The US internet buddies I've talked to who voted republican did it more because they did not under any circumstance want to vote for the democratic party.
Based on how intensely they despised the thought of voting dem, I got the feeling the republican candidate could literally have been Satan and they'd still vote rep.
It's easy to understand, though? Daily outrage and vilification porn. Highly addictive stuff, and people will equivocate and believe the most preposterous things you've ever heard in order to keep the outrage righteous and their pornographer of choice credible.
They have no choice to believe that he is the one that promotes freedom, and his adversaries the opposite. Not believing that would mean their outrage is not righteous, which would make future supply worthless, and their brains will just not allow that.
Yes I'm really surprised and scared to see how much people actually like being consumed by anger and hate. We see the same in the Netherlands now since the radical right party came to power.
I've tried to 'disarm' this in some of my ex-friends with actual facts to show that they've been duped into many of their sources of anger. But it's like they don't want to know. Like you say, they want to hold on to it.
I don't see them anymore because I can't deal with that negativity.
The “Trump is the lesser evil” camp has got to be tiny. Trump overwhelmingly won the primary and something like 84% percent of republicans give Trump a favorable approval rating in polls this month.
Republicans are really good at misinformation, they've convinced their entire base that all democrats are AOC and Bernie Sanders types and billionaire elites and there's a massive conspiracy to LGBT everything and open borders and remove Israel's right to self defense.
Democrats are really bad at appealing to their base. During the election, they attempted to flank Trump from the right on several conservative talking points like immigration and the Israel-Palestine conflict, while promising their base mostly "fundamentally nothing will change" vibes.
We're hoping this leads to the collapse of the democrat party into a new party (both parties currently represent billionaire elites), but I suppose the Democrat party can remain irrational longer than you can remain unrepresented.
The Democratic party has been slowly dying since Reagan almost entirely because of Fox News. It was apocryphally invented entirely to prevent another republican president from having to step down due to the unpopularity of their acts. Since then, America voted for the "TV personality" president in such a landslide that it killed all democrat power in the US. The democrats adopted the conservative's economic policy in response, and that got us Clinton, but Americans kept watching Fox News, and voted for a literal nepobaby for their new president, who immediately started at least one outright illegal war, which every republican who voted for him will insist was awful but also they can't vote for democrats because they are evil, and they mostly voted for him again in 2004!
Everyone who said "Democrats want to trans our kids" got their information from right wing information sources, and they did it willingly and purposely, and EXCLUDED OR IGNORED any source that tried to carry the actual left wing message.
What the hell counter-party to this system do you think could possibly rise out of the ashes? Any counter to the republicans has to contend with the same effect of a population that willingly and purposely opt in to a propaganda outlet?
Fox News lost viewership after they said the 2020 election wasn't stolen!
My brother, who agreed the 2020 election wasn't stolen, still spends his time in right wing information spheres and still votes for republicans. "For guns" he says, but no democrat has ever done anything to his guns and our supposedly liberal state enacted constitutional carry. He still wants to shoot all democrats.
Hell, my most right wing uncle who consistently posts hateful anti-women memes on facebook (to the point that the rest of my conservative family members who mostly agree with "women are lesser" in practice still thought he was problematic!) insisted that he wished Trump would get the fuck off twitter. You can bet he reads all of trump's tweets.
There is ample study that shows that people who vote republican will APPROVE of a progressive ideology right up until you tell them a democrat wants it.
Nah, that's just slander propagated by the enemies of the people! Besides, Trump has been saved by God himself when that assassin tried to shoot him last year, so even if he looks like the devil and quacks... er, talks like the devil, he must be the Saviour reborn to redeem America!
There was literally a tape... and it's completely consistent with his other behavior. We should be honest with ourselves about politicians, warts and all.
I acknowledge your point that politicians of all stripes (Clinton, some Kennedys, Gingrich, Trump, Larry Craig, Eric Massa as examples) flout sexual mores. I think the difference here is that conservative politicians in the past have used a "character matters" stance to do things like impeach Bill Clinton. Did you know Brett Kavanaugh was deeply involved on the Republican side?
I agree we should be honest about politician's warts, and I'll even go so far as to say that some things go too far, and should be impeachable.
Sticking to the truth and reporting what other people say is not a "self-report".
But go ahead, this kind of distortion and power games is exactly what got Trump elected in the first place. I'm not even entirely happy about him winning, but as you demonstrate, the alternative might have been worse.
Certainly not 90%! Many American men are religious, and those that aren't are often feminists. The fraction of American men who are in neither set couldn't be more than 20-30%.
>Trump: Yeah, that’s her. With the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.
>Bush: Whatever you want.
>Trump: Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.
The mental gymnastics required to believe this is ok.
>The above is just locker room talk which probably 90% of American men have participated in.
Nope. Do you know what we did in the locker room? Mostly dick helicopters. Locker rooms filled with men are hilariously homoerotic. The only people who brag about how much pussy they get are exclusively losers and sad people with no identity other than "I must seem cool to other men", which is hilarious again, because healthy, well adjusted men see right through that horse shit. Sometimes they have a gaggle of lonely losers who look up to them as if getting pussy would somehow fix their lives that are miserable for entirely different reasons. I once thought the same.
When I was 14. And pathetically sad from all sorts of problems and maladjustments. I got better, though I had to learn some things the hard way and that brought me immense suffering and involved me hurting someone I insisted I cared deeply about.
Dick helicopters are hilarious though and I would vote for a president who made dick helicopters in the locker room.
It's indisputable that half of this country has voted for the most unrepentantly anti-christian candidate ever. Twice. So it should be no surprise then that when we jettison all moral values (Christian or otherwise) in pursuit of only power, we get an antichrist and all his degenerate acolytes that make this kind of misdeed possible (like the Tates and Musk).
Trump's incoherent misdeeds of this past month are just the beginning. Without wholehearted and unyielding opposition to more of this, Trump will push us all into depths of slime never before imagined in America.
Technically only about 22% of the country actually voted for the current president, if you consider voter turnout. And less than half voted for the top 2 candidates combined.
I wish those facts were more encouraging. They make it clear that, despite knowing Trump's history, 40% of us passively sat by and let this mess happen.
> Is this what folks voted for? To pressure for the release of a man who openly brags about pushing women into sex work and profiting from their labor?
Yes!!
Now, to qualify, I don't mean all Trump voters voted for this, or would align themselves with other individual things, say, stopping the development of an oral covid vaccine, or pardoning violent criminals and international dark web drug kingpins, or giving a billionaire essentially unfettered control over the federal government (and then pretending someone else is in charge when called on it).
I don't even mean that the reasons people vote for people are individual (though of course they are).
What I mean is, the promises the Trump campaign made were highly segmented and targeted, in ways that are not obvious from a national or international media perspective because that media perspective was dominated by what Trump says. (And since Trump voters don't listen to the words, they listen for the tone -- the shared anger and the feeling of being heard -- they will often "listen past" anything Trump says that directly contradicts the campaign outreach)
For example, Latinx voters were sold a very different, more nuanced picture of immigration reform through outreach than the national picture. Muslims in Dearborn will have seen voter suppression efforts if not outright claims that Trump would get a better deal in Israel. Clearly libertarians believed, with some justification, that they'd get RFK Jr (a priapic lunatic) in charge of healthcare and they'd get Ross Ulbricht (a man who is credibly accused of having purchased a murder) pardoned.
I strongly suspect that if you dig through the outreach they made to the young-manosphere on social media, on Tiktok etc., you will see ways they presented themselves as sympathetic to the Tates' plight that will make this look like acting on a hinted, if not explicitly stated, promise. Someone will have said "we're going to strongly look into that".
Now, I am not going to pretend I think Trump is good for anyone. He's not. And I am not an American.
But I think the Democrats need to understand something important: they spent all that time laughing at the hamfistedness of Elon Musk's wasteful ground game, which probably was useless and counterproductive, and they ignored how effective, organised, and segmented weird little Charlie Kirk's ground game was.
It's clearly one of the greatest successes in campaigning history: they sold a crooked, bullying, manipulated, intellectually ignorant felon to an electorate and won.
Do I think first-time-voting and angry/lonely/divorced twenty-and-thirtysomething men were targeted by a campaign that spoke to them in Andrew Tate's language and suggested he was being unfairly treated? Fuck yes.
(Posting throwaway because I no longer have an account)
> the promises the Trump campaign made were highly segmented and targeted, in ways that are not obvious from a national or international media perspective because that media perspective was dominated by what Trump says. (And since Trump voters don't listen to the words, they listen for the tone -- the shared anger and the feeling of being heard -- they will often "listen past" anything Trump says that directly contradicts the campaign outreach)
interesting perspective; I hadn't really thought about the MAGA being more concerned with Trump's tone than his actual words. Makes a lot of sense.
>Do I think first-time-voting and angry divorced twenty-and-thirtysomething men were targeted by a campaign that spoke to them in Andrew Tate's language and suggested he was being unfairly treated? Fuck yes.
Perhaps then other politicians should think about what they will offer that demographic other than "you're the scapegoat."
Trump at least threw a couple scraps of pardons, even if he is a lying evil bastard or whatever the long form of that is. You've got to do something to get votes.
I guess they thought "not having a candidate who would destroy the country" was enough of a thing to get votes. But it wasn't, so here we are with a president who's destroying the country.
The fact of the matter is, if you are an angry young man, you don't WANT to hear anything other than "<They> are the problem, not you". So unless you want the democrats to adopt Tate's "Women are whores" rhetoric, what the heck are you supposed to offer the angry young men?
They literally are the problem. Women don't like them because, surprise surprise, angry young men don't have much to offer.
These angry young men are lonely because they refuse to see themselves as the problem. They make a pass at one or two girls and get mildly rejected and utterly reject modern reality, instead of doing what their grandparents did which was usually try again, or try someone else, or just otherwise persist in attempting to be valuable to women in general. There are plenty of women who actually want the tradwife lifestyle, where they stay at home and raise a family like it's 1940.
But even those women don't want to be abused, or manipulated, or treated like a lesser person because they don't bring home a paycheck, or get refused basic medical rights because some old white guys can't read the bible and just listen to whatever their asshole pastor with no formal training says on Sunday.
People keep saying the democrats should offer these people something they want, but what they want (as evidenced from voting for trump) is fundamentally incompatible with democracy and individual freedoms of women. They usually want a world in which they are valuable just by virtue of being men, which they believe the past held, but they completely ignore the blunt reality that in the past, men like them just died alone and sad.
There is less sex and drugs and rock and roll nowadays because people socialize less in general, thanks to social media scratching the same itch and preventing people from being forced to go out and touch grass and meet strangers to fulfill that basic biological need.
Instead, these lonely men blame the liberalization of women, and some imaginary "feminist" movement that wants to harm men, actively. Zero sum thinking.
Democrats cannot offer them what they want, because what they want is lies.
As an aside it is VERY funny to me that it is Rick Grenell riding to Tate's rescue.
In the old days we'd have described Rick Grenell as "openly gay" -- a term people very justifiably think should be left in the old days that described people, usually men, who adopted any position beyond simply not lying to anyone. Nowadays this is what we expect for any gay person: they should not have to lie to anyone, or adopt any particular position of downplaying their identity.
But in Trump world I think it probably has some meaning and currency: Grenell is an openly-gay Trumpist.
It must really upset Tate that this man is being sent to save him.
Because Tate is a throwback: he is not fond of the openly gay. (Emphasis yours.)
Profiting from (others') labor is basically every business in the US, and sex work is rapidly being seen as something women are allowed to do. I see it as matching what people would vote for were it we had a direct democracy.
They were charged with rape, holding women against their will, trafficking minors, and laundering money. The debate over legal sex work doesn’t really intersect with that.
If I were pressured into a line of work by a love interest with ulterior motives, have to pay 50%+ to this pimp, and risk social being ostracized or at least loss of future prospects, then I'd be quite unhappy. Are such 'businesses' ethical or even legal? Apparently not in Romania.
It's not the profit, it's the force. Many agree that women should have the right to do sex work, and even for others to profit from that, but not that it should be possible to compel or defraud them into it.
I’m deeply ashamed my country makes HN with this headline, but that’s the sobering truth, Romania operates under a two-tier legal system.
Too much to go into detail here, but this is just one of the many cases where politically connected people get away with it. Other cases involve threatening journalists that break corruption stories, attempting to bury whistleblowers with fake “mental illness” diagnostics , etc.
> Romania’s public prosecutor’s office said it had approved the brothers’ request to travel to the US pending investigation, and judicial sources told local media they were due to return for a court hearing in March.
Right... as if anyone believes that's going to happen!
And in case you're wondering why they were released:
> Their flight to the US comes after the Financial Times reported that Trump’s special envoy, Richard Grenell, had spoken to the Romanian foreign minister, Emil Hurezeanu, about the Tate brothers at this month’s Munich Security Conference.
Tate is not a hardcore convert to anything. Tate's Islam conversion is about two things:
1) putting up a flag to find somewhere comfortable without an extradition treaty where his views are normal
2) seeking narcissistic supply from an easily identified demographic: angry, wealthy young muslim men in repressive countries. He's stylised himself like that: like the wealthy son of an exiled Emirati.
He's a malignant narcissist: broken, cold, and lonely inside in a way that only adoration can fix.
As it goes, Tate shares with Musk and Trump a genuinely tragic origin story of adoring a bullying, abusive, cold, father. (With one likely additional common factor: neurodivergence. Autism in Tate's case, AuDHD in Musk's, ADHD in Trump's)
The paradox of this world is that if Trump, Musk and Tate sat down, talked and cried together about the abuse and coldness of their early years -- their utterly broken childhood -- then masculine culture and the world might get somewhere.
Thats the thing about neurodivergence, it's a double edged sword I feel like. Like, all of the great men of history were extremely likely to be neurodivergent, so if you're a normal person with no mental illness, you kind of just know you won't be the next Thomas Edison or Genghis Khan. At the same time, you're a normal person, so you won't like, do something crazy like electrocute an elephant or kill millions of people.
> With one likely additional common factor: neurodivergence. Autism in Tate's case, AuDHD in Musk's, ADHD in Trump's
Have any of them have actually been diagnosed? If not, I would consider whether that’s a genuine factor or an attempt to use the neurodivergent community as a shield.
I kind of doubt Trump suffers from ADHD. He's pretty clearly old, tired, and has that weird born-into-money thing were he believes he just can't fail, so every normal person around him goes along with it. I don't know what that's called.
After more than 15 years of EU membership, there is no rule of law in Romania; a sad truth, obvious to anyone willing to take an interest.
That's not Trump's fault, is it ?
The law in Romania is certainly not known for its perfection, but what legal system doesn't flex when the US (or a regional equivalent great power) leans on it? This is not a reasonable benchmark.
+ e.g. in Serbia EU's leadership (Ursula and the gang) applauds the local BDFL publicly, and on the same day EU report comes out condemning state of political freedoms and rule of law in Serbia.
And they do this the whole day. Meanwhile in the Ukraine the fire openly burns.
Their flight to the US comes after the Financial Times reported that Trump’s special envoy, Richard Grenell, had spoken to the Romanian foreign minister, Emil Hurezeanu, about the Tate brothers at this month’s Munich Security Conference.
Is not the first time people flee abroad while prosecuted in Romania. There are quite a few high profile cases, usually for corruption.
My point is that anything is possible in Romanian justice, either through bribes or influence.
It's amazing to me he wasn't arrested in the US before he ever left for Romania.