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I didn't vote for Trump, though considering I live in one of the least-swing states in the country, I didn't vote at all because I didn't think it would be worth the gas I would expend driving to the polling place.
In any case, Trump is president now.
When I was a kid at the time of Obama v McCain my nice teacher Miss Collins gave us a very simplified and seven-year-old friendly explanation of politics. In some countries, one guy got to be in charge and nobody else got any say. But America was different because we got to have elections every four years, which let the people choose who we wanted to be in charge. Everybody went into a booth and chose who they wanted to be president, and whoever got picked by the most people automatically won.
When I got a little older I started spending a bunch of time on various forums and image boards where I learned that actually democracy is fake and gay. It's all a sham. We live under the system/the Cathedral/the regime/whatever. Voting doesn't matter because no matter who wins, The Regime will never allow a true based right-winger to come to power.
This skepticism continued through the Trump years, with the explanation for his 2016 victory being that They were caught off guard. And of course his loss in 2020 was because the System was no longer off guard, and had fortified itself against the possibility of another Trump victory through means of gross election fraud. "There's no voting your way out of this." In the lead up to 2024, various RW voices, including many on this forum, insisted that Trump would never be allowed to take office again. Mysterious votes would be hauled out at 3:00 AM to ensure a Harris win. Or else he would be assassinated. Or once in office, he would not be permitted to actually do anything Based™ by the Deep State.
Well, despite the universal opprobrium and opposition of every single group of people I've been assured are really running the show, variously journalists, left-wing billionaires, the CIA, other unelected federal bureaucrats, college professors, the Jews, NGOs, liberal white women, or some combination thereof, Trump won. "They were caught off guard" no longer remotely works as an explanation.
Trump doing mass firings of federal employees, mass deportations, and dismantling DEI, just like he promised. The libs are coping and seething, but they can't do anything more than that, and the reason they can't do anything more than that is because more people pressed the "Trump" button than the "Harris" button in the voting booth, and according to the magic piece of paper, this means Trump is in charge now. Democracy worked exactly like Miss Collins said it would. This literally happened, just replace Hitler with "woke DEI". As soon as it the results of the election were clear, the libs immediately acted in accordance with the magic piece of paper and handed over power, without any attempt at military coups, riots, Hail Mary legal endeavors, or even a lib January 6th. And no Deep State has stepped forward to prevent him from doing exactly what he said he would do on the campaign trail. The Magic Piece of Paper has spoken.
While this is a massive L for the libs, it's also a massive L for many reactionary theory of politics which have proven so popular in what can broadly be called the "dissident right."
Like what is the cope for this? Trump isn't a real right-winger, the System would never allow the election of a real right-winger who would restore seigneurial dues and reverse the industrial revolution? The System is just biding its time until it can do a reverse QAnon Storm?
All the based esoteric schizos gibbering about the Cathedral and ZOG and how everybody is a communist were wrong. Turns, they were the fake and gay ones all along, and my sweet normie liberal second grade teacher was right the whole time. Democracy is Real and Straight. Sorry Miss Collins.
Did you watch the post-election interview that Bob Brady gave? (I think this is it: YouTube link) If you thought that 30M votes were going to be stuffed at the last minute, I think the interview reveals a very plausible explanation for why they weren't.
Now, I am not saying that Miss Collins was wrong. But I am saying that watching the interview gave me the strong (and perhaps wrong) vibe that what happened is that Team Kamala was full of noobs and didn't pony up and play with the city machines and as a result the city machines sent a Clear Message about what happened when you go off-script by simply not coughing up votes for Kamala.
Of course, that's not necessarily a conspiracy along the lines of the CIA controlling voting machines via satellite or something. There are shades of conspiratorial interpretations here, ranging from the sinister and illegal "the machines didn't stuff the ballots because the Presidential campaign didn't release cash to them" to the dodgy-but-legal "the machines didn't bother to get out because they weren't adequately compensated by the Presidential campaign for staff time" to the relatively benign "Kamala failed to coordinate with the boots on the ground and as a result they were disorganized." I don't see the need to say any of the more conspiratorial interpretations are correct, but it seems worth at least acknowledging the possibility that city machines are capable of large-scale voter fraud.
But whichever of these explanations is true, it's worth watching the interview because I think it reveals a lot more about how politics and power works than sitting around theorizing about how a shadowy three-letter-organization has ironclad control over our elections.
That suggests that big city Democratic machines are in fact entirely ambivalent about the Democratic Party and progressive politics and only care about getting paid, which again would be a strong point against the “…burgers?” argument on the right that suggests these people Really Do Care a lot about this stuff for reasons that go way beyond financial incentives.
Senior Dem and non-profit managers being shocked that their interns actually believe all that stuff has been a running theme for the last decade now. And the city machines are the least vulnerable to activist takeover tactics that originated in colleges and are optimized to take over the college-like environments of modern corps and ngos.
I can see an existential battle between the philly turnout machine boss and the 26yo kamela advisor who, like? hit up Beyonce on tiktok? and ofc she's down with the struggle against like fascism and stuff? and sure she'll help us turn out the youth vote?
So now you really are going back to the oft-mocked “it’s just kids on campuses” argument? I mean this seems clearly contradictory. The truth is that the “establishment” or whatever word you want to use for it was not sufficiently threatened by Trump to do everything to prevent him from winning again, the same way they didn’t actually do everything to stop FDR from winning.
You're talking to a different person. But yes, my blackpill take is that they need someone to take the fall for the coming recession, like your pt4 in another post.
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