Fucking Chemtrails. I have MS and one of the times I was in a physical rehabilitation clinic, relearning how to walk, I had a nurse who believed in chemtrails. She asked if I realized that my MS was caused by chemtrails. I was taken aback. I was actively playing civ with a friend who heard my side of the conversation. After she said that, I had a short conversation with her about how chemtrails aren’t real. She said “Well I guess all those congressional hearings I watched were fake.” To which I said that we are never going to agree on this and it’s better to just stop talking so we don’t have an argument. She basically agreed and thankfully she was gone by the time I needed my MS meds that evening. Chemtrails are BS and yet so many people believe they’re real, even in professions that should understand they’re not real, that it is genuinely depressing.

The uncommitted movement is 100% what primaries are for. It gives a clear message in actual voting data to the democrats and bidens campaign and I do think they know that they’ve got some ground to cover, whether they manage to remains to be seen. To be honest I was gonna vote in my primary but I’m in a red state and there’s no uncommitted on the ballot so I don’t really see a point when all of my other candidates for other positions are also already decided. Worst of all, all of my local positions are solely Republicans and it sucks that I don’t feel like I can vote for anyone locally who could actually represent me. Anyway, I’m really glad there have been so many uncommitted voters, it’s how primaries should work when there’s only one real candidate.

Sure I’ll bite. This article was written by John Burn-Murdoch, and from what I can tell, he is not related to Rupert Murdoch and just seems like a boring centrist. So let’s look at his first graph. It says it shows diminishing support for democrats among non-white voters, supposedly showing they’re now at 60% support for non-white voters entirely. So the argument is that they are leaving the dems because they’re being disillusioned. That 60% figure is suspicious though since actual voting shows completely different dynamics. In 2022 the breakdown actually shows around the same amount of support in particularly black voters, 93% of black voters supported the dems, which was around the same amount as the election in 2020 and 2018. But in the graph in your article it does not use those numbers. It uses share of non-white voters who identify as democrats, not actual voting patterns. The author uses that to show that black voters and other non-white voters are separating from the democrats, but never mentions the actual voting data showing that despite not identifying themselves as democrats, they still vote for democrats.

The next graph does the same thing, uses how people are identifying themselves in a poll as opposed to actual voting data and doesn’t even make much sense when actually looked at, especially since the y axis isn’t labeled so it’s confusing. I mean, does it show how nearly 100% of white voters in 2022 are republicans and close to 100% of white voters are liberal? It just makes no sense and is not a good representation when the author doesn’t even provide context to what the graph is trying to say. It makes no sense. Then he uses a book to try to illustrate that black voters are abandoning the democrats, but that book “Steadfast democrats: how social forces shape black political behavior”, was released in 2020 and is about how black voters are unified around the democrats and examines the reasons for this. So this author is using data to say what he wants to say that actually says the opposite of what he is trying to say. Then the next graph supposedly shows racial breakdowns for different more conservative beliefs and for those that identify as liberal or conservative. But it as a graph that also makes little sense. 75% of black voters identify as conservative while close to 90% or above identify as liberal? How can you have those numbers when they don’t add up to be 100%? There’s not 165% of black voters. This graph is suspicious as fuck, if you are gonna use percentages and want me to take you seriously, they need to add up to 100%. I’d also like to acknowledge here that multiple of the links in this article that are supposed to lead to actual other articles, actually just lead to the main page, that could be because I am not a subscriber, it’s just annoying and not the important part.

Anyway, lets go to the next graph which the author introduces by saying that he extended the books research to include all non-white groups, despite it again not actually showing what he wants it to show. He claims it shows that different races are increasingly identifying as conservative, but it uses the book and a Pew Research Center American Trends Panel Wave 43 to make that case. But from what I can tell in that pew research trends panel, there is no mention on how many non-white voters identify as conservative, so I have no clue where he is getting that information unless it’s from the book which I also doubt given the book being about how black americans rally around the democrats consistently. The article finishes by saying that as the US becomes less racially segregated, more black and non-white Americans will change party affiliations to republican. But all it uses for that is just the census data which never mentions less racially segregated america leading to more non-white GOP voters. It also uses a republican pollster named Patrick Ruffini and his book “Party of the People Inside the Multiracial populist coalition remaking the GOP” as evidence, again, for showing how black voters are abandoning the democrats despite the fact that the share of republican black and non-white voters hasn’t changed much in the last couple of elections, the distribution is the same, it’s just that turnout was higher so there were more non-white GOP voters. Okay last thing on this incredibly long post, the article actually ends by saying that these voters are likely to become swing voters and that they likely will be won back by the dems, or at least can be. Essentially saying that all that he was saying in the article wasn’t actually influential and that the distribution in the voters could still be the same. He doesn’t use voting data for the entire article, which is the most important data to use when it comes to this.

Anyway, I couldn’t find a lot on John Burn-Murdoch, but this article is still trash.

This article was written by Jeff Charles. A podcaster and political contributor who has appeared on fox News and Newsmax. He’s also anti sensible gun control, transphobic and believes being trans is just ignoring biology, believes that schools should ban books that have “ideology” in them (anything queer), thinks kids are being indoctrinated just because it occasionally comes up that there are different ways of being a person, says he’s an anarchist but will say libertarian sometimes to avoid “making people think he’s crazy” but just doing that shows that he doesn’t actually understand what anarchism is (or how crazy some libertarians are), and also talks about how the left wants Americans to be dependent on the state (all social programs). He’s also on point for some things, specifically things that most libertarians ascribe to, like fuck cops and anti drug war. But like most libertarians, he only believes in his “do whatever you want and leave me alone” mentality when it lines up with his personal beliefs.

I don’t disagree that there are black voters who are frustrated with the dems, but this is not a very good article and is written by an ass who has to push the idea so he can continue to be brought onto Fox News and Newsmax to talk about it and so his site gets new subscribers. Subscribers that have to pay 50 bucks a year for his premium content. Which I’m honestly surprised doesn’t cost more. He’s also partnered with Doni Anthony who has his own site/substack, which when you’re on the landing page, the second article is, well, it requires subscribing and I’m not gonna do that. But it’s about a bill called the Inclusive Democracy Act of 2023 which is about restoring voting rights to people with criminal records/felonies who have done their time, the article is about the “hidden” reason the democrats support the bill, which is a far right conspiracy that average voters would never vote for a democrat so they have to make new voters to be able to win. It’s all baseless conspiracy stuff and is the same thought process for the “illegal immigrants voting” conspiracy.

The point is that an article is only as reliable as the author is, and this author is just crap.

I mean technically yeah, but that’s just updating the citizens that the process is actively rolling. I’d rather be updated that things are happening as opposed to radio silence and thinking the administration is ignoring the issue.

Yes, the democrats and republicans supported the war on drugs for decades, but just because those things happened doesn’t mean they’ll continue to happen. Democrats have been leading the way most of the time when it comes to legalization and other weed related issues like banking or drug testing, even in congress with multiple legalization measures introduced and even passed by the democratic house despite the senate not picking it up. The party wasn’t for legalization back when they had a super majority, that sucks, and it’s okay to be angry that that didn’t happen. But it’s being worked on now, and the present is just as important as the past. Rescheduling would be a first step that can really help the industry and consumers and patients. It’s not the last step, there has to be more done to help undo the disastrous effects of the drug war, but it is a first step. We have to remember that the democrat party is not the party from back in the day, even from 2009 when they last had a super majority, it’s changed a lot. For instance, changing their stance on gay marriage and other lgbt issues, that was fantastic and while it should have happened sooner, it still happened and that’s important. Also I think it’s important to remember that despite there being a level of bipartisanship when it comes to legalization outside of congress, the republican party has devolved into the “stop everything democrats want to do” party, so full legalization could take a while since they’re so fucking hell bent on breaking congress and the federal government. Unless democrats get another super majority in the senate, something that isn’t likely, legalization through congress is next to impossible.

Nope, the process to reschedule has been started, it’d be changed to schedule 3, which, unless you think tylenol with codeine is illegal, it wouldn’t be illegal anymore.

Just so everyone knows, the DEA is actively reviewing a report from the Department of Health and Human services where they recommended to reschedule weed to a schedule 3. Biden had directed HHS to research to see if it should be rescheduled, so while biden hasn’t unilaterally legalized weed (something that would quickly be challenged in court since presidents don’t usually have unilateral power for most things), he has definitely been pushing it not be schedule 1. Which, while not legalization, would be a huge step for not just the industry but for all the medical patients out there who have had their doctors refuse to treat them because they use weed for pain.

Multiple democratic supermajorities? There hasn’t been a democratic super majority since Ted Kennedy died in August of 2009. Which was before anyone had even legalized for recreational use. I’m not saying the DNC hasn’t been dragging its feet, but they have not had a super majority to just do it themselves unilaterally.

A few people in these comments are essentially saying there are no real differences in the parties. Don’t get me wrong, there are 100% things that the parties agree on, like capitalism, supporting Israel, and continuing to fuck with countries that we really shouldn’t be messing with. But here’s the thing, if you think the parties are the exact same then you most likely aren’t having your rights to exist threatened by this election. Republicans want to ban books, want to have lgbt people put in prison for just existing, want to keep people of color from voting, want to have women getting illegal abortions so more of them die, want to force Christianity on the entire country because they think they’re the religion that’s “right”, want to make trans people illegal and force all of us to detransition or be put in prison, want to block all immigrants and deport the ones that currently exist in the country, want democratic lawmakers to be killed in a mob, want to go on a murderous rampage killing all they deem to be scum of the earth, want to literally bring on the rapture, want to establish death and work camps like what was done in nazi germany, want to have putin take over all of europe because he has dirt on them, want to remove all governmental assistance so that poor people die more often, want to eliminate all public education, want to take away voting power from women, want to make the internet as uniform and unsafe a place as possible, want to have disabled people be unable to afford to live so that they die, want to strip all workers rights and go back to before we had unions, want to criminalize homelessness to the point that they are literally dying because that’s easier, want to increase fossil fuel consumption because they don’t think that global warming is real, want to make life on earth as shitty as possible because they think they’re gonna be raptured up and won’t have to deal with the ramifications of their actions. I could go on but this is already a really long comment. There are important differences to the parties, even if you personally won’t be significantly impacted by those differences.

The article uses a single black college student who says he might vote for trump, and a single “liberal climate group” poll from a recent New York Times article. So a single student and poll mean that America is not realizing how bad things would be? If that was true there would be far more republicans winning special elections and the house would have swung to a much larger majority for the republicans. The problem lies in the polling and assuming polls are at all accurate. Polls haven’t been super accurate for a while. Polls said Biden would be in a dead heat in 2020 but he won a decent victory, far more than the polls expected. The polls said 2018 was gonna be a good year for democrats, which was right, but the polls far underestimated the turn out. In 2016 the polls had Clinton winning over trump but that didn’t happen in the states it needed to happen in, despite most of the polls saying it would. In 2022, the polls expected republicans to get over 20 or 30 seats. That didn’t happen. Using barely any evidence to show how America isn’t understanding whats going on just ignores that the majority definitely understand. Its just that 43-46 percent of voters, who are the most likely ones to respond to polls, will always support trump. We can’t base our view on the election just because of polls. Look at the actual elections that democrats usually have been winning where they need to be winning.

Also, it’s not that I don’t think there are people who don’t understand how bad a second Trump term would be, it’s just that those are a minority and will get smaller as the election gets closer.

Of course at the end of the day, we just have to vote. Ignore the polls, they’re all bullshit, you just gotta vote.