You’ve essentially described meme theory except your blaming the products of memes for the memes themselves. Trump isn’t the cancer, nor is musk or Putin or whoever. They all have supporters and a lot of them. Trumps approval rating is still near 45-50%. And the supporters aren’t something he grew or cultivated.

Trump is the product of a meme. Conservatism isn’t the end point results of a meme, it’s an expression of an underlying cultural phenomenon where after much progress is achieved, people begin to miss the familiarity of the past and wish to stop making progress for a short time.

And so the real thing being spread and what needs to die is the meme itself. And the only way you kill a meme is to change it into a better version of itself. Better meaning beneficial. Whereas what memes naturally do is become larger and more popular ideas until they are out competed by another meme.

You can’t kill a meme by turning conservative people liberal. All you can do is make people better conservatives and help them criticize and improve their own memes. Same way with religion and it’s been happening for millennia for most of them.

You realize that the US has nukes inside of the EU right?

I mean yes but I view this stuff as deeply unserious in the US politics.

If RFK actually cared he would ban high fructose corn syrup from food. Or implement a sugar/calorie ban. Or focus on incentivizing exercise in everyday life. Or limiting/taxing fast food. Or force portion regulations to be stricter, even banning certain portions of things like soda.

There are one million billion things the US government could do to improve health and they’re doing essentially nothing by going after something that (probably) impacts us very little in comparison with the entire rest of the industry.

Call it what it is: pandering. They know that this has broad general support so they get brownie points while doing very little to actually help us.

If you really have to drink it, drink the zero versions of most sodas. Dr Pepper in particular has some really decent flavors without the gross aftertaste. Pepsi zero is also really good. Just stop drinking regular soda. We have the technology to make diet taste good now so use it.

Tariffs will not significantly increase domestic investment. The US is at its maximum employment and that’s without deporting people. Who will even work in those factories?

Not to mention American labor means that products made here are at least double the price. So no it’s smarter to just raise your prices 20-30% than build a factory that will also have raw material costs 20-30% higher anyways.

Not sure why everyone keeps suggesting that the economy will do well under trump. It will only do well if he doesn’t do anything. But the deportations alone will be a disaster.

You’re talking about entire towns losing their farming and dairy communities overnight, not good. Same is true of healthcare workers and food service. Housing prices might double.

And if he does the tariffs, we’re cooked. Recession would happen the very next day no question. So he has like 5 different ways he already plans on taking the economy, he just needs to try one of them and we’ll be in recession.

Exactly. In a high dissatisfaction environment, you must do your best to distance from the status quo which is why Trump got elected twice. It’s not that democrats are proposing bad policies, it’s that they’re only associated with changes that don’t mean much to average people. They represent the status quo far too much to be interesting.

It really didn’t have much to do with abandoning anyone. It didn’t matter what democrats proposed at all. The vast majority of people answers they were dissatisfied with America in exit polls. The economy is doing fine on paper but people don’t feel that way. It was the inability to distance from Biden and provide actual radical solutions to things that got them voted down.

At this point it has nothing to do with working class policies. It has everything to do with voter dissatisfaction and pandering to moderates.

Democrats once again focused on taking the high road after losing one of the most consequential elections in history. I mean I like AOC but calling for people not to be hostile or divisive towards voters who believe in dragging immigrants from their homes, putting them in camps, and then deporting them to their potential deaths is just not it.

You can call for unity all you want to but you won’t ever hear those same words from the mouths of republicans.

The point of what I said isn’t that Project 2025 is actually a joke, it’s that Walsh is making a joke about it being officially implemented (which we have no actual confirmation of) so that he can show the left as irrational when they fall for the obvious bait to report on what he said.

Do they plan to implement a lot of the project? Probably. Is it serious and scary? Yes. But that’s exactly why he knew people would overreact and he could manipulate them. It’s a smart move by Walsh unfortunately because it just makes the left seem paranoid about the project when it is in fact a real danger.

I’ll expound a bit. Of course there are a portion but that portion of better off conservatives is relatively small. And affluence often doesn’t result in wanting more kids.

I think most people would agree that the average wage of a dem voter is significantly higher than that of a conservative voter even when adjusting for COL. A lot of their voters lack degrees and lack the financial situation to have a bunch of kids.

Also keep in mind that this stuff is kind of exponential right. If 10% of women don’t have kids, they’re probably on average not having about 2 kids. So you either need 10% of other women to have 2 kids or 20% of women to have 1 extra child. That’s a big ask for your average American of any political skew. If 10% of women participate, that means 1 in 4 people need to have an extra child. And the larger that portion of participating women becomes, the exponentially greater pressure it puts on other women who want to absorb that impact.

The point isn’t to isolate men and create more incels, the point is for women to stop tolerating behavior that is not worthy of rewarding with intimacy or relationship. Women shouldn’t put up with awful men that don’t care about their rights just because they’re worried that they will become even worse men.

The point isn’t necessarily that women get what they want politically either; it’s a reaction to the majority of men displaying a lack of shared interest in their partners health and wellbeing. Not to mention that most men never have to deal with the results of these elections, now they will.

You don’t need to. I’ve run the numbers elsewhere but if we assume 100% of your dating pool are women and 50%-ish are liberal, even if only half of them participate it’s going to put pressure on men very quickly if they don’t want to be alone.

Now we know those women aren’t spread equally so this movement isn’t going to be consistently effective everywhere. But in places like Texas, it would mean most of the major cities harm Republican men seeking relationships/sex.

And taken one step further, this creates a child shortage if done for long enough. Even just 10% of women deciding not to have kids will have a big effect. People worry about conservatives just having more kids but realistically they work lower end jobs and don’t have money for that. Imagine raising 3-4 kids in this economy, not many will do that.

I mean the trick worked, everyone is here panicking despite Walsh having no weight in these things and no insider information.

The statement was designed to scare you so he can make fun of you, that was about it and it worked perfectly.

Not sure how you got that message at all. These aren’t powerful people. Bannon is washed up and Matt Walsh is just a commentator that says stupid things to annoy people constantly. They’re both mostly irrelevant and don’t deserve the alarm everyone here is sounding. It serves no purpose other than to drive hysteria for people already worried about the project, to anyone not yet worried they’re less likely to be worried and see you as unreasonable. So just ignore it.

This is such an overreaction honestly and I think it’s just giving a false start to the alarmism about Project 2025 which is exactly what these dumb extremists want. Allow me to explain.

Matt Walsh actually said this as a joke. Bannon is probably only half joking. Both had the intention of making articles like this happen so that when the backlash reaches conservative ears they can swat it away and say hey, it’s an obvious joke. Because it was.

The point is the same as what they’ve done with other phrases. They’ll point out the unjustified alarmism and use it to take the power out of the Project 2025 criticism. This is the problem with sensationalist media, they’ll raise alarms about everything well before people should listen. Then people ignore them.

Well that’s because California is pro-prison and also because the simple arguments for prison labor are well known and arguments against it aren’t.

Most people don’t think about it beyond “they committed a crime and it costs money to keep them in there, therefore they should be helping to pay for that”. That’s about as deep as it goes.

And that’s exactly what makes it not the “real you”. Read my edit but someone without inhibitions isn’t telling you who they are, they’re telling you who they choose not to be using inhibitions.

People that say this either don’t understand alcohol or haven’t been around it much.

Edit: I cannot believe that people need clarification of this is 2024. Alcohol modifies someone’s personality through its effects. If you’ve ever heard of a happy or angry drunk, that’s why. It can cause mood swings in people, increased aggression, and at the same time makes them act irrationally. That isn’t the “real person” underneath. The part of you that alcohol takes away is part of you.

And when you take away the ability to reason and make good decisions, you say all sorts of stupid things you don’t mean. That isn’t the real you. A drunk person will mostly just be telling you their impulsive subconscious thoughts that they aren’t in control of at all. That’s not a real person at that point.

Didn’t that happen as he was resigning from the race already?