Ohio has Issue 1 regarding gerrymandering…
…which the Ohio Supreme Court already told them to unfuck and the GOP was like, “nah, fam”…
…and which LaRose obfuscated (just like he did with the abortion amendment) via confusing language and outright lies (under the guide of free speech, apparently) to trick people into voting No
So, a No vote keeps the same crap we have now where a majority of the state has no voice. A Yes vote gives everyone a more equal say
I have seen so many signs in rural Ohio where people have taken sharpie to their Trump Pence signs to alter the letters to Trump VAnce
They are ingenuitive I guess but also like who holds on to political yard signs until the next term…
is my current spam inbox on my texts messages. I engage sometimes a la the top text, but also my name isn’t Renay and I’ve had this phone number for many many years
My sister in law is a Republican, but doesn’t like Trump, but also buys in to a lot of what he says (her entire personality is “pro-life”)
Yesterday, she’s talking to my wife, who is one of those people that keeps her conversations on speaker when she’s in the house:
SIL: did you guys ever vote early
W: yep, last several elections
SIL: I think I’m going to test them and vote on my mail-in, early, and in person on Tuesday
Me: you will go to jail for that…
They just gobble up whatever they hear in their echo chamber. Nevermind all the Republicans who have gone to jail for voter fraud
Also SIL: well the people who died two years ago that vote won’t go to jail
W: yes but the people that voted in their place did…
I’m just so exhausted trying to understand remotely where they come from
It doesn’t help that LaRose just writes whatever he wants to on the ballot issues (ie summarizing the abortion amendment down to more words than the original amendment, obfuscating this whole gerrymandering thing to make it seem as though a Yes vote will force gerrymandering into our already-gerrymandered state)
I’m surprised he didn’t just say “vote No and we will give you a free puppy and migrants will do your laundry for a year”
Omg can you imagine if Rogan fiees up a dutchie and Trump, feeling like he can’t be outdone since he’s the “alpha male,” gets way too fucked up and let’s all his bullshit out like “yeah I’m only doing this for the pussy, Joe. I love pussy bigly you know I used to grab it accordion hands”
I may also be fucked up on the dutchie
Some fast food places near me have started using automated ordering at the window ie a chatbot
Also order-yourself screens in the inside ordering zones
Which I guess is cool or whatever but some of us don’t mind human interaction and are fine paying .50 extra for a taco if that keeps someone employed until we can figure out how to move to a more automated world without fucking over those at the bottom
My job is doing outside sales in Ohio and my customer base is very much blue collar manufacturing. There is an obvious overlap in manufacturing and Trump supporters. A lot of places I visit have Trump memorabilia posted around - signs, stickers, flags, whatever.
The other day I was in a spot southeast of Columbus, near the Ohio River. I pull in to this smaller machine shop and see Trump signs in the windows and Trump stickers on the only car outside.
Go in and start chatting with the owner. Within 5 minutes he had already hit me with 3 hard Rs, going on a rant about the “criminals in office” and “if everything goes the way it’s supposed to November 5th” and “if it doesn’t there’s gonna be some problems on November 6th”. Had a Biden-Harris Target List hanging (idk if it was a list of people he wanted to kill or if it was one of those “people judge me for my shitty actions and I feel attacked” things).
He was carrying a Glock (not uncommon in a lot of these places that people open carry) and I’m not unfamiliar with firearms (I grew up in Kentucky and was in the Marine Corps), so in order to turn the conversation back to business and away from the racist pro-Trump conversation, I mentioned that the company I work for makes gun barrels for a couple high-profile gun manufacturers. Conversation went that way for a minute (he says it’s “bullshit that they try to take guns away from people like you and me (I’m a white dude so I guess we are the only ones supposed to have guns) when everybody knows the hard Rs and illegals are the ones committing all the crime”), then he says, “yeah, if you were a hard R, you’d be seeing this pistol up close”
Idk what my point is other than this guy is the type of dude that’s gonna vote for Trump and if that’s the people Trump supporters want to side with idk y’all need to look at yourself in a mirror or something.
Your guy isn’t in the inner circle of the highest ranking members of a party. Atwater was, and refer to the quote above. Rather than being overt, they couch the racism in other terms, but it’s the same terms.
Since the 1960s and the ERA and Nixon, racism and fear-of-the-Other has been intrinsic to the Republican party.
Like… Per their own words. In the quote I referenced. From someone in the inner circle of the Republican party, and who helped them get elected. How? By preying on the fear-of-the-Other ie racism
The current GOP is still entrenched in their Southern Strategy. To quote Lee Atwater:
Y’all don’t quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, “removed, removed, removed.” By 1968 you can’t say “removed”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “removed, removed.”
This plus fundamentalist Christianity is the basis of the modern GOP playbook, only now it’s Latinos that are the target, at least moreso than blacks
Sure we can’t distill it down to just racism since the GOP has become so entrenched with the religious right, so let’s just call it Christofascist Racism, but let’s not ignore 60 years of Republican racism and bullshit
Edit: Lemmy blocks the n-word even when it’s a direct quote, but Atwater was using that derogatory term for blacks in the above quote
-Carlin