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I've been reading up more on Tulsi Gabbard. Honestly, she has an incredible and distinguished track record- from being a medic in Iraq, to her Hawaiian heritage.
If she really does get the DNI position in the Trump cabinet, there is strong chance that she will attempt a bid for President immediately after.
This could cause competition for the Thelians hoping for more JD Vance after Trump leaves office. But I'm not here to wargame 2028 campaign hypotheticals when Trump isn't even sworn in yet.
It seems she and her husband converted to hinduism.
My immediate take is that her presence and native pacific islander background means you know she ascended, and worked for the positions she had. Her brief stint as a Democrat is a bit odd, but otherwise she looks like she has a pretty pristine track record that's really hard to shit on.
Her being anti-lgbt, with a track record of policies that would otherwise be fairly progressive, she seems like a standard, good pick for almost any position in ... any president's cabinet?
From reading the wiki page, I'm having a hard time figuring out why anyone would mouth-froth over the idea of her having any position of power.
Dear Mottizens, what is your view on her? Any information I've missed?
She's a crank with similar vibes to RFK Jr. or Ron Paul, although they have very different voting records. The fact this group has ascended now is thanks to the Republicans being dominated by the Dale Gribble voters.
Uh, how exactly is she a crank? She’s a Hare Krishna who doesn’t hide her ‘member of a very conservative religion’ views on social issues while having some progressive ideas and being opposed to US intervention.
r/neoliberal on suicide watch rn.
I know, reddit. But they are so confident that she’s a Russian agent. What’s the deal with that? Is it just normal radlib demoralized Russia hysteria? It seems deeper than that.
On a related note; I’ve been on Reddit a lot in the last week, mostly out of morbid curiosity. I had stayed away for probably 12-18 months, and it’s terrible. A much worse echo chamber than I remember, and it was incredibly bad before. Good god.
I think the Democrats unleashed the most massive wave of bot and shill astroturfing that they ever have before onto Reddit in the last year or so. I have heard a theory that seems very plausible to me, which is that one of their main astroturf focuses has been to put political posts up on relatively obscure subreddits and then massively upvote them using automated or semi-automated means to drive them to the front page. https://old.reddit.com/r/houstonwade/ is often presented as an example of this theory, and if you take a look at it it seems to check out.
The astroturfing combined with years of censorship having driven out most political dissent means that a large fraction of the political discourse on Reddit in the last few months has consisted of waves of bot and shill astroturfing slamming into the minds of people who are already mentally prepared to believe in wild pro-Democrat political theories.
Reddit is almost done as a political discussion space. Even /r/politicaldiscussion, which was maybe like 70% pro-Democrat a few years ago, is now more like 90% pro-Democrat. /r/moderatepolitics is still holding out but I don't know for how much longer. The dirtbag and socialist left on places like /r/stupidpol and /r/redscarepod is still being tolerated but again, I do not know for how much longer given that they criticize mainstream Democrats almost as much as Republicans do.
I don't know if trying to turn Reddit from 95% pro-Democrat to 99% pro-Democrat was worth what the Democrats invested in it, but it might be. Such astoturfing campaigns are not necessarily very expensive, and in a close election they well might swing it.
X has also been full of astroturfing, and still is for that matter. But in the case of X, the astroturfing is coming through from both sides, rather than almost entirely from the Democrats like on Reddit. I don't know if Republicans didn't bother to invest much into astroturfing Reddit or if it's just that their attempts got foiled by censorship, but on X their astroturfing attempts seem to have decent penetration.
Apparently the Harris campaign was astroturfing Reddit using an army of volunteers organized via a discord.
But, as you point out, why did they even bother? The site is full of deranged partisans. Almost all the top posts are made by deranged partisans. Going from 95% to 99% DNC propaganda if anything just devalues it.
In any case, no one ever accused the Harris campaign of competence.
Exactly. What’s weird about democrats is that they spend so much time and energy to reach out to people who already agree with them and are already going to “vote blue no matter who”. It’s just a stupid idea. Even if you win, you’re winning the converted. If you wanted to astroturf, going for a neutral to semi hostile media network might convince a Trump voter or two.
I constantly see claims that modern elections are 99% about turnout, not convincing swing voters, since politics is too polarized for there to be a significant number of swing voters. Maybe those takes are completely wrong, but it's certainly the received wisdom in any at all mainstream election analysis. Not sure that targeting redditors in particular is useful way to get out the vote of Democratic partisans, but the Democrats definitely believe that winning elections is about getting their own partisans to actually vote and discouraging Republican partisans from voting (e.g., by spreading negative news about Republican candidates). I say Democrats simply because that's the media bubble I'm in; I have no reason to believe the Republicans don't believe the same with the parties flipped.
But how does adding yet another pro-Harris post to a sub-reddit that is already 100% full of pro-Harris posts drive turnout? It makes no sense.
It's like a guy adding a 17th Harris/Walz yard sign to a yard that already has 16. It doesn't make his neighbors want to go vote for Harris. It just makes him look like a crazy person.
It's the same mistake that mass media outlets like ABC make. You can make a choice to burn a small amount of credibility in exchange for partisan politics. But at some point, the credibility is gone and then your endorsements actually hurt the candidate.
Democrats who look at the front page of Reddit will say "holy shit, what a bunch of crazy people" and think "maybe I'll stay home on Tuesday".
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Republicans 100% believe that there are democrats who can be convinced to vote Republican with the right pitch(and that Trump did this), although often holding that non voters are mostly people who shouldn’t be voting anyways.
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