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90 seconds of stone cold truth from Killer Mike. The editor mashed this up well. Powerful stuff.
Killer Mike on one clear difference between Bernie and Hillary, Bernie Sanders shows a clear difference between how Bernie Sanders has engaged protestors versus Hilary Clinton.
Watch: John Oliver compares certain abortion laws to a computer folder labeled “definitely not porn.”
I reblogged this video yesterday but everyone needs to see it
Why do I live here
Texas and what the rest of the republicans are trying to do.
One of my biggest fears about this election is that all the millennials are gonna come out and vote for Bernie Sanders and forget to vote for anybody else. Every seat in the House of Representatives is up for reelection and a bunch of Senate seats are up as well. Most states do their governor and state legislature during mid-terms (which means we’re all gonna need to go out again in 2018), but a few are open in this cycle and people living in those states need to know about that too.
There are two things about American politics that nobody seems to know and everyone should: republicans only win when people don’t vote and local politics affect you at least as much as national level shit. Vote for your favorite Presidential candidate, but also vote for like, city council and state representative and stuff. It’s all important and if we as a generation want to make real change we need to flex our voting power at every level of government and show our country that we are a political force to be reckoned with. I want to see us out, in force, in every election until we’re all goddamned dead. Because that’s how shit gets done in a democracy.
If you want some sort of help figuring it out, isidewith.com is a good start. I make a cheat sheet when i go because following this shit is hard and getting in front of the machine still occasionally wigs me out.
Thirty years ago, reeling from the Reagan Revolution, elite Democrats rebranded their party, which had long championed both economic and cultural liberalism. They kept cultural liberalism, but ditched economic liberalism for “neoliberalism”; a blend of economic deregulation, free trade, smaller government and targeted tax cuts. Few said it out loud, but it was the end of the Roosevelt coalition, which had been built on economic issues of universal appeal and which had lasted 50 years.
Neoliberalism appeals to the rich. Neoliberal Bill Clinton was the first Democratic presidential nominee to outspend a Republican. In 2008 Obama outspent John McCain 2-to-1, breaking a record set in 1972 by Richard Nixon. But neoliberalism is killing the middle class. It’s why both parties rely on cultural issues to hold their bases. If you back abortion rights, same sex marriage and gun safety you’re a Democrat. If not, you’re a Republican. On economic issues it’s more complex. If you hate big banks and political corruption, you could be for Sanders or Trump. It’s why Sanders talks so much about these things; they’re what the election’s all about.
When Clinton isn’t calling Sanders a traitor, she says she shares his goals. But she doesn’t. Clinton was part of the neoliberal revolt that destroyed the Roosevelt coalition and she is as we’ve seen, a woman of markedly fixed views. She may be Obama’s heir, but Sanders is FDR’s. She campaigns as she does out of habit, and to hide the very real choice. The neoliberal experiment is over. Democrats, proud heirs to Franklin Roosevelt, are ready to come home.
It’s funny how Hillary Clinton will nae nae on stage, reference Beyoncé, try to court Latinos by saying she’s an Abuela, reference Star Wars, and literally change her accent depending on her audience, doing anything to appeal to everyone yet an old, unfashionable, unkempt, Jewish, socialist is winning with millennials by a 2-1 (and growing) margin just by being true to himself. Hmmm
The problem with Hillary and the people running her campaign is that they are running on the same mindset as everyone of that generation: they truly believe that millennials and younger voters “only care about memes” and are uninterested in politics or making the world better. What they don’t understand is that this younger generation isn’t uninterested in politics or the political process, but that they see American politics for what they are: a game of broken promises, where you can barely differentiate between liberals and conservatives as this point. The Democrats and Republicans running for office are all more invested in the interests of the rich and powerful than they are of the people. This generation isn’t untierested in politics, it’s just tired of playing a game that is clearly rigged. The reason Bernie is wrecking every other Democratic candidate with young voters is because he’s actually speaking about issues that this generation cares about, mirroring their fears and anger, and providing plans for possible solutions to problems like income inequality, the rising cost of higher education, the racism embedded in our social systems, the rising cost of living with no rise in wages anywhere on sight, etc.
You can whip and nae nae all you fucking want and wish the Force to be with me, but what I really wanna know is why students are leaving universities with $30K+ of debt to a shit job market to be underpaid for their skills, or why our police departments are being given access to military grade weaponry, or why black people can’t drive without being harassed by police officers, up to a point where they will sometimes end up dead. Hillary can eat me.
kill em
it’s also important to note that the general line of thinking when it comes to young voters is that they’re unimportant. i’m not just being flippant: “young people don’t vote” is bandied about as a sad-but-true fact within both parties, and thus any attention paid to the issues of young voters is lip service at best from the majority of all candidates, in any serious race. the fact that sanders doesn’t do that is shocking to everyone, including young people, and it is also why people dismiss his lead as (to paraphrase the washington post from an article i cannot seem to find) ‘a false balloon of support resting on young voters who won’t turn up at the polls’.
simultaneously, media outlets caution us on the trump phenomenon. while at a surface level both sanders and trump are similar candidates (anti-establishment, fringe candidates with their main base largely consisting of first-time or non-reliable voters) the biggest difference (beyond rhetoric, obviously) is that trump’s main supporters are middle-aged and older, even if they are not traditional voters. thus, they are to be taken more seriously, in accordance with traditional lines of thinking and past data. but what really happened in iowa was the opposite: it was TRUMPS supporters who didn’t turn up, and not bernie’s. (this doesn’t mean trump isn’t a serious threat, it simply means iowa predictions weren’t as cut and dry as some may have logically believed).
in clinton’s defense, she HAS realised that sanders is a power in this race, but she doesn’t know how to attract young voters, namely because no establishment democrat has ever really tried before.
on a related issue, the importance of anger and dissatisfaction in this race overall has been fascinating and reveals much more about the media coverage thus far than it does about voters themselves.
dozens of articles come out every week discussing the loyalty of trump’s supporters, the troubles within the republican establishment, and the underlying anger of republicans or independents who are most likely to vote for trump. ”trump taps into a real and genuine anger within this country that other republicans don’t know how to court” is an oft-agreed upon statement. boiled down, it pretty much just means there are a lot of furious bigots in this country, and that they are a vocal and loyal minority (though the size of which is constantly argued).
on the flip side, i have seen very few articles (at least by the more right-of-center, and even in some of the self-proclaimed left-of-center news outlets) about the anger and dissatisfaction that drives sander’s campaign. interestingly, it is usually simply sander’s “frenzied, impassioned” speech style that is discussed, and not why that in particular appeals to his likely voters. this brings us back to the young people conversation: even when in disagreement with those core values (i have yet to read an article that doesn’t have various levels of ill-disguised dislike for trump), the media has a tendency to focus on and legitimize the anger of older, bigoted individuals than that of the disenfranchised youth. while arguably both core bases have an equal chance of voter turn-out based on past data and polling results (according, again, to those same media outlets), it is the vocal, uninformed hatred of the privileged, and not the righteous fury of the consistently oppressed, that is feared – or at the very least, counted.
