If so the Democrats could act like it by showing what happens when they try to say what they aren’t allowed to say.

At which point you could say that the Democrats are owned by the far right, at which point “far right” becomes an impractical phrase to use to distinguish between the likes of AOC and Mamdani and the likes of Trump.

So no, the news media aren’t owned by the far right. They are owned by the same people that own the Democrats and Republicans, which have a diverse range of right wing opinions none of which include stopping fascists that got elected through the system that they rely on for their wealth and power.

If the DNC wanted to hammer the Republicans on this, then by the same token the news media would want to let them. But the DNC doesn’t want to encourage opposition too much because they know they and their owners would lose massive amounts of money if there was any kind of structural reform.

And things ended up this way because in 1776 they had little idea of how their rules were going to play out but they had to choose something to get started and they hoped it would get fixed with time.

Presumption of innocence.

Also, a long history of the US government engaging in fraud and slander as an excuse to start wars, from the USS Maine to the Gulf of Tonkin incident to the WMDs in Iraq.

Historically, British Zionism has been fundamentally tied to English supremacism and antisemitism.

Essentially, Israel is the UK’s “not quite final solution” to the “problem” of Jews living in Britain - a place to dump all the Jews so England can be more ethnically pure.

This is public information - see the history of Zionism in Britain on wikipedia. The lesson ethnonationalists took from the holocaust - with Hitler publicly bemoaning he had no place to dump Jews forcing him into his final solution - was that every ethnicity needed their own homeland.

The story is similar for USAmerican white supremacists and ethic supremacists across Europe. If Israel collapsed, millions of Jews would flee to Europe and the US, and that’s terrible if you’re an antisemite.

But for the past 80 years, publicly admitting you’re doing it for antisemitic or even ethnic supremacist reasons has been a faux pas, so there has been a whole literary genre of dogwhistles and motivated reasoning, combined with weaponizing of the “antisemitic” label, resulting in an intentionally opaque mess of justifications.

So then, as icing on the cake, the observation that this is a mess has been brilliantly co-opted by the propagandists through antisemitic conspiracy theory: Don’t look behind the curtain, look at the Jewish boogeyman projected onto the curtain.

And of course capitalism also plays into this, but the capitalist elite has always been quite generous towards their fellow elites. “Socialism for the rich” is not just a turn of phrase, a lot of billionaires lost good money in the 2008 financial crisis bailout.

Golden parachutes, positions for each other’s nepo babies, charity balls for trophy wives’ pet projects, etc. - Despite capitalism supposedly being about profit maximization, the elites don’t eat their own. They will let their portfolio burn billions to help each other out. But who is the in-group?

Surprise - it’s white supremacists again. It’s Epstein, Trump, Musk, the Kochs, the Waltons, the Clintons, the Kennedys, the British royals, etc. Nonwhites can definitely get invited to the cookout - Obama, Oprah, Rothschilds, etc. - but they are always peripheral and more easily cast out.

It’s not a cabal, it’s a community. Trump was the village idiot but his talent for demagoguery made him the hero of the town. White supremacy isn’t a nefarious grand scheme, it’s just a common belief that affects their friendships, their worldview, and their choices. Multiculturalism was a fun idea that helped destroy unions but now that people are angry it’s easiest to fall back on the people you know (if you know what I mean). Bailouts are helping friends through tough times.

And Israel? Israel is a lightning rod. Anti-elitism can be tainted with antisemitism, ethnic supremacy is legitimized by their existence as a supposed solution to antisemitism while criticism of it isn’t directed at white supremacy, anti-imperialism can be externalized, Islamophobia is sustained to justify oil wars, the military-industrial guys have a nice playing ground, the news can always look away from coups and neocolonial violence elsewhere, etc.

So that’s the world - a bunch of rich white guys using Jews as a scapegoat for their own fuckery. Same as the past 1800 years, really.

Yes, I’m sure that when the Oil Manufacturers Cooperative murders climate activists and spreads propaganda to prevent the adoption of sustainable alternatives, humanity will be much better off…

Capitalism in any form is unsustainable, any system that treats the world as fungible is. What we need is fundamental, structural change.

We need a system that naturally incentivizes degrowth and makes the filling of power vacuums by corrupt, greedy, or opportunistic people or systems impossible.

That’s not capitalism, it’s not syndicalism, it’s not state communism. It’s something in the realm of anarchocommunism. Societies that are prosperous because nobody in them is trying to screw people over: ones without capital accumulation or exertion of power, that are nevertheless resistant to power over them.

Source?

Tell that to the 10% of the German population that didn’t survive WW2.

The fact that Republicans wouldn’t do that doesn’t change the fact that there are undecided voters that would do that. If you think non-whites aren’t capable of being as conservative as republicans, you’re going to be disappointed time and time again.

I guess the main thing is that if you’re going to argue for something very unpopular, rather than arguing for the sake of your opponent as they are today, argue for the sake of uncommitted onlookers and for the sake of the opponent a week from now after they’ve had time to calm down and reprocess. Respond to their arguments, of course, but do it in a way that illustrates to less polarized people that you’ve got a point, rather than trying to convince your opponent or finding specific errors in the opponent’s reasoning/self-justification.

When an issue is as polarized as this, people very rarely switch sides publicly (unless they’re shilling and they didn’t hold the original position to begin with), but people can cringe from the side making bad arguments, quietly distancing themselves, and a few months or years later show up on a different side.

If you want that side to be your side, it’s nice to present a pipeline that does that. People who cringe from bottom-of-the-barrel leftist discourse can fall into alt-right pipelines, which you presumably don’t want, so ideally you would want to have examples of (leftist) influencers whose takes you find reasonable, ideally on the case itself. For example, LegalEagle (“it is plausible that the jury was right that murder under Wisconsin law was not proven beyond reasonable doubt”).

The hate is not really avoidable except by forgoing this venue or not arguing your point, but like with the hate thrown towards peaceful climate activists, it is not a sign that you’re doing a bad job.

Your original comment is passive-aggressive. You decry that people aren’t doing their due dilligence but don’t actually provide your perspective on the story or give any indication that you’ve put in any effort of your own. Unless you believe that legal definitions and jury trials are simply right, in which case, wow, you’re such a leftist.

If you want to have a fact based conversation, it would be nice if you came with facts instead of just claiming they exist.

If you want to discuss about what kind of killing is worth calling murder, it would be nice if you explained your position.

Your original comment is incredibly passive-aggressive.

I put together this gif for a side-by-side comparison. The picture was taken from a slightly different location, so it’s not perfect, but the difference is obvious.

Your mistake is seeing them as Democrat voters. Maybe if the Republicans had a brown candidate they would vote for them instead.

Trump shows that FPTP doesn’t have to result in a closest-to-center career politician. The DNC likes to pretend that it does in order to prop up their most centrist candidates, but as long as there is a large group of radicals and non-voters, a candidate who appeals to those voters can defeat a candidate who appeals to the center.

There were people who switched from Bernie to Trump. There were people who didn’t want to vote Biden because he supported Palestinian genocide too much. Those people are idiots, but they still vote. Lower class workers tend to vote left-wing if they trust that fair competent government is possible and right-wing if they don’t, with most of them in the US voting right-wing, especially in rural areas.

It’s annoying that she put this on Instagram where there’s no scrobble function, and she then spends so much time leading up to it.

For those not willing to sit around listening to off-the-cuff meandering, AOC’s points:

• Ohio requires political parties to submit their candidates’ names before the Democratic convention. If the convention is contested, Democrats likely won’t be able to vote there effectively.
• AOC says that swing states might have enough legal ambiguity in the electoral code that Republicans can challenge any voting results, and then let it escalate to the Supreme Court who can throw out the Democratic result.
• Democrats are divided on who would be the replacement candidate, with many of the people calling for Biden to step down opposing Harris as well.
• The Biden/Harris campaign has $100M of campaign funding that will not be able to be transferred to another ticket. (Maybe it can be transferred to Harris? She mumbles a bit there).
• Anecdotally, when AOC sat “in rooms with those people” that call for Biden to step down, they didn’t seem to have a proposed game plan for any sort of replacement. This includes lawyers who ought to know whether this creates legal trouble and people in the legislature.
• There is a risk that if the Democratic convention is contested, it won’t be concluded before the deadline to submit the ticket in more states, which is two days after the scheduled end.
• There are no candidates that poll way better than Biden.
• Many mail-in votes can already be made in September or October. A new candidate would have to have a succesful campaign by that time.
• Biden is systematically underestimated (by Democrats and fianciers?) in his ability to rally ‘demographics typically not cared for’.
• Biden does great with elderly people, which may not transfer to other Democrats.
• Democrats opposing Biden seem to be mostly concerned about big donors, not popular support.
• Democratic party members speaking anonymously to the press is both strategically stupid and undemocratic. They should have either spoken out publicly or kept it behind closed doors. The fact that they did may be why Biden is polling so bad.
• Biden gets energized from having people around him, which was not the case for the debate with Trump.

My personal opinions:

• With regards to Ohio, betting websites put the Republicans at 95% chance of winning the state, and Biden appears to have been trailing by 10 percentage points even before the debate. Losing Ohio only matters if you would have won Ohio with Biden, and that’s questionable.
• With regards to the Supreme court handing the election to Trump based on a bullshit legal ruling, it seems like AOC is making the dangerous and questionable assumption that the Supreme Court cares about the law, and that the outcome of these legal challenges will depend on technicalities rather than on whether they think they can practically succeed at the coup.
• With regards to the $100M war chest, this seems to be cancelled out by her argument that Democrats opposing Trump are mostly concerned about donors. In 2020, Biden’s election got $1 billion in funding while on May 9th, Biden had raked in $170M according to this website. So with upwards of $700M of donations left to collect, a 14% decrease in donations would mean Biden has less money to work with than other candidates.
• With regards to other candidates not doing much better, it seems impressive that they are polling better than Biden even with Biden running a massive election campaign and having spent a hundred million dollars in ads already. I would expect the gap to widen if those other candidates actually start trying to win the election as much as Biden is.
• With regards to the votes in September and October, with regards to the elderly and demographics typically not cared for and popular support, these all seem to be cancelled out by the polls.
• With regards to the Democrat backchannels, the damage is done. It’s fair that she’s mad about it, but it doesn’t affect future decisions.
• With regards to Biden’s energy, either this doesn’t explain the Zelensky-Putin gaffe, or it’s kind of irrelevant. Biden won’t be sitting in the oval office with an audience to work off of.

So from everything AOC says, all that seems reasonable to me is (1) the observation that there is no good Democratic alternative plan, (2) the worry that the convention might run long so the alternative candidate can’t appear on the ticket, (3) the possibility that a succesful Republican coup is significantly more likely with a candidate that might provide loopholes for the Supreme Court to work off of than with Biden, and (4) the possibility of losing Ohio if Biden would otherwise have won it.

However, even here, the parts of the alternative plan she is most worried about seems to be the legal trouble, which she seems most worried about only if the Democrats aren’t on time with selecting a candidate. It seems to me that if only the Democrats are able to rally behind a new candidate before the Ohio deadline two days before the convention, none of her concerns apply more to the new candidate than to Biden. If it happens after the Ohio deadline, it only matters if there is a technicality that disqualifies the new candidate and Biden would otherwise have won Ohio and that technicality determines whether a coup succesfully occurs.