4 ms·

> Is this what folks voted for? To pressure for the release of a man who openly brags about pushing women into sex work and profiting from their labor? Yes!!

by tmp202502 2y ago

> Is this what folks voted for? To pressure for the release of a man who openly brags about pushing women into sex work and profiting from their labor? Yes!! Now, to qualify, I don't mean all Trump voters voted for this, or would align themselves with other individual things, say, stopping the development of an oral covid vaccine, or pardoning violent criminals and international dark web drug kingpins, or giving a billionaire essentially unfettered control over the federal government (and then pretending someone else is in charge when called on it). I don't even mean that the reasons people vote for people are individual (though of course they are). What I mean is, the promises the Trump campaign made were highly segmented and targeted, in ways that are not obvious from a national or international media perspective because that media perspective was dominated by what Trump says. (And since Trump voters don't listen to the words, they listen for the tone -- the shared anger and the feeling of being heard -- they will often "listen past" anything Trump says that directly contradicts the campaign outreach) For example, Latinx voters were sold a very different, more nuanced picture of immigration reform through outreach than the national picture. Muslims in Dearborn will have seen voter suppression efforts if not outright claims that Trump would get a better deal in Israel. Clearly libertarians believed, with some justification, that they'd get RFK Jr (a priapic lunatic) in charge of healthcare and they'd get Ross Ulbricht (a man who is credibly accused of having purchased a murder) pardoned. I strongly suspect that if you dig through the outreach they made to the young-manosphere on social media, on Tiktok etc., you will see ways they presented themselves as sympathetic to the Tates' plight that will make this look like acting on a hinted, if not explicitly stated, promise. Someone will have said "we're going to strongly look into that". Now, I am not going to pretend I think Trump is good for anyone. He's not. And I am not an American. But I think the Democrats need to understand something important: they spent all that time laughing at the hamfistedness of Elon Musk's wasteful ground game, which probably was useless and counterproductive, and they ignored how effective, organised, and segmented weird little Charlie Kirk's ground game was. It's clearly one of the greatest successes in campaigning history: they sold a crooked, bullying, manipulated, intellectually ignorant felon to an electorate and won. Do I think first-time-voting and angry/lonely/divorced twenty-and-thirtysomething men were targeted by a campaign that spoke to them in Andrew Tate's language and suggested he was being unfairly treated? Fuck yes. (Posting throwaway because I no longer have an account)

ty6853 2y ago
>Do I think first-time-voting and angry divorced twenty-and-thirtysomething men were targeted by a campaign that spoke to them in Andrew Tate's language and suggested he was being unfairly treated? Fuck yes. Perhaps then other politicians should think about what they will offer that demographic other than "you're the scapegoat." Trump at least threw a couple scraps of pardons, even if he is a lying evil bastard or whatever the long form of that is. You've got to do something to get votes.
- tmp202502 2y ago
  You do. (Though exactly what is aligned to Democratic Party values that can be "thrown" to that demographic is a challenge). And I agree, they did not. They ran a late, modified, campaign that deep-down assumed enough people were "post-Trump" that it was inevitable. Trump ran a campaign knowing what Trump knows personally: people can be manipulated with needful things.
- mcphage 2y ago
  > You've got to do something to get votes. I guess they thought "not having a candidate who would destroy the country" was enough of a thing to get votes. But it wasn't, so here we are with a president who's destroying the country.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  The fact of the matter is, if you are an angry young man, you don't WANT to hear anything other than "<They> are the problem, not you". So unless you want the democrats to adopt Tate's "Women are whores" rhetoric, what the heck are you supposed to offer the angry young men? They literally are the problem. Women don't like them because, surprise surprise, angry young men don't have much to offer. These angry young men are lonely because they refuse to see themselves as the problem. They make a pass at one or two girls and get mildly rejected and utterly reject modern reality, instead of doing what their grandparents did which was usually try again, or try someone else, or just otherwise persist in attempting to be valuable to women in general. There are plenty of women who actually want the tradwife lifestyle, where they stay at home and raise a family like it's 1940. But even those women don't want to be abused, or manipulated, or treated like a lesser person because they don't bring home a paycheck, or get refused basic medical rights because some old white guys can't read the bible and just listen to whatever their asshole pastor with no formal training says on Sunday. People keep saying the democrats should offer these people something they want, but what they want (as evidenced from voting for trump) is fundamentally incompatible with democracy and individual freedoms of women. They usually want a world in which they are valuable just by virtue of being men, which they believe the past held, but they completely ignore the blunt reality that in the past, men like them just died alone and sad. There is less sex and drugs and rock and roll nowadays because people socialize less in general, thanks to social media scratching the same itch and preventing people from being forced to go out and touch grass and meet strangers to fulfill that basic biological need. Instead, these lonely men blame the liberalization of women, and some imaginary "feminist" movement that wants to harm men, actively. Zero sum thinking. Democrats cannot offer them what they want, because what they want is lies.

ty6853 2y ago

>Do I think first-time-voting and angry divorced twenty-and-thirtysomething men were targeted by a campaign that spoke to them in Andrew Tate's language and suggested he was being unfairly treated? Fuck yes. Perhaps then other politicians should think about what they will offer that demographic other than "you're the scapegoat." Trump at least threw a couple scraps of pardons, even if he is a lying evil bastard or whatever the long form of that is. You've got to do something to get votes.

tmp202502 2y ago
You do. (Though exactly what is aligned to Democratic Party values that can be "thrown" to that demographic is a challenge). And I agree, they did not. They ran a late, modified, campaign that deep-down assumed enough people were "post-Trump" that it was inevitable. Trump ran a campaign knowing what Trump knows personally: people can be manipulated with needful things.
mcphage 2y ago
> You've got to do something to get votes. I guess they thought "not having a candidate who would destroy the country" was enough of a thing to get votes. But it wasn't, so here we are with a president who's destroying the country.
mrguyorama 2y ago
The fact of the matter is, if you are an angry young man, you don't WANT to hear anything other than "<They> are the problem, not you". So unless you want the democrats to adopt Tate's "Women are whores" rhetoric, what the heck are you supposed to offer the angry young men? They literally are the problem. Women don't like them because, surprise surprise, angry young men don't have much to offer. These angry young men are lonely because they refuse to see themselves as the problem. They make a pass at one or two girls and get mildly rejected and utterly reject modern reality, instead of doing what their grandparents did which was usually try again, or try someone else, or just otherwise persist in attempting to be valuable to women in general. There are plenty of women who actually want the tradwife lifestyle, where they stay at home and raise a family like it's 1940. But even those women don't want to be abused, or manipulated, or treated like a lesser person because they don't bring home a paycheck, or get refused basic medical rights because some old white guys can't read the bible and just listen to whatever their asshole pastor with no formal training says on Sunday. People keep saying the democrats should offer these people something they want, but what they want (as evidenced from voting for trump) is fundamentally incompatible with democracy and individual freedoms of women. They usually want a world in which they are valuable just by virtue of being men, which they believe the past held, but they completely ignore the blunt reality that in the past, men like them just died alone and sad. There is less sex and drugs and rock and roll nowadays because people socialize less in general, thanks to social media scratching the same itch and preventing people from being forced to go out and touch grass and meet strangers to fulfill that basic biological need. Instead, these lonely men blame the liberalization of women, and some imaginary "feminist" movement that wants to harm men, actively. Zero sum thinking. Democrats cannot offer them what they want, because what they want is lies.