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US US Politics General - Discussion of President Biden and other politicians
- Thread starter SeniorFuckFace
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"Never forget Joe's ability to fuck things up." - ObamnaThe Trump campaign needed this one.
Definitely on purpose. Anything to hurt Harris' campaign.
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- Sep 4, 2019
Why are there so many projecting the Dems to take the House? If Trump is currently ahead of Kamala in the polling average, I can't imagine the Dems picking up seats.
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- Oct 21, 2018
you are part of the problem. vote against people with black or kike names-
urr13 account
kiwifarms.net
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- Nov 23, 2021
Thank-you, great post. I'm learning a lot.
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- May 23, 2022
Idunno, I always wonder the same thing. Who the fuck is voting democrat then republican then democrat back and forth like it's volleyball.
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- Mar 16, 2019
Another video of the Trump float in Japan:
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- Dec 17, 2022
Those guys are cops.
https://x.com/BucksCountyGovt/status/1851362463322939789 (archive.ph)
https://x.com/BucksCountyGovt/status/1851362464295723265 (archive.ph)
https://x.com/BucksCountyGovt/status/1851362465105187256 (archive.ph)
Trump and Republicans Bet Big on Anti-Trans Ads Across the Country
The New York Times (archive.ph)
By Shane Goldmacher
2024-10-08 20:44:23GMT
Former President Donald J. Trump and other Republican candidates have poured tens of million of dollars into television ads across the country about transgender issues.Credit...Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times
With just four weeks until the election, Donald J. Trump and Republican candidates nationwide are putting transgender issues at the center of their campaigns, tapping into fears about transgender women and girls in sports and about taxpayer-funded gender transitions in prisons.
Since the beginning of August, Republicans have poured more than $65 million into television ads in more than a dozen states on these topics in some of the country’s most competitive races, according to a New York Times analysis of advertising data compiled by AdImpact.
The flood of ads in races for the House, Senate and White House inflame cultural divisions and cast Democrats as outside the mainstream. They are a sign that Republican strategists believe they have found a potent third leg for their messaging stool in 2024, along with the mainstays of inflation and immigration.
Republicans are returning to a message that was tried, mostly unsuccessfully, in the 2022 midterms, as they attempt to motivate their base and curb their losses with female voters repelled by the party’s stance on abortion.
Mr. Trump’s most aired ad about Vice President Kamala Harris in recent weeks ends with the tagline: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
In Ohio since the start of September, every ad about Senator Sherrod Brown from the leading Senate Republican super PAC has touched on transgender topics, such as accusing him of “allowing transgender biological males in girls’ sports.” Mr. Brown is one of the nation’s most vulnerable Democratic incumbents.
In Montana, five ads have deployed similar lines about transgender women in sports and bathrooms as Republicans press the case that Senator Jon Tester, another endangered Democrat up for re-election, is too liberal for the heavily Republican state.
“It’s one of the issues where Democrats are furthest from the center of the country,” said Brad Todd, a Republican ad maker who has produced commercials on transgender issues in multiple races this year. “They are doing something that is totally illogical to appease a tiny slice that is very radical in their base.”
Republicans acknowledge there are relatively few instances in which transgender athletes compete in youth sports. But they said highlighting the unwillingness of Democratic politicians to break with their party’s progressive wing on the issue was a powerful tool for depicting lawmakers as liberal or extreme.
Up and down the ballot, Democratic candidates have mostly tried to ignore the onslaught, preferring to pivot toward more favorable policy terrain, such as abortion, rather than to be dragged into public debates on transgender issues.
Privately, though, Democratic strategists concede that the transgender attacks are taking a toll in some races. The most aired Trump ad in recent weeks was rated as one of his campaign’s more effective in September in some Democratic testing, according to results reviewed by The Times.
Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, has been the target of what his campaign estimated was $37 million in attacks on transgender issues.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Kelley Robinson, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, one of the country’s leading L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups, said Republican attempts to use transgender people as political tools had failed in key races in 2022 and 2023. She predicted they would fall flat again in 2024.
“It shows that Republicans are desperate right now,” Ms. Robinson said. “Instead of articulating how they’re going to make the economy better or our schools safer, they’re focused on sowing fear and chaos.”
Attacks on what Mr. Trump calls “transgender insanity” have reliably been one of his loudest applause lines at his rallies. But now Mr. Trump has shifted significant resources to move that message far beyond his most fervent fans.
In the last three weeks, Mr. Trump’s campaign alone has spent more than $15.5 million on two television ads that resurface comments Ms. Harris made in 2019 describing her support for policies that “every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access” to gender-affirming surgery.
Chris LaCivita, one of Mr. Trump’s two campaign managers, said what made the commercials potent was using Ms. Harris in her own words. “It doesn’t require any hyperbole,” he said. “It’s her.”
In that 2019 interview, Ms. Harris said she supported gender-affirming surgery for state prison inmates, and she expressed support in an American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire that year for gender-transition care, including surgery, for federal prisoners and detained migrants.
“She wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison,” Mr. Trump said at their debate last month.
The Harris campaign declined to comment.
Transgender-focused ads have been running in key Senate races, including in Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin. Many are from the Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the top Senate Republican.
Most of the Republican ads do not criticize the transgender community in general. Instead, they zero in on specific wedge cases, such as transgender women and girls in sports, transgender women’s sharing of locker rooms, the use of taxpayer funds for gender-affirming surgery for people in prison and access to transition services for minors, such as puberty blockers.
Leigh Finke, the first transgender member of the Minnesota House of Representatives and the executive director of the Queer Equity Institute, said the more narrow focus could make the attacks especially hard to address because they were more about emotion than evidence.
“There is no way for the data to show that trans inclusion is somehow a threat,” Ms. Finke, a Democrat, said, adding, “This is really an argument that is based on an impulse someone might feel. It’s hard to argue with someone’s feelings.”
Leigh Finke of the Minnesota House of Representatives said that ads about transgender issues were hard to address because they were about emotion rather than evidence.Credit...Andrea Ellen Reed for The New York Times
Republican strategists said the focus on transgender women and girls in sports had been particularly effective with a key group of voters the party has hemorrhaged support from in recent years: college-educated suburban women.
“One of the things you see in the focus groups is the moms get really visibly angry on this issue,” said Jim McLaughlin, a Republican pollster who works for Mr. Trump and other Republican campaigns. “It’s a fairness issue. They don’t want their daughters to lose a scholarship, and they don’t want them to get hurt.”
Those are some of the recurring themes in the ads.
“It’s just wrong,” one mother says in a Republican ad in Wisconsin.
“It’s unfair and dangerous,” a grandfather says in a Republican ad in Ohio.
“Our girls’ sports are under attack,” another Montana mother says in an ad.
The Trump campaign placed its transgender ads in heavy rotation during football games in recent weeks, according to a person with knowledge of the ad-buying strategy. The popular radio host Charlamagne Tha God said on his show, “The Breakfast Club,” last week that the transgender commercial was especially striking because of when it aired.
“I don’t know if it was the backdrop of football, but when you hear the narrator say, ‘Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners’ — that one line, I was like, hell, no, I don’t want my taxpayer dollars going to that,” he said. “That ad was effective.”
It has helped Republicans that there have been high-profile examples of transgender athletes, especially the swimmer Lia Thomas, who in 2022 became the first transgender athlete to win an N.C.A.A. Division I title.
One of Ms. Thomas’s past competitors, Riley Gaines, narrated ads in the Missouri and Tennessee Senate races this year.
“Woke politics made me swim against a man,” Ms. Gaines says in the Tennessee ad.
Riley Gaines, a former collegiate swimmer, has become a prominent anti-transgender activist. She narrated ads in the Missouri and Tennessee Senate races this year.Credit...Rebecca Noble for The New York Times
A Gallup poll in 2023 showed that only 26 percent of Americans believed transgender athletes should be able to play on sports teams that fit their gender identity — a drop from two years earlier.
At the same time, polls routinely show that a majority of Americans believe society should accept transgender people for the gender they identify with, including in five presidential battleground states surveyed by The New York Times and Siena College: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin.
That was also the case in Ohio, where 54 percent of voters agreed, and yet no one has faced a more relentless focus on the issue than Mr. Brown.
Mr. Brown’s campaign has been the target of what it estimated was $37 million in attacks on transgender issues, including all the ads from the Senate Leadership Fund since Labor Day. Reeves Oyster, a spokeswoman for Mr. Brown, said the senator agreed with the state’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, that decisions about sports participation should be determined by local school districts, individual sports leagues and the state athletic commission.
In the presidential race, a pro-Trump super PAC began to echo the campaign commercial over the weekend with an ad of its own, calling Ms. Harris a “crazy liberal,” showing the same clip about surgery for prisoners and ending with the same “they/them” tagline. The ad featured an image of Jonathan Van Ness, the star of the show “Queer Eye,” wearing a dress. Mr. Van Ness has said he identifies as nonbinary.
“Coming after a renowned celebrity star that people love and adore that has been in our living room for years doesn’t seem like the right strategy to win hearts and minds,” said Ms. Robinson of the Human Rights Campaign.
Ms. Harris met with Mr. Van Ness and the “Queer Eye” cast in July. An image from that meeting appeared in a recent ad from the American Principles Project, a socially conservative advocacy group. Terry Schilling, the group’s president, said that in a dozen focus groups it conducted last year, it found that when it introduced the issue of minors and gender identity, liberal women were much less comfortable than they were with any other issue.
Mr. Schilling said the most effective ad his group had run in 2024 focused on Ms. Harris and her previous statements on transgender issues and that, when shown to viewers online, the 30-second ad had a completion rate of 91 percent, meaning 91 percent of viewers watched to the end and did not click the “skip ad” option.
“This is where Republicans can run the numbers up, make Democrats look extreme and also reach the base,” Mr. Schilling said. “It’s three birds with one stone.”
The New York Times (archive.ph)
By Patrick Healy and M. Gessen
2024-10-28 09:03:33GMT
The Republican Party has been investing millions of dollars in anti-trans advertisements in a play to reach moderates and voters on the left who feel uncomfortable with or confused by transgender rights. In this episode of “The Opinions,” the New York Times Opinion deputy editor, Patrick Healy, and the columnist M. Gessen discuss these ads and the fear they’re tapping into in American society.
Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Patrick Healy: I’m Patrick Healy, deputy editor of New York Times Opinion. I’ve covered American politics for decades as a reporter and editor and running our New York Times focus groups.
M. Gessen: My name is Masha Gessen. I’m an Opinion columnist at The New York Times. I write about politics. I specialize in Russia and autocracy and L.G.B.T.Q. rights.
Healy: Election Day is just over a week away, and one thing I’ve been watching is this onslaught of anti-transgender ads that Republicans are blanketing across swing states.
Since the beginning of August, Republicans have poured more than $65 million into these ads, and they’re running a lot in places like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin — these states that the election is going to come down to. There’s this huge amount of money being spent on an issue that’s not a top issue for voters. It’s not like the economy. And I think something really important is going on here, and it’s really what I want to talk to you about today.
Masha, I do want to show you one of the Republican ads, just so we can dig into what we’re talking about.
Audio clip of a political ad:
Narrator: Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners.
Kamala Harris: Surgery —
Interviewer: For prisoners.
Harris: — for prisoners, every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access.
Narrator: It’s hard to believe, but it’s true. Even the liberal media was shocked Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens.
Harris: Every transgender inmate would have access.
Narrator: Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.
Healy: So, Masha, this ad draws on an A.C.L.U. questionnaire that Kamala Harris filled out in 2019 when she was running for president.
Clearly, they’re trying to use her own words from five years ago against her. Talk to us about what you think Republicans are saying, both explicitly and implicitly, with the messaging in this ad.
Gessen: Yeah, the ad is pretty amazing. There’s the text of the ad, which — I find it kind of fascinating because it basically frames transition as a privilege, because why would you object to spending taxpayer dollars or just supporting gender-affirming surgery or other gender-affirming care for inmates and people that they’re calling illegal aliens? So I think that’s kind of funny, right? The transitioning is portrayed as a kind of desirable, privileged thing.
The subtext is much more crude. I think the ad is aimed at placing Kamala Harris in association with three severely othered groups that are perceived as menacing. She is with inmates. She is with asylum seekers, whom they’re calling illegal aliens. And she’s with trans people. All people that the voters that the ad is aimed at never have personal contact with but have a great fear of.
Healy: So I asked several Republican and Democratic pollsters about the strategy behind these ads. What they kept pointing out was that there are moderate and independent voters, including Democrats, Democrats with children, liberal women, who are pretty uncomfortable with trans and gender-nonconforming students playing on girls’ school sports teams. Some of these Democrats feel that their party is kind of in the thrall of trans activists on issues involving kids.
Now, these anti-trans ads, they’re trying to play on that discomfort, these pollsters think. And it’s strange because the number of trans and gender-nonconforming kids is just so, so small. So part of the political challenge for Kamala Harris, these pollsters say, is that a lot of voters don’t really know her well enough to say what she truly believes in.
So when Republican ads say that Harris is for they/them and not for you, these ads have a certain effectiveness in making voters say, “Well, what does Harris believe in?” or “How do Democratic leaders see these issues?” And so I’m really curious about what you make of all that.
Gessen: I think that the Republican Party and the Democratic Party perceive these issues very, very differently. And I think that the Republicans may have it a little bit more right in terms of what voters feel and fear than the Democrats.
I think that Democrats are looking at straight-up answers to questions about what’s important to you and seeing that for most people, trans issues are not that important or at all important, because, of course, they’re much more worried about the price of eggs than about somebody’s access to gender-affirming care.
What Republicans are seeing or feeling is that people are anxious about the future. They’re anxious about their economic future. They’re anxious about their social future. And it can all be boiled down to this anxiety about one’s children — that one’s children are going to come home from school one day and speak a different language than the parents or use a different name and generally be a stranger.
That fear of being alienated from your own children is at once fundamental and also a great stand-in for this generalized anxiety about the future. I think that that’s something that Republicans understand super well and Democrats don’t understand at all.
Healy: How do you think Harris is responding to that anxiety? Because these ads — we hear about them in focus groups that we do — are all over the swing states now. How do you see her in this?
Gessen: I don’t think she’s responding well. I think it’s also part of a larger issue. She spends very little time speaking directly to these anxieties. Donald Trump spends all of his time speaking to people’s anxieties about the future. Harris does this on housing. And the only other issue that she is really direct on is abortion rights.
Healy: Yeah.
Gessen: And I don’t know that that addresses people’s anxieties about the future, or if it does, it doesn’t for specific cases. But it’s not the same kind of generalized “I don’t recognize the world that I’m living in. I can’t imagine myself in 10, 15 years. Help me” kind of feeling.
She is not speaking to people that it matters to, and the calculus is probably — and not incorrectly — that those of us who are trans are going to vote for her anyway. The people she’s not speaking to are the people that those ads might actually work on.
Healy: I’m not entirely sure how effective these ads are ultimately going to be, at least in a direct way. We just haven’t seen a lot of evidence in 2022 and 2023 that voters themselves were going out and taking ballot action to respond to trans rights issues or that they were motivated by this.
I found myself wondering if something larger is at work in the Republican Party, and that’s to tell its base, but perhaps independents, that the Democratic Party leadership has a view about traditional gender roles that are different from what you may believe. Or Kamala Harris may see certain issues differently. That there’s kind of an othering going on that’s part of a broader strategy.
Gessen: If you look at how autocrats around the world have wielded trans issues — and this is pretty consistent wherever you look, but let’s look at Vladimir Putin, whose money and muscle have been very important in fostering this international traditional values movement, or what Putin calls the “traditional values civilization”: Women are women. Men are men.
Putin has spent a lot of time talking about transness, and Russia has outlawed transness completely. They’ve outlawed being trans. They’ve outlawed medical transition. They’ve outlawed social transition. For people who have already transitioned, they’ve made it illegal for them to marry.
But they’re using the specter of transness as a stand-in for a whole way of life and a whole way of understanding the world. And I think we have to acknowledge that that picture is internally coherent. If you believe that women should be women and men should be men and if you believe in marriage and if you believe in family, then all of this follows.
I think that’s the way Trump’s Republican Party is wielding transness as well. As a kind of foregrounded issue of a larger picture of the way things should be.
Another thing that’s going on — and this is something that we know a lot about from anti-gay campaigns of old in this country or not so old in other countries around the world — it’s actually super easy to target people who are a very small minority. Because if most of your audience doesn’t know a trans person, then it’s much easier for them to perceive trans people and transness as something monstrous and terrifying.
That used to work with gay and lesbian people back when nobody knew a gay or lesbian person. And as we know, one of the driving forces in the L.G.B.T.Q. rights movement was coming out. It’s much harder to sell something to Americans or anyone else when they feel like you’re talking about their kid, their brother, their cousin, their next-door neighbor. But a very small minority is actually an excellent target.
Healy: I agree with what you’re saying, and I think I would add one more, which is going back to your point about gender-nonconforming people. There are a lot more gender-nonconforming people in society today, including in positions of power and visibility, and I think that creates, to some degree, a panic, a fear, a worry about what direction that’s going in.
And it leaves politicians and lawmakers to want to take, to some extent, power into their own hands to shape or reshape the culture in ways, whether it’s making them more comfortable or just stopping something that they don’t like.
Gessen: Absolutely. I think most politicians have children. They know that their children are actually living in a different world. Even I know that my children are living in a different world. For my 12-year-old or my 23-year-old, it’s so much easier for them to wield pronouns than it is for people my age, however well intentioned the people my age are.
That perception of a major social shift is inescapable. What we have is, on one side, the Republican Party speaking to the anxiety that a major social shift inevitably causes.
And on the other side, the Democratic Party not having the courage to say: Social change is great. We change. There’s progress. The greatest thing about humanity is that we invent things that have never been done before. That’s what actually lies at the root of political hope.
Instead of saying that, they downplay it. And when they downplay it, they come off as disingenuous or perhaps not connected to the world that people are actually living in.
Healy: I see it a little bit differently. I think you’re right about the Democratic Party leadership not having that kind of courage. But I can’t forget the number of, particularly, women who identified themselves as Democrats or liberals in conversations to me who have a bit of a “What is going on here?” attitude and an anxiety about it.
For them, I’m not sure if courage is the issue. I think that they, to some degree, see the Democratic Party as believing essentially one thing, let’s say, about support for trans rights. And that can include medical care, gender-affirming care for adults, for younger people as well, and they’re not comfortable with it.
I don’t know if it’s an issue of persuasion, if it’s an issue of science, if it’s just a sense among some Democratic people that they feel like their party is out of step with where a majority of voters are. Essentially, whether this is a political issue, a social issue, a medical issue —
Gessen: Sometimes parties are and party leaders are out of step with where a majority of voters are. That’s called leadership. And I think we see that around major social change or minor social change, right? But social change. There was leadership in this country when a majority of voters held to profoundly racist positions.
I think there was leadership in this country when a majority of voters held to profoundly anti-immigrant positions. But we don’t see that anymore. Or certainly we don’t see that in the Democratic Party. We basically see populism on steroids in the Republican Party, where the whole point of the entire politics is to reflect what a majority of voters want.
And we see a kind of subdued populism in the Democratic Party, where the point is to play to the things that a majority of voters think and never to take risks.
Healy: I can’t tell whether it’s the fear that fueled that kind of racism and misogyny that you’re talking about that’s animating this or something that is — and I’ll call it, you may disagree — a little more benign, which is just uncertainty.
“I don’t know what’s right for my kid” or “I don’t know who my kid really is, and it scares me,” but there’s still love in that fear, if that makes sense.
I’m throwing all that at you without answers. I don’t have children. You do. But I find myself, when I interview some voters like this, feeling a mix of “What’s really going on here?” with them, in terms of what’s actually driving their views, I guess, with some degree of empathy, again, because I’m not a parent and I don’t know what it would be like to have a child who suddenly you aren’t recognizing, for lack of a better word, the way you once did.
Gessen: I actually have empathy for that as well, precisely because I do have kids. Your children will, as one of my friends says, never run out of ways to disappoint you. But, of course, fears around gender and children are so basic. They really just go to something that is fundamental to the way we organize the world.
In my imagination, there can be a politician who says, “Look, it’s not a big deal. You can still love your child. We can live in a world that’s organized not like the world of our parents. That’s what political leadership and invention and futurism are about, and it’s going to be OK because we’re all going to figure it out together.”
I think that a Kamala Harris or a Tim Walz in a different political situation is totally capable of transmitting that kind of message.
Healy: Masha, thanks so much for talking to me about this.
Gessen: Thank you, Patrick.
Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Patrick Healy: I’m Patrick Healy, deputy editor of New York Times Opinion. I’ve covered American politics for decades as a reporter and editor and running our New York Times focus groups.
M. Gessen: My name is Masha Gessen. I’m an Opinion columnist at The New York Times. I write about politics. I specialize in Russia and autocracy and L.G.B.T.Q. rights.
Healy: Election Day is just over a week away, and one thing I’ve been watching is this onslaught of anti-transgender ads that Republicans are blanketing across swing states.
Since the beginning of August, Republicans have poured more than $65 million into these ads, and they’re running a lot in places like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin — these states that the election is going to come down to. There’s this huge amount of money being spent on an issue that’s not a top issue for voters. It’s not like the economy. And I think something really important is going on here, and it’s really what I want to talk to you about today.
Masha, I do want to show you one of the Republican ads, just so we can dig into what we’re talking about.
Audio clip of a political ad:
Narrator: Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners.
Kamala Harris: Surgery —
Interviewer: For prisoners.
Harris: — for prisoners, every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access.
Narrator: It’s hard to believe, but it’s true. Even the liberal media was shocked Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens.
Harris: Every transgender inmate would have access.
Narrator: Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.
Healy: So, Masha, this ad draws on an A.C.L.U. questionnaire that Kamala Harris filled out in 2019 when she was running for president.
Clearly, they’re trying to use her own words from five years ago against her. Talk to us about what you think Republicans are saying, both explicitly and implicitly, with the messaging in this ad.
Gessen: Yeah, the ad is pretty amazing. There’s the text of the ad, which — I find it kind of fascinating because it basically frames transition as a privilege, because why would you object to spending taxpayer dollars or just supporting gender-affirming surgery or other gender-affirming care for inmates and people that they’re calling illegal aliens? So I think that’s kind of funny, right? The transitioning is portrayed as a kind of desirable, privileged thing.
The subtext is much more crude. I think the ad is aimed at placing Kamala Harris in association with three severely othered groups that are perceived as menacing. She is with inmates. She is with asylum seekers, whom they’re calling illegal aliens. And she’s with trans people. All people that the voters that the ad is aimed at never have personal contact with but have a great fear of.
Healy: So I asked several Republican and Democratic pollsters about the strategy behind these ads. What they kept pointing out was that there are moderate and independent voters, including Democrats, Democrats with children, liberal women, who are pretty uncomfortable with trans and gender-nonconforming students playing on girls’ school sports teams. Some of these Democrats feel that their party is kind of in the thrall of trans activists on issues involving kids.
Now, these anti-trans ads, they’re trying to play on that discomfort, these pollsters think. And it’s strange because the number of trans and gender-nonconforming kids is just so, so small. So part of the political challenge for Kamala Harris, these pollsters say, is that a lot of voters don’t really know her well enough to say what she truly believes in.
So when Republican ads say that Harris is for they/them and not for you, these ads have a certain effectiveness in making voters say, “Well, what does Harris believe in?” or “How do Democratic leaders see these issues?” And so I’m really curious about what you make of all that.
Gessen: I think that the Republican Party and the Democratic Party perceive these issues very, very differently. And I think that the Republicans may have it a little bit more right in terms of what voters feel and fear than the Democrats.
I think that Democrats are looking at straight-up answers to questions about what’s important to you and seeing that for most people, trans issues are not that important or at all important, because, of course, they’re much more worried about the price of eggs than about somebody’s access to gender-affirming care.
What Republicans are seeing or feeling is that people are anxious about the future. They’re anxious about their economic future. They’re anxious about their social future. And it can all be boiled down to this anxiety about one’s children — that one’s children are going to come home from school one day and speak a different language than the parents or use a different name and generally be a stranger.
That fear of being alienated from your own children is at once fundamental and also a great stand-in for this generalized anxiety about the future. I think that that’s something that Republicans understand super well and Democrats don’t understand at all.
Healy: How do you think Harris is responding to that anxiety? Because these ads — we hear about them in focus groups that we do — are all over the swing states now. How do you see her in this?
Gessen: I don’t think she’s responding well. I think it’s also part of a larger issue. She spends very little time speaking directly to these anxieties. Donald Trump spends all of his time speaking to people’s anxieties about the future. Harris does this on housing. And the only other issue that she is really direct on is abortion rights.
Healy: Yeah.
Gessen: And I don’t know that that addresses people’s anxieties about the future, or if it does, it doesn’t for specific cases. But it’s not the same kind of generalized “I don’t recognize the world that I’m living in. I can’t imagine myself in 10, 15 years. Help me” kind of feeling.
She is not speaking to people that it matters to, and the calculus is probably — and not incorrectly — that those of us who are trans are going to vote for her anyway. The people she’s not speaking to are the people that those ads might actually work on.
Healy: I’m not entirely sure how effective these ads are ultimately going to be, at least in a direct way. We just haven’t seen a lot of evidence in 2022 and 2023 that voters themselves were going out and taking ballot action to respond to trans rights issues or that they were motivated by this.
I found myself wondering if something larger is at work in the Republican Party, and that’s to tell its base, but perhaps independents, that the Democratic Party leadership has a view about traditional gender roles that are different from what you may believe. Or Kamala Harris may see certain issues differently. That there’s kind of an othering going on that’s part of a broader strategy.
Gessen: If you look at how autocrats around the world have wielded trans issues — and this is pretty consistent wherever you look, but let’s look at Vladimir Putin, whose money and muscle have been very important in fostering this international traditional values movement, or what Putin calls the “traditional values civilization”: Women are women. Men are men.
Putin has spent a lot of time talking about transness, and Russia has outlawed transness completely. They’ve outlawed being trans. They’ve outlawed medical transition. They’ve outlawed social transition. For people who have already transitioned, they’ve made it illegal for them to marry.
But they’re using the specter of transness as a stand-in for a whole way of life and a whole way of understanding the world. And I think we have to acknowledge that that picture is internally coherent. If you believe that women should be women and men should be men and if you believe in marriage and if you believe in family, then all of this follows.
I think that’s the way Trump’s Republican Party is wielding transness as well. As a kind of foregrounded issue of a larger picture of the way things should be.
Another thing that’s going on — and this is something that we know a lot about from anti-gay campaigns of old in this country or not so old in other countries around the world — it’s actually super easy to target people who are a very small minority. Because if most of your audience doesn’t know a trans person, then it’s much easier for them to perceive trans people and transness as something monstrous and terrifying.
That used to work with gay and lesbian people back when nobody knew a gay or lesbian person. And as we know, one of the driving forces in the L.G.B.T.Q. rights movement was coming out. It’s much harder to sell something to Americans or anyone else when they feel like you’re talking about their kid, their brother, their cousin, their next-door neighbor. But a very small minority is actually an excellent target.
Healy: I agree with what you’re saying, and I think I would add one more, which is going back to your point about gender-nonconforming people. There are a lot more gender-nonconforming people in society today, including in positions of power and visibility, and I think that creates, to some degree, a panic, a fear, a worry about what direction that’s going in.
And it leaves politicians and lawmakers to want to take, to some extent, power into their own hands to shape or reshape the culture in ways, whether it’s making them more comfortable or just stopping something that they don’t like.
Gessen: Absolutely. I think most politicians have children. They know that their children are actually living in a different world. Even I know that my children are living in a different world. For my 12-year-old or my 23-year-old, it’s so much easier for them to wield pronouns than it is for people my age, however well intentioned the people my age are.
That perception of a major social shift is inescapable. What we have is, on one side, the Republican Party speaking to the anxiety that a major social shift inevitably causes.
And on the other side, the Democratic Party not having the courage to say: Social change is great. We change. There’s progress. The greatest thing about humanity is that we invent things that have never been done before. That’s what actually lies at the root of political hope.
Instead of saying that, they downplay it. And when they downplay it, they come off as disingenuous or perhaps not connected to the world that people are actually living in.
Healy: I see it a little bit differently. I think you’re right about the Democratic Party leadership not having that kind of courage. But I can’t forget the number of, particularly, women who identified themselves as Democrats or liberals in conversations to me who have a bit of a “What is going on here?” attitude and an anxiety about it.
For them, I’m not sure if courage is the issue. I think that they, to some degree, see the Democratic Party as believing essentially one thing, let’s say, about support for trans rights. And that can include medical care, gender-affirming care for adults, for younger people as well, and they’re not comfortable with it.
I don’t know if it’s an issue of persuasion, if it’s an issue of science, if it’s just a sense among some Democratic people that they feel like their party is out of step with where a majority of voters are. Essentially, whether this is a political issue, a social issue, a medical issue —
Gessen: Sometimes parties are and party leaders are out of step with where a majority of voters are. That’s called leadership. And I think we see that around major social change or minor social change, right? But social change. There was leadership in this country when a majority of voters held to profoundly racist positions.
I think there was leadership in this country when a majority of voters held to profoundly anti-immigrant positions. But we don’t see that anymore. Or certainly we don’t see that in the Democratic Party. We basically see populism on steroids in the Republican Party, where the whole point of the entire politics is to reflect what a majority of voters want.
And we see a kind of subdued populism in the Democratic Party, where the point is to play to the things that a majority of voters think and never to take risks.
Healy: I can’t tell whether it’s the fear that fueled that kind of racism and misogyny that you’re talking about that’s animating this or something that is — and I’ll call it, you may disagree — a little more benign, which is just uncertainty.
“I don’t know what’s right for my kid” or “I don’t know who my kid really is, and it scares me,” but there’s still love in that fear, if that makes sense.
I’m throwing all that at you without answers. I don’t have children. You do. But I find myself, when I interview some voters like this, feeling a mix of “What’s really going on here?” with them, in terms of what’s actually driving their views, I guess, with some degree of empathy, again, because I’m not a parent and I don’t know what it would be like to have a child who suddenly you aren’t recognizing, for lack of a better word, the way you once did.
Gessen: I actually have empathy for that as well, precisely because I do have kids. Your children will, as one of my friends says, never run out of ways to disappoint you. But, of course, fears around gender and children are so basic. They really just go to something that is fundamental to the way we organize the world.
In my imagination, there can be a politician who says, “Look, it’s not a big deal. You can still love your child. We can live in a world that’s organized not like the world of our parents. That’s what political leadership and invention and futurism are about, and it’s going to be OK because we’re all going to figure it out together.”
I think that a Kamala Harris or a Tim Walz in a different political situation is totally capable of transmitting that kind of message.
Healy: Masha, thanks so much for talking to me about this.
Gessen: Thank you, Patrick.
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- Aug 1, 2013
Funny to see how many Maryland voters there are in this thread.
Hogan has kind of put himself in a spot where no one will be surprised if he loses. His perpetual fence-sitting to appease Montgomery County and Baltimore hurts his support in the redder parts of the state and the people in those areas are going to be far more likely to vote for his Democrat opponent (especially with her being a black woman from PG County).
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- May 23, 2024
I knew I wouldn't have to go far to find psyop cope. Same cellphone pings used for 2000 Mules that the company who put them forward had to admit were bullshit? Or is this a different GOP cell phone ping tracking operation with instant knowledge and access to this kind of data?
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- Jul 30, 2016
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- Jul 29, 2024
DC has great restaurants. Harris Teeter rules.
Also, serious question: what the fuck is sea lioning? I've heard this term before and it sounds like some made up Reddit bullshit.
The dumbest part is that if these immigrants really were just downtrodden and looking for mercy, they would have probably gotten it had they kept their noses clean and they fucking behaved. Too bad that's not how humans, or reality, works. I wish I could go back in time 10 years and show everyone how wretched it's gotten.
It's a wonder that VPC is even legal. They really skirt the lines with its illegal information retention and illegal robocalls. In fact, the organization was fined in 2008 by the state of North Carolina for its illegal robocalls. VPC has also been caught violating basic ethics with its vendors, specifically the company that handles its phone services. It's a bullshit racket, like most 501c companies.
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- Apr 21, 2013
I mean, @Marvin is a pickleman. I think that counts for something.
namelesstacotruck
kiwifarms.net
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- Jul 9, 2020
A properly gerry mandered state can be majority house seats for one party even if overall the state would go for the opposite party. Also the Congressional Rs are backstabbers and arent supporting shit.
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- Apr 11, 2016
holyhandgrenade
kiwifarms.net
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- Nov 6, 2023
I worked at a facility processing paperwork for the immigration office when Obama passed the dreamers thing and it was very interesting. The amount of white guys that buy Asian wives is hilarious tbh
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- Jun 3, 2024
Basically it's when anyone asks a leftist to substantiate his claims.
Based on this comic trying to frame anyone that does as unreasonable and invasive.
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- Aug 17, 2018
People around that rally waiting in line, they did not care I existed. I was just strolling around them; invisible. A few coworkers were concerned. I think they left as soon as possible.
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No, it isn't. It’s (D)ifferent, you see.
The IRS ain't run by anyone to the right of ol' Uncle Joe Stalin.
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My mom watched it. She thought it was weird. I rattled off some of her catchphrases and she just nodded along
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- Sep 4, 2019
But have they been redrawn since 2022, when the Rs took the House WITHOUT Trump's coattails?
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