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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026

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Democrats are constantly running on "Republicans want to cut spending on [widely used government service or one that serves a sympathetic category] and pay for it by lowering taxes on the wealthy". That's like the single most common Democratic line besides "Trump is bad".

Democrats are constantly running on "Republicans want to cut spending on [widely used government service or one that serves a sympathetic category] and pay for it by lowering taxes on the wealthy".

Ok, and the analogous situation would be if there were some kind of conservative NGO with a website and literature promoting these sorts of tax and spending cuts; and some Democrat supporters started spreading their literature among people who would be offended by such proposals; and they concealed the fact that they were the ones spreading the literature.

I think that in that situation, a conservative Republican candidate might respond with something along the lines of "I support tax cuts for everyone and my priority would be to cut taxes for the middle class, not just the wealthy." Which might be a bald-faced lie, but I think @MaiqTheTrue 's point is plausible.

It seems that much more than the Republicans, the Democrats have positions which are very unpopular, very embarrassing, but which they still are reluctant to disavow. To be sure, I am a conservative so I am possibly biased on this issue, but if anyone can identity a few analogous issues on the Republican side of things I would be interested.

True, but if I understand correctly, these are unedited flyers merely send to the wrong people. The group in question doesn't even claim that it disagrees with the content itself?

Anti-Rep ads on the other hand usually explicitly uses a Dem framing, like the planned medicare changes: Reps say they want to make access harder to make abuse more difficult, Dems say they just hate poor people (Btw, I'm against the medicare change).

That seems qualitatively different.

Yeah like Democrats had no problems with pushing a lot of 'Project 2025 is the secret plan of the Republican Establishments look how evil it is' when it's like one think-tank's opinions which have some overlap with Republican interests but are nowhere near 1-1. Reddit Libs were treating Project 2025 like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for years.