Based post, outsized influence from Kleptocrats should be entirely disbanded and if we had an electorate capable of thinking for themselves, we wouldn't even have to do this.
I think Citizens United is such a flimsy legal argument and I'm still mad about it. Money isn't free speech. Any billionaire has the full right to give their opinion on any political candidate they want to. But being allowed to spend unlimited money to buy any eleciton was never what any founder intended when they protected free speech in the First Amendment, it's really grasping at straws.
Others would say it was the Great Recession; or 9/11; or the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act; or the Clinton Welfare Reform Bill; or the creation of Fox News; or the ‘94 midterm elections; or the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine; or the rise of far-right talk radio; or Reagan’s election and subsequent administration; or Watergate; or the mid-70s stagflation; or the end of the gold standard; or the beginning of the Southern Strategy; or Fred Hampton, MLK, RFK, and JFK’s assassinations; or the Gulf of Tonkin incident and subsequent Vietnam War; or the postwar push by urban planners to prioritize car-dependent, highway-filled suburbs as the dominant plans for cities, as well as “urban renewal” conducted under similar pretenses; or the establishment of shareholder primacy in Dodge v. Ford; or the failure of Reconstruction and the institution of Jim Crow laws; or the writing of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence by people who were proud slave owners; or . . .
I suppose the point is that people have always been saying that America is in decline. The validity of said statements over time is difficult to determine. I personally think the two worst periods in American history were the Great Depression and the Civil War, as then the country was on the brink of collapse. The Cold War era in which there were legitimate fears of nuclear war breaking out is also up there somewhere, despite a large portion of that time period also being the “Golden Age of Capitalism and the (White) Middle Class.” I would say that current times in America are comparatively worse than, say, the 90s, but probably not that much worse compared to every other decade since the 1950s.
People just see the past with Rose tinted glasses. I've seen redditors glaze the 50s-70s as the best time to live forgetting the constant stress of nuclear annihilation, the korean war, Vietnam war etc. Even if the USA is in 'decline' this is still basically the best time to be alive up to now
For my money, the greatest butterfly effect was how soft the government was on the confederate after the Civil War. It's like a constant curse in.this God forsaken country that we have to go easy on the poor misunderstood retarded southerners every time they do a little sedition and/or treason. It just kept happening, too. Throughout the Jom Crow and Civil Rights eras, Watergate, Iran-Contra, etc, the worst of the American right-wing always gets off easy and takes it as an opportunity to regroup and fuck us again
Sherman didn't go far enough. The confederacy lasted just a few years and somehow lives on in the hearts of our stupid fucking rural population
It's even more generalized than that. And it's precisely why the ACLU felt Citizens United was correctly decided. The question is "Can you cleanly separate the First Amendment rights of media from other media-like groups?"
Can the New York Times spend millions of dollars running op-eds favoring one party? Sure. That's easy First Amendment rights.
Now can another entity get together, form a media organization, and spend the same millions of dollars running op-eds favoring another party? People who oppose Citizens United say "No, they aren't quite news media. They don't feel like the New York Times, but more campaignish. So the First Amendment shouldn't apply to them the same way. Their spending on speech must be limited and regulated by the government."
Which is a verrrrry awkward and tenuous argument. Which is why Citizens United ended the way it did.
I’m always disgusted by political ads, and always wishing 50% of every spend was taxed and sent directly to pay the principal of the national debt. And another 50% taxed at the donation time too. At least that would make me feel better when I see an ad.
…and what “free speech rights” were those associations exercising in that case?
monetary political expenditures
The McCain-Feingold Act barred corporations and unions from *funding* "electioneering communications"
Which should be clear, in any case the corporations is not literally the person doing the talking (an abstract entity can’t speak), its the organization funding the people talking
People know citizens united was a specific change in the law. they ought to know it was one of the biggest in the series of changes over 20+ years that increased the flow of money in politics. But that takes so many words to say. I think maybe I’m ok with them thinking it was just one because at least they’re unified in identifying what needs to change: the laws. I wave it off as not a big deal because of the thought: Maybe we ought to not waste time on correcting them and instead progress to actually getting reversing changes through.
I think correctly identifying the problem is important. Not everything is a simple black and white and letting people chant random slogans has not been good for our political discourse. People can be held to a higher bar to actually know what they're talking about.
Citizens United explicitly claimed that campaign spending is free speech. It affirmed the prior ruling, Buckley v. Valeo, which already held to that, but expanded it by saying even corporations and unions may spend unlimited amounts of money on campaigns.
My apologies for the innacuracy, though Citizens United still reaffirmed a stupid legal principle even if it didn't establish it.
Edit: well thinking about it a little more one could make the argument that being allowed to buy an ad is free speech, but I still think there is no right to buying an unlimited number of ads.
In general I do not believe commerce is necessarily equivalent to free speech, including ad reservations.
Edit 2: I changed my mind, ad buying isn't a form of free speech at all.
I don't think there is a legal or consistent moral argument about only limiting the number of ads unless you ban all advertisements. For example, tobacco companies can't buy any advertisements by law. The government also prohibits sex toy companies from advertising due to obscentity laws. But that's a complete ban not only you can run 20 advertisements in a given 7 day week.
I don't see how it would be possible to stop independent citizens from purchasing advertisements, billboards, and ads on social media speaking about a specific topic; if they have the money and hate abortion, they should be able to try and purchase as many ads as the platforms would allow.
I think Congress can limit the amount of ads purchased. Really, it comes down to whether or not it actually violates the Constitution. I don't think free speech is infringed by Congress limiting campaign contributions. If a very wealthy person wants to give their opinion on a campaign, they absolutely can. But them spending massive amounts of money to run ads is not the exercise of free speech, and thus I think it can be banned.
>there is no right to buying an unlimited amount of ads
So then there are rules on how one can legally spend their own money on legal products?
This is kind of the issue with Citizens United. Holistically and as a gut reaction, one would say it shouldn’t be legal.
But when you dig into the law and principles and situations there, there isn’t a legal justification to ban it from the courtroom.
Of course Congress could pass a law which could put stricter caps on the spending (which is already there and pretty low, $5,000 IIRC) or limit PACs, but those are also the people who use the PACs.
The problem is with your first sentence: "So then there are rules on how one can legally spend their own money on legal products?" Congress absolutely can pass laws regulating the use of otherwise "legal" products.
Alcohol is legal. You can buy alcohol. But Congress can still prohibit you from drinking it in certain places, or before the age of 21 (although tbh I'm not sure whether Congress or the States regulate alcohol consumption, but at least in principle Congress could legally regulate it).
Campaign donations are only a "legal" form of commerce in so far as Congress permits them. If Congress passed a law banning them or restricting them, it would become illegal under the circumstances it was banned. Citizens United and Buckley v. Valeo both claim Congress actually can't limit campaign donations under most circumstances because it violates free speech rights, which I think is wrong.
With bots, increasingly convincing AI agents, and personalized targeted ads this shit is gonna get dangerous. It already is dangerous. Before too long, a whole group of your friends will do a video call to get you to vote a certain way, but it will all be ai lol.
Over 90% of Congressional candidates who spend more win their races. Obviously, the causation could go either way, but there is a clear correlation.
If ads couldn't buy an election, nobody would ever run ads. Why would a candidate spend hundreds of millions of dollars if it had no effect on an election? It statistically does make a big impact. It can only make so much of an impact, but that amount is enough to win the majority of elections.
if ads won elections on their own Harris would have blown Trump out of the water having raised and spent several hundred million more than he did
Ads and raising awareness can be important especially for more fundraising. But PACs run those ads because there little other legal activity they can engage in not because ads are the most effective thing ever and PACs run the majority of ads not candidates.
No, it's not. It's just education, there's indoctrination issues in some places sure, but generally speaking it's just because educated people tend to think less of retarded ideas
The fake electors plot. Him and his allies literally documented themselves attempting to steal the 2020 election while simultaneously accusing the dems.
Hearing “every accusation is a confession” all the time gets old but fuck if it’s not true.
In about 20 years when Trump is dead and people are all pretending to have never supported him the fake electors plot will finally be recognized as the low point in American democracy that it really was.
This is just another why Trump supporters are some of the dumbest people ever.
Trump claims (without evidence) that Obama’s election was illegitimate -2012
Trump claims (without evidence) that the election that he won in 2016 was rigged. He tries to force states to turn over voter data. His investigation into election fraud turns up nothing. -2016
Trump claims (without evidence) that the 2020 election is going to be rigged. He tries to prevent people from voting by mail. -2020.
Trump claims (without evidence) that the 2020 election was stolen from him. He loses thousands of lawsuits, conservative groups fun investigations and recounts all over the country. No major election fraud is found. A few Republicans are found to have voted illegally. Trump incites a riot and attempted insurrection by telling his idiot supporters that the election was stolen from him. -2020
Republicans and Trump attempt suppress likely democratic voters. His allies break the law by bribing voters to vote for Trump. There is possible election fraud in MI. Trump refuses to admit that he lost in 2020 as well as promising to adhere to election results if he loses.
Trump claims (without evidence) that the election is going to be stolen from him, he wants to send national guard and ICE to polling places, he wants to use a flawed database to revoke voter registration and to interfere with mail in voting. -2026
Over 10 years of this shit and his supporters are still so fucking stupid that they buy into this bullshit.
They already are, DoJ has preemptively filed a lawsuit regarding the Dans Sullivan in Alaska, they have something in the works with California I believe regarding voter roles, and DHS has talked on TV about sending "monitors" to polling places.
I get that the last one isn't completely irregular but do you really trust this administration to monitor polling places?
"common strategy to create divisions by fabricating events whereby a person accuses others of what he or she does or wants to do"
someone falsely attributes their own motives or intentions onto their adversaries
imputing to the adversaries the intentions that one has oneself or the action that you are in the process of enacting. Mucchielli explained how the perpetrator who intends to start a war will proclaim his peaceful intentions and accuse the adversary of warmongering
Accusation in a mirror (AiM)[a] is a technique often used to incite hate speech, where someone falsely attributes their own motives or intentions onto their adversaries.[3][4][5]
First sentence and we're already at "hate speech" which doesn't even have a definition.
Along with dehumanization, accusation in a mirror is one of the indirect or cloaked forms of incitement to genocide,
Second sentence and we're at genocide.
Yeah even assuming Accusation In a Mirror is a real thing, this wiki article is pure slop.
If we could get one thing out of the second half of the current president's term, I'd like it to be clamping down on Executive Orders. They make a mockery of the entire idea of checks and balances, regardless of which party the president belongs to.
Soros was one of several billionaires investing into politics yeah, the right just decided to specifically isolate him as this big master of all evil for some reason.
He was just the most prolific cause he spent the most (of the left wing leaning ones), before the left zeroed in on Musk the right wing analogue was the Koch brothers.
I wonder if that comes down to levels of transparency. His donations are some levels removed, but not enough that it's not clearly linked to him. But shrewder, or sneakier, donators might have done more.
I swear to god it’s like trying to stop a baby from shoving its dick into a wall socket. You people aren’t built to be anything but slaves I swear to god. Dumbest human beings to ever drag themselves through to adulthood.
Seriously, what do you guys think? That Elon regularly attends meetings of the Nazi party, where he’s sieg hieling all the time, and it slipped out? Or he’s just awkward, and did an awkward gesture?
Tbh I don’t think anyone in modern politics is a Nazi. Not Elon, not platner, not Trump.
Considering the national socialism is an ideology which believes in the rebirth of the nation, through widespread systems of racial hygiene, I do not think that a Nazi would be the kind of person to hide their ideology, as it requires the mass mobilization of the people in order to achieve it.
Obviously this was intentional and musk is a nazi. I’m glad his intentions are so clear and he didn’t do something that requires nuance like getting a literal Nazi tattoo on his chest.
Glad he dropped out because democrats definitely would have voted him in. It took rape accusations, from a Democrat woman, for him to start losing support from other prominent democrats. Nazi tattoo and domestic abuse allegations, from a Republican woman, are apparently a-ok for democrats.
Watch how they cry election fraud as they erode American democracy more and more. This guy should have just stuck to SpaceX and cemented himself as one of the great industrialists of 21st century America
If he gets a base on the moon or Mars built (he won't because space is fake), I doubt anyone will give any amount of shits about his outspending of Soros.
No the left will hate anyone that doesn't 100% agree with them on every single topic ever, including future ones and ones where they've changed their mind on that day. Even if he never got into politics or made any statement they'd hate him because checks notes he has money. Even if he donated money to good causes and was decent they'd still hate him, as they already do with many others. Appealing to the left is always a fools game
Now just about everybody doesn’t like or hates him. Also what’s with this “appealing to the left”, he donated 4x more than Soros in a midterms, that’s going full on right not “appealing” to anything, nobody said he had to fucking pay attention to retard leftists, but licking the boots of right wing politicians isn’t it
The money isn't the part that matters, it's the purchasing of X. The attention economy is so much more valuable than just raw dollars, just look at Trump winning despite being outspent in every election.
We need overhauls to section 230 that will force these companies to be more transparent with their algorithms, instead of having this control over what has become the new public square. X is a breeding ground for radical ideas, and I don't really believe it's natural.
He's not wrong though. Twitter went from being worse than reddit to being the polar opposite. A mixture of less censorship and left wing people always running away to echo chambers, like blue sky, caused it to completely shift in the opposite direction. How would a nationalist really gauge how popular their position is without a reasonably popular space for ideas to pass around and be discussed?
Spent more on US Elections? Like, donated to a campaign? Because there are other ways to help influence a campaign, and donating directly to a campaign is probably the least shady way of doing it.
They're not saying it's inherently shady to give to political campaigns, they're saying it is dumb to claim a single actor giving enormous sums to your opponents is bad then turn around and have the world richest man give your own party.
I think people who have an issue with "Soros" tend to have more an issue with the way he uses the money, or at least what they think he does, not that he donates to a politician.
I could be wrong, but that's the sentiment I get from people that talk about it.
Sure, but at what point do you just stop complaining and match or beat their methods? Decades of bitching about Soros might look hypocritical, but the modern Republican party isn't the same party, and at some point you have to play to win instead of crying about it.
If we're comparing non monetary ways of influencing a campaign, then he isn't just mega soros, he's ultra super mega ultimate final form soros 5000. In fact he's so far past soros that comparing them is honestly laughable. The amount of money spent is the only arena soros can compete and make it even slightly competitive.
i dont even know what soros did but fuk em anyway. But the shit Elon did with DOGE cancelling investigations into his own companies getting social security data leaked and throttling Ukraines ability to defend themself s which got people killed is far worse to me and i hope there is consequences for that shit(there wont).
He spent $44 billion to turn Twitter into a GOP propaganda machine in 2024 which is more money than all superpac spending combined for like the last 20 years.
MAGA donors spending billions of dollars to elect candidates who will send trillions of dollars to a foreign government to buy our weapons made by companies owned by said billionaires, exclusively to murder children, just so they go rape other children on an island in the Caribbean -based and freedom pilled (according to rightoids)
Other billionaire donors spending money not to let that happen- evil and despicable and unAmerican
Yeah, there is no salvation for Republicans. Scrap the entire party and just start over. They're cooked.
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u/Uptight_Technocrat12 1d ago edited 1d ago
Meanwhile, me trying to resurrect Teddy Roosevelt so he can kick our monopoly problems in the balls: