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Notes -
Who else up watching election results? As of the time of this writing Decision Desk has called all of:
The Virginia governor race in favor of Abigail Spanberger (D).
The Virginia lieutenant governor race in favor of Ghazala Hashmi (D and the first Muslim woman elected to statewide office).
The Virginia Attorney General race in favor of Jay Jones (D lmao).
The New Jersey governor race in favor of Mickie Sherrill (D).
The NYC mayoral race for Zohran Mamdani (D, projecting a majority of the vote too lmao).
Both statewide Georgia Public Service Commissioner races for the Democratic candidates.
Polls are still open in California so no word yet there on the redistricting ballot measure. In other Jay Jones news the house delegate who leaked his texts is on track to lose her re-election, as part of dems winning a trifecta in the Virginia government.
The county by county level results I've seen show pretty much all of the above running ahead of Harris and Spanberger even running ahead of Biden in 2020. Is this indicative of what we might see going forward? Dems had previously overperformed in special elections this year but this is the closest to a general until next years actual federal elections. If these trends hold up not a good sign for Republicans!
Whisper it but I'm actually a fan of Mamdani. Not of his policies, but it's not like the Trump faction has any better policies so it's a wash on that front but Mamdani wins hands down on everything else. Speaking from an ocean away I hope he gives the right a taste of their own medicine.
Truly the Dramatard candidate of choice...
He wasn't even the most drama candidate in the race. Sliwa is an incredible specimen.
Fair point. I hadn't been paying much attention to the race so all I knew about him was that he was the Republican candidate who wore his red beret everywhere which is suspect but not that crazy, however looking at his Wiki page I see he's been arrested 75+ times...
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My opinion of Zohran has improved over time. It went from negative to neutral.
For one, MAGA twitter and Cuomo's crash outs were embarrassing. It lowered my expectations for political candidates. Zohran seems tame in comparison. Next, he has moderated his positions. Admittedly, he started from a from an extreme place. But, Zohran has extended olive branches to the police & Jewish communities. Good enough. Shows humility and statesmanship.
I love NYC and hope to live here for the foreseeable future. So I'll choose optimism. But yeah, if Eric Adams was electable, I'd have liked to see him re-elected.
Why would you take that at face value? A politician "moderating" during a campaign is probably the least trustworthy speaker on Earth.
It shows grace in victory. It's good enough.
In practice, his transition team is a good early tell.
I recognize Maria Torres-Springer and Lina Khan, both appointees by moderate democrats. There is some reconciliation with moderates. So far, mt read is more Trump 1 than Trump 2.
I'm judging Zohran by the standards set for your bang average Democrat mayor. The republicans promised pogroms and govt. mandated namaaz 5 times a day. This ain't it.
Look, I am hoping to spend my life in NYC. I am optimistic because I have to be optimistic. I don't want to leave this place. Therefore, I want Zohran to be good. It is ass backwards. But, It keeps me going. For a moment, let me have this. Reality will hit me in the face soon enough.
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That's just to be expected. Americans want more from their government than it provides and the party that controls the White House is the biggest symbol of the government, so in midterm elections it's more common for the party that controls the White House to lose than it is for it to win.
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That "IF" is doing absurd amounts of work here.
Anyway, literally none of these outcomes was too surprising or even concerning to me. I have managed to studiously avoid caring too much about these elections since my state has mostly just been a beneficiary of other states self-immolating.
The outcome that was ALSO unsurprising but I think has some really noticeable import is the Young Female Vote*:
and on the male side:
*Exit polling, so the real margins might look different.
Dems can pull a basic majority with young men, but still have 40+% going republican even in a good year. But are pulling huge majorities with the young women.
So there's a sizeable gendered political gap even in blue-leaning states.
If you're a young conservative dude in any of those states, good freaking luck finding a romantic partner. For the <20% of women who might partially agree with your politics, your competition is your 'fellow' conservatives, who overall outnumber the available pool of women.
Oh and then there's the recent research that "Male students show more tolerance for political enemies than females show for their own allies"
So in terms of 'trends,' What do you think eventually happens if young women continue voting for Democrats/lefties in droves... and have extreme intolerance for anyone who doesn't, while young men tack further right?
Your takeaway from these numbers is 'but who will the male conservatives bang?'. I think the more valid question would be 'why are the large majority of young women voting D instead of R?'.
The short version of that is that the Democratic policies are based on strong appeals to emotions, be it general anxiety, sympathy, or outright fear of vaguely specified catastrophes happening in the future.
Women are generally more susceptible to pure emotional appeals:
(I plucked this study at random, but there are MANY like it.)
Women also tend to be conform more to 'public' pressure. than men so it'd be unsurprising they'd follow each other's lead and cluster around the same parties/candidates if they think all the other girls are doing so.
THUS if you build your coalition largely around those groups that respond most strongly to emotional rhetoric, it will end up having an outsize amount of women in it.
Simple as.
The slightly longer version:
Women are just way more neurotic now.
So many of them are in a constant state of anxiety.
(Fun research I read recently: there's been a noticeable rise in young females' "Solo" alcohol consumption.)
This all means they are extra sensitive to fear-based messaging.
Which political actors are keen on exploiting. Make your voters believe that the sky is falling, the climate is overheating, the KKK is about to arise and re-instate segregation, children are dying en masse in some random country, that measles is making a comeback, whatever.
Make your voters believe the other party/tribe is the reason for these occurrence, or at least the main obstacle stopping them from fixing them.
And then propose that the crisis can be fixed (and your anxieties relieved) by voting the 'correct' way. And now you've got a motivated, easily controlled, almost fanatical voter based to mobilize around election time.
But, of course, voting never actually fixes the anxiety issue, because the source of the anxiety wasn't actually what they said it was. So you can exploit those anxious tendencies indefinitely.
Which is why liberals, especially 'extreme' liberals, have much, much higher rates of mental illness diagnoses than moderates and conservatives.
So the political message is simple. "You should be afraid. You should fear [external thing]. Republicans are causing [external thing]. Vote for us to make [external thing] go away."
Add in that Women have more student loan debt than men.
Add in that Women Consume more healthcare and spend more on prescription drugs.
Add in that Women are by and large more likely to be receiving welfare benefits from the state although THAT is strongly mediated by race (scroll down and click the "Filter by Characteristics - Individuals" tab).
And you can see why they would tend to cluster towards the party that promises to forgive student debt, make healthcare free, and preserve or increase various welfare benefits.
So it all seems pretty straightforward.
Notice that the women who buck this trend are the married ones. They're happier, less mentally ill (not less stressed necessarily), and more likely to vote Republican.
But there are fewer women getting married, so whichever way the causal arrow points, its not too surprising there's a large pool of single women that are more likely to vote Democrat.
So in conclusion:
There's one party that caters to the most insecure, anxious, fearful and conformist subsets of the population.
And there's an increasing pool of insecure, anxious, fearful, relatively conformist women for them to cater to.
2 + 2 = 4.
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Republicans are the party of "your body my choice" and Democrats... aren't. It's not complicated.
Wasn't the pro-life/pro-choice gender gap formerly pretty small? That is, there used to be a similar amount of pro-life women as pro-choice up until the last decade or so?
Even more recently than that! The big split was only really post-Dobbs. It turns out that once you have skin in the game (abortion can actually be criminalized) people change their mind. I know the phrase arises in the abortion context but I think it is also a synecdoche for a certain kind of politics towards women generally. How many Democrats are talking about how women shouldn't be working outside the home? That we should repeal the 19th amendment? That women's participation in the economy or public life has been bad for society? There is a certain kind of politics that believes women ought to be in positions of legal, social, and economic subordination to men and it is heavily concentrated among Republicans.
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Because young women want material things for free or with minimal effort, and Democrats are, at this time, the party that is vocally for redistribution.
Also, women in general like it when men do violence on their behalf, and Democrats are vocally the party of sheltering women from consequences. Don’t be fooled by young women jumping in on “Defund the Police” and other such slogans. For AWFLs, that only ever meant “Neuter the police as a force resisting the violence of POC males. Absolutely keep it as a force protecting me personally from violence, and also resisting any violence my co-ethnic males might engage in.”
Following on from that, and I will admit that this part is purely speculation, but my experience is that many more young women have a problem with self-loathing, vs young men. And Democrats are vocally the party of self-loathing for their constituents.
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Did you seriously ask this question in the Culture War thread?
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Complete Democrat political dominance? 80+% of women consistently voting for Democratic party candidates would be a nigh insurmountable electoral advantage.
Right.
Unless men decide they don't like that.
I've said it before, Women are a potent political force but an incompetent military/policing one.
If 60ish percent of men vote one way, and 80ish percent of women vote the other, and win, seems like a problem if the men who are in that 60% are ALSO the ones who would be tasked with carrying out/enforcing the laws they expressly disagree with.
Oh, and paying for it all too.
So here's the question I really want answered:
If less than half of the young men buy-in to the ideal of gender equality, what happens to a Democracy that tries to enforce gender equality?
WE'RE PROBABLY GONNA FIND OUT.
But will it stay that way, if a disproportionally male faction wages war against a disporportionally female faction, seeking to reduce them to a state of subjugation?
"God made men, and God made women, but Samuel Colt made them equal."
That works pretty well if we're talking about one-on-one encounters. In fact I endorse it.
But organized violence as a group is FAR AND AWAY a male specialty.
Hence why I said
If we ever got to a breakdown of order severe enough that men are banding up in militias, warbands, gangs, whatever, the advantage will turn extremely against women in general.
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@faceh
Men won’t do shit.
@Celestial-body-NOS
Women won’t do shit.
Nothing ever happens.
To add some actual analysis here, I react to these discussions the same way I react to pop-sci articles about how we’re all going to evolve into a race of pale, long-fingered morloks in order to better access our computer terminals: it’s laughable to expect that these completely unsustainable systems are are going to last long enough to make any kind of difference whatsoever.
And as I’ve said before, I think if incel rage ever does boil over, it will probably be sublimated into some other ideological movement, be that fascism, Bolshevism, radical Islam, or radical Christianity.
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The #1 best way, in this very moment, to test the willingness of either sex to stop hearts, is to look at the demographics of hunters.
As I’m sure you can imagine, the statistics on female participation in hunting are abysmal, somewhere between 5 to 1 and 9 to 1, and the statistics are almost certainly failing to account for the fact that there are plenty of female-owned hunting tags out there that are actually filled by the man. Yes, this is illegal. Surprise.
The ratios in target shooting are somewhat more equal, something like 3 women out of 10 shooters, but at the end of target shooting, nothing is actually dead.
Now, there are definitely female hunters out, there is no denying that. But, even there, we can try to observe the propensity for violence of each sex. This gets down into anecdotal information, but there are women who can take the shot but are for some reason incapable of doing the gutting and quartering, or if not incapable, vastly prefer that the man do it. War doesn’t tend to feature direct butchery, but it is pretty gruesome and I would consider unwillingness to do butchery as an indicator of an overall unwillingness to engage in aggressive, violent action. Also, if a man could shoot but not butcher, he would be relentlessly mocked by his buddies until he finally did the thing.
Nurses of course see plenty of gruesome things, but for healing and nurturing reasons, which I would argue makes it a much different experience for women.
So women are not taking Samuel Colt up on his offer in nearly the ratios we would expect if the two sexes were actually equal in matters of violence. As a result, my theory in response to your question is that women would mostly do what they have done for all of human history. That is, mostly help out the remaining men on their side with the lighter duties, with a limited minority of women actually participating fighting the fight.
If they win this disturbing hypothetical, they could be anywhere from magnanimous in victory, to as cruel as Comanche squaws. If they were to lose, 90%+ would just accept the new status quo. Women as a group aren’t ever actually going to be treated all that badly.
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Equally dead when shot in the head perhaps, but not equally able to get to that point.
Maybe not, but it closes the gap considerably.
Agree to disagree? "Considerably" is vague, and I imagine that it does a lot more work for you than it does for me.
For evidence, I present to you...the entire world's history of physical violence. All of it. Ever. Up to the very present.
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Are we still doing the 90's "women can do anything men do, just as well" thing? They can't even match men in Call Of Duty, I doubt either the skill or apetite for actual warfare.
As with eSports, female participation and competence in war will increase with the deployment of the tranissaries.
Trans-friendly feminism is suddenly making some sense.
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Time for the modern version of Lysistrata? Will the men fare any better this time around?
Its sort of already happening.
But no real demands are being made so there's no clear way to end the standoff.
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What are you envisioning here? Are police going to refuse to make arrests for crimes? What crimes? Prosecutors refuse to file charges? Judges going to toss cases? Are you under the impression all parts of the justice system today think every law they enforce is just? I am very skeptical that is the case.
What do you think is going to happen?
The thing about the legal system is that it is always susceptible to cascades in any direction.
Lets say the new trend is that drug cases are not big deals. Police stop charging them, prosecutors dismiss the cases pending, judges find not guilty in the cases they try. But, if drugs become a big deal, police charge them, prosecutors prosecute them, and judges find guilty. The guilty pipeline is more fraught with obstacles, but is not uncommon.
Once the police forces of a place make a choice, only the males of that place can rebel realistically in a way that would be confrontation-ally successful. So the theory does hold. M-W polarization is not sustainable, as approximately 90% of philosophers have suggested over the last 2000 years.
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That's a regular occurrence right now. At least in some progressive cities with progressive prosecutors. Maybe some day the right will pick up such weapons commonly used by progressives.
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Depends. If the issue is most prevalent on a state-by-state basis, I think we see Police quit and move to more favorable jurisdictions., which worsens the crime issues in the Blue areas, which either 'forces' a political correction, or it spirals into decay a la Detroit.
Likewise, why, do you suppose, did Military recruitment surge in 2025 after literally hitting an all-time-low in 2022 under Biden?
Guys choosing to simply not join military/police forces would be enough to undermine a government's legitimacy in a given territory.
I think we see a political figure arise who notices and exploits the disconnect between the political priorities of the government and the actual political grievances expressed by a majority of men.
I think we should be very hopeful that its J.D. Vance or a guy like him. Vance clearly NOTICES the issue, and he's good at credibly establishing himself as "one of the guys."
Whether Vance will exploit this to the hilt remains to be seen.
But someone will.
I also think that an economic contraction will re-assert some 'reality' to the discourse, should it occur. We had a long era of economic growth post the 2008 crash and the Zero-Interest-Rate era. Plus the Covid Hiring boom.
lotta people getting laid off from cushy jobs, in many cases maybe the only real career-type jobs they've ever held. Women might finally, F-I-N-A-L-L-Y be required to either suffer from economic destitution or make some concessions to men to obtain the support of a good one.
If they can't marry a corporation who will take care of all their needs, and the Federal Government, for once, isn't bending over backwards to accommodate their complaints, well, the default fallback is probably either prostitution or marriage. And there's already a lot of prostitutes.
I do personally expect things to get worse before they get better.
Without @HereAndGone's snarkiness: why do so many of you salivate at the thought of women being forced to sexually service someone they don't want in order to eat? Yes, this was the norm in earlier ages. Those ages sucked a lot for almost everyone, given that the average person lived a precarious existence at best.
To desire a return to the sort of civilization in which you can get a woman because her survival literally depends on you does not seem to me like a normal, healthy thing to desire in a society with abundance enough that most people shouldn't have to consider starvation or enslavement a realistic possibility.
Even if this worked, would you not always be living with that gnawing awareness that she's only with you out of necessity? That you're literally just the next best thing to starvation?
It seems to me to not only be a spiteful and misogynistic attitude, but one utterly lacking in self respect.
I respect the hell out of that philosophy: if you can't run a society off the free and willing sacrifice of its members, it doesn't really deserve to stick around.
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The question is whether this level of abundance will remain sustainable on a level where average women are practically self-sufficient.
If they were practically self-sufficient, I think we would actually see more abundance, and that would be a very different and very interesting world. I think that world would have a high chance of dying out in a generation or two, but it might not, and that would very interesting.
The problem is that, even accounting for the fact that practically no one is truly self-sufficient in these times, women appear to be less self-sufficient than men, on average.
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Consider it this way: when the Chinese government banned cram schools, one might think they were attacking a deeply beloved institution. People paid huge amounts of money to the cram schools, kids spent huge amounts of their time there. Surely they would be really upset at having them taken away?
But no, of course not. Everyone hated and resented the cram schools. They existed because of a specific set of incentives that were unchangeable from the inside, and that could only be changed by a large-scale coercion.
I can’t speak for the Dread Jim etc. because I don’t follow them, but IMO the point is that men and women more naturally form loving bonds when a) they are paired together, and b) their interests are broadly aligned.
Modern society has broken both of these conditions, in an attempt to solve the problems that arose in cases when the previous system went wrong. By allowing women to work in the same paying jobs as men, and by providing unconditional support, it deliberately ensured that women didn’t require a man to take care of herself. A noble goal to be sure, but the result is that the natural fear of opportunity costs, generalised fear and distrust of men, (and, yes, a certain hypergamous tendency) combine to ensure lots of women don’t end up paired. (The same dynamics apply on the male side to but I think to a lesser degree).
Likewise, we have worked hard to ensure that even when married, a woman’s interests are kept separate from her husband’s, in order to avoid genuinely nasty abuses that occurred under the previous system. Women now retain their property when married, they usually retain their jobs, and they can decouple with minimal difficulty. This means that even during marriage, a woman often has one eye on being ready for an exit and her own private interests often conflict with the interests of her husband and family.
IMO the goal is lots of loving, happy relationships. (With, yes, an inevitable long tail of grudging-but-functional relationships and some pretty nasty ones). This benefits a big fraction men very clearly, because the current system is straightforwardly inimical to them; it’s hard to say whether it benefits women because they will gain certain things and lose certain things and probably different groups of women will benefit. I would like to think that the averaged outcome for women would be better, but even if it is mildly negative, ultimately the end effect will be positive when averaged across the sexes.
I don't personally agree with passing whatever laws you think would be necessary to eject women from the workforce, but the principle behind it, that women are happier being married with children and that everyone would be happier if society aligned to encourage that instead of "independent women," is probably true. I object to coercion and restricting people's freedom, even freedom to make bad choices, so I am not going to subscribe to "We should make women do what's best for them" even if I really did believe it's what best for them and not motivated by self-interest. "Society would be better if people did X, therefore we will force X through legislation" is ironically the sort of authoritarian thinking communist governments try to implement to reorder society for the greater good.
This is a pretty autistic Motte-pilled take. "If we measure how much happier most men would be, and how much happier many women would be, we can calculate that the net increase in happiness X is greater than the decrease in happiness Y of the women who don't like this arrangement, therefore they can suck it up." Talk about your authoritarian central planning! But let's say it's true. Let's say we blithely handwave away your "long tail" of abuse and misery which was much of the motivation for the rise of the feminist movement in the first place.
Here is the part you're really missing:
The Dread Jims of the world (of whom there apparently many more than you might think, even in Western society) don't care about love and happiness. They care about themselves and sexual satisfaction, and removing the indignity of women being able to thwart them. I don't know what Jim's personal life is actually like, but having read enough of his essays, it's hard to believe he actually loves his wife or daughters, except maybe in the same sense you might love your dog. Some of them (like Jim) might talk in Biblical terms about God's intended role for men and women, but their motivation is much baser and cruder: they think women should be property. Literally. Unironically. Dread Jim wrote an essay about it. He isn't kidding and he isn't being metaphorical. Most of our blackpillers and incels aren't so explicit about it, but you can read it in their words. They aren't motivated by some philosophical notion of what's best for society. They're seething that women they want to have sex with can tell them no. Their goal is not "loving, happy relationships," because that implies that the happiness of women is important also, and they consider pleasing women to be a distraction at best, the source of all evils at worst. You are not cynical enough when reading the words they actually type.
You know the old feminist slogan "Feminism is the radical belief that women are human." It's rightly derided for its simplistic, bad-faith assumptions about those who criticize feminism ("What the hell do you mean, no one is saying women aren't human!") While I roll my eyes like most people when I actually see it on t-shirts in the wild, I am occasionally reminded, even here on the Motte, that there are in fact people who exemplify the mindset that slogan is reacting to. It is not surprising to me that, faced with men like this who make it clear that they see a woman as a collection of warm wet holes that unfortunately has vocal cords and a brain stem attached, some women react in an extreme and possibly self-destructive fashion. If you want to persuade women that they should "settle" for less than the unrealistic and absurdly high standards that supposedly they are all demanding nowadays, keep in mind you're not just telling them to settle for an average guy who'd be a good if unexceptional husband, you are (at least from the incel viewpoint) telling them they should settle for a man who viscerally hates them and will treat them like a fleshlight.
You can either say you don't care about that because society as a whole will be better off, or you can have some understanding for why this is a hard sell for anyone who does, um, think women are human.
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The mistake is thinking that modern society broke men and women on a simple whim that could be reversed just as simply with a lil' bit of political will. In reality, we have had techno-economical changes that first uplifted many men and women from farming/peasantry to urban work, offshored a lot of labor that required raw physical strength to machinery, and interlinked industry in such a way that people no longer rely mostly on themselves and a few local craftsmen to produce all they need in life.
Meaning, the attempts to blindly RETVRN are not aligning the interests of men and women because regressing to the farmer economy is not really in most people's interest. Also, the men that are most interested in upending the status quo are, it seems, not really the kind of men who were capable of forming "grudging-but-functional relationships" before, let alone loving ones.
The way for west-of-Hajnal societies, I think, is nowhere but forward. Or, we can break down our factories, go back to villages and sit there waiting for the ever-dreaded Muslims, who have got a lot more experience in that kind of life, to overrun us.
Contra ergw and the rest, I do not believe most true incels are so productive that they must be appeased with government-issued wives or society collapses. It should be sufficient to let the incels have their AIfus, the femcels their serial killer LLMen, erect some basic fucking standards so that the eligible men don't poach the femcels too much and use technology to connect pair-bondable men to pair-bondable women for once. Instead of whatever it is the dating apps are doing.
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It's a spiteful and misogynistic attitude, but the alternative you imply isn't good either -- that women get to eat through the efforts of men that they provide absolutely nothing for. His attitude is pro-rape; that alternative is slavery.
Are those truly the only two alternatives you can conceive of? You are literally incapable of envisioning, or observing, relationships between men and women that are not slavery?
That is indeed horrifying.
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Because the typical man disgusts the typical woman. The only way the average man gets laid on a regular basis if a woman is coerced into fucking him through some combination of physical force, legal authority, social pressure, religious indoctrination, and economic privation. The alternative is what we see now; masses of incels whose best chance at marriage is to wife up some post-wall roastie in her thirties, huge numbers of single mothers and childless cat ladies, legions of children traumatized by divorce, cratering birth rates driving us towards extinction, elites responding by importing infinite immigrants to replace the missing grandchildren.
The fact that the government steals at gunpoint from productive men to support women's """independence""" just adds insult to injury. The government taxes us to provide welfare to underclass women, uses the threat of lawsuits to force companies to hire middle-class women, and employs armies of men as cops and soldiers to physically defend all women. In other words, men are still providing money and protection for women, like we have always done, but now we do it collectively rather than individually, and get nothing out of it.
The message the political figure @faceh is talking about needs to deliver is simple: "We don't have to live like this. We don't. There is another way; a better way. But it starts with rejecting the zeroth commandment".
If the redpill view on women is correct, what's the alternative? You can accept being an incel and become a MGTOW, you can work towards a tradcon world where every productive man is rewarded with a wife, or you can try to become Chad and use PUA to pump and dump as many women as possible while enjoying the decline.
Still, it does fill one with existential dread. As AntiDem put it:
On disgust: that is more malleable than most of us would like to admit. Ask any plumber, pest control guy, crime scene cleanup guy, or healthcare worker.
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Since I was nine years old, I have known I never wanted to get married. And every time I revisit that and wonder "what would it have been like to get a partner/spouse?", some guy comes along with "women should be forced by the threat of actual starvation to marry me because that means I have the whip hand in that situation, and if you think that's a metaphor you aren't reading what I'm writing".
Thank God for spinsterhood, say I!
You should hear the cursing and swearing I'm doing right now. But okay, guys, let's cosplay Gor and force women into subordinate sexual service complete with leashes. Women can make themselves widows, and the rate of poisonings will go zooming upward. Be forced into a marriage, wait a little, disencumber yourself of the tyrant, and be a free widow. This worked in the Classical world and you want that back in the modern world?
We will see the return of veneration of St. Uncumber!
You want adultery and uncertain paternity to skyrocket? Because that's what you get when forcing women into unwanted marriage. Read the Canterbury Tales and all the jokes/stories about younger wives cuckolding their elderly, jealous husbands.
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This is a big claim. Neither my anecdotal observation nor the data that I've seen supports it. According to this 2020 survey only 31% of US men are single. Now, out of the 69% of men who are not single, of course some fraction is partnered with women are either not having sex with them or are only having sex with them for reasons other than being attracted to them. I contend, based on anecdotal observation, that this fraction is not large. If you believe otherwise, perhaps you can put forward some data to support the claim.
However, no matter how large the fraction is, keep in mind that out of the US men who are single, there is also a fraction who would not be single if they lowered their standards.
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You aren't citing redpill theory, which argues that we all act according to evolutionary imperatives to reproduce, which supposedly explains almost all male/female behavior. As reductive as it is, it does not posit that we are a loveless, hateful species unable to be happy with one another.
You are blackpilling. That's the "Females are hypergamous whores incapable of forming genuine emotional attachments to men because they hos" theory.
Indeed. If I believed your philosophy, I would see little reason to pursue a relationship at all.
If I were a woman in your world, I would expect death to be preferable to being forced to partner with men.
Now of course an outlook being bleak and nihilistic beyond words doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong. But my empirical observation suggests you're wrong.
Certainly, you don't make a compelling case for any woman, or any man who doesn't absolutely despise women, to adopt your worldview and solutions.
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Golly gee, I wonder why those uppity females are not rushing out to marry men who think they should have the right to beat and rape them just like the Good Old Days when the choice was between economic destitution or making concessions regarding marriage.
This is why there was a whole thing about women having careers of their own, so there wouldn't be the risk of economic destitution. This kind of statement is one step away from "and in fact being enslaved was better for the slaves because owners were obliged to feed and shelter them".
You are not going to solve the problem of "why are men and women not getting on? why isn't marriage and children happening?" by telling one side "we want to force you into marriage with someone you would not choose and who can be abusive thereafter, because the alternative is indeed literal starvation and he knows you will be trapped".
Why the hell are you making it "being a whore is better for me than being a wife"? Don't we want women to choose to be wives and mothers, instead of "well if it's sex for meat, then at least let me not be tied to one provider"?
There's a peculiar tension in certain strains of gender-roles conservatism which simultaneously holds that motherhood is the highest and most virtuous calling to which a woman can aspire, and also that because women aren't directly engaged in productive labor that they deserve less (or no) say in decision making.
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Serious question. Do you think concessions in a marriage are a bad thing?
No. I don't think there's such a thing as the romantic soulmate, the twin flame, or whatever other nonsense new term is floating around. There is no perfect Mr or Ms Right out there waiting for you. Settling is not a bad thing, and both of you need to work at the marriage to make it work. It's not going to be perfect bliss all the time, and probably yeah both of you will wonder about the other guy/gal you could have married at least sometime.
But that's not at all the same thing as "finally women, under the threat of starvation, will be forced to marry men they don't want or like". Men, too, can be forced into undesired marriages. I don't think forcing anyone is a good thing. And if you find out your spouse only married you as a meal ticket, what then? Do you demand they love you like the perfect romantic lover you dreamed of, in addition to being your coerced bondservant? People want to be valued for themselves. Being realistic about your chances and your options is not the same as being coldly calculating or dreaming of finally being able to force those haughty bitches who turned you down in high school to fawn on you for scraps.
To quote Tolkien from a letter to his son Michael in 1941:
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Odd thing to say, when its becoming increasingly evident that married women are happier on average than unmarried ones. And that this has been true FOR a long time.
Oh, also side note. Single Women are more likely to be victimized by rape and homicide than ones in a commited relationship too. So if fear of violent men is a factor, you're making women WORSE off by discouraging marriage.
Maybe... just maybe... women have been lied to about the allegedly rapey, abusey, slavery-lite portrayal of marriage in the past?
Is it possible that this entire debate has been framed around an abject falsehood?
As we can see, the only evidence presented to rebut the idea that marriage is a good deal for women is a derisive dismissal of men as a gender as if the ONLY thing they can do to keep a woman is literally lock them up barefoot and pregnant, there's no POSSIBLE way they could entice them to stick around otherwise.
Of course. But that requires there to be an incentive to choose and pressure to make a choice and stick with it. Rather than the current zeitgeist of "take as long as you need, keep your standards as high as possible, there's no (social) penalty to remaining single, and if you don't get married don't worry the state will make sure you're basically comfortable anyway." In a world where all pressure to settle has been removed AND women are being told that marriage is a huge imposition on their freedom and happiness, "I wonder why those uppity females are not rushing out to marry men" when literally no person with authority anywhere is telling them to do so.
One thing I always find amusing is the conceit that women shouldn't have to depend on men...
But if they are now completely dependent on an uncaring corporate entity for their healthcare, housing, social life, and income, THAT is somehow the mark of 'independence.'
Explain to me how being tied down to a job with a (most likely male) boss who places constant demands on your time and labor but can also fire you at any time is AT ALL inherently better than being tied to an individual male that has at least publicly stated his own intentions to remain loyal to you up until death.
And of course a corporation can never give them kids.
Its actually an absurd sort of logic that women are safer and more comfortable in a corporate workplace than at home with children. Especially when female happiness has been on a constant decline for the last fifty years. They are not satisfied despite all changes in their favor, despite having 'better' jobs, fewer obligations, and fewer kids.
But hey.
I'm sure it will be fine.
Anyhow, this is just what I mean, bringing up men's issues and framing them in ANY way that might pose ANY inconvenience on women as part of the solution invites absolute antipathy. This is why women's issues are just easier to discuss seriously, since nobody loses their mind if you suggest imposing more costs on men to help out women.
Which is basically what we've been doing to an increasing degree for 50 straight years.
Married women are happy when they are treated as partners, not dogs on a leash.
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Exploits it how, exactly? And what makes you think such a figure — with a minority of democratic support, and strong institutional opposition — wouldn't just end up shut out and shut down?
"To the disaffected, lonely men listening now, I promise I will stop the flow of tax dollars out of your pockets to programs that disproportionately benefit single mothers and childless girlbosses.
I will aggressively punish institutionalized discrimination against males at every level, and seek removal of any gender or other quotas that undermine meritocratic promotion or allow your salary to be undercut and your career derailed.
I will create large tax credit incentives for men who get married, hold down a job, and are raising children, and promote strong, male-led households where he can be the primary breadwinner without needing a second job or for the wife to work full time."
Or if you want a really simple one: "Men, I'm going to close off all non-skilled immigration except for attractive, fertile young women, and due to the looming crisis of declining birthrates we will issue emergency visas and expedited citizenship paths to any such women who get married and bear at least 2 kids."
Basically actually propose solutions, viable or not, that address the actual anxieties and misgivings that men have been expressing, and make them feel like they've got some investment in the movement.
Note that there is no real mainstream political figure, ANYWHERE, in ANY country that is able to make these sort of statements. Which has led to the current issue. Women's issues are central in the Overton Window, its impossible to even elevate male concerns to the point where they're discussed seriously.
By whom. They keep trying to do that to Andrew Tate, he still has a voice and following.
Charlie Kirk was talking about these sort of issues until he died.
Matt Walsh brings these issues up too and he's still got a large following.
The only option they'd have is arresting them and that'd probably not work out for them unless the person in question was actually trying to get seriously militant/violent.
And if this person is J.D. Vance, how the hell do you expect them to 'shut out' the sitting Vice President of the United States.
This is one I'm surprised I haven't seen mooted. Making it easier for passport bros to import wives seems like an easy stink bomb for the Trump admin to throw into the Democratic coalition, it would almost certainly cause them to chase their tails for months.
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Sure there is; you need only look north. That won't get you into political power in that country for reasons that have a lot to do with geography, but at least the solvent half of the country will vote for you.
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I would like to see that happen, but I'm dubious for a couple of reasons. First, we've set up our economies so that isn't really a runner, anymore. Unionised jobs which did provide good benefits and you could be the single breadwinner became corrupt and atrophied (see the fairly recent example of the longshoremen, for one). Industries collapsed during the 80s and the salvation was to outsource to cheaper labour and resources abroad, and to get more women into the workforce.
Second, a strong male-led household can be one where the man runs them into debt and other problems, or where the ostensible male head is weak and incapable. To work at its best, marriage should be a partnership. "This happens because I say so" can only work where "I say so" is reasonable and not "I've decided to take out loans, mortgage the house, and put all our savings into this sure thing a guy told me about, and if you don't like it, here's a black eye for you".
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And when this program fails to get them enough votes, because the men who approve of such are outnumbered by the mix of:
Assuming, that is, that such a person is even allowed in the race to begin with.
Have you considered that maybe there's a reason for that? That, first, it might not play as well with voters as you think; and second, even if it could, that maybe the Establishment have tools at their disposal to ensure that any person who would make these sort of statements is totally prevented from ever becoming a "real mainstream political figure"?
The Cathedral/Deep State/Swamp. The Ruling Elites who actually decide everything, regardless of what the voters in the sham that is "democracy" think.
And is he running for office? How much electoral sway does that "following" have?
And where did it get him?
Same questions as Tate.
First, no, there are other options. Just do like in Europe and engage in "defensive democracy" — make sure both party establishments know not to let such a person ever get on the ballot. Second, I think arresting them would work just fine. First, because it'd be easy to develop any number of pretexts for doing so that the media can "sell" to enough of the public. Second, because what would it not "working out for them" even look like?
It almost certainly won't be.
In rough order of escalation? Get the GOP to nominate someone else instead. Defeat his campaign with lawfare a la Ted Stevens. Find a legal excuse to remove him from the ballot. Rig the election. Assassination by "lone gunman." Imprison or execute him after he's convicted in Nuremberg-style trials alongside the rest of the "Fascist Trump regime" as part of the start of the campaign to "denazify" America.
Democracy is fake, electoral politics is all kayfabe, the will of the electorate means nothing, us peasant masses are entirely powerless.
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He didn't just die. He was murdered. So there is your answer.
Vance is married with a daughter. If he does it he'll stop when his daughter is old enough to understand.
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Without doxxing myself too aggressively, holy shit this was a blue year around here.
We had a Court of Common Pleas election in which the Republican was more qualified, spent more money, put more effort in, sent out more mail, put up more signs, contacted more volunteers. In the primary, where judicial candidates traditionally cross-file to both the R and D primary ballots, she was just a few percentage points from beating the D candidate on the D ballot, while winning the Republican ballot with Saddam Hussein numbers.
She got wrecked today, lost by a large margin. Just four years ago, in a three-seat judicial race, this same county elected three Republicans.
Zohran seemed like styles-make-fights to me. I don't really care about New Jersey or VA. But this one has me spooked. By all rights he should not have won that election, all the local political so-and-sos didn't think he would. His whole campaign was getting on the ballot as a D and hoping for the best. The best happened.
Do you think the enormous population of federal workers in Virginia combined with the DOGE and shutdown stuff is wholly or only partially responsible for the wave?
I don't think it's at all responsible for the results I'm talking about, in Pennsylvania.
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It’s almost funny comparing this to the 2016 narrative. The smart money was wrong, the local insiders were wrong, how could this happen?
This comment is giving me strong Buffalo bills energy
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I am pretty happy about Mamdani. I have a somewhat radical opinion about democracy that is rarely held in the intelligentsia circles - that if voters want something, let them have it. The other thing that said circles never learn is - don't talk down to the voters. They have no choice but to vote Cuomo - guess what they did have a choice. And it was not voting for Cuomo.
The squeals of the anti Mamdani factions are a balm on the soul. And the ADL worst nightmare seems to be coming true - antisemitic as a label is sliding into indifference. Which is kinda amusing when right now for the first time in probably 60 years in the West there is proper 14 karat antisemitism showing its head.
I do hope that he will be able to hurt NY City enough to push things toward R in 2026 and 2028, but I doubt it - the mayor just doesn't have that many powers to ruin something that fast.
I agree that Mamdani is likely to make NYC worse, and I share your skepticism that “the worse, the better” (for R prospects) will apply here, not only because one single mayor—especially one with zero experience managing large organizations—can’t change much in a short time, but also because, paraphrasing Adam Smith, “There is much ruin in New York City”. The city has too much going for it for its biggest tax pay
pigers (major financial institutions) to seriously consider the idea of picking up stakes and relocating to, say, Miami, at least in the short term. In the long term, I can definitely see a slow decline as businesses get strangled out of existence by onerous D policies. But that will happen much too slowly for the voting public to even notice, let alone pin the blame on a specific mayor or party.It will be interesting to see whether those New York City Jews who swore they would leave for Florida if Mamdani got elected will make good on their promised exodus [heh]. My money is on “no”, in the main: their loyalty is to leftism first and foremost and to Judaism a distant second, so the prospect of living in a state where anyone could be carrying a handgun and where abortion is illegal after 6 weeks is anathema, no matter how philosemitic the state government.
And lastly, if I were a NYC resident, I would vote for literally anyone but Cuomo: his bungling of the pandemic (first with the nursing home massacres, then by riding roughshod over civil liberties to cover it up) is absolutely unforgivable.
I hate commies more than anyone, but I still wouldn't hold my nose to vote for Cuomo. Fuck that guy.
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They have already been expanding presence in Miami. They may not jump (because Mandami may cut a deal) but they have been preparing to.
They've been moving to Florida for decades anyway; evidently once you're old enough you don't care about either abortion or handguns. You'll hear more classic NYC accents in Fort Lauderdale than New York City.
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I'd love to see God top his Red Sea trick with one all down the US East Coast from Manhattan to Miami. It's over 5x the distance, but it's been a couple thousand years, at least, since He pulled that off for Moses, which is a lot of time for Him to improve (or is that also one of those things that a perfect, omnipotent being can't do?).
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Yeah, I think that's the most likely outcome. Come into office on a slate of promises. Some get watered down, because he has to compromise to get them passed. Some get junked, because they were only campaign promises, ha ha did you really think you were going to get a pony for your birthday? And some will go nowhere, because he's butting right up against institutional inertia, 'this is the way we've always done it', entrenched power blocs, and "you gotta find the money to grease the palms somewhere, Zohran, or else nothin' doin'".
Like free bus services. First, that will have to jump through sixteen hoops, on fire, then swandive into a coffee cup just in order to get past everyone who wants it to die or they want too big a slice of the pie for it to work. Second, it will be tried. Thirdly, after ten minutes it will crash and burn and be quietly sidelined.
Actually I think this is the one promise he is most likely to keep. Have you seen how common fare evasion is in NYC? The reality is that we already have free buses—some people just don’t know it yet.
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I wasn't really paying attention to the NY election race, but for some of the World Series I was watching the Fox NY stream - and boy oh boy were some of the ads airing totally unhinged.
I'm vaguely aware that Mamdani is a sort of DSA-type, so I think it's fairly safe to bet policy-wise he's a bit out there, but also won't accomplish much. But it's hard not to root for him a little given the kind of frothing, incoherent rage he was generating.
I only saw bits of some ads online, and "unhinged" was a thought that came to my mind as well, reminiscent of the type of things thrown at Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024, which ostensibly helped him get elected in 2/3 of those cases. The past decade or so, I'd been worried that President AOC was going to be the Dems' President Trump, but it looks like Mamdani being that might be more likely. The Republicans might MDS their way into creating enough political will to change the Constitution to allow someone naturalized into US citizenship to become POTUS for the sake of Mamdani.
Mamdani has a position of real executive power unlike AOC who is just 1 of 435 legislators. Given he's a socialist, it's hard to believe he won't fuck it up. Even if he weren't ineligible I can't see him being a serious contender for President based on what I expect his record to be.
As much as I'm being tongue-in-cheek by taking how hot Mamdani's been the last 3 months and extending it out forward (then he'd be God Emperor of the Democratic People's Republic of Earth within the decade - but no one remains that hot in politics for that long, not even exceptions to exceptions to exceptions like Trump), I think this analysis is flawed.
Almost certainly he will fuck it up - by default because he's a politician, and even moreso because he's a socialist - but a politician's record doesn't matter for his electoral prospects; it's the perception of his record by the voters that matters. And I've been burned too many times underestimating just how far the distance between perception and reality can be, especially in politics, to bet that Mamdani's (predicted) poor record once he becomes NYC mayor will meaningfully affect his chances in future elections for bigger seats, relative to his apparent charisma to half the voters, along with his superior genetics and religion to much of that same half.
My prediction as of a couple weeks ago has been that once Mamdani wins and rules over NYC, to whatever extent he achieves his political promises, they won't effectively address the real thing that the policies are supposed to address, and this failure will entirely be blamed on Republicans and not-sufficiently-socialist-Democrats for not doing what their moral superiors have told them they ought to do, rather than Mamdani and his allies for simply having a poor understanding of how politics and economics work. Whether or not this assignment of blame is "fair" or "correct" for whatever those terms mean in this context, most high status journalism outlets will reinforce the notion that it is "correct" to enough of an extent that it will be the mainstream, default, "educated" opinion that Mamdani didn't fail, he was failed by an Islamophobic, racist, and probably transphobic populace/political machine that stood in his way even after he had used his sheer force of charisma and standing for Basic Human Decency to convince enough voters to elect him.
One major wrinkle (among many, I'm sure) in this prediction is that these high status journalists' credibility has been falling among the electorate and seems likely to continue, and so I could be overcorrecting from underestimating the future distance between perception and reality to overestimating it.
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I’m old enough to remember when people thought the Republicans might do this so that their own guy (Schwarzenegger) could run for president.
President Schwarzenegger would have been so so cool.
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People need to reflect upon the fact that a mayor race of a US city is having an ethnic group's view of its homeland as the main issue. Imagine if a significant US city was having its election being about the Sudanese communities view of the mayor's Sudan policy. The absolute level of capture and control by a lobby of a small country is reason enough to vote for anyone opposed to it.
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It may not, in fact, have been a good idea for the White House and the departments like Homeland Security to adopt a "stuff that's designed to make 12 year old anons say "based", hopefully" style messaging strategy, insofar as the popularity of the President's party is concerned.
Someone needs to tell that to Newsom's campaign manager then?
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/gavin-newsom-trolls-trump-touch-194117931.html
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Yes, if only they had a twitter feed more appealing to leftwingers, these blue states would surely flip red.
I don’t think Homeland Security’s Twitter feed is the problem.
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They are appealing to Zoomers, rather than Millennials. Mamdani ran the most Millennial, Chapo-listener campaign I've ever seen and cleaned up, because Millennials are the new boomers. They will soon be the largest and most wealthy generation in human history.
The death of the left-wing Millennial has been overstated, they are still around, and soon they will decide the course of the West. If the right wants to win they need to realise that they need to appeal to the crowd whose culture is downstream of mid-00s Something Awful rather than late-2010s 4chan and Twitter.
(sigh) GenX erasure never ceases!
Quiet, you! We don't exist and we aim to keep it that way!
Funny, I could have sworn I heard something - ah well, must have imagined it!
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GenX is already boomers. Anyone older than a Millennial is a boomer, to anyone Millennial or younger. And I suspect that to Zed, the Millennials are boomers. I wouldn't be surprised if Gen Delta ended up calling Gen Alpha "boomers".
Internet rules:
Anyone who is retired is a boomer (the WW2 gen is 99% deceased and Silents are either deceased or forgotten).
Anyone who is contemplating retirement is a boomer.
Anyone who owns a house and has a decent job is a boomer.
t. Gen Y boomer
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Setting aside the silliness over cultural milestones (Are Generation Jones and Xennials really that similar?), in fiscal/political terms Gen X is rapidly approaching Boomer territory, aka. retirement. Expect our gerontocracy problems to get worse in the short term as Gen Xers (a larger generation than the Silents) retire faster than old Boomers and Silents die.
Why, for example, is there suddenly such a fight over enhanced ACA subsidies? It turns out that somewhere along the way the ACA became a defacto extension of Medicare Advantage for the 55-65 crowd such that the most common age for an Obamacare enrollee is 64. Hell hath no fury like that of Bill and Shelley.
Well, I've already said that as an Xer if those ACA subsidies get extended I'm retiring American Style and taking all that sweet government money; I'll take a page (or hell, 30 pages) from Ayn Rand and call it restitution for some of the taxes I've paid.
That doesn't make me a boomer though! Perish the thought! No boomers in MY family; my parents are Silent.
Same here, to the point that I kind of missed the boat on boomer hate. I was a Gulf War baby with Gen X parents and Silent grandparents.
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Mamdani won Zoomers, including male Zoomers, as comprehensively as the Millennials. While there's no specific racial breakdown for age/gender classes, Mamdani also won white voters in general, so it's a fair guess that he's probably won white male Zoomers, too, as a demographic.
The whitehouse.gov / DHS Twitter messaging line is not really designed to appeal to Zoomers as a whole generation but to a very specific segment of forumlords of the sort that probably staff the junior ranks in the apparatus. The same problem in reverse the Dems had when they let Millennial Tumblr users design their messaging.
I am a little surprised by the lack of gender polarization in those numbers, except the 18-29 group. I would have thought it would be a cross-age phenomenon.
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The specific point made was not that the blue states are electing blue candidates but that the said candidates are doing better than Harris or even Biden.
Flipping a red state blue might prove some sort of a point, comparing voting percentages of local politicians to national ones feels quite silly.
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That three blue states voted blue no matter who in an off-presidential election in an era of tribal polarization and increasing base radicalism?
I suppose not, in the sense that a forecast of showers is always a bad sign for staying dry, but you're not exactly laying out what is supposed to be a surprise. The only somewhat eyebrow raising one there is Jay Jones, and it was already pretty clear that the party machine was closing ranks about him. Same with the California gerrymandering passing- the one-party state party machine is performing as a party-state machine does.
As for the rest, again, what is the baseline expectation to be deviated from? Just on historical norms alone you'd expect Trump to lose the house and possibly the senate next year.
Virginia's statewide elections are always off-presidential-year, by state law. Republicans swept all three VA races I mentioned above in the last general election in 2021. It is hardly the case that, at least in recent history, Republicans are incapable of winning statewide offices in VA general elections.
2021 was a very weird year that became a referendum on Democratic insanity around COVID and schools and sexual abuse therein
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California can reliably elect Democrats, but when it comes to specific issues, the ballot initiatives don't always go the way one thinks they would. Looking at recent years: Funding greenhouse gas initiatives by raising taxes on incomes over $2 million? Failed. Raising the minimum wage? Failed. Expanding the ability of local governments to impose rent control? Failed. Two initiatives to legalize certain forms of gambling failed. The measures voters actually approved in that time period were ones for increased funding for arts and music education, two involving healthcare, and one that increased sentences for certain drug and theft crimes. I don't know how much the party apparatus was involved in pushing or pushing against some of these, but there's no clear pattern here, and the left-coded ones that were approved were of the more boring variety. This probably received more attention than any of the others, but the margin by which it passed sends a pretty clear signal.
To add to your list: affirmative action was banned by ballot proposition in the 1990s, and a spectacularly-failed attempt was made to repeal it via another proposition in 2020—just after the Summer of Floyd, no less!
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All things considered, I’m not too upset. I think it’s good to have an opposition that’s getting its footing back. It means that all these losers saying Trump is the end of democracy are wrong - Trump’s election motivated a bunch of Canadians to vote in the left and likely here too. It reins him in a bit to know he’s still got to play his cards right to win in 26.
Still feel like the momentum will slow - Momdommy definitely is different and built some enthusiasm for other races. People on twitter right now are like ‘woke is back!!1!’. Still think Trump is going to buck historical trends for midterm elections and keep congress maybe. He’s just so persuasive.
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It seems like to me the Republicans pretty much threw in the towel for the VA governor with a nonserious candidate, and down the ballot suffered as well. Either way I do think Youngkin was expected to be a blip in the rapid slide of VA into the deep end. He was bouyed by some favorable short term issues but there was nothing that would stick past a news cycle.
In terms of using it as a bellweather, polymarket's numbers for 2028 are down for the democrats, so it seems that if anything the democrats very slightly underperformed compared to expectations. https://polymarket.com/event/which-party-wins-2028-us-presidential-election
Edit: actually 2026 numbers are down for republicans so it's bad news for them
Why did Youngkin not run again?
VA governors can't run for consecutive terms.
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VA does not allow Governors to run again immediately. I think they can wait out a cycle though?
I feel like I should know this.
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Can you say more about why Earle-Sears was not a serious candidate? She was elected Lieutenant Governor in 2021.
Apart from what @hydroacetylene said, I'll try to give you a more complete answer. You have to go back to 2020 and the Virginia GOP's decision to have a convention instead of a primary. Virginia had been a Republican stronghold for years, but in little more than a decade had become reliably liberal. A lot of conservatives like to blame Federal employees in Northern Virginia for this shift, but that's a bit of a cop out; NoVa had been reliably Republican well into the 2000s, and the shift was occurring in other places, like suburban parts of Richmond and Hampton Roads. Biden won Virginia Beach in 2020, the first Democrat to do so since the days of the Solid South. This sudden shift left the state GOP scrambling and rudderless. While Republicans found ways to win in liberal strongholds like Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, and California, no Republican had won statewide office in Virginia in ten years. Rather than look to these other states as examples of how to win in hostile territory, the state GOP appealed to rural voters in the western part of the state more closely aligned with West Virginia and Kentucky than the Tidewater. But running up the score from a 60% win to a 75% win doesn't do much if the county has 5,000 voters, and it was clear to some in the party that this was a formula for continued irrelevance.
In February 2020, state delegate Amanda Chase announced that she would be seeking the gubernatorial nomination. Ms. Chase dubbed herself "Trump in Heels" and represented the far-right fringe of the party. She had been disciplined by the state GOP in the past and had taken every opportunity to publicize her maverick image. As 2020 wore on, and COVID restrictions came into place, she was representing her district from a plexiglass box she was forced to sit in due to her refusal to wear a mask during sessions. She had previously open carried in the state house. As 2020 drew to a close and Trump lost the election (and by double digits in Virginia), she became a vocal proponent of the MASSIVE FRAUD narrative, part of the fringe who genuinely thought there was a chance of Trump being sworn in for a second term in January. She was completely unelectable. She also had a decent shot at being the Republican nominee for governor.
The party establishment was alarmed, and devised a plan to prevent her nomination at all costs. Per state law, they had the privilege of holding a convention rather than a primary. In a primary, Chase could win the nomination with 30% of the votes, with three serious candidates and several minor ones splitting the remaining 70%. But in a convention, the nominee would need a majority, elected by screened delegates. the establishment's push for a convention led to all-out war within the party. MAGA hardliners had by this point made sizeable inroads into party leadership, and sought to thwart what they saw as a rigged nomination process. The convention went forward, but rules and logistical challenges turned it into a mess.
The idea was that delegates would be seated in an "unassembled convention" whereby they would submit ballots at 37 locations throughout the state. Ranked choice voting would be used, and delegate votes would be weighted based on Republican turnout in the previous election. Most importantly, since Virginia does not include party affiliation with voter registration, delegates would be screened by the local party before they would be seated, ostensibly to weed out Democrats, but realistically to ensure that only committed party men would go through the process. As the May convention approached, the party bragged that over 53,000 delegates had qualified, but only 30,000 showed up, a far cry from the over 300,000 who participated in the last primary. The byzantine process had critics describe the whole thing as a mess that only made the GOP look worse, but it achieved its objective: Chase finished third, and that November, Virginia elected its first Republican governor since 2009.
A seemingly minor side-effect of this whole debacle was that Winsome Sears was nominated as Lieutenant Governor. Sears had served a single term as state delegate 20 years prior, but was otherwise a small business owner from Winchester and occasional minor candidate. How she won the nomination appears to be a mystery, since I can find nothing about how this happened. I suspect, though, that it's largely a combination of the unusual nature of the nominating process and sheer luck. I can't find much in the way of traditional campaigning, no one seems to have paid much attention to the LT side, she only got 32% of the vote on the first ballot (compared to 22% for second), and that just may have been the way the cookie crumbled. If anyone has any information that explains this, I'd love to hear it, but whatever happened, I think it's safe to say that she didn't win the nomination through running a traditional campaign.
So she essentially lucks into the LT role after Youngkin wins. And he's able to do so by shying away from MAGA rhetoric and focusing his campaign on a few key issues that were big at the time. In the process, he cements himself as one of the rising stars within the party and a possible presidential nominee. He maintains a decent approval rating in a state hostile to his party, even after
TrumpHarris carried it in 2024. He can't run for reelection, but it's clear to the party that the best way to stay in power is to extend his governorship the best way you can. And the obvious person to do that is the lieutenant governor. By this point the party is in agreement about the best path forward, so they have a primary, except there's only one name on the ballot.The upshot of all of this is that, in 2025, Sears found herself as the major party nominee for governor of a larger state, her only record of having won a competitive election on her own being state delegate race in 2002. She hadn't even run in a competitive race since 2004. She lucked into the LT nomination because of an unusual situation, got elected LT in the general by virtue of being ticketed with Youngkin, and won the nomination in 2025 without a primary opponent. The state party failed to realize that this was a recipe for disaster.
Several things ultimately did her in, and contributed to her image as an unserious candidate. The first was a series of glitches and booboos. The kind that a seasoned candidate wouldn't have made. The kind that a seasoned candidate may have made, but not so many. The kind that a seasoned candidate who made as many as she did could have recovered from by responding better. Things like putting watermarked stock photos on your campaign website, and likening DEI to slavery. I wouldn't say these alone sunk her campaign, but they didn't giver her an image as a good campaign manager running a well-oiled machine.
The second was that her inexperience was underscored by her inability to raise money. This is where I'd lay the most blame on the state party, because they should have considered this and had a plan to counter the problem. It was unrealistic to expect her to suddenly raise large sums of money when she hadn't had to before, and they needed to either get on the horn for her or teach her how to dial for dollars or whatever it took. It was clear this was going to be a problem the minute her candidacy was announced, and a party that cleared the path for her nomination should have been rolling in dough to give for the general. There is absolutely no excuse for this.
The biggest problem, though, was that she had very little in the way of policy, and what she did have was an object lesson in what not to do. The only two policy positions she seemed to care about were anti-abortion and anti-LGBT. She could mouth conservative buzzwords like school choice and what have you, but there was no real substance to her campaign. the Issues part of her website was buried at the bottom of the Meet Winsome section, and outlined five positions: lower taxes and government spending, be tough on crime (and illegals), school choice, right to work, no trans in sports. Nine total paragraphs. In 2017, the Republican nominee had pages and pages of policy positions down to minutia like how much money should be allocated to increase enrollment at the University of Virginia at Wise. Apart from the paucity of substance, these are not winning positions in this kind of race. Youngkin may have been elected, but it's still a blue state. Generic conservative talking points are not going to win the election, because the conservative isn't the default candidate. Youngkin understood this. She didn't, and the party didn't. The ultimate illustration of how inept she was at this came towards the end of the campaign, when she hammered the airwaves with commercials reminiscent of the "they/them" ads that critics found especially damaging to Harris. Apart from the blunder of fighting the last war, it wasn't even her last war. Trump was trying to win marginal votes in swing states; there was no expectation that those ads would get enough votes for an unexpected victory.
She completely misunderstood the election she was running in and either forgot or didn't realize that to win in Virginia, you have to attract the kind of voter who wouldn't normally be inclined to vote for you. And as these failures became evident, so did the final failure, the complete lack of a ground game. She didn't tour the state. She didn't respond to media requests. She didn't respond to voters. She disappeared the last month of the campaign. Whether it was from lack of money, lack of experience, or a sense that the enterprise was a lost cause, dropping off the face of the earth during crunch time isn't the mark of a serious candidate. At least take your best shot. You're a major party nominee for the governorship of an important state. When you launched your campaign, it looked winnable. Act like it still is, don't just throw in the towel. I don't think that this hurt her too much since she would have lost anyway, but it took the party from looking like geniuses who managed the improbable to inept jackasses who mishandled an important candidate in a winnable election. They moved heaven and earth to come back from the dead four years earlier, but, depending on how they handle things going forward, the view of Youngkin's win may go from a rejuvenation to a last gasp.
Harris carried Virginia in 2024
Spanberger ran as a moderate, just as Youngkin did.
Thanks, I don't know what I did there because if Trump had indeed won Virginia that sentence wouldn't have made sense. Corrected.
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She looked unhinged. Like that's it, she looked like the homeless woman outside of walmart who asks for cigarette money and delivers a warning about lizard people. This stuff matters.
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Sears as a non-serious candidate has to confront Jones winning. Without doing that, paeans to candidate quality are just post-hoc justifications.
It’s a downballot election, most people don’t pay attention to AG- they check the box matching their party preference for governor.
That's just saying 'no one cared about cheering for the blood of children' with more steps.
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Candidate quality matters more when the fundamental lean is against you. Virginia is D+3, but Jones ran 4 points behind Spanberger. In a closer State, that would have cost him the election.
And if my aunt had balls, she'd be trans. Virginia's not a D+3 state because of Jones, and it's not a D+3 state because of Sears. Fundamentals run the story here; anyone without a sha256 is just explaining what story they want to tell rather than looking at what gives testable predictions.
Oh I fully agree. But if the GOP can field a +5 candidate they can win in a D+3 state. That how Youngkin won.
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It doesn't if you consider the fact that very few people are going to the polls because of an AG race. Down ballot candidates ride the momentum of the headlining act, so to speak. If a lot of Republicans weren't sufficiently motivated to turn out for Earle-Sears, they weren't going to turn out against Jones.
I dunno, I'm not from Virginia but I am from a state the borders it, and I am a Republican who didn't really care about Earle-Sears or Spanberger much either way but I would have crawled across glass to vote against Jones, and the fact that he won while salivating about the death of republican children makes me want very bad things to happen to every dem in VA.
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NYC, Philadelphia and DC suburbs are not bellwethers.
It's obviously fraud, anyway. As of a couple Wikipedia checks, Spanberger is at 1.469 million, Winsome Earle-Sears at 1.156 million. Jones is at 1.483 million to Miyares' 1.375 million. In no world does a man who says "I want you to watch your children die" in the wake of an assassination not have impacted turnout.
This is also mens rea. An organization who backs Jones says "We will cheat if we can."
Saying an election is "obviously fraud" is a very inflammatory claim for which you have provided insufficient evidence to justify just throwing it out there as an "obvious" fact, and claiming the entire Democratic party "will cheat if we can" (because they backed a noxious candidate) is merely booing your outgroup.
Many other people have made more substantive arguments about these issues, for which there is ample ground to criticize Democrats and Jones. Aspire to do likewise.
Inflammatory is perception so I can't say it's not inflammatory, I can say people who think it's inflammatory are wrong.
There aren't substantive arguments to be made here. It's not an argument to say "They don't think he means it," I'd apply this generally, but it is objectively false to take that angle in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk and (1) the glee of leftists on social media and (2) the utterly unapologetic media coverage, culminating in Jimmy Kimmel blood libeling the right and keeping his job.
There are exactly two possible conclusions from Jones winning his election.
On point 1, we have the following justifications.
(A): Those of the constituency who didn't know the man they voted for wished death on the child of a state nobody; too ignorant to make decisions on the future.
(B): Those of the constituency who thought he wasn't serious, see: Kirk, an inexcusable naivety; too foolish to make necessary decisions on the future.
(C): Those of the constituency who liked what he said. There are only two further steps on the ratchet from Jones' remarks, I have frequently explained here how it's not actually time for action, this is, those who have no problem with him wishing horror on a state nobody, psychopaths; this group should be put in prison. The current step on the ratchet is enough for the DOJ to three-felonies-a-day Jones; the next step, "Won't someone rid me of these meddlesome children" if ignored would be cause to dismantle the organization backing such a figure, as the last step is war.
On point 2, the government is currently guilty of fraud in 100% of elections where it cannot prove itself free of fraud. The people are under no obligation to prove a crime committed by the government; the government is obligated to prove it hasn't committed a crime. By philosophy and by precedent, the government has no claim to a right against self-incrimination and the adverse inference may be exercised. The inability to prove itself free of fraud may be concluded as definitive evidence of fraud. We have the ability to have ballots with established and sufficiently anonymized provenance, our continued failure to implement such a system must only be because it would impede fraud.
And I'll say also, a fair reading of my original post would be understood as anti-inflammatory. No, it's not that 1,791,589 Virginians are a mix of inexcusable fools and psychopaths, it's that the machine stole the election, and in fact the vast majority of dems had a problem with Jones' remarks.
You don't get to say what he said. It is truly that simple, everything less than disenfranchisement or fraud is rationalizing. Tribalism? Yeah, radicalize the reds even further, great plan. "Economy" He was running for state AG. State AG. The position in the top 5 of the 100% of offices it disqualifies him from holding.
Yes, inflammatory is perception. My perception, as the mod who makes these decisions, is that claiming an election was "obviously fraud" is inflammatory. An example of an "inflammatory" statement is a highly-charged partisan statement that the other party is certainly not going to agree with, which claiming that an election was "obviously fraud" obviously is.
I am not making a judgment as to whether or not what you said was true. Maybe the election was fraudulent. Maybe it wasn't. You're free to argue that.
You are not prohibited from making inflammatory statements, like claiming that an election was fraud, or even "obviously" fraud.
What you are prohibited from doing is making an assertion like that and not providing sufficient evidence or reasoning to back up the assertion.
Assumptions that "this couldn't possibly happen because it doesn't fit my model of how the world works" are not sufficient evidence or reasoning, though the expanded version you posted above would probably have been sufficient to avoid being dinged for a bald inflammatory assertion. "I think this election was obviously fraud because here's why I cannot believe it could have been otherwise" is still inflammatory, but it is backed by why you believe that. "I think this election was obviously fraud because duh!" is not.
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Where are you getting these numbers, I checked just now at 10:53 New York time and found:
The pages for the elections
They've updated now -- Spanberger at 1,967,646 and Jones at 1,791,589
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Pure 100% copium. The Democrats have installed themselves as the default for voters in the US, and they only lose when they're doing something actively, obviously terrible (like transing the kids, or perhaps running a senile candidate) at the moment.
They certainly have.
As above, the claim that, now, 9 in 10 dems have no problem with "I want your children to die" is a conclusion not found in reality. That is not the United States of 2025. If the demo had been inculcated with that degree of animus, the rate of leftist violence would be higher. There have been the handful of loud examples but they are a handful, nothing systemic, and if the suggestion is they're successfully moderating extreme elements, they would have taken the loss on forcing Jones out.
The conclusion found in reality is an unimpeded fraud machine, as most demonstrated by the massive changes in blue voting in Florida under DeSantis.
By that logic, now, 9 in 10 Republicans have no problem with grabbing women by the pussy and the rate of sexual assault among Republicans should be higher. Sure, there are a handful of loud examples, but nothing systemic. the only conclusion, then is a MASSIVE FRAUD machine that got Trump elected twice.
FTFY. And it's 9 in 10 Democrats too, as evidenced by Bill Clinton's continued popularity, and the way most boomers of either side celebrate the rock stars of the 60s-80s.
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Okay. 9 in 10 Republicans have no problem with sexual assault. 9 in 10 Democrats have no problem with wanting their opponents murdered.
It was a wrong thing you did here, to present these as comparable.
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My understanding of polling is that the bellwether effect here isn't that Dems won NYC and other urban areas, it's that you can track over time election margins to determine the relative change in how a party or candidate performs. People who follow these things closely seem to believe that these results are indicative of a bad environment for the GOP. I don't know of any obvious proof of fraud that I've seen, however there of course could be.
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How does that fit into a wider context? I see 7/7 Democrat wins. Were there just seven meaningful races? Were they expected to go D regardless of the current trends? Anything special about any of those races?
Jay Jones's win -- and lackluster to nonexistent pushback from the 'moderate centrist's -- is pretty radicalizing.
Golly, until this election we held politicians to a high standard of restraint and decorum, and now suddenly for no reason at all people don’t care much any more.
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Guys, are users here surprised by this outcome? I don't think you should conclude that over half of residents in Virginia want you personally dead. You should conclude that most of them know nothing about this text scandal that only the Motte and Twitter know about, but they know about every single time ICE tackled a protestor.
The mainstream media has been hammering the Trump administration's every move. I listen to breathless NPR coverage every morning, and they're complaining about something new and "unprecedented" literally every single day. People actually think Republicans shut down the government on purpose just to specifically repeal Obamacare subsidies, instead of letting them expire when the law said that they would expire. How could Virginia ever, ever have had any other outcome in this election?
The traditional media channels still have a say in what people think about and talk about, and they do not want you to be happy with the Trump administration.
To quote myself 29 days ago:
The meme would be I'm not surprised, I'm just disappointed, but I didn't have the hope for that. I'm mostly just trying not to become a ball of rage.
Trump was not on the ballot this year. Jaye's opponent was not campaigning -- nor was -- a MAGA Trumpist. Neither would have any power over immigration law or enforcement. There is near-unprecedented access, bought at no small cost, for information outside of the mainstream media and NPR cloister, at the same time that the broader progressive movement is crowing about the importance of Not Ignoring Evil. Jone's comments even got some mainstream attention.
The best-case scenario would hold that despite all those unprecedented (and likely unstable) advantages and uniquely bad behaviors, it wasn't enough. Indeed, it turned out to be enough not enough that it mattered less than past scandals in the same state.
But, worse, that's a prediction that would predict side effects. 'If only the average voter knew' runs headfirst into what we're imagining that the average voter would do if they did know. And some of them did. Optimistically, maybe one-in-ten? Forget anyone running out into the street and screaming into the sky like a Charlton Heston outtake, forget any member of the Abundance Caucus speaking against the man without being pushed about him first. You'd expect to see someone horrified.
So then the next best-case scenario's that everyone just thought it hyperbole, or joke. But then you look at everybody that thought it funny when Kirk was murdered...
But no. They don't 'want' me dead. They don't even know me! It'd just be funny afterward.
Alternatively, my thesis: it's extraordinarily bad politics to tell people they aren't allowed to vote for someone or something. Trump, Mamdani, Brexit, Jaye, even something like Roy Moore in the Republican primary. When voters perceive an outside authority tut-tutting them that they aren't "allowed" to vote for someone, the natural reaction is "Fuck me? No, fuck you."
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You should have told that to Miyares before the election because that's what he campaigned on. He doesn't have an Issues section of his website, but he does have an Accomplishments section, which he divides into four sections. One is law enforcement and one is immigration. Another one is the opiate epidemic, which is fine, but that's par for the course among people running for AG regardless of party. The other is protecting children, by which he mostly means the Loudon County school incident but also includes a few other non-culture war things. Even with the normal AG stuff he could only offer half a loaf because there was nothing about fraud and corporate malfeasance, which, I don't know his record and Jones attacked him for being too friendly to big business, so maybe there were people he didn't want to piss off.
As for the Trump stuff, it was even worse than @KennethAlmquist points out. The centerpiece of Jones's campaign was that Miyares sat idly by when Trump was running roughshod over the state and didn't bother joining in lawsuits that other AGs were filing. In particular, he didn't join in the one that argued that Federal employees were wrongfully terminated, the result of which was the employees got reinstated in other states but not in Virginia. I don't have to tell you that there are more Federal employees in Virginia than in most other places. Miyares had no response to this, and when confronted drifted into his normal mode of attacking Jone's liberal legislative record and lack of experience as a prosecutor, which is fine when you're winning but doesn't cut it when you're behind. Jones was able to successfully paint Miyares as more loyal to Trump than to Virginians, and it was a fatal blow.
I'd say that most of them knew because Miyares wouldn't shut up about it, to the point that he'd use it as a crutch and bring it up when confronted with a question he couldn't respond to. Miyares, however, had the misfortune of representing a party that has spent the better part of the past decade defending statements from Trump that would have previously been undefendable all the while bemoaning cancel culture and the alleged erosion of free speech. To be fair, at first the Republican establishment did condemn him and try to end his career, but once he secured the nomination these condemnations gradually turned to excuses, and then justifications, and finally admissions that they really didn't give a shit. Republicans are well past the point where they can credibly say that this is the point where they draw the line. Do you seriously think that if similar texts from Trump came to light a month before last year's election that the GOP establishment would be tripping over themselves to endorse Harris? Do you think his voters abandon him en masse? Do you think Trump even apologizes? I think you know the answer to this one.
I don't have his phone number, but the Supreme Court did tell him, directly, and the concertina wire case he's left on his website lost too.
I can litigate the rest if you want, but even taking everything you've said as true, he's still just a replacement-level Republican. If your defense is that Democratic party members will hold to their claimed principles only when they can get someone with the exactly same politics in instead, that's definitely a claim, but it's a long way from what we had everyone arguing here or in the mainstream media for literally a decade now.
But if that expense is too high, thankfully there's another off-ramp coming up. Spangberger could literally name Jones' replacement if he abdicated. That's not just a low-cost opportunity, it's nearly free: she could pick any Dem, even one more extreme, without having to worry about the scandals hanging around her AG's neck for every single policy proposal she gives. Do you want to make any bets on whether it happens? Whether anyone high-profile in her admin even calls for it?
Trivially, I did, for far less. Hell, I committed to not vote for him before the election.
Less trivially, Democratic posters in this community made a big deal about moderation and enforcement, both as a portrayal of why Democratic people were better and as why they themselves were taking the high road and were better than the Republican tolerance of Trump, and then doing nothing. A moderator on this forum said that "I'm optimistic that Biden might use it responsibly, and at the times he doesn't I'm prepared to kick and scream and shake my fist impotently at the sky before casting a meaningless vote against him. I have only supported them, and will only support them, provided I see serious attempts at deescalation." and then went on to absolutely not cast a meaningless vote against him or even argue any "serious attempts at deescalation”. The same man is now conveniently incommunicado and unwilling to even give a sha256 about political assassination fandom.
And no, we have examples. In some cases, the comparisons are hilariously on-point: contrast the aftermath of Gossar's anime meme violence to Ilhan Omar's Kirk Deserved It poasting. That's why you have to propose hypotheticals that are not merely untested, but untestable; that's why you have to draw to obscenely dissimilar comparisons, that's why you have to litigate how 'oh this is bad, but it's not so bad as allow people to overlook <Mainstream Political Position A>', that's why it'll always be "This isn't a change in anything." as it goes from crabby old guys in bars to senators to state AGs.
Other than the people who did, perhaps. And now Democrats are past that line, and no one cares, and no one will ever care again.
If I may ask, how is it that you are able to find these older posts you link to so readily? (Or, more specifically, that Reddit post? I've always found it a pain to search.)
Some of them I've set up a custom storage system for local search and indexing. Most of the time it's better looking at third-party search tools. Unfortunately, these tend to either close up or go into indefinite maintenance cycles, but the current best option I know of is samac
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I get this. This is why I voted against Trump in every primary and general, despite his policies being closer to mine than the Dems. I was rewarded with Dark Brandon and open borders and yet still I say Trump is unacceptable.
But all of the sneering Dems like you who are so very shocked by Trump have now voted Jones. And nothing that Trump said is even 1/10th as bad as "people who disagree with me should have their two year old son die in his mothers arms" and saying it is close is offensive. I have learned my lesson. If it is to be filth I will stick with making fun of people and policies I like and you can stick with wishing death and misery upon children, and may God have mercy on your soul.
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I didn’t follow the race (I don’t live in Virginia), but if DuckDuckGo is to be believed, the only mention of Donald trump on Jason Miyares’ campaign website is in a Washington Post piece that was copied to the website. Nothing condemning the fake electors scheme (which he presumably knew about when he campaigned for Donald Trump in 2024). Nothing condemning the use of the Justice Department to go after his enemies. Low level cases like the prosecution of Sydney Reid (which I assume Trump had no knowledge of but which likely is the consequences of his personnel choices and the tone he sets) also go unmentioned.
So Miyares wasn’t campaigning as a MAGA Republican, but he also didn’t go out of his way to indicate that he would take his duty as attorney general to the law over the wishes of Donald Trump. Miyares was the only candidate in Virgina endorsed by Donald Trump. Miyares could have refused to accept the endorsement; he didn’t.
Someone running for attorney general can’t plausibly claim to have no interest in what Trump is doing to the Department of Justice and the rule of law, so silence looks like complicity. Another way to look at this is that if somebody is running for office, they either define themselves forcefully or risk letting other people define them.
That's a defense that would undermine Spanbergler, nevermind Jones, and notably it didn't. Neither could forcefully define themselves as the not-killing-kids (and committing hilarious frauds, if we're going to pretend 'rule of law' matters).
Dem voters just didn't care.
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Don't worry. I'm sure all of our stalwart norms enjoyers will pop in to excoriate the Democrats for liking Jones even more after his comments came out.
I’m absolutely horrified. But much like how Trump won despite his horrific comments, there’s more to elections than merely comments like that. I’m fervently hoping it’s not a sign of things to come.
I’m not totally convinced that this provided an actual positive bump for Jones though. Would need to look into it more.
AIUI, he gained approval with Dem voted, lost more with independents, and came out with a net loss that was still enough to win the election.
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Sure - I'm a "norms enjoyer". Let's have a look at the texts,
I think Jones clearly wishes death upon Republicans (and with the "breeding little fascists" comment, he also harbours an extreme hatred towards White people) And if Gilbert, or any other Republican were assassinated, he would secretly celebrate their deaths.
I think it's a bad thing that the Democrats elected such a person as a State AG. Even though he said he was sorry, the texts were egregiously hateful, so non-progressives will likely see his future uses of discretion as illegitimate, and stuff like this encourages escalation because it makes people feel unsafe.
The only caveat I'd add is that I'm opposed to the leaking of private messages between friends. But the messages were leaked, and we can see them: an immoral source for the evidence does not make the inference drawn any less valid.EDIT: I misunderstood the (non-existent) nature of his relationship with Coyner.Now that he knows it doesn't matter, he'd openly celebrate their deaths.
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AFAIK this even left out the worst part, which is that he doubled down yet again that he hopes their kids are killed, bleeding out in front of them.
Do you have a source for more of the texts? Everything I found online was just the 3 screens in my link.
Sorry for talking a while. It seems I slightly misremembered it. The kids-bleeding-out part is something he allegedly said, not wrote, but it is referenced in the text you quoted ("you were talking about hoping jennifer gilbert's kids would die" -> "Yes I've told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy").
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This is a lie. They were not friends, unless you think everyone you work with, even in an adversarial manner, is your "friend". This was sheer gloating directly to a political rival on the other team. He directly said these things, while a Democrat state legislator, to another Republican state legislator, while they were both serving, in the aftermath of a 3rd state legislators funeral.
That's the sort of unhinged psychopath that now has top legal authority over me and my growing family of "little fascist".
Right, I had initially thought this was the case because the articles I found never mentioned a long-standing relationship. But I dismissed this as being too insane... it seems not, and the reason there was no mention was because he went out of his way to harass her.
Yes, the enemy of the people are excellent at telling only the truth, but still leaving you believing a lie.
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It might be possible to describe me as a "stalwart norms enjoyer", but I have also quixotically been trying to cultivate a sense of tribalism around my state and regional culture, and and a sense that my "out group" is everyone else.
This is an ongoing process, but it means I am trying to genuinely not care about every outrage that happens in another state on the right or the left. Those are basically foreign countries, and as long as they mostly play by the rules of our constitutional system, they can rot or flourish for all I care about them.
Who cares what the silly foreigners in Dixie or Tidewater or Yankeedom get up to? I don't live in any of those countries, and I'm sure they're better equipped to manage their own affairs than I am. As long as they don't make it my problem if/when things go wrong thanks to their bad policies, why should I care who they elect?
Don't get me wrong, the coresidents of my state can look out at the foreign nations that are part of our federal league and try to learn what to do and what not to do based on the practical experience those foreign nations get up to, but I'm not a busybody. What can an attorney general in Virginia do to my kith and kin in my state? Does he have any real power to harm me, being away in the far off foreign nation of Tidewater?
As long as the dirty Tidewaterers don't start moving to where I live and make things go to shit with their inferior cultural values, I feel safe and secure in my own city.
I do care what the leader of our military league does, because it affects people in the region I actually care about as well. I don't think that makes me a hypocrite.
I overall agree with your attitude and it's one I try to cultivate myself, but living in places that have been overrun by Californians et al. demonstrates the weakness of that position. I could say "what does an AG race in California have to do with me?" and then Harris ends up as VP and running for President. I'm not going to get worked up about, or even think much about, the Virginia AG race other than posting about it here, but I can't be 100% certain it's not going to have eventual unpleasant effects in my life.
Same for Mamdani's election. I couldn't care less about NYC (I think Goldwater's take on the eastern seaboard had some merits), but when NYCers start flooding into my state to escape him, then I have to deal with it. And having dealt with plenty of former New Yorkers, they'll complain incessantly about how bad the city was, but then vote to replicate its problems while complaining about what a shithole cultural desert they've fled to.
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There is no bottom. Jennifer Welch reacting to a clip from Virginia where normie democrats were talking about being glad Charlie Kirk was dead, and might want the Republican Media Person interviewing them to be murder too was right. Murdering Republicans is a winning campaign platform, and Democrats need to get with the message or be left behind.
God help us all.
Would you prefer the Democrats to moderate and then appeal to normies?
The problem is that by NOT moderating, they are appealing to normies. This is where the normies are.
Are you sure about that?
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Well, at least this is a place of reason and decency. I'm sure the respectability centrists among us will pop in to drop some absolutely scathing denounciations of the Virgina Democrat party. I mean, if they didn't then that would be taken as Bayesian evidence that they never sincerely cared about respectability and standards and norms at all, and it was just pure arguments as soldiers and that they're morally more contemptible than men like Donald Trump or George Santos. So I'm sure they'll be by.
Any time now.
Your first post was a low-effort sneer (@gattsuru was at least pointing at something substantive, a specific grievance, you are just sneering). Your second post above is doubling down on the non-specific callouts of non-specific "respectability centrists" whom you are apparently accusing of being morally contemptible hypocrites who don't actually care about standards and decency. As an enforcer of standards and norms here, I am telling you this is a terrible post because all it does is spray piss on the floor. Apparently the eight people who have reported you so far agree.
So you're angry that Jay Jones won. That's fine. Who, exactly, do you think you are directing this venom at? Because just saying, as @gattsuru did, that it's radicalizing that Democrats elected him despite his abhorrent statements is fair commentary. But you seem to be angry and wanting to start a fight with people here.
I'm not going to say "Who?" because we don't actually encourage named call-outs just to start fights, but on the other hand, it's hard to see who you did have in mind. A couple of people have already asked if you mean them. I dunno, maybe you mean me too. Maybe my previous post unambiguously denouncing Charlie Kirk's murder wasn't enough for you. As I predicted to @gattsuru way back when, those of us on the moderate/left side are apparently responsible for denouncing unhinged leftists wherever and whenever they occur or we're assumed to sympathize with them. "Silence is violence"?
Or maybe you just mean anyone who votes Democrat or anyone who believes in norms and decency in politics. Because it's very reasonable and rational to track every terrible thing someone vaguely aligned with your opponent says or does and demand a repudiation or else claim they are responsible too. Just like they do on X, a very rational and reasonable place of respectable politics and decency.
Speaking for myself only, I am not a Virginia voter. Jay Jones seems like a disgusting person to me, and I also think Mamdani winning in New York is bad but neither am I a New York voter. If someone ever asked me "Hey @Amadan what do you think of that shit Jay Jones said?" I would have said "Utterly terrible and if I were a Virginia voter I wouldn't vote for him." But no one did because why should they? If my reputation on the forum is not sufficient to make people believe that I do not in fact endorse or sympathize with people cheering for political violence despite my many, many posts to the contrary, I don't know what to tell you. (Well, I do, but nothing I can type as a mod.)
Of course my response here is not a personal defense. I'm charitably assuming you didn't mean me, though honestly I don't care who you meant. What I do care about is that you are angry-posting and looking for a fight with any targets who present themselves and just vaguely gesturing at a group of people you want to spit on. As much as I also dislike @gattsuru's tactic of linking to months- or years-old threads to start fights over them again, at least he points to a specific thing to take issue with. You just seem to be angry and hoping someone will step up to fight you.
Stop it. Stop this snide, sneering, passive-aggressive baiting.
I don't think this was ever going to start any fights. I left the address line open-ended so it might apply to anyone who thinks it might apply to them. I've had a number of conversations with people here over the last six months where they were very insistent that their norms-loving was very even and non-partisan, they're just unfortunately new enough to have never been recorded denouncing a violation from the left (or have ever heard of one, or been able to think of one when prompted).
This seemed like a really great opportunity for those people to build some credibility.
I would be shocked if anyone started an argument over this. I expect silence instead, which I absolutely plan to remember, gattsuru style, the next time certain people insist they are not just engaged in concern trolling.
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Are you talking about me?
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Who are you even thinking of when you say this? Respectability centrist isn't a label I'd apply to anyone here.
In the event you're thinking of me, Charlie Kirk's assassination was Bad with a capital B, Jay Jones' texts were Bad and should have been disqualifying, if people voted for him as an endorsement of those feelings then that is also abhorrent. I'm not sure the latter is true, but I'm also fairly far removed from Virginia.
Are you ready to denounce the bullshit on your side too, or do you get to dodge that responsibility by not identifying as a 'respectability centrist?' Next time Trump does something bad, shall I demand you pop up in the comments to say something about it?
This is a reasonable complaint but there also needs to term that describes the sort of "polite" anti-confrontationist liberalism ostensibly espoused by publications like The Bulwark and The Atlantic and commentators like David Roberts and Bill Kristol.
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Nah, I know you and would have predicted you taking this stance. You're an actual reasonable person, Chris. I was thinking more of magicalkittycat and wanderinginthewilderness and a few others, newish accounts who get so deeply concerned about civility and norms violations from the right. In my discussions with them, they keep insisting that it's a general principle and they definitely apply it generally, even if they struggle to name a single example. Well, this is a perfect opportunity to build credibility on that topic, isn't it?
And yes, I do try to denounce, not "bullshit", but "actual psycho shit" from my own side. I think it's important to set those kinds of bounds.
I do not acknowledge this as an accurate summary of my positions. Even if I did, I don't see what Jay Jones's texts have to do with "civility" and "norms violation" - they are, in fact, leaked texts, not public statements. As for "struggling to name a single example" of bad behavior on the Left, I don't know how many times I have to reply that I am against cancel culture. Like, generally. Point me to any example of a harassment campaign against a random private citizen based on their politics, I am going to be against that. But again, I wouldn't term the substance of my objections "concern about civility and norms violations". I care about the fact that such methods are wrong and harmful, not that they are indecorous in some kind of abstract way.
Incidentally, I really don't care, but it's Wanderer, not Wandering.
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So are you a norm enjoyer or not? Let’s hear the denunciations of Trump and co.
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For a passive that aggressive, you might as well drop @names.
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The VA AG race had some uncertainty after some controversial texts from Jay Jones came to light. The GA wins by the Democratic party candidates are the first time D's have won a statewide state position (as opposed to federal) in 20 years. Sherrill was probably the favorite in the NJ Governor race but it's also the first time the same party has had a member elected governor for a third consecutive time in decades. The NYC mayoral race had been closely watched (at least in my political circles) due to disgraced ex-governor Andrew Cuomo's attempt to run for the seat. First in the Dem primary, then as a third party.
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The political realignment means that the Republican coalition is dominated by low-propensity voters. A lot of these guys show up for presidential elections every four years and nothing else.
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Mandani was a shoo-in.
Virginia flipping all blue was not unexpected, but probably pointing to the growing strength of NoVA compared to the rest of the state.
New Jersey is probably 2-3 cycles away from being a swing state, but Trump is probably too divisive of a character to do that quite yet.
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