I mean there’s ton of grifting in the industry but there are two kinds of messaging, the kind that consolidates your existing adherents and the kind that gets the neutral politically uninvolved people to listen. The reason Amerifats hate public transport and slavishly promote deregulation–to the point of even saying universal device charging port requirements are government overreach–is because insanely effective propaganda ghouls workshopped and had a strategy for disseminating to people who initially didn’t have a strong opinion one way or the other.

Israel itself was previously so skilled at propaganda targeting Americans who had little knowledge about the mid-east that the average left-wing view on the Levant even about 7 years ago was “there are two equally bad aggressors.” During the War on Terror era Israel would make these stories and news dramatizations about pretty white women getting blown up in clubs, and astroturf the online New Atheists with anti-Muslim rhetoric, and people left and right took it as gospel that Israel was our secular and unfairly besieged sympatico country in the Middle East. These were no make-work jobs, even tens of millions in PR fees for this work paid for themselves in spades, because it facilitated decades of unprotested billion-dollar weapons exchanges.

Even though today’s Israeli propaganda is dogshit because of the nepo incompetent descendants of the hasbara masters, and misspend of excess funds you mention, and even though it’s now mostly effective only on rousing their existing supporters, for decades skilled torrential PR was what made us turn a blind eye to how horrific the IDF and Israeli government were. The grifting opportunities in PR came to the field because the past value it brought to people in power justified millions in cash influxes.

And to your point about the message needing people in a place to hear them, there is an untapped group of people who know the Dems are cowards who don’t do enough but don’t feel like they can criticize them too harshly, the overperformance of Bernie proved that.

Not everywhere, in the children’s book my school used they retained that verse and even had complementary illustrations. I am sure some school boards have successfully gotten it removed, but it there are a not insignificant number of schools that keep the verse in.

love the username

Based on polling the lib voters are actually a lot less addicted to that victim-as-hero image than their representatives are. The problem is that the message the Democrats sell to their voters from the top-down has consciously been chosen to be the “when they go low, we go high” message. But letting their voters cast themselves as the hall monitors of democracy and decency is just the form of appeal the top Dems consciously crafted to be most advantageous to them in their simultaneous pursuit of rewards from capital and everyday voters–who have the potential to become far more radicalized.

People will go toward whichever mainstream and widely publicized figure/party that agrees most with their views, just like how most people choose to go see studio movies over Indies because that’s what has the ad spend. So Dem voters choose which leaders to follow and let themselves be guided by based on who they’re putting on the TV, but what the popular Dem politicians and pundits espouse do not represent the fixed baseline average for what their voters already believe, just the fixed baseline for what their voters feel free to say at the current moment. Looking at an example from the other side, Republicans were terrified to call out Iraq for being a disaster until Trump called it out in a debate and opened the floodgates overnight.

The Dem voter-politician split on Gaza, Medicare 4 All, etc. is so stark, and while Biden is pulls his anti-Trump ads out of decorum the liberal voters online, especially on black Twitter are like “I don’t give a fuck if he got popped.” The message their voters crave has no mainstream figure to articulate for them yet.

While the Democrats deserve no help, this original post is about how we should resign ourselves to fascism because the Teamsters are at the RNC. Doesn’t that imply that we at least prefer they not be there, even if it means being at the DNC? We should focus on moving the needle toward what we want. The Dems may stand to benefit and piggyback off us for power, but what other option is there really at the point. If we genuinely believed that Trump and fascism have won and the only option is mutual aid groups for when he is in power, Hexbear would be filled with posts on mutual aid groups building. But we clearly don’t believe in that deep down yet or at least have some residual hope of something different, and we can work chasing that feeling.