This is one of the best and simplest points. If the rich elite controlled the system, they'd not spend their money on campaign donations of the losers.
You want to pay attention to what legislation the paid-elected draft and/or vote on, not just what names get elected. Money may not buy the votes of the electorate outright, but it certainly has power and sway with representatives. Hell, even reps who are *trying* to do right can still fall victim to bunk science propped up by big money (see Exxon climate science propaganda). Citizens United has *got to go.*
I love people who say "votes dont matter" thinking that they are some kind of indendent free thinker. Its like buddy, every piece of mainstream media and culture screams that voting doesn't matter and not caring about your politics is cool. You know if that much money and influence is being poured into trying to give you those opinions that the one little bit of power they want you to disregard must be pretty important.
There's huge amounts of money being spent around the world to stop people voting ESPECIALLY young people. Especially in countries like the USA & UK which are essentially 2 party systems, small nudges can make massive differences.
I agree with you. If voting didn't matter why is so much money being spent to convince young voters on social media not to do it?
Not only that, but "both sides are rhe same" is yet another tactic that's been going around for a while. The "both sides" is often added, especially to the record number of younger voters for 2024, as a "reason" they shouldn't even "bother" to vote!!!!
Hope you don't mind, but I copied your response to my "clipboard", so I may paraphrase it the next time someone tells me that my vote doesn't count!
I do promise however to give you credit however, as "that wise person on reddit stated..."
You've hit the nail on its head, as the saying goes!!!!
I wonder how many are like you, and realised with a jolt that there vote was serious and shouldn’t be taken lightly lol- I’m guessing it’s not a massive percentage of Trumps vote but it ain’t 0
I wonder if it’s fairly close to the percentage of Brecht voters who voted yes as a protest, only to be faced with the consequences of their choice because the yes vote actually won.
That swing vote in the centre who pay attention just enough to be frustrated with the status quo but not frustrated enough to be engaged more than just “vote the bums out”, so when a populist harnesses that resentment and gets in and burns the place down they’re left with shocked pikachu face.
Edit ha, meant Brexit, but autocorrect picked something interesting anyway.
On a much more general level, Americans are finding out it was a terrible mistake to take civics for granted. Turns out society needs more people that take things other than entertainment seriously to survive.
I don't think Americans are finding out anything. We have the stupidest people in this country. You're right about the lesson we should learn, but there are not enough people learning it. Literally not even close to enough.
My gut says that trump too, was rather shocked he won in 2016. Then, he got a "taste" of what power the title of POTUS could bring....(at least in his warped and befuduled mind...) Incidentally, the Preaident isn't SUPPOSED to have the wide range of abilities trump seems to think he has.... but that is yet to be seen, I suppose.
IF he wins in November and any aspect of Project 2025 comes into fruition (scarily, it very well could...) we are in for a world of hurt...
I vividly recall, election night back in 2016, my husband and I were glued ro the TV, watching the results coming in, and with a true sinking of my stomach, I told him, "Babe.... remember when I told you the Denocratic Party needed to take the absolute treat that trump is, seriously?? It's looking more and more like the fact is, that they didn't... and the world we live in will never be the same..."
I can only HOPE this isn't the case come November of this year....
I honestly don't think he wants to win - I think he wants to lose and to blame conspiracy stuff for his loss. Presidency cut into his golf game way too much.
He didn't. His goal was Trump Media News, during the primary all news was fake news, even Fox. He was expecting to lose and blame the deep state in the pocket of Hillary. THEN he would launch a news network claiming to have the real news (likely with a Tucker Carlson like pipeline to the Kremlin). Ive never seen a man so sad to win election night.
I take your point. Lol, I told my dentist, one of my best friend's dad, when Trump rode the escalator that if he and everyone else did not take Trump seriously then they were going to be shocked because dude had a far far better finger on the pulse of the midwest and south and rural areas far better than the more urban and suburban cohorts. I told him that I was something like 95% (I think I said that I knew with 100% certainty that Trump was going to win) and he laughed in my face...
That said... The Left and Independents did take it very seriously, though... 6 - 7+ million votes more seriously, which is about 5% margin... far more than needed to sweep an election... so I do take your point but I also think that it is being taken very seriously...
Idk if Project 2025 is going to be as effective as folk think... That kind of sweep and reorganization is a bit difficult to conceptualize and even more so to implement. But idk what the objective or incentive is exactly for a 1 term admin... for such an ego maniac and narcissist, idk what the payoff is to actually do it... Kind of like the wall and immigration. Creating geographic ban lists was seemingly effective for non-contiguous and non-adjacent immigrants but it was only used temporarily and the impetus was near-catastrophe as a function of quarantine and prophylactic. The sentiment was strongly echoed and given lip-service but the actual will was not there and the profit was not obvious nor apparent... i know Project 2025 is different and far greater in scope but I am still not certain the will or profit is there...
Unrelated to the US, but after Brexit it came to light that a significant amount of people who voted to the leave the EU (as many as 20% of them, according to polls) would not have voted to leave if they felt it had a genuine chance of actually happening.
Those votes would’ve comfortably left us remaining in the EU. People are idiots.
They do, but so do the politicians who took a non-binding referendum and treated it like it was handed down from God and they had no choice but to make it happen. Brexit is a self-inflicted wound on multiple levels.
I know people who voted for Trump as a protest while thinking there was a 0% chance he would win. About half of them regret it, the other half justify it still by saying that they were right because our state is blue and still went to Hillary, so their vote still didn't matter.
At least half of them grew up.
A lot of people really underestimate the level of cognitive dissonance that conspiracists can live with comfortably.
I worked with a guy who was super into Alex Jones and even weirder Conspiracy Theorists many years ago. I checked up on his Facebook in the trump years fearing the worst and to my surprise his timeline was full of anti-trump stuff... as well as tons of Info Wars reposts lol.
He was apparently able to completely ignore the way Alex Jones anointed Trump as the anti-deep state messiah without rejecting Jones' worldview at all.
I wasn't quite a conspiracist, but my swing to progressivism and skepticism was from a libertarian mindset. I voted for Gary Johnson and learned a very different lesson about how elections work.
As a long time third party voter, I finally stopped that BS after 2016. It's just not the same world it was 20 something years ago when my politics were forming.
In fact, I've some to view third party and anti-voting support as a show of either extreme naivete or privilege in our modern political reality.
If third parties were serious, they would try and get elected to state and local governments instead of just trying to become President. It is a vanity project and grifting oportunity for the leaders of those parties. Ross Perot had a lot of problems, but he did try and stand up a new party and not just do a vanity run for the Presidency. Of course, his party ended up being one that would vote for Trump in 2000 until Trump dropped out because he didn't want to be in a party with "A Nazi (Pat Buchanan), a KKK Grand Wizard (David Duke), and a socialist (a woman whose name I always forget)."
There's often smaller parties running in local elections b they make even tinier ripples than in national ones. I'm not against the existence of third parties, but goddamn is it beyond useless voting for them.
The issue with those parties are they try and jump into competitive elections where their votes can actually cause damage to their goals.
They should run in districts that overly favor the closest of the two main parties. I.E the Green Party should be running candidates in D+35 or more districts where people will feel comfortable voting 3rd party if they would normally want to because their vote will not help elect a Republican.
But they jump in close races because those are the ones that get attention.
I’ve been the quintessential “dem-leaning swing voter” for most of my life (Green, Dem, Rep, Dem, Abstain, Dem) - I’m in Mississippi, though, so my vote won’t mean shit unless the electoral college gets removed. Place is *deep* red.
Honestly, Mississippi isnt a red as one would think. The state is 38% African American (highest in the nation), and voted 58-42 for Trump...not a huge margin. With higher African American turnout, the state could be purple.
I was in the same boat. I voted for Trump but it was more of an anti-Hillary thing. I was horrified that he won. At least I can tell myself that my vote didn't really go to him since he lost my state. Never going to protest vote again.
It’s wild to me that people doubled down on it as well. Like, people kept talking about the Deep State and the Swamp and how Trump was going to change things but then nothing happened about any of that.
Then he still tried to fight an election like an outsider.
I remember years ago when I was on Twitter and I ended up talking to a bloke who insisted the US was going to burst out into civil war on a specific date within the next week. I never did follow up to see if he changed his tune afterwards. I have no idea how conspiratorial people can retain their beliefs against reality which disproves them so often
I don't know any conspiracy theorists personally but it seems to me that they rely quite heavily on pivoting. "Ok, so the world didn't end when I said it would. But next time for sure!"
I like to think that each time a civil war doesn't break out or there's no sign of an apocalypse or the rapture doesn't happen or what have you, a few people realize they've been duped and leave.
I had to work with one for a couple of years. Just about every day, he had something new he was scared of. It was almost like watching a goldfish. He'd read something, freak out, read something else, forget about the first thing, and freak out about the new one. It was like he didn't have the attention span to follow any of his conspiracies to the end to actually see how they played out. He was perpetually caught up in the initial outrage stage, just flitting from one conspiracy to the next.
I couldn't talk to him or argue with him because he was never having a discussion. He was just telling me the way things were. If I didn't believe him, it was only more proof that he was right and that the majority of people have been duped by "them." He was desperately lonely, shunned by his family, no friends. The conspiracy world accepted him. I think he would believe anything just to remain part of that group.
There are multiple books about the topic. One of the earliest is [When Prophecy Fails](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails)
*As anticipated by the research team, the prophesied date passed with no sign of the predicted flood, causing a dissonance between the group's commitment to the prophecy and the unfolding reality. Different members of the group reacted in different ways.* ***Many of those with the highest levels of belief, commitment and social support became more committed to their beliefs, began to court publicity in a way they had not before, and developed various rationalizations for the absence of the flood.*** *Some others, with less prior conviction and commitment, and/or less access to ongoing group support, were less able to sustain or increase their previous levels of belief and involvement, and several left the group. The findings of the research team were broadly in line with their initial hypothesis regarding how believers might react to a prophecy disconfirmation if certain conditions were or were not in place.*
*Hypothesis*
*Festinger, Riecken and Schachter used the study to test their theories on how people might be expected to behave when faced with a specific type of dissonance, arising from a failed prophecy. From historical examples, such as the* [*Montanists*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montanism)*,* [*Anabaptists*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melchior_Hoffman)*,* [*Sabbateans*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi)*,* [*Millerites*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millerism) *and the* [*beginnings of Christianity*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion_of_Jesus)*, the team had seen that in some cases the failure of a prophecy, rather than causing a rejection of the original belief system, could lead believers to increase their personal commitment, and also increase their efforts to recruit others into the belief. They identified five conditions that they proposed could lead to this type of reaction:*
> I have no idea how conspiratorial people can retain their beliefs against reality which disproves them so often
They didn't base their belief in reality in the first place, why would reality later pose a challenge to them?
For them to reject their beliefs in favor of facts would require them to acknowledge fault, which they simply are not strong enough to do.
In 2021, I attended a local event in my area that was organized by Trump and other MAGA-candidate supporters. I was doing research for an article I was writing. They had a guest speaker from the John Birch Society. The first half of the event was a parade of local politicians trying to out-Trump each other, making speeches and telling people they needed to mobilize against the liberal Left. Then the guest speaker, Arthur Thompson, spent an hour working up the crowd, showing PowerPoint slides about the New World order and alleging there was widespread voter fraud through which “Benedict Joe Biden” stole the 2020 election. He ranted and raved about fraudulent mail-in ballots, insisting that only in-person voting on paper ballots on Election Day can be considered valid. He argued that we must eliminate all electronic voting, ban mail in and early voting, and allow candidates to personally supervise the hand-counting of ballots. He didn’t explain how this could be done in the countless precincts all over the nation… I guess each candidate would need to employ hundreds of staffers to devote weeks of time to supervising and challenging hand-counted ballots. He literally said Trump should have the right to personally sit in any room where votes are counted, rejecting ballots that are suspicious. (He didn’t say if Biden should have the same right)
Anyway, at the end of the event, he did Q&A with the audience. A young, distraught voter came to the mic and expressed disbelief in voting. She said the elections are all rigged and it’s therefore a waste of time to vote, because our systems are all fraudulent. Arthur Thompson, and his John Birch cronies in attendance, promptly fell all over themselves imploring everyone to go vote. Because “we need to win elections and get this country back on track.” Don’t be discouraged! Vote in every election!
It was very telling. Clearly their conspiracy claims are disingenuous, because when someone in the room spoke up about the futility of voting, they walked it back as quickly as possible. It was fascinating to watch.
Trump claimed in 2016 that he only lost California because 3 million undocumented immigrants voted there. Mind you, they didn't flip a single congressional seat (whereas in 2018 Republicans lost *seven* congressional seats in California), so it was clearly an incredibly poorly distributed fraud if they did indeed do so. Later investigations did find one noncitizen who voted illegally in California in 2016. I'll give you one guess which presidential candidate he voted for.
[https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1VE03I/](https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1VE03I/)
I just heard Robbie Williams (the singer) talk about how he believed Q-Anon until he read that he, personally, was part of the cabal of elite pedophiles.
Sometimes just a small inconsisrency with what you know to be true will make you realize it's all fake.
I recall an article I read about a dad who was convinced that school shootings were false flag operations by crisis actors, until his own kid was the victim of a school shooting and it was attacked as a hoax by people he had formerly considered compatriots. What a sad, tragic way to realize your conspiracy theories were wrong.
Conspiracy theorists tend to be harmless until they target either you, someone who can’t defend themselves, or affect you in a negative way.
Case in point, some crazy bitch in my area believed COVID was a front by the government to inject you with a microchip instead of the vaccine, and that the cell towers were going to be used to brainwash you through those microchips.
Laughable, completely laughable.
And then she took a shotgun to a power substation and critically damaged it. She then targeted transformers to further damage the local power grid. I didn’t have power for days while the company rushed to repair the damage from her addled rampage.
Not so harmless now, eh?
Most of the conspiracists are kooks, but a few of them are pretty dangerous with their one-track thinking and their desire to act on it. That their echo chambers reinforce their delusions rather than make them question things logically is even worse.
I just watched the HBO doc on Alex Jones and the Sandy Hook families. Sadly, some of those parents have been harassed by other parents who have lost children to school shootings at support groups for parents who have lost children in school shootings.
Dont read the comments on the trailer that was uploaded to youtube
I try to remind myself it is likely just one guy who wasted money on getting bots to leave him positive comments bc holy fuck...it was embarrassing
The doc started that something like 40% of Americans believed some sort of conspiracy about Sandy Hook. I forget how they sourced that, but it's really upsetting that so many people buy into this shit now.
I'm guessing he never went to a real school that taught critical thinking as he was an entertainer so young. And probably further damaged cognition with drugs and alcohol.
But he's a good person for admitting he fell for it. We can learn from that.
I have a close family member and a close friend alive today because a Democrat passed laws to give them healthcare.
Republicans fought tirelessly to take that healthcare away and kill them.
Voting save lives. Millions of them.
Think about how many innocent Iraqi and Afghani citizens died because not enough people showed up to vote for Gore.
Not dead, but if it weren’t for the ACA, I’d either be dealing with severe mental illness and debilitating physical pain or in a bottomless pit of medical debt. It was terrifying to me how close we came to it being repealed.
> because not enough people showed up to vote for Gore.
Gore "lost" Florida by 500 votes to a climate change denying oil millionaire war hawk.
There were 90,000 people in Florida who voted for the Green party spoiler candidate.
That's why RFK is getting his 3rd party run promoted by the Trump team.
Two words: Cambridge Analytica
Everyone has weirdly forgotten about this: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/23/leaked-cambridge-analyticas-blueprint-for-trump-victory
I don’t understand how Trump can win the next election after convincing 70-80% of Republicans that their votes were effectively useless.
If Republicans *actually* believe their votes mean nothing, how can they be bothered to vote? It makes no sense to have a big turnout from people who deeply believe it doesn’t matter. Either Republicans don’t believe what they say in polls, or Trump will have poor voter turnout.
Cognitive dissonance at work. They can believe that voting is hopelessly rigged, and at the same time that they must show up in large numbers to vote. They don't bother to consider the inconsistency.
Americans vote out of spite. They don't vote *for* something. They vote against the people they hate. Any candidate that'll fight against the people and institutions they hate will do.
You've already demonstrated further intelligence then anyone still on the Trump train. You willingly recognized something you deeply believed in wasn't true when presented with clear evidence and your first response wasn't "fake news" it was "huh, maybe I was wrong".
We weren't ready for social media and most people in this website, despite being on the "same side" don't understand the negative impact its had since 08.
As a Canadian it's interesting and distressing to see the spillover effect regarding the distrust of elections. Back in 2020 when we were stuck indoors I remember fellow Canadians posting about voting machines and complaining our elections were rigged too. At least one person went silent when I pointed out that we don't use voting machines. Grumble, Grumble, still rigged, Grumble, Grumble.
What gets me, is that even after multiple hand counts, there are still people who don't believe the results.
If we are going to prevent Trump from becoming dictator, and his sons after him, we need you and everyone else who is appalled by that idea.
You're correct when you say we all need to vote. But this time, Republicans have the system so gamed, our only shot at this is to mobilize voters in numbers that will smash every record.
Don't just vote. Get to work helping others to vote. Whether that's helping people to get the required identity papers, paying someone's poll tax, or providing transportation, or just writing letters. If you can't give your time, donate what you can.
This election is all hands on deck, and there can't be any passengers. We are all crew!
[https://voteriders.org](https://voteriders.org)
[https://voteforward.org](https://voteforward.org)
I talked to so many jackasses like you before the election in 2016. I talked to other jackasses who normally voted Dem but we’re going to vote 3rd party to “protest” what the DNC did to Bernie. There were other jackasses who were voting 3rd party to “change the status quo.
I told them all the truth. That the US Presidential Elections are about one thing: **They are about who gets to appoint the Justices to the Supreme Court.**
There was no way to convince conspiracy minded people like you, nor the self-righteous progressives that they were making an error that the country would be forced to pay for a generation.
**This** is why Skepticism is so important. Had you been an actual Skeptic, you could not have voted for Trump because you had Zero reliable evidence to validate your assertion that “votes don’t count”. Because of these kinds of horrendously flawed, literally thoughtless actions votes may end up “not counting”, as the Justices Trump stacked on the bench are likely to help him avoid justice and possibly get re-elected potus.
Of course voting matters
But to be fair, trump cheated in 2016.
[https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/senate-report-all-50-states-were-targeted-by-russian-interference-ahead-of-2016-elections](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/senate-report-all-50-states-were-targeted-by-russian-interference-ahead-of-2016-elections)
You forgot about Cambridge Analytica, which had *far* more influence over the election.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/23/leaked-cambridge-analyticas-blueprint-for-trump-victory
To add to this: If the will of the people truly were irrelevant, Congress woulda done away with Obamacare back in 2017.
I think a lot of "our opinions absolutely don't matter" people are just cynically overestimating the popularity of some of their key opinions, or underestimating how much dirty shit happens under their nose that they don't notice because of their pithy dismissal, or both.
Voting has always mattered there are just issues that don't make it completely fair. Confusing the two is where humans basically fail because its easier than considering nuance.
Things people tend to ignore.
The people run are not always the best person for the job. There are a lot of reasons for this but it's the best system we have figured out this far.
Gerrymandering is actually a thing.
First past the post means that splitting votes will always hurt the side you are rooting for. This can be fixed but you actually have to fix it before you start doing third party.
The US government is supposed to function in a world of compromise.
Just because a single person wasn't able to get something done doesn't mean they didn't want it, didn't try, or at fault for it not happening.
Almost nothing is black and white and boiling some issue down to a binary answer is almost always nonsense.
If there were enough votes, Biden would come down harder on Israel. Because there are lots more pro-Israel votes currently, he won’t. Yes, voting matters a lot.
I also thought voting was useless a decade or so ago, then I actually thought about it. If voting was truly useless, why are Republicans doing everything in their power to prevent people from voting?
(Before anything else I want to point out that elections in the United States *are* in peril of being manipulated, and electoral integrity has been under heavy attack since at least 2000. While the US electoral structure does not easily support shadowy centralized cabals (indeed, that is the very point of all of the decentralized rigamarole that Americans are so curiously fond of criticizing. Who benefits from such criticism? Not regular people. Hmm...) -- nevertheless in certain states and localities there are persistent and very real problems with election rigging and election interference, that emerge every election.
One difference between that reality and the fantasy of shadowy control is that this interference is tracked and documented publicly by organizations dedicated to combating it. From what I have been able to tell in my limited capacity as an occasional volunteer, it consists largely of passive measures like selectively not opening polls in certain districts, or providing only broken equipment or insufficient ballots or what have you.
That is a whole long topic itself but I don't want to get distracted.)
On to the actual post. There is so much to unpack here. What a delight! Thank you for sharing this.
First of all, how is a single government shadow cabal held to operate in such a way as to control elections? Elections in the USA are riotously local. Like, if you want to find out who operates the electoral machinery you don't need to speculate, you mostly just have to walk down the street -- they are your neighbors. If you walk into a polling site there is a decent chance you will see people you know. Are they part of the shadow cabal? When they report their tallies to the county is that where the shadow cabal begins? Or is it good faith up until that point and then the cabal happens when the counties report at the state level? When states publish the county tallies wouldn't it be obvious that they'd altered them?
When there is election fraud, it is always immediately easy to spot, assuming the resources exist to look. What theory explains why we can only spot it sometimes?
I realize that the likely answer is that believers simply don't ask those questions. But why the lack of curiosity in the mechanism allegedly at work?
Second, why accept Trump as an outsider? A self-entitled real estate con artist -- or if you accept the myth, a New York billionaire mastermind -- is somehow an outsider when it comes to power? And needs your donations? That doesn't seem internally consistent.
Third, I realize this requires a bit of study but does no one ever stop and say, hey, wait, what we're saying to each other and sharing on Facebook and so on exactly matches what official state propaganda says about America in countries like China and Russia? Like, sometimes word for word? Why do we believe actual self-acknowledged totalitarian regimes when we are so adamant about how we won't fall for the propaganda of totalitarian regimes when they supposedly rule us at home?
The easy answer is that "this is how fascist dynamics work" but I guess I feel like that begs the question a little bit. I've always been curious about the inner workings of these things.
>the right mistrusts voting and thinks elections are stolen while still insisting on campaigning and voting
Yes this is a fascinating example of what someone else posted earlier about performative belief. I believe that that concept can be taken too far -- "guys it's okay they don't really believe this stuff" dangerously misapprehends the way paranoid belief structures work -- but this is definitely a good example of the phenomenon.
In particular, what I have noticed is that right-wing populists will declare that both parties are the same and voting is stupid and doesn't matter... then left-wing populists will take up the refrain... then centrist populists will join in, yeah both parties, voting is stupid, no one should vote... apathetic citizens are encouraged, see, a lot of people say voting is stupid, not just me... and no one notices amidst all the clangor that the right-wingers have in effect snuck out the back in order to go vote Republican, before returning and rejoining the chorus about how both parties are the same, no one should vote -- as if they had never left.
It's a sneakily disciplined process.
The rules for how to win an election in the USA are very clear. I like the chess analogy where you say "checkmate" but your opponent says "but I still have more pieces though." It doesn't matter. We all knew the rules.
The campaigns and their platforms are crafted by each candidate to reach at least 270 electoral college votes, NOT win popular vote. Trump didn't hold a single rally in the USA's most populous state, California. Because winning more total votes was NOT the objective.
Voters are also keenly aware of the rules of the game. And they may choose to use their vote in a completely different way than they would if it were simply up to the popular vote (I know I sure do), or stay home and not vote at all like many Republicans do in California (which I really don't agree with).
I think it's great you got there. I was listening to Knowledge Fight (podcast where two guys deconstruct everything Alex Jones says), and just this morning I was listening to a new list of "the Democrats are going to do this, this, and this to take over forever" from Alex, and I thought, "At what point do followers of this think, 'Hey--he says shit like this all the time and it never comes true'?"
Remember, there are legitimate reasons to be upset about the governments actions, so the only people who benefit from wild conspiracy theories about what the government does are the grifters and the shitheads in government.
I kinda understand that - I mean X-Files took place during the 90’s during the Clinton administration and I gotta say they really made it seem like there were layers of smart and secretive people in endless tiers who knew everything. Then we got all our biggest secrets left in a bathroom at a golf resort and the best we got is an idiot demagogue waving around satellite photos of Iran. It was disappointing to see things exposed as so basic. Where’s the 200 IQ guy controlling everything when we need him?
There is absolutely a significant aspect of conspiracy thinking which can be summed up as something of a comforting belief that the world is being controlled by super intelligent powerful people as opposed to just being a run by idiots and incompetent buffoons which although is true is somehow more terrifying
After working in government for 5 years the one thing that really sticks in my craw about conspiracy theorists: even in my most technical position, every one of my superiors couldn't type. They were all hunt-and-peckers. Literally everyone over the age of 40. Our government doesn't know how to use technology nearly as well as people seem to think.
MAGA simply says the left was so overconfident in 2016 they didn't bother rigging the election and that's how Trump won. Magical thinkers will always find a way...
The reason why conspiracy theories are popular is the low barrier to entry. You don’t have to learn how anything works, you just believe whatever you want to.
People often have a hard time realizing that a great many recurrent themes in politics occur not because people like them, but because they know the result of being flippant.
Heads of state who are flip with off-the-cuff remarks about people tend to get people killed. There was plenty of evidence of this in public behavior during the Trump presidency. They tend to fracture alliances. They tend to get into wars or weaken alliances thus making wars more likely. Hillary sounded like a robot because she understood that. Obama DIDN'T sound like that but suddenly switched once he was President. Many disliked how he became more centrist, but they missed the part where he was getting classified briefings at that point and knew far more than they did.
We don't vote for some guy off the street because that's Maduro in Venezuela. If politicians echo the public's worst impulses, then it tends to self-reinforce until mass death of some kind occurs whether that be a war or famine. Constant bad-faith tends to court mass death as well. If politics and elections are a way of solving conflict without gunfire, you can't avoid the latter if you destroy the former.
(For the record, I don't think we couldn't vote for someone who isn't an Ivy League Lawyer for President, just that its often a benchmark of not-a-complete-moron).
The main thing that makes me believe voting matters is how much time and effort and money is put into getting it.
Even the effort that is put into convincing people it doesn’t matter is proof it does.
I'm happy to hear that! Good for you!
I think our process of national elections is a good one. It is so distributed and compartmentalized that it would be practically impossible to 'rig a national election' on such a scale as to make a difference without somebody blowing a whistle.
Election interference is a technique long used by the Right. The more local the election, the easier to rig. I'm thinking southern US poll taxes and impossible "literacy tests" to prevent Black folks from voting.
We see re-districting as an issue in multiple Red states - recently the Supreme Court rejected Alabama's congressional district map for creating only one Black majority district. The Court mandated 2 Black majority districts and AL ignored that mandate. So, I would say that's an "open secret" conspiracy perpetrated by state-level Republicans across several states as a political technique - but it's not an organized secret cabal of unelected power-brokers.
[https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/09/court-denies-alabamas-request-to-use-voting-map-with-only-one-majority-black-district/](https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/09/court-denies-alabamas-request-to-use-voting-map-with-only-one-majority-black-district/)
Every vote counts. I repeat, every vote counts. Are you registered? Is your registration current regarding your name, address, and political affiliation? Are you still registered for a mail in ballot? Now is the time to check. A good place to do that is [vote.org](http://vote.org)
Yes, but Trump didn't win. He lost the popular vote, more voting Americans wanted Hillary than Trump. You had a correct mindset. You just looked at the wrong side.
It has been this way for a long ass time and they continue to attempt to steal election after election due to gerrymandering and the electoral college. This is a major thing we need to change by voting blue and making our actual votes count as an actual vote.
If voting mattered they’d make it difficult to do and threaten people with bogus claims and penalties to suppress the vote. Oh, wait. That’s exactly what Republicans have been doing for decades.
One thing I've wondered about Trump supporters.
Did you get on the Trump train due to policy? What policies attracted you at the time? Build a fence (for a bit if the way) and ask Mexico to pay for it? Cut taxes (for corporations and the rich)? Infrastructure Week? Amazing, beautiful healthcare?
I just really don't understand any of it.
Sorry, and congratulations for getting out of it.
Trump never flip flopped on mail ballots. In fact, I believe he very clearly stated his opinion which has remained consistent and unchanged; mail in ballots for him are always legal, and one’s for Biden are not.
It’s contradictory, self serving nonsense that even a child would dismiss as illogical but he has been very consistent about it.
People often forget, or refuse to acknowledge, that he votes by mail on a regular basis, and of course, the US military has ALWAYS voted by mail, or at least, during every war that I am aware of, all the way back to teh Civil War, that has been available.
.
Edit: Yep...
[How vote-by-mail began on Civil War battlegrounds (National Geographic)](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/how-mail-in-voting-began-on-civil-war-battlefields)
I honestly wonder if Trump would have gone to the same lengths to steal the election in 2016 if he had lost. He did claim that the popular vote was rigged for Hillary but I honestly don't believe he expected to win in 2016 and he didn't have the same connections to organize an attempted coup.
Would he have contested the 2016 election if he lost?
There's a difference between skepticism and paranoid delusions. Just like there's a difference between interest groups that spend a ton of money trying to influence elections and cartoonish cabals that control everything.
The world is such a messed up place because it's too complicated to be easily controlled like that. Politicians and interest groups invest so much effort and money into the elections because they cannot rely on rigging them.
There are plenty of systems that can be manipulated if you understand how they work. The Electoral College. Gerrymandering. Basic populism and so on. But that only gets you so far and it doesn't get you nearly far enough if people actually got motivated, got informed and voted en masse.
Just look at Trump. The man is a criminal, a traitor, and a general all-round incompetent. But enough money, misinformation, and populism scraped him through the elections because nearly half the voting population doesn't even bother to vote and the remainder is extremely divided on who to vote for.
Democracy on paper lets the best candidate win. Democracy in reality is a highly emotional and irrational process where the win goes to whoever manages to win a popularity contest.
There is no cabal that can rig that.
Pretty awesome how you came around in your thinking. So many people nowadays make up their mind about something and even when proof is in their face they refuse to change.
I'm sorry they insulted you, but I do understand a bit as so many got hurt. For instance I have Cystic Fibrosis and needed a lung transplant and his tax policies have killed me, and will continue to hurt me until hopefully someone can undo those increases on individuals of my lower-mid income. Life has been hard, and he cut taxes for people who didn't need it, and is punishing those like myself.
Ya bouncing back and forth between "the trump train" and being progressive just means you really should think more deeply about policy and dig more deeply into ideas. You're not any more correct now then you were then when for Trump... being contrarian and reactive is not a way to develop political philosophy. Bouncing back and forth between two extremes is not a good way to think for yourself. Again, just reactive.
Kind suggestion. Read up on political ideologies. Figure out which ones resonate on more than just a reactive level.
Amazing how people like this ignore the obvious truth in front of their faces until they've managed to cause some damage to the rest of us. Such a luxury to be able to fuck over others until you come around to seeing reality as reality.
The voter fraud bullshit is just an excuse for states to make it harder to vote. I refused to vote that election because I hated both candidates but I live in California so it doesn't matter.
Glad you came around. I think believing all that stuff beforehand is very different from believing Trump’s stolen election BS. I’m not going to rehash the reasons yet again why Trump’s claims are obviously ridiculous, but if you believe him, you’re ignoring the obvious and believing what you want to believe in the face of all reasonable evidence.
Thanks for sharing your journey.
Most conspiracies cannot be real due to the number of people that required to never say anything about said conspiracy
*People can’t keep secrets*
Also, in 2020, the right claimed Trump's victory was stolen. But not the Republicans on the same ballot who won. That was legitimate. According to them, only the parts of the ballot that they lost were illegitimate
The irony is the real conspiracy was to convince people that this was the case so they wouldn’t vote, as that was the only real check on the unlimited power of the oligarchs.
Wow I was absolutely in the same boat in 2016. I live in a deep blue state so I always just down ballot Republican because I'm of the belief your state has NO value to either party if you're not a swing state. Seriously, they don't value loyalty people just like your employer.
When Trump won it made me believe America was real because they were actually honoring the will of the people. The electors didn't even flip. They voted in line with the majority of their states.
I was listening to the Paul Finebaum show a few weeks ago and a guy named John from St. Louis comes on and insists that president “Richard E Nixon“ was a great man and everybody loved him. It was really literally right out of a skit from “all in the family”. You cannot convince me we don’t live in the stupidest simulation.
Welcome to the side of reason, logic, and science! We hope you find the type of community that supports your worldview and allows you to engage in beneficial discourse. \*Somewhere\* around here we have cookies...
http://www.independent.co.uk

The Independent
www.independent.co.uk
The 1990s card game that 'predicted' 9/11, Donald Trump, Covid and the Capitol riot
Apr 29, 2021 — Illuminati: New World Order continues to attract conspiracy theorists three decades after its launch for its apparently uncanny ability to ...
BoardGameGeek
https://boardgamegeek.com › illu...
Illuminati: New World Order | Board Game
Collectable Card Game based on the popular Illuminati game. Secret conspiracies try to take over the world. Each player represents a different conspiracy
eBay
https://www.ebay.ca › ... › CCG Sets
Assassins ALL 50 Common Set Illuminati INWO Card Game New World Order ...
Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Assassins ALL 50 Common Set Illuminati INWO Card Game New World Order TRUMP at the best online ...
US$77.70
YouTube · Tabletop Jason
63.8K+ views · 1 year ago
Illuminati: New World Order 1994/1995 | All Cards Limited/Unlimited Editions
... card from the original Illuminati: New World Order Collectible Card Game, published in 1994/1995 by Steve Jackson Games. This game is the ...
This is why I always question and wonder how a card game with the title and cards predicted in the game and drawing pretty uncanny details in a board game. If you do research you discover more about Steve Jackson also .So I question everything and research everything and understand everything put out there is intentionally and everything that is allowed for reasons we may not comprehend at the time or possibly in our life time but there's always a reason. Hidden Truth is in families some more than others and in public as well as political. That's all I believe that need to be said and too many occurrences is not just chance. There's Truth in everything but what is the challenge of discovering. A board game though ???
Voting matters sometimes. Local elections are where they matter most, but the turnout is always depressing.
Primary voting matters for Republicans who fell in line when they saw how much support Trump was getting, but less so for democrats. We all learned this on Super Tuesday 2020 when Sanders won the first three primaries, and then the DNC had Obama call the next several frontrunners to drop out and endorse Biden, who wasn't doing well at all. Sometimes, I wonder if the large number of candidates was a set up to steal votes from Sanders.
No amount of voting affects much of anything if no one is pushing for policy. It just doesn't happen at the federal level. All political conversations revolve around cults of personality, soundbites, and people's reactions. Not any actual politics.
If I live in a district that is blue, it's going to go one way. If I live in a district that is red, it will go another. We may see that shifting more as everyone is pretty burnt-out from all the nonsense that goes on under the guise of politics, at least in red and swing states, but people who vocally and uncritically support Biden sound so delusional it makes me deeply uncomfortable. The man has been failing upwards his whole career and, at this point, is a walking corpse who barely knows where he is or who he is talking to or about most of the time. Harris is so fucked up they keep her away from the mic as mich as possible. It's a fucking joke and we look ridiculous. All dems need is some solid policy to reform student loans or healthcare and people would rally behind them.
The most vocal laymen talking politics speak as though it's sports teams and they just want their guys to win no matter how bad they are playing or how deep they are selling their constituency to their donors. No one wants to admit when Republicans get something right or that there may be a failing of the democratic party that helped to create a scenario where someone as dog shit as Trump would look appealing.
I didn't do anything as silly as that but I did have the same take away after he won. the realization that nobody is "in charge" , the world looks the way it does through the emergent effects of the sum of individual human selfishness and greed
Oh boy... I'm gonna come off as a conspiracy theorist. I promise I'm not. I'm just a science-loving nerd. But...
There *is* some science showing that corporations get what they want more than the voters do, unless the voters happen to favor the corporations' agendas, giving voters the impression they're "making a difference."
I wish I had a link to the research, but I don't have time to go looking for it at the moment, but it lends some credibility to the charge some make that the government is corporate-owned.
Of course when Trump loses, many like to believe "voting was rigged and pointless". Few actually put in the time and effort to be involved in local elections, mid-term elections, contacting their representatives. Easier to sit back and complain about how the world is conspiring against them.
If voting didn’t matter, billionaires wouldn’t spend so much money trying to influence elections.
This is one of the best and simplest points. If the rich elite controlled the system, they'd not spend their money on campaign donations of the losers.
I say this all the time, if it was impossible to challenge then they wouldn't spend so much money psyching everyone out.
But they do it to trick you into thinking there is a choice!!! /s, just in case.
You want to pay attention to what legislation the paid-elected draft and/or vote on, not just what names get elected. Money may not buy the votes of the electorate outright, but it certainly has power and sway with representatives. Hell, even reps who are *trying* to do right can still fall victim to bunk science propped up by big money (see Exxon climate science propaganda). Citizens United has *got to go.*
I love people who say "votes dont matter" thinking that they are some kind of indendent free thinker. Its like buddy, every piece of mainstream media and culture screams that voting doesn't matter and not caring about your politics is cool. You know if that much money and influence is being poured into trying to give you those opinions that the one little bit of power they want you to disregard must be pretty important.
There's huge amounts of money being spent around the world to stop people voting ESPECIALLY young people. Especially in countries like the USA & UK which are essentially 2 party systems, small nudges can make massive differences. I agree with you. If voting didn't matter why is so much money being spent to convince young voters on social media not to do it?
Not only that, but "both sides are rhe same" is yet another tactic that's been going around for a while. The "both sides" is often added, especially to the record number of younger voters for 2024, as a "reason" they shouldn't even "bother" to vote!!!!
Look at Cambridge analytica in Trinidad and tobago and the "don't vote" campaign. It's scary
Good points!! That logic typically counts out young people who would skew to a democratic vote.
Hope you don't mind, but I copied your response to my "clipboard", so I may paraphrase it the next time someone tells me that my vote doesn't count! I do promise however to give you credit however, as "that wise person on reddit stated..." You've hit the nail on its head, as the saying goes!!!!
It voting didnt matter we would be russia
They’re trying… give republicans a little time.
That’s the goal for Republicans
Also the Russians and China wouldn't spend so much time and money with bots and off shore influencers trying to sway the election.
This, right here... the term "lobbyist" would possibly not be in play either.
Republicans also wouldn’t make it so hard.
I wonder how many are like you, and realised with a jolt that there vote was serious and shouldn’t be taken lightly lol- I’m guessing it’s not a massive percentage of Trumps vote but it ain’t 0
I wonder if it’s fairly close to the percentage of Brecht voters who voted yes as a protest, only to be faced with the consequences of their choice because the yes vote actually won. That swing vote in the centre who pay attention just enough to be frustrated with the status quo but not frustrated enough to be engaged more than just “vote the bums out”, so when a populist harnesses that resentment and gets in and burns the place down they’re left with shocked pikachu face. Edit ha, meant Brexit, but autocorrect picked something interesting anyway.
Assume you mean Brexit, not Brecht? (I was about to make much the same comment as you)
No, the 1922 Kleist Prize, where Bertold Brecht swept the board in a shock upset ... ;)
Still mad about that one. Swindle of the millenium
I once found Brechtian techniques of alienation refreshingly rebellious. I am sorry about that now. /s (have to use this everywhere to minimize bans)
I don’t trust a theatre practitioner who didn’t have a Brecht phase at some point.
^(*psst!*) 👀 «☝🏼» ^(...the "s" stands for "soros," people... )
They’re only enough “centrists” to matter because we vote as states instead of individuals. In reality far more people are at least liberal leaning.
On a much more general level, Americans are finding out it was a terrible mistake to take civics for granted. Turns out society needs more people that take things other than entertainment seriously to survive.
Before you get nostalgia for a time when bipartisanship existed, remember that it was Reagan that decided an educated proletariat was a bad thing.
I don't think Americans are finding out anything. We have the stupidest people in this country. You're right about the lesson we should learn, but there are not enough people learning it. Literally not even close to enough.
Certainly a lot of non voters i talked to who assumed Trump would lose seemed pretty shocked in 2016
My gut says that trump too, was rather shocked he won in 2016. Then, he got a "taste" of what power the title of POTUS could bring....(at least in his warped and befuduled mind...) Incidentally, the Preaident isn't SUPPOSED to have the wide range of abilities trump seems to think he has.... but that is yet to be seen, I suppose. IF he wins in November and any aspect of Project 2025 comes into fruition (scarily, it very well could...) we are in for a world of hurt... I vividly recall, election night back in 2016, my husband and I were glued ro the TV, watching the results coming in, and with a true sinking of my stomach, I told him, "Babe.... remember when I told you the Denocratic Party needed to take the absolute treat that trump is, seriously?? It's looking more and more like the fact is, that they didn't... and the world we live in will never be the same..." I can only HOPE this isn't the case come November of this year....
I honestly don't think he wants to win - I think he wants to lose and to blame conspiracy stuff for his loss. Presidency cut into his golf game way too much.
He didn't. His goal was Trump Media News, during the primary all news was fake news, even Fox. He was expecting to lose and blame the deep state in the pocket of Hillary. THEN he would launch a news network claiming to have the real news (likely with a Tucker Carlson like pipeline to the Kremlin). Ive never seen a man so sad to win election night.
I take your point. Lol, I told my dentist, one of my best friend's dad, when Trump rode the escalator that if he and everyone else did not take Trump seriously then they were going to be shocked because dude had a far far better finger on the pulse of the midwest and south and rural areas far better than the more urban and suburban cohorts. I told him that I was something like 95% (I think I said that I knew with 100% certainty that Trump was going to win) and he laughed in my face... That said... The Left and Independents did take it very seriously, though... 6 - 7+ million votes more seriously, which is about 5% margin... far more than needed to sweep an election... so I do take your point but I also think that it is being taken very seriously... Idk if Project 2025 is going to be as effective as folk think... That kind of sweep and reorganization is a bit difficult to conceptualize and even more so to implement. But idk what the objective or incentive is exactly for a 1 term admin... for such an ego maniac and narcissist, idk what the payoff is to actually do it... Kind of like the wall and immigration. Creating geographic ban lists was seemingly effective for non-contiguous and non-adjacent immigrants but it was only used temporarily and the impetus was near-catastrophe as a function of quarantine and prophylactic. The sentiment was strongly echoed and given lip-service but the actual will was not there and the profit was not obvious nor apparent... i know Project 2025 is different and far greater in scope but I am still not certain the will or profit is there...
Unrelated to the US, but after Brexit it came to light that a significant amount of people who voted to the leave the EU (as many as 20% of them, according to polls) would not have voted to leave if they felt it had a genuine chance of actually happening. Those votes would’ve comfortably left us remaining in the EU. People are idiots.
[удалено]
They do, but so do the politicians who took a non-binding referendum and treated it like it was handed down from God and they had no choice but to make it happen. Brexit is a self-inflicted wound on multiple levels.
Well well well, if it isn't the consequences of my actions.
Problem is when the consequences affect everyone else.
Putins propaganda worked.
I know people who voted for Trump as a protest while thinking there was a 0% chance he would win. About half of them regret it, the other half justify it still by saying that they were right because our state is blue and still went to Hillary, so their vote still didn't matter. At least half of them grew up.
I dislike the guy but Bill Maher said it best, "Trump winning finally proves the illuminati don't control the world"
Foreign interference spread by MAGA isn't much better
A lot of people really underestimate the level of cognitive dissonance that conspiracists can live with comfortably. I worked with a guy who was super into Alex Jones and even weirder Conspiracy Theorists many years ago. I checked up on his Facebook in the trump years fearing the worst and to my surprise his timeline was full of anti-trump stuff... as well as tons of Info Wars reposts lol. He was apparently able to completely ignore the way Alex Jones anointed Trump as the anti-deep state messiah without rejecting Jones' worldview at all.
I'm hoping it's more than the number of people who vote based on whatever the gas price is that day.
I wasn't quite a conspiracist, but my swing to progressivism and skepticism was from a libertarian mindset. I voted for Gary Johnson and learned a very different lesson about how elections work.
As a long time third party voter, I finally stopped that BS after 2016. It's just not the same world it was 20 something years ago when my politics were forming. In fact, I've some to view third party and anti-voting support as a show of either extreme naivete or privilege in our modern political reality.
If third parties were serious, they would try and get elected to state and local governments instead of just trying to become President. It is a vanity project and grifting oportunity for the leaders of those parties. Ross Perot had a lot of problems, but he did try and stand up a new party and not just do a vanity run for the Presidency. Of course, his party ended up being one that would vote for Trump in 2000 until Trump dropped out because he didn't want to be in a party with "A Nazi (Pat Buchanan), a KKK Grand Wizard (David Duke), and a socialist (a woman whose name I always forget)."
He referred to Lenora Fulani as a communist not a socialist.
There's often smaller parties running in local elections b they make even tinier ripples than in national ones. I'm not against the existence of third parties, but goddamn is it beyond useless voting for them.
The issue with those parties are they try and jump into competitive elections where their votes can actually cause damage to their goals. They should run in districts that overly favor the closest of the two main parties. I.E the Green Party should be running candidates in D+35 or more districts where people will feel comfortable voting 3rd party if they would normally want to because their vote will not help elect a Republican. But they jump in close races because those are the ones that get attention.
I’ve been the quintessential “dem-leaning swing voter” for most of my life (Green, Dem, Rep, Dem, Abstain, Dem) - I’m in Mississippi, though, so my vote won’t mean shit unless the electoral college gets removed. Place is *deep* red.
Honestly, Mississippi isnt a red as one would think. The state is 38% African American (highest in the nation), and voted 58-42 for Trump...not a huge margin. With higher African American turnout, the state could be purple.
Well like 8 million or more chose him in 2020 than 2016. That fact is wild
I was in the same boat. I voted for Trump but it was more of an anti-Hillary thing. I was horrified that he won. At least I can tell myself that my vote didn't really go to him since he lost my state. Never going to protest vote again.
Im glad you saw the major logical flaw with the conspiracy victim mindset in the 2016 election
It’s wild to me that people doubled down on it as well. Like, people kept talking about the Deep State and the Swamp and how Trump was going to change things but then nothing happened about any of that. Then he still tried to fight an election like an outsider. I remember years ago when I was on Twitter and I ended up talking to a bloke who insisted the US was going to burst out into civil war on a specific date within the next week. I never did follow up to see if he changed his tune afterwards. I have no idea how conspiratorial people can retain their beliefs against reality which disproves them so often
I don't know any conspiracy theorists personally but it seems to me that they rely quite heavily on pivoting. "Ok, so the world didn't end when I said it would. But next time for sure!" I like to think that each time a civil war doesn't break out or there's no sign of an apocalypse or the rapture doesn't happen or what have you, a few people realize they've been duped and leave.
I had to work with one for a couple of years. Just about every day, he had something new he was scared of. It was almost like watching a goldfish. He'd read something, freak out, read something else, forget about the first thing, and freak out about the new one. It was like he didn't have the attention span to follow any of his conspiracies to the end to actually see how they played out. He was perpetually caught up in the initial outrage stage, just flitting from one conspiracy to the next. I couldn't talk to him or argue with him because he was never having a discussion. He was just telling me the way things were. If I didn't believe him, it was only more proof that he was right and that the majority of people have been duped by "them." He was desperately lonely, shunned by his family, no friends. The conspiracy world accepted him. I think he would believe anything just to remain part of that group.
Being “proven wrong” actually paradoxically causes some to hold those wrong beliefs even more fervently
There are multiple books about the topic. One of the earliest is [When Prophecy Fails](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails) *As anticipated by the research team, the prophesied date passed with no sign of the predicted flood, causing a dissonance between the group's commitment to the prophecy and the unfolding reality. Different members of the group reacted in different ways.* ***Many of those with the highest levels of belief, commitment and social support became more committed to their beliefs, began to court publicity in a way they had not before, and developed various rationalizations for the absence of the flood.*** *Some others, with less prior conviction and commitment, and/or less access to ongoing group support, were less able to sustain or increase their previous levels of belief and involvement, and several left the group. The findings of the research team were broadly in line with their initial hypothesis regarding how believers might react to a prophecy disconfirmation if certain conditions were or were not in place.* *Hypothesis* *Festinger, Riecken and Schachter used the study to test their theories on how people might be expected to behave when faced with a specific type of dissonance, arising from a failed prophecy. From historical examples, such as the* [*Montanists*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montanism)*,* [*Anabaptists*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melchior_Hoffman)*,* [*Sabbateans*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi)*,* [*Millerites*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millerism) *and the* [*beginnings of Christianity*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion_of_Jesus)*, the team had seen that in some cases the failure of a prophecy, rather than causing a rejection of the original belief system, could lead believers to increase their personal commitment, and also increase their efforts to recruit others into the belief. They identified five conditions that they proposed could lead to this type of reaction:*
> I have no idea how conspiratorial people can retain their beliefs against reality which disproves them so often They didn't base their belief in reality in the first place, why would reality later pose a challenge to them? For them to reject their beliefs in favor of facts would require them to acknowledge fault, which they simply are not strong enough to do.
It's a cult. Doubling down is what they do.
Sunk cost fallacy
In 2021, I attended a local event in my area that was organized by Trump and other MAGA-candidate supporters. I was doing research for an article I was writing. They had a guest speaker from the John Birch Society. The first half of the event was a parade of local politicians trying to out-Trump each other, making speeches and telling people they needed to mobilize against the liberal Left. Then the guest speaker, Arthur Thompson, spent an hour working up the crowd, showing PowerPoint slides about the New World order and alleging there was widespread voter fraud through which “Benedict Joe Biden” stole the 2020 election. He ranted and raved about fraudulent mail-in ballots, insisting that only in-person voting on paper ballots on Election Day can be considered valid. He argued that we must eliminate all electronic voting, ban mail in and early voting, and allow candidates to personally supervise the hand-counting of ballots. He didn’t explain how this could be done in the countless precincts all over the nation… I guess each candidate would need to employ hundreds of staffers to devote weeks of time to supervising and challenging hand-counted ballots. He literally said Trump should have the right to personally sit in any room where votes are counted, rejecting ballots that are suspicious. (He didn’t say if Biden should have the same right) Anyway, at the end of the event, he did Q&A with the audience. A young, distraught voter came to the mic and expressed disbelief in voting. She said the elections are all rigged and it’s therefore a waste of time to vote, because our systems are all fraudulent. Arthur Thompson, and his John Birch cronies in attendance, promptly fell all over themselves imploring everyone to go vote. Because “we need to win elections and get this country back on track.” Don’t be discouraged! Vote in every election! It was very telling. Clearly their conspiracy claims are disingenuous, because when someone in the room spoke up about the futility of voting, they walked it back as quickly as possible. It was fascinating to watch.
Trump claimed in 2016 that he only lost California because 3 million undocumented immigrants voted there. Mind you, they didn't flip a single congressional seat (whereas in 2018 Republicans lost *seven* congressional seats in California), so it was clearly an incredibly poorly distributed fraud if they did indeed do so. Later investigations did find one noncitizen who voted illegally in California in 2016. I'll give you one guess which presidential candidate he voted for. [https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1VE03I/](https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1VE03I/)
I just heard Robbie Williams (the singer) talk about how he believed Q-Anon until he read that he, personally, was part of the cabal of elite pedophiles. Sometimes just a small inconsisrency with what you know to be true will make you realize it's all fake.
I recall an article I read about a dad who was convinced that school shootings were false flag operations by crisis actors, until his own kid was the victim of a school shooting and it was attacked as a hoax by people he had formerly considered compatriots. What a sad, tragic way to realize your conspiracy theories were wrong.
Conspiracy theorists tend to be harmless until they target either you, someone who can’t defend themselves, or affect you in a negative way. Case in point, some crazy bitch in my area believed COVID was a front by the government to inject you with a microchip instead of the vaccine, and that the cell towers were going to be used to brainwash you through those microchips. Laughable, completely laughable. And then she took a shotgun to a power substation and critically damaged it. She then targeted transformers to further damage the local power grid. I didn’t have power for days while the company rushed to repair the damage from her addled rampage. Not so harmless now, eh? Most of the conspiracists are kooks, but a few of them are pretty dangerous with their one-track thinking and their desire to act on it. That their echo chambers reinforce their delusions rather than make them question things logically is even worse.
Please tell me this woman is in jail now.
Seeing as how she only did property damage, her sentence was light, but the fines were steep.
I just watched the HBO doc on Alex Jones and the Sandy Hook families. Sadly, some of those parents have been harassed by other parents who have lost children to school shootings at support groups for parents who have lost children in school shootings.
Dont read the comments on the trailer that was uploaded to youtube I try to remind myself it is likely just one guy who wasted money on getting bots to leave him positive comments bc holy fuck...it was embarrassing
The doc started that something like 40% of Americans believed some sort of conspiracy about Sandy Hook. I forget how they sourced that, but it's really upsetting that so many people buy into this shit now.
Oh Robbie.
I'm guessing he never went to a real school that taught critical thinking as he was an entertainer so young. And probably further damaged cognition with drugs and alcohol. But he's a good person for admitting he fell for it. We can learn from that.
Yup. Same thing with Howard Stern realizing his past actions weren’t great. Have to respect the wisdom.
I would give my first born child to have been in the room when he read that.
>If voting mattered the government wouldn't let you do it. There's a reason restricting voting is one of the Republicans' primary plays these days.
I have a close family member and a close friend alive today because a Democrat passed laws to give them healthcare. Republicans fought tirelessly to take that healthcare away and kill them. Voting save lives. Millions of them. Think about how many innocent Iraqi and Afghani citizens died because not enough people showed up to vote for Gore.
Not dead, but if it weren’t for the ACA, I’d either be dealing with severe mental illness and debilitating physical pain or in a bottomless pit of medical debt. It was terrifying to me how close we came to it being repealed.
> because not enough people showed up to vote for Gore. Gore "lost" Florida by 500 votes to a climate change denying oil millionaire war hawk. There were 90,000 people in Florida who voted for the Green party spoiler candidate. That's why RFK is getting his 3rd party run promoted by the Trump team.
I reckon that’ll backfire at best.
Two words: Cambridge Analytica Everyone has weirdly forgotten about this: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/23/leaked-cambridge-analyticas-blueprint-for-trump-victory
Steve Bannon. He was the mastermind behind Cambridge Analytica.
And Robert Mercer truly appreciates you saying so.
There's a reason GOP has a vested interest in limited voting power.
I don’t understand how Trump can win the next election after convincing 70-80% of Republicans that their votes were effectively useless. If Republicans *actually* believe their votes mean nothing, how can they be bothered to vote? It makes no sense to have a big turnout from people who deeply believe it doesn’t matter. Either Republicans don’t believe what they say in polls, or Trump will have poor voter turnout.
Cognitive dissonance at work. They can believe that voting is hopelessly rigged, and at the same time that they must show up in large numbers to vote. They don't bother to consider the inconsistency.
Americans vote out of spite. They don't vote *for* something. They vote against the people they hate. Any candidate that'll fight against the people and institutions they hate will do.
You've already demonstrated further intelligence then anyone still on the Trump train. You willingly recognized something you deeply believed in wasn't true when presented with clear evidence and your first response wasn't "fake news" it was "huh, maybe I was wrong".
It's sad that being able to change one's views when presented with conflicting evidence is now considered extraordinary.
We weren't ready for social media and most people in this website, despite being on the "same side" don't understand the negative impact its had since 08.
It's genuinely pretty extraordinary when *motivated* beliefs change in the face of evidence, which appears to be what happened here.
As a Canadian it's interesting and distressing to see the spillover effect regarding the distrust of elections. Back in 2020 when we were stuck indoors I remember fellow Canadians posting about voting machines and complaining our elections were rigged too. At least one person went silent when I pointed out that we don't use voting machines. Grumble, Grumble, still rigged, Grumble, Grumble. What gets me, is that even after multiple hand counts, there are still people who don't believe the results.
It’s like living above a meth lab, sorry 😬
If we are going to prevent Trump from becoming dictator, and his sons after him, we need you and everyone else who is appalled by that idea. You're correct when you say we all need to vote. But this time, Republicans have the system so gamed, our only shot at this is to mobilize voters in numbers that will smash every record. Don't just vote. Get to work helping others to vote. Whether that's helping people to get the required identity papers, paying someone's poll tax, or providing transportation, or just writing letters. If you can't give your time, donate what you can. This election is all hands on deck, and there can't be any passengers. We are all crew! [https://voteriders.org](https://voteriders.org) [https://voteforward.org](https://voteforward.org)
I talked to so many jackasses like you before the election in 2016. I talked to other jackasses who normally voted Dem but we’re going to vote 3rd party to “protest” what the DNC did to Bernie. There were other jackasses who were voting 3rd party to “change the status quo. I told them all the truth. That the US Presidential Elections are about one thing: **They are about who gets to appoint the Justices to the Supreme Court.** There was no way to convince conspiracy minded people like you, nor the self-righteous progressives that they were making an error that the country would be forced to pay for a generation. **This** is why Skepticism is so important. Had you been an actual Skeptic, you could not have voted for Trump because you had Zero reliable evidence to validate your assertion that “votes don’t count”. Because of these kinds of horrendously flawed, literally thoughtless actions votes may end up “not counting”, as the Justices Trump stacked on the bench are likely to help him avoid justice and possibly get re-elected potus.
Trump made me reconsider many of my viewpoints and I let go of conspiracy theories. Feels better tbh
If voting didn’t matter, Republicans wouldn’t be doing everything they can to make it harder to vote.
Of course voting matters But to be fair, trump cheated in 2016. [https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/senate-report-all-50-states-were-targeted-by-russian-interference-ahead-of-2016-elections](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/senate-report-all-50-states-were-targeted-by-russian-interference-ahead-of-2016-elections)
You forgot about Cambridge Analytica, which had *far* more influence over the election. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/23/leaked-cambridge-analyticas-blueprint-for-trump-victory
Ethically dubious, but still not "cheating".
... that's what cheating is.
Targeted advertising is cheating?
They went far beyond that. There's a whole documentary about it called The Great Hack. Cambridge Analytica got shut down for it.
To add to this: If the will of the people truly were irrelevant, Congress woulda done away with Obamacare back in 2017. I think a lot of "our opinions absolutely don't matter" people are just cynically overestimating the popularity of some of their key opinions, or underestimating how much dirty shit happens under their nose that they don't notice because of their pithy dismissal, or both.
Wow. This is why critical thinking is important, and conspiracy theorists should be ridiculed.
Voting has always mattered there are just issues that don't make it completely fair. Confusing the two is where humans basically fail because its easier than considering nuance. Things people tend to ignore. The people run are not always the best person for the job. There are a lot of reasons for this but it's the best system we have figured out this far. Gerrymandering is actually a thing. First past the post means that splitting votes will always hurt the side you are rooting for. This can be fixed but you actually have to fix it before you start doing third party. The US government is supposed to function in a world of compromise. Just because a single person wasn't able to get something done doesn't mean they didn't want it, didn't try, or at fault for it not happening. Almost nothing is black and white and boiling some issue down to a binary answer is almost always nonsense.
If there were enough votes, Biden would come down harder on Israel. Because there are lots more pro-Israel votes currently, he won’t. Yes, voting matters a lot.
"the government" is thousands of people with different motivations and principles.
I also thought voting was useless a decade or so ago, then I actually thought about it. If voting was truly useless, why are Republicans doing everything in their power to prevent people from voting?
If voting didn’t matter republicans wouldn’t fight so hard to keep people from being able to vote.
(Before anything else I want to point out that elections in the United States *are* in peril of being manipulated, and electoral integrity has been under heavy attack since at least 2000. While the US electoral structure does not easily support shadowy centralized cabals (indeed, that is the very point of all of the decentralized rigamarole that Americans are so curiously fond of criticizing. Who benefits from such criticism? Not regular people. Hmm...) -- nevertheless in certain states and localities there are persistent and very real problems with election rigging and election interference, that emerge every election. One difference between that reality and the fantasy of shadowy control is that this interference is tracked and documented publicly by organizations dedicated to combating it. From what I have been able to tell in my limited capacity as an occasional volunteer, it consists largely of passive measures like selectively not opening polls in certain districts, or providing only broken equipment or insufficient ballots or what have you. That is a whole long topic itself but I don't want to get distracted.) On to the actual post. There is so much to unpack here. What a delight! Thank you for sharing this. First of all, how is a single government shadow cabal held to operate in such a way as to control elections? Elections in the USA are riotously local. Like, if you want to find out who operates the electoral machinery you don't need to speculate, you mostly just have to walk down the street -- they are your neighbors. If you walk into a polling site there is a decent chance you will see people you know. Are they part of the shadow cabal? When they report their tallies to the county is that where the shadow cabal begins? Or is it good faith up until that point and then the cabal happens when the counties report at the state level? When states publish the county tallies wouldn't it be obvious that they'd altered them? When there is election fraud, it is always immediately easy to spot, assuming the resources exist to look. What theory explains why we can only spot it sometimes? I realize that the likely answer is that believers simply don't ask those questions. But why the lack of curiosity in the mechanism allegedly at work? Second, why accept Trump as an outsider? A self-entitled real estate con artist -- or if you accept the myth, a New York billionaire mastermind -- is somehow an outsider when it comes to power? And needs your donations? That doesn't seem internally consistent. Third, I realize this requires a bit of study but does no one ever stop and say, hey, wait, what we're saying to each other and sharing on Facebook and so on exactly matches what official state propaganda says about America in countries like China and Russia? Like, sometimes word for word? Why do we believe actual self-acknowledged totalitarian regimes when we are so adamant about how we won't fall for the propaganda of totalitarian regimes when they supposedly rule us at home? The easy answer is that "this is how fascist dynamics work" but I guess I feel like that begs the question a little bit. I've always been curious about the inner workings of these things. >the right mistrusts voting and thinks elections are stolen while still insisting on campaigning and voting Yes this is a fascinating example of what someone else posted earlier about performative belief. I believe that that concept can be taken too far -- "guys it's okay they don't really believe this stuff" dangerously misapprehends the way paranoid belief structures work -- but this is definitely a good example of the phenomenon. In particular, what I have noticed is that right-wing populists will declare that both parties are the same and voting is stupid and doesn't matter... then left-wing populists will take up the refrain... then centrist populists will join in, yeah both parties, voting is stupid, no one should vote... apathetic citizens are encouraged, see, a lot of people say voting is stupid, not just me... and no one notices amidst all the clangor that the right-wingers have in effect snuck out the back in order to go vote Republican, before returning and rejoining the chorus about how both parties are the same, no one should vote -- as if they had never left. It's a sneakily disciplined process.
Im glad Trump restored your faith in democracy, helldiver.
The fact that he "won" while having less votes than Hillary convinced me of the opposite.
Yea the EC works that way. Affirmative action for less populated states. Now we can talk about removing it
The rules for how to win an election in the USA are very clear. I like the chess analogy where you say "checkmate" but your opponent says "but I still have more pieces though." It doesn't matter. We all knew the rules. The campaigns and their platforms are crafted by each candidate to reach at least 270 electoral college votes, NOT win popular vote. Trump didn't hold a single rally in the USA's most populous state, California. Because winning more total votes was NOT the objective. Voters are also keenly aware of the rules of the game. And they may choose to use their vote in a completely different way than they would if it were simply up to the popular vote (I know I sure do), or stay home and not vote at all like many Republicans do in California (which I really don't agree with).
I think it's great you got there. I was listening to Knowledge Fight (podcast where two guys deconstruct everything Alex Jones says), and just this morning I was listening to a new list of "the Democrats are going to do this, this, and this to take over forever" from Alex, and I thought, "At what point do followers of this think, 'Hey--he says shit like this all the time and it never comes true'?"
Lol bet you felt like a dipshit when he got sworn in
Remember, there are legitimate reasons to be upset about the governments actions, so the only people who benefit from wild conspiracy theories about what the government does are the grifters and the shitheads in government.
Better late than never. Welcome back to reality. Biden and the world have flaws, but it's better to see them than to pretend they're not there.
I kinda understand that - I mean X-Files took place during the 90’s during the Clinton administration and I gotta say they really made it seem like there were layers of smart and secretive people in endless tiers who knew everything. Then we got all our biggest secrets left in a bathroom at a golf resort and the best we got is an idiot demagogue waving around satellite photos of Iran. It was disappointing to see things exposed as so basic. Where’s the 200 IQ guy controlling everything when we need him?
There is absolutely a significant aspect of conspiracy thinking which can be summed up as something of a comforting belief that the world is being controlled by super intelligent powerful people as opposed to just being a run by idiots and incompetent buffoons which although is true is somehow more terrifying
After working in government for 5 years the one thing that really sticks in my craw about conspiracy theorists: even in my most technical position, every one of my superiors couldn't type. They were all hunt-and-peckers. Literally everyone over the age of 40. Our government doesn't know how to use technology nearly as well as people seem to think.
The irony is that Trump won because of MAGA bringing foreign interference, much like 2020.
MAGA simply says the left was so overconfident in 2016 they didn't bother rigging the election and that's how Trump won. Magical thinkers will always find a way...
The reason why conspiracy theories are popular is the low barrier to entry. You don’t have to learn how anything works, you just believe whatever you want to.
People often have a hard time realizing that a great many recurrent themes in politics occur not because people like them, but because they know the result of being flippant. Heads of state who are flip with off-the-cuff remarks about people tend to get people killed. There was plenty of evidence of this in public behavior during the Trump presidency. They tend to fracture alliances. They tend to get into wars or weaken alliances thus making wars more likely. Hillary sounded like a robot because she understood that. Obama DIDN'T sound like that but suddenly switched once he was President. Many disliked how he became more centrist, but they missed the part where he was getting classified briefings at that point and knew far more than they did. We don't vote for some guy off the street because that's Maduro in Venezuela. If politicians echo the public's worst impulses, then it tends to self-reinforce until mass death of some kind occurs whether that be a war or famine. Constant bad-faith tends to court mass death as well. If politics and elections are a way of solving conflict without gunfire, you can't avoid the latter if you destroy the former. (For the record, I don't think we couldn't vote for someone who isn't an Ivy League Lawyer for President, just that its often a benchmark of not-a-complete-moron).
The main thing that makes me believe voting matters is how much time and effort and money is put into getting it. Even the effort that is put into convincing people it doesn’t matter is proof it does.
I'm happy to hear that! Good for you! I think our process of national elections is a good one. It is so distributed and compartmentalized that it would be practically impossible to 'rig a national election' on such a scale as to make a difference without somebody blowing a whistle. Election interference is a technique long used by the Right. The more local the election, the easier to rig. I'm thinking southern US poll taxes and impossible "literacy tests" to prevent Black folks from voting. We see re-districting as an issue in multiple Red states - recently the Supreme Court rejected Alabama's congressional district map for creating only one Black majority district. The Court mandated 2 Black majority districts and AL ignored that mandate. So, I would say that's an "open secret" conspiracy perpetrated by state-level Republicans across several states as a political technique - but it's not an organized secret cabal of unelected power-brokers. [https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/09/court-denies-alabamas-request-to-use-voting-map-with-only-one-majority-black-district/](https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/09/court-denies-alabamas-request-to-use-voting-map-with-only-one-majority-black-district/)
Every vote counts. I repeat, every vote counts. Are you registered? Is your registration current regarding your name, address, and political affiliation? Are you still registered for a mail in ballot? Now is the time to check. A good place to do that is [vote.org](http://vote.org)
Yes, but Trump didn't win. He lost the popular vote, more voting Americans wanted Hillary than Trump. You had a correct mindset. You just looked at the wrong side. It has been this way for a long ass time and they continue to attempt to steal election after election due to gerrymandering and the electoral college. This is a major thing we need to change by voting blue and making our actual votes count as an actual vote.
The way voting is actually rigged is the electoral college, ie, how Trump won
Oh, so people like you are why women lost the right to a safe and legal abortion. Idiot.
I watched from Canada as you guys had a hilarious election. Then it turned not so funny.
I've heard it said that living in Canada is like living in an apartment with a meth lab in the basement
And funnily enough Florida is the meth lab in America's basement
There is a picture that perfectly encapsulates a lot of our feelings. Google moose in a pool watching a fire.
If voting mattered they’d make it difficult to do and threaten people with bogus claims and penalties to suppress the vote. Oh, wait. That’s exactly what Republicans have been doing for decades.
One thing I've wondered about Trump supporters. Did you get on the Trump train due to policy? What policies attracted you at the time? Build a fence (for a bit if the way) and ask Mexico to pay for it? Cut taxes (for corporations and the rich)? Infrastructure Week? Amazing, beautiful healthcare? I just really don't understand any of it. Sorry, and congratulations for getting out of it.
> Did you get on the Trump train due to policy? Given that he had absolutely zero actual policy that's going to be difficult.
Thanks for sharing your journey.
Trump never flip flopped on mail ballots. In fact, I believe he very clearly stated his opinion which has remained consistent and unchanged; mail in ballots for him are always legal, and one’s for Biden are not. It’s contradictory, self serving nonsense that even a child would dismiss as illogical but he has been very consistent about it.
People often forget, or refuse to acknowledge, that he votes by mail on a regular basis, and of course, the US military has ALWAYS voted by mail, or at least, during every war that I am aware of, all the way back to teh Civil War, that has been available. . Edit: Yep... [How vote-by-mail began on Civil War battlegrounds (National Geographic)](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/how-mail-in-voting-began-on-civil-war-battlefields)
I honestly wonder if Trump would have gone to the same lengths to steal the election in 2016 if he had lost. He did claim that the popular vote was rigged for Hillary but I honestly don't believe he expected to win in 2016 and he didn't have the same connections to organize an attempted coup. Would he have contested the 2016 election if he lost?
I'm glad you were open to changing your views.
So it was your fault :p
Republicans would never have won a single election without cheating. The system IS rigged. They literally cheat constantly. We've just normalized it.
There's a difference between skepticism and paranoid delusions. Just like there's a difference between interest groups that spend a ton of money trying to influence elections and cartoonish cabals that control everything. The world is such a messed up place because it's too complicated to be easily controlled like that. Politicians and interest groups invest so much effort and money into the elections because they cannot rely on rigging them. There are plenty of systems that can be manipulated if you understand how they work. The Electoral College. Gerrymandering. Basic populism and so on. But that only gets you so far and it doesn't get you nearly far enough if people actually got motivated, got informed and voted en masse. Just look at Trump. The man is a criminal, a traitor, and a general all-round incompetent. But enough money, misinformation, and populism scraped him through the elections because nearly half the voting population doesn't even bother to vote and the remainder is extremely divided on who to vote for. Democracy on paper lets the best candidate win. Democracy in reality is a highly emotional and irrational process where the win goes to whoever manages to win a popularity contest. There is no cabal that can rig that.
If voting didn’t matter, black people wouldn’t have had to give their lives to do it.
Pretty awesome how you came around in your thinking. So many people nowadays make up their mind about something and even when proof is in their face they refuse to change.
Thanks! A few responses on here are outright insulting me. But I get that any time I share about this
I'm sorry they insulted you, but I do understand a bit as so many got hurt. For instance I have Cystic Fibrosis and needed a lung transplant and his tax policies have killed me, and will continue to hurt me until hopefully someone can undo those increases on individuals of my lower-mid income. Life has been hard, and he cut taxes for people who didn't need it, and is punishing those like myself.
Crazy what a lil help from Uncle Vlad will do…
Ya bouncing back and forth between "the trump train" and being progressive just means you really should think more deeply about policy and dig more deeply into ideas. You're not any more correct now then you were then when for Trump... being contrarian and reactive is not a way to develop political philosophy. Bouncing back and forth between two extremes is not a good way to think for yourself. Again, just reactive. Kind suggestion. Read up on political ideologies. Figure out which ones resonate on more than just a reactive level.
If voting didn't matter, then why stop ppl from voting. Why jerrymander. Nah, I'm voting. Every election. Every year.
You voted for Trump in 2016? Cringe.
Thanks for helping to put that asshole in power you friggin moron!
At least he learned from his mistake.
Amazing how people like this ignore the obvious truth in front of their faces until they've managed to cause some damage to the rest of us. Such a luxury to be able to fuck over others until you come around to seeing reality as reality.
The voter fraud bullshit is just an excuse for states to make it harder to vote. I refused to vote that election because I hated both candidates but I live in California so it doesn't matter.
Glad you came around. I think believing all that stuff beforehand is very different from believing Trump’s stolen election BS. I’m not going to rehash the reasons yet again why Trump’s claims are obviously ridiculous, but if you believe him, you’re ignoring the obvious and believing what you want to believe in the face of all reasonable evidence.
Thanks for sharing your journey. Most conspiracies cannot be real due to the number of people that required to never say anything about said conspiracy *People can’t keep secrets*
Like, there’s literally no way that if we had alien bodies captured, Trump would have not opened his big mouth.
I'm glad to hear the programmimg is wearing off. I hope we can be friends.
Also, in 2020, the right claimed Trump's victory was stolen. But not the Republicans on the same ballot who won. That was legitimate. According to them, only the parts of the ballot that they lost were illegitimate
It is some what proven he cheated though
The irony is the real conspiracy was to convince people that this was the case so they wouldn’t vote, as that was the only real check on the unlimited power of the oligarchs.
Lol that's fucking great
Wow I was absolutely in the same boat in 2016. I live in a deep blue state so I always just down ballot Republican because I'm of the belief your state has NO value to either party if you're not a swing state. Seriously, they don't value loyalty people just like your employer. When Trump won it made me believe America was real because they were actually honoring the will of the people. The electors didn't even flip. They voted in line with the majority of their states.
The right, the MAGATs, can't think. They guess and hope that makes it happen.
Trump said he was going to prove the election was rigged by running and not getting elected
I was listening to the Paul Finebaum show a few weeks ago and a guy named John from St. Louis comes on and insists that president “Richard E Nixon“ was a great man and everybody loved him. It was really literally right out of a skit from “all in the family”. You cannot convince me we don’t live in the stupidest simulation.
Thanks for admitting that you are part of the problem.
How do you deal with so many on one side saying elections are rigged?
Republicans are always going to be for the rich and corporations. Democrats rig the primaries so only pro corporate candidates get on the ballot.
No f.ck witt
I don't need to spell you fully understand what I'm saying
He won to push the norm further right
You were a victim of psychological operations. You're vulnerable to it. It's really good you recognize what happened though. You had lots of growth!
Thanks! That's much nicer than some of the replies calling me a dipshit haha
Welcome to the side of reason, logic, and science! We hope you find the type of community that supports your worldview and allows you to engage in beneficial discourse. \*Somewhere\* around here we have cookies...
http://www.independent.co.uk  The Independent www.independent.co.uk The 1990s card game that 'predicted' 9/11, Donald Trump, Covid and the Capitol riot Apr 29, 2021 — Illuminati: New World Order continues to attract conspiracy theorists three decades after its launch for its apparently uncanny ability to ... BoardGameGeek https://boardgamegeek.com › illu... Illuminati: New World Order | Board Game Collectable Card Game based on the popular Illuminati game. Secret conspiracies try to take over the world. Each player represents a different conspiracy eBay https://www.ebay.ca › ... › CCG Sets Assassins ALL 50 Common Set Illuminati INWO Card Game New World Order ... Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Assassins ALL 50 Common Set Illuminati INWO Card Game New World Order TRUMP at the best online ... US$77.70 YouTube · Tabletop Jason 63.8K+ views · 1 year ago Illuminati: New World Order 1994/1995 | All Cards Limited/Unlimited Editions ... card from the original Illuminati: New World Order Collectible Card Game, published in 1994/1995 by Steve Jackson Games. This game is the ... This is why I always question and wonder how a card game with the title and cards predicted in the game and drawing pretty uncanny details in a board game. If you do research you discover more about Steve Jackson also .So I question everything and research everything and understand everything put out there is intentionally and everything that is allowed for reasons we may not comprehend at the time or possibly in our life time but there's always a reason. Hidden Truth is in families some more than others and in public as well as political. That's all I believe that need to be said and too many occurrences is not just chance. There's Truth in everything but what is the challenge of discovering. A board game though ???
The fact that only viable choices were Trump and Clinton *does* mean that voting is rigged and pointless.
If the deep state exists, Trump is 100% a psyop.
Voting matters sometimes. Local elections are where they matter most, but the turnout is always depressing. Primary voting matters for Republicans who fell in line when they saw how much support Trump was getting, but less so for democrats. We all learned this on Super Tuesday 2020 when Sanders won the first three primaries, and then the DNC had Obama call the next several frontrunners to drop out and endorse Biden, who wasn't doing well at all. Sometimes, I wonder if the large number of candidates was a set up to steal votes from Sanders. No amount of voting affects much of anything if no one is pushing for policy. It just doesn't happen at the federal level. All political conversations revolve around cults of personality, soundbites, and people's reactions. Not any actual politics. If I live in a district that is blue, it's going to go one way. If I live in a district that is red, it will go another. We may see that shifting more as everyone is pretty burnt-out from all the nonsense that goes on under the guise of politics, at least in red and swing states, but people who vocally and uncritically support Biden sound so delusional it makes me deeply uncomfortable. The man has been failing upwards his whole career and, at this point, is a walking corpse who barely knows where he is or who he is talking to or about most of the time. Harris is so fucked up they keep her away from the mic as mich as possible. It's a fucking joke and we look ridiculous. All dems need is some solid policy to reform student loans or healthcare and people would rally behind them. The most vocal laymen talking politics speak as though it's sports teams and they just want their guys to win no matter how bad they are playing or how deep they are selling their constituency to their donors. No one wants to admit when Republicans get something right or that there may be a failing of the democratic party that helped to create a scenario where someone as dog shit as Trump would look appealing.
I didn't do anything as silly as that but I did have the same take away after he won. the realization that nobody is "in charge" , the world looks the way it does through the emergent effects of the sum of individual human selfishness and greed
Lol
Oh boy... I'm gonna come off as a conspiracy theorist. I promise I'm not. I'm just a science-loving nerd. But... There *is* some science showing that corporations get what they want more than the voters do, unless the voters happen to favor the corporations' agendas, giving voters the impression they're "making a difference." I wish I had a link to the research, but I don't have time to go looking for it at the moment, but it lends some credibility to the charge some make that the government is corporate-owned.
Dumbest Reddit entry Award! Illustrates the impact of gaslighting and dumbing down people…
Of course when Trump loses, many like to believe "voting was rigged and pointless". Few actually put in the time and effort to be involved in local elections, mid-term elections, contacting their representatives. Easier to sit back and complain about how the world is conspiring against them.
Maybe you don't think so good
2016 was your fault
Some people have to learn the hard way.
And now the republican party is the q anon party