| HN Mirror

It's the voters fault.

They want to hurt people. They elect Republicans to hurt people and openly cry that the republicans do not hurt the "right" people, and then vote for them again. They cheer on siccing the damn National Guard on random blue cities, which they have never even seen and have no knowledge of because they hate liberals. They cheer for sending brown skinned people to torture prisons and putting razor wire in the rivers they use to cross because the cruelty is intentional. They've wanted to turn the southern border into the berlin wall at least since Bush Jr, and emphatically want the guards to be just as hostile as the soviet ones.

The day after the Penn State massacre by the National Guard, more than half of the polled people blamed the students for getting shot. They were upset that students were protesting the Vietnam war.

They just want "uppity" people put down, because non-conformance is somehow the biggest problem I guess? The want this imagined social and societal conformance that only existed in their head. Though a large fraction of them explicitly want a theocracy and to take away your rights to not be christian or to be taught things that are against a fundamentalist christian perspective, which is funny, because the "christian" religions pushing for this are insanely unchristian.

The entire reason the US has laws on the book for "Religious exemptions for required vaccines" that are currently being weaponized to for some reason bring back nearly eradicated diseases is entirely because of the Church of Jesus Christ; Scientist, which claims to be christian even though it's a cult that spawned from like 20 literal Simps competing for the attention of an insane lady who plagiarized her fake religion from a crackpot "doctor" right here in Portland Maine, and outright lied about a miraculous disease recovery that never happened. This same group also successfully prevented states from punishing parents who let their children die from completely preventable illness for "religious reasons".

This is not "Freedom of religion". Those dead kids are not free from religion. In fact, the US and state governments went out of its way to carve out rules to allow parents to impart THEIR religion on their kids.

A lower bound of 10% of Americans openly state that they believe Continental Drift has not happened and that god created humans and the earth as it is now within the past 10k years. 30 million americans openly state that they believe easily verifiable science is not just wrong, but outright a conspiracy against them done by science in league with satan. That is not an exaggeration. There's an entire parallel set of media industries around teaching your kids that science is fake and that scientists think you are stupid, have no evidence, and are literally helping satan trick you into hating god. They consistently make movies, shows, books, etc where they are the poor little victims of an authoritarian state who literally busts down their doors for believing in god. They insist that Starbucks not saying "merry christmas" is an attack on their religious freedom. They WRONGLY assert that the US was founded as a "christian" nation, including multiple currently sitting members of state and federal legislatures. This can only be a lie, as the founders were not shy about being not conventionally christian.

Since the Civil Rights Act, Americans have reliably elected more and more Republicans. It took BS marketing slogans ("It's the economy stupid") to elect Clinton and the worst economic event in many decades to get them to vote for Obama, and a pandemic to vote in Biden. Otherwise they reliably elect Republicans and let them cause problems.

I cannot fathom how people still "blame democrats". They cannot do anything when people do not vote for them, that's how democracy works and this goes triple for the US democracy that does not give minority parties any power. There is nothing a democrat president can do with a hostile congress and court, and that's as designed

You can say "Well the democrats need to be more electable" or something, but you cannot court the racists and religious fundamentalists without objectively abandoning important things like "Freedom" and "Justice" and "children should be educated in a way that may not be compatible with religious fundamentalism and unquestioning parental authority if the parent is wrong about something".

When democrats in the 90s backed liberalism, it's because that's what americans voted for as seen by Reagan's landslide. When they backed the stupid Crime bill, they did it because that's what americans were screaming for. Now, even though those were objectively what Americans wanted, Democrats are held at fault for both. Even though when they tried to not embrace liberalism, they lost nearly all power, and it nearly destroyed the democrat party.

When Democrats suggest incentives to build new power infrastructure, that's socialism and anti-american and they are killing the economy and destroying our country. When Donald Trump cuts us off from global markets and talks about invading our allies and massively increases the cost of building things in the US and literally takes a national stock in a private company, that's somehow fine and nobody ever says the S word.

There is an insane double standard, where Democrats are absolutely panned for not having Authoritarian power to fix everything and be perfect even after they do not get voted in, but republicans get to seriously undermine our country and people and still somehow get elected. It's infuriating. It is deeply dishonest.

There are plenty of polls that demonstrate that there is a huge effect from having "(D)" next to your name. Voters will say "I agree with this" in a poll, and then also say "I refuse to support a (D) doing this" in a similar poll. They then vote for a republican who objectively will not do that thing, because their public platform loudly declares they support the opposite. Most republicans want a legalization of weed, but keep voting for republicans who openly declare their intent to continue to criminalize weed. There are several states that have public referendums that pass popular measures which are then outright contravened or illegally suppressed by Republican governments, and those same voters reelect those same politicians

Republicans openly state that they will prevent democrats from doing things, and it is still blamed on democrats