People who never believed Gaza counted in the first place are determined to negate its impact in the 2024 election. By doing so, they compound their error.
I still read Daily Kos, if only to get a sense of what the folks there are discussing. It’s still an important hub of activity for people really invested in party politics.
Unfortunately, what I see is that DKos has warped its own information space. Whether or not LM1985 has it right with the assertion that the higher ups at DKos banished reporting about Gaza from their Front Page and from articles written by paid staff, it remains that the message to all essayists were to stay away from the topic if they knew what was good for them (many writers, including myself, were banned for making forays into the subject). Without spaces to talk about the conflict in Gaza, the less the site reflected genuine fault lines in the party itself. Without being able to talk about those fissures, they were allowed to widen.
Censorship is a self-defeating strategy.
Now, what happened with the Amsterdam coverage (which is still going on) is another thing entirely! I may write a bit more about it. The pattern matches what happened with Rashida Tlaib being smeared by CNN as well as the coverage given to student protesters. One could even say it parallels the coverage of the bombing of al-Ahly hospital where the media backtracked and said it wasn’t Israel after all but Islamic Jihad instead. The Amsterdam coverage was simply caught in real-time.
I have seen some comments on the Other Site stating that paid staff were/are forbidden from writing about Gaza and that nothing on the subject can appear in the front page. If this is the editorial stance - plus the fact that so many posters claimed that it would be imprudent to bring Gaza up during an election - then I’m not sure why they operate under the delusion that they have the potential to act as an underground “resistance” during the once and future Trump administration. Making fun of Trump is a cottage industry, and it’s clear that the establishment (political, cultural, media) would have rather had Harris, whom they know how to deal with. The fact that Biden/Harris quickly conceded the election and committed to a peaceful transfer of power illustrates that all their rhetoric about fascism was a scam. If you (universal you) really believe that the election is fraudulent and the country is about to fall into fascism, pulling a January 6 makes perfect sense.
Due to the team sport nature of politics, I don’t think posters at the Other Site can conceive of the fact that a person could vote for Trump and vote to legalize abortion. Many issues such as M4A, ending forever wars, and legalized abortion poll well among all demographics, as long as they aren’t linked to a particular political party. They also don’t understand that many people didn’t vote for Trump or Harris, but voted down ballot, which explains part of the supposed mystery of the missing voters.
The stubborn need to knee jerk defend Biden and Harris, not to mention their reflexive hate for Trump, blinds them to the fact that a lot of people aren’t happy with the status quo. It’s completely grotesque and ignorant that they don’t understand why people in Dearborn who may have lost dozens of family members wouldn’t want to vote for Harris. Those in the Arab and Muslim communities who did try to engage with the Harris campaign were told in no uncertain terms to get lost. I think Harris thought that she could offset the loss of Arabs, Muslims, and their allies in the antiwar movement by courting the neocons, apparently forgetting that no one who isn’t already a Beltway insider cares about the approval of neocons.
The repeated mantra about how Harris supposedly ran a “flawless campaign” just seems like copium among the faithful. Much like how the Jehovah’s Witnesses had to scramble to find an answer for why the world didn’t end in 1914, BlueAnon has to find a reason why Harris supposedly did everything right and still got trounced. Gaza has to be minimized for several reasons. One, I think they would have to come to terms that “their side” has been minimizing at best and contributing to at worst crimes against humanity. This disrupts their crude good vs evil narrative. Two, it casts doubt on the wisdom of senior DNC leadership, which is taboo. Third, they would have to admit that they were wrong and the “tankies” were right, which once again causes doubt on the righteousness of “their side” and its leadership. The blowback from Gaza is going to be horrific, and I doubt the Democrats who enabled with this will even realize what they’ve done.
Normally I would not call out the Other Site by name, but in this instance it's rather necessary, as it is the site owner who is central to many of these attitudes and conceptions running wild on the site. His posts attract hundreds of views on a regular basis, all the more when it's dealing with the aftermath of an unforeseen and devastating electoral loss. People are looking for answers. He's providing superficial context, to the point of misleading his audience.
You say: "I don’t think posters at the Other Site can conceive of the fact that a person could vote for Trump and vote to legalize abortion. Many issues such as M4A, ending forever wars, and legalized abortion poll well among all demographics, as long as they aren’t linked to a particular political party."
I do think there is some genuine confusion among certain voters as to how they reconcile their views on abortion. One YouTuber pointed to comments (not displayed, so I'm taking this recap on faith) by a voter in one southwestern state -- Arizona, maybe? -- who said that she was voting for Trump because he safeguarded abortion rights by returning the issue to the states. So that's problematic, to say the least. She appears to be a states' rights person who also wants to retain abortion rights, and this is the way that she was able to get those two ideas to dovetail. She obviously does not understand why Roe was decided by SCOTUS in the first place.
As for the fact that certain policies poll well if party affiliation is left off: so much more the fact that some people value things said by certain people than by others. We know this to be true. We know this by the fact that women and POC in the corporate environment can bring things up at the conference table, have that item rather ignored, then have someone else -- usually a male, usually also White -- say the very same thing, often in the very same meeting, and have people respond to the item favorably. So much more so the fact that Kamala Harris was a Black female sending Democratic ideas into the information space. As I said elsewhere, considering that this was not just any cycle but one in which fascism was in the air / on the ballot, the best the Democrats could have done was serve a mirror match whereby Democratic ideals were issued from a White male's mouth. I'm not saying that a Black woman could never be elected in the U.S. -- though that task is terribly set back in the wake of this loss -- but that fascist-curious folks would see two White guys and actually compare the two on every other metric without immutable traits coming in and fuzzing up the delivery of their rhetoric.
Besides that, none of the below-the-belt attacks that Trump landed on Harris for her race or gender would have been applicable to a White male candidate and so Trump would have been bereft of most of his attacks. We never would have heard about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs. No one on stage with Trump would have mentioned anything about "pimp handlers." All of that would have been inoperative.
Everything in your third paragraph I agree, 100%.
Your last paragraph is on-point as well. I think the "flawless" statement is coming partially from Van Jones (!), who just before Election Day coined the phrase, "He gets to be lawless, she has to be flawless." It's a great turn of phrase, I must give it to Jones. But it has cemented this idea that Harris could do no wrong. This is fallacious. She made lots of mistakes. It is true that some elements were out of her hands -- she didn't know she'd be running until this summer. That wasn't fair to her. But yes, I agree that this latching onto "flawless" is to find succor in an otherwise bitter landscape.
I too think that some folks in the Democratic Party will wake up with a terrible genocide hangover, and I don't know how they will console themselves. I do need for them to make it to the right conclusion without diverting into scapegoating and missing the lesson altogether. I saw someone at the Other Site (and at the NYT as well) blame "deep-seated antisemitism on the left" for the desertion of voters this year, saying that due to these people "now genocide is ensured." I want to point out that, from the construction of that clause, that person believes that genocide has not yet happened! They think there's going to be a cause and effect stemming from the actions of people who were demonstrating against Israel's actions in Gaza. This is turning reality on its head, and it's done apparently in an effort to protect oneself from seeing the obvious truth: genocide has been going on for months, and the vast majority of Democrats turned a blind eye because they were more worried about winning at the ballot box.
I wonder if history will blame it on Biden's mental frailty. Nothing would surprise me anymore after the rewrite of what happened in Amsterdam.
So much for the Daily Kos. I won't be reading them anymore.
I still read Daily Kos, if only to get a sense of what the folks there are discussing. It’s still an important hub of activity for people really invested in party politics.
Unfortunately, what I see is that DKos has warped its own information space. Whether or not LM1985 has it right with the assertion that the higher ups at DKos banished reporting about Gaza from their Front Page and from articles written by paid staff, it remains that the message to all essayists were to stay away from the topic if they knew what was good for them (many writers, including myself, were banned for making forays into the subject). Without spaces to talk about the conflict in Gaza, the less the site reflected genuine fault lines in the party itself. Without being able to talk about those fissures, they were allowed to widen.
Censorship is a self-defeating strategy.
Now, what happened with the Amsterdam coverage (which is still going on) is another thing entirely! I may write a bit more about it. The pattern matches what happened with Rashida Tlaib being smeared by CNN as well as the coverage given to student protesters. One could even say it parallels the coverage of the bombing of al-Ahly hospital where the media backtracked and said it wasn’t Israel after all but Islamic Jihad instead. The Amsterdam coverage was simply caught in real-time.
I have seen some comments on the Other Site stating that paid staff were/are forbidden from writing about Gaza and that nothing on the subject can appear in the front page. If this is the editorial stance - plus the fact that so many posters claimed that it would be imprudent to bring Gaza up during an election - then I’m not sure why they operate under the delusion that they have the potential to act as an underground “resistance” during the once and future Trump administration. Making fun of Trump is a cottage industry, and it’s clear that the establishment (political, cultural, media) would have rather had Harris, whom they know how to deal with. The fact that Biden/Harris quickly conceded the election and committed to a peaceful transfer of power illustrates that all their rhetoric about fascism was a scam. If you (universal you) really believe that the election is fraudulent and the country is about to fall into fascism, pulling a January 6 makes perfect sense.
Due to the team sport nature of politics, I don’t think posters at the Other Site can conceive of the fact that a person could vote for Trump and vote to legalize abortion. Many issues such as M4A, ending forever wars, and legalized abortion poll well among all demographics, as long as they aren’t linked to a particular political party. They also don’t understand that many people didn’t vote for Trump or Harris, but voted down ballot, which explains part of the supposed mystery of the missing voters.
The stubborn need to knee jerk defend Biden and Harris, not to mention their reflexive hate for Trump, blinds them to the fact that a lot of people aren’t happy with the status quo. It’s completely grotesque and ignorant that they don’t understand why people in Dearborn who may have lost dozens of family members wouldn’t want to vote for Harris. Those in the Arab and Muslim communities who did try to engage with the Harris campaign were told in no uncertain terms to get lost. I think Harris thought that she could offset the loss of Arabs, Muslims, and their allies in the antiwar movement by courting the neocons, apparently forgetting that no one who isn’t already a Beltway insider cares about the approval of neocons.
The repeated mantra about how Harris supposedly ran a “flawless campaign” just seems like copium among the faithful. Much like how the Jehovah’s Witnesses had to scramble to find an answer for why the world didn’t end in 1914, BlueAnon has to find a reason why Harris supposedly did everything right and still got trounced. Gaza has to be minimized for several reasons. One, I think they would have to come to terms that “their side” has been minimizing at best and contributing to at worst crimes against humanity. This disrupts their crude good vs evil narrative. Two, it casts doubt on the wisdom of senior DNC leadership, which is taboo. Third, they would have to admit that they were wrong and the “tankies” were right, which once again causes doubt on the righteousness of “their side” and its leadership. The blowback from Gaza is going to be horrific, and I doubt the Democrats who enabled with this will even realize what they’ve done.
Thanks for weighing in, LM.
Normally I would not call out the Other Site by name, but in this instance it's rather necessary, as it is the site owner who is central to many of these attitudes and conceptions running wild on the site. His posts attract hundreds of views on a regular basis, all the more when it's dealing with the aftermath of an unforeseen and devastating electoral loss. People are looking for answers. He's providing superficial context, to the point of misleading his audience.
You say: "I don’t think posters at the Other Site can conceive of the fact that a person could vote for Trump and vote to legalize abortion. Many issues such as M4A, ending forever wars, and legalized abortion poll well among all demographics, as long as they aren’t linked to a particular political party."
I do think there is some genuine confusion among certain voters as to how they reconcile their views on abortion. One YouTuber pointed to comments (not displayed, so I'm taking this recap on faith) by a voter in one southwestern state -- Arizona, maybe? -- who said that she was voting for Trump because he safeguarded abortion rights by returning the issue to the states. So that's problematic, to say the least. She appears to be a states' rights person who also wants to retain abortion rights, and this is the way that she was able to get those two ideas to dovetail. She obviously does not understand why Roe was decided by SCOTUS in the first place.
As for the fact that certain policies poll well if party affiliation is left off: so much more the fact that some people value things said by certain people than by others. We know this to be true. We know this by the fact that women and POC in the corporate environment can bring things up at the conference table, have that item rather ignored, then have someone else -- usually a male, usually also White -- say the very same thing, often in the very same meeting, and have people respond to the item favorably. So much more so the fact that Kamala Harris was a Black female sending Democratic ideas into the information space. As I said elsewhere, considering that this was not just any cycle but one in which fascism was in the air / on the ballot, the best the Democrats could have done was serve a mirror match whereby Democratic ideals were issued from a White male's mouth. I'm not saying that a Black woman could never be elected in the U.S. -- though that task is terribly set back in the wake of this loss -- but that fascist-curious folks would see two White guys and actually compare the two on every other metric without immutable traits coming in and fuzzing up the delivery of their rhetoric.
Besides that, none of the below-the-belt attacks that Trump landed on Harris for her race or gender would have been applicable to a White male candidate and so Trump would have been bereft of most of his attacks. We never would have heard about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs. No one on stage with Trump would have mentioned anything about "pimp handlers." All of that would have been inoperative.
Everything in your third paragraph I agree, 100%.
Your last paragraph is on-point as well. I think the "flawless" statement is coming partially from Van Jones (!), who just before Election Day coined the phrase, "He gets to be lawless, she has to be flawless." It's a great turn of phrase, I must give it to Jones. But it has cemented this idea that Harris could do no wrong. This is fallacious. She made lots of mistakes. It is true that some elements were out of her hands -- she didn't know she'd be running until this summer. That wasn't fair to her. But yes, I agree that this latching onto "flawless" is to find succor in an otherwise bitter landscape.
I too think that some folks in the Democratic Party will wake up with a terrible genocide hangover, and I don't know how they will console themselves. I do need for them to make it to the right conclusion without diverting into scapegoating and missing the lesson altogether. I saw someone at the Other Site (and at the NYT as well) blame "deep-seated antisemitism on the left" for the desertion of voters this year, saying that due to these people "now genocide is ensured." I want to point out that, from the construction of that clause, that person believes that genocide has not yet happened! They think there's going to be a cause and effect stemming from the actions of people who were demonstrating against Israel's actions in Gaza. This is turning reality on its head, and it's done apparently in an effort to protect oneself from seeing the obvious truth: genocide has been going on for months, and the vast majority of Democrats turned a blind eye because they were more worried about winning at the ballot box.