News and Newsday had endorsed Clinton, the momentum was with Sanders, who had come off seven straight primary wins. By April 2016, Sanders had narrowed Clinton’s initial 60-point lead with voters nationally, to 10 points, and appeared to be gaining on her. However, a Sanders victory in New York had been deemed a long shot, based on Clinton’s formidable support by the local Democratic Party establishment.

Essentially Sanders was closing the gap with the votes, so the establishment helped kneecap his momentum for Clinton’s benefit.