5 ms·

And the optics of Kent State worked so well for the administration. Kind of like shooting reporters with rubber bullets.

• brewdad 1y ago
  About 35% of the country supported what the National Guard did at Kent State. Deplorable is being far too kind to these people.
  • JKCalhoun 1y ago
    Not sure it would be a good idea to shoot US citizens for the 35% approval. (But to your point, anything >0% is pretty horrible.)
    • lotsofpulp 1y ago
      That is enough to win elections.
      • sanderjd 1y ago
        ... no it isn't. If you have 35% support but everyone else is opposed, that's not enough to win elections.
        • lotsofpulp 1y ago
          But everyone else isn't opposed. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/2024-presidential-election-voting-registration-tables.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/2024-pre... >In the 2024 presidential election, 73.6% (or 174 million people) of the citizen voting-age population was registered to vote and 65.3% (or 154 million people) voted according to new voting and registration tables released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. Moreover, due to the electoral college and Senate and gerrymandering of House districts, the majority is hardly needed for attain power. I bet that even in other societies, throughout time, roughly a third of the population will not react to what one of the other thirds is doing (even if they claim they don't approve in polls).
          • sanderjd 1y ago
            I agree. This was my point. The 35% number is the strong support. But that is not enough. If they lose all their weak support, they lose.
            • deleted 1y ago
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        • anigbrowl 1y ago
          It demonstrably is, because of gerrymandering, electoral college, turnout manipulation etc.
          • hparadiz 1y ago
            You only need PA, WI, and MI
            • sanderjd 1y ago
              If you only have 35% of the popular vote, you aren't going to win in the electoral college.
              • johnnyanmac 1y ago
                That's what happned in 2024, right? you're not accounting for the fact that 30-40% of the country does not vote in nationals.
                • sanderjd 1y ago
                  No, it's not what happened... The election was not won with 35% of the popular vote... Again, if you insist on talking about "35% of people in the US" rather than "35% of voters", then fine, but I think it's a weird way to talk about it. We don't know what the people who didn't vote thought about the candidates. Voting is the way that we find that out!
                  • johnnyanmac 1y ago
                    >if you insist on talking about "35% of people in the US" rather than "35% of voters", then fine, but I think it's a weird way to talk about it. When were talking about adhering to a dangerous status quo, the conversation makes sense. A status quo of boring beauracracy can be defendable. A status quo of fascism, much less so. Thars why conversations in 2025 are like this. Even then:remember Trump still had a 40% approval rating after all this.
          • 1y ago
        • distortionfield 1y ago
          Most numbers I can find say that about 65% of Americans are registered to vote. Let’s say 100% of them voted in 2024. Of that, let’s call it a flat 51% voted for Trump. That means that about half of 65%, or roughly 32.5% of American citizens support Trump, and by extension, likely this policy move. So yes, it actually is more than you need to win elections.
          • sanderjd 1y ago
            Oh hmm, if the 35% number is all Americans, then sure. But typically people are talking about percentages of voters with statistics like this.
      • netsharc 1y ago
        Didn't Trump say we won't have to worry about elections anymore? What's stopping them to do enough fuckery between now and 2028 to "win" the GOP the election in 2028 (or even 2026), and to stop Trump from joining the ranks of despots that keep getting reelected like Putin and Erdogan? Or JD Vance can be his Medvedev. To use a horrible analogy, a lot of times women don't even admit to themselves that they've been raped, because accepting that means accepting a horrific label. The USA is in the middle of getting raped, and so far the response has been to mostly freeze up and take it, not wanting to fight, because that is scary and can get you hurt even more. (Well, at least for the majority of the country there isn't a real fightback yet...).
        • msgodel 1y ago
          If you're concerned about that you have a moral responsibility to campaign for secession.
          • johnnyanmac 1y ago
            I'm giving it until 2028. I'm not even fully convinced Trump makes it that far. But if that comes to fruition, then yes. I would support California joining Canada.
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        • distortionfield 1y ago
          Trump has already joined those ranks, he just failed at it. January 6th was a legitimate attempt at overturning the election results. He was impeached over it. Mike Pence was the only thing that stopped it, and I can’t believe how close we actually came to that timeline. And you’re absolutely right about the denial. It manifests as the “nothing ever happens” meme.
    • int_19h 1y ago
      It depends on whether you plan to have elections afterwards or not. If not, 35% approval is perfectly fine if that includes most of the police and the military.
• anigbrowl 1y ago
  That was a very different time, as you must be aware. We did not have anything like the same polarization or the accelerating effect of the internet coupled with all-out information warfare across a 24-7 news cycle. I could go on for 1000 words about how different society is from 60 years ago.
• i80and 1y ago
  The majority of non-city dwellers I know are now so propagandized against cities that I think they would be neutral to outright supportive of a kill order. This is a dire situation and I'm not sure how this country crawls back out of this authoritarian slide, but we've got to somehow.
  • deleted 1y ago
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• Redoubts 1y ago
  Nixon won 49/50 states in the next election, FWIW
• mrguyorama 1y ago
  The day after Kent State, a Gallup poll found 58% of polled Americans blamed the students for being shot. 31% had no opinion, and 11% blamed the National Guard. After the National Guard shot a few kids for literally no reason (nobody had ever been given orders to fire), they told the student standing around "Disperse or we will shoot again" This has never been a problem for the party of Roger Stone who literally has a large back tattoo of Nixon and is one of the primary reasons we had Bush Jr as president even though Al Gore won the votes when the count was allowed to finish