@Robby:
You keep making completely bad faith smears and arguments, constantly on the side Trump. Even if you're not mentioning his name, you've spent the last several pages being incredibly anti-Biden and peddling conspiracy theories even after people have already told you those are coming from extremely unreliable, biased sources.
You don't have to actually be saying "Trump is great" when you keep saying "This is Trump's race to lose" and "everyone else sucks."
I'm really stunned by this post, but I guess it makes sense now why you started out believing I was a secret Trump supporter even though I voted for Hillary and all I did that could be misconstrued as support of him was ask "does he really deserve this criticism?" a few too many times. I was apologetic at first, but after the first time you accused me of defending Trump this year I immediately knew something was off.
You've actually been driven somewhat insane by the last four years, with Trump constantly gaslighting you and the media recycling every horrible he did and putting a spin on it up to eleven.
I couldn't take all the stress of keeping up with that so I gave up two years in to deal with personal issues, only occasionally tuning in to hear about the latest insane scandal.
When my fiancee's mother died in the fall I had to step up and take a lot of the responsibility of handling her funeral and estate matters, I finally recognized the media coverage of all the terrible things Trump does for what it is: a lethal distraction.
someone should be paying attention to every little crazy thing that happens but it shouldn't be me because I had work to do and sanity to maintain.
But yes, even though you didn't phrase it that way, I do genuinely hate Joe Biden.
I didn't start out hating him, and I didn't hate him when the DNC refused to do what Biden's spokesperson indicated needed to be done in Iowa after the paper trail failed: a complete re-do of the caucus. She was fired shortly after.
Instead I blamed the DNC for not pushing to ensure a fair election, which I still think was fair in retrospect. To this day we don't know who came in first in Iowa and that's pretty insulting as a Democrat and as an American.
I had hung my hopes on Sanders all along and we all know how that turned out, but the constant lies and nasty attacks by the media were somehow far worse than in 2016.
At some point it became clear that the left was learning from Trump and abandoning the pretenses of civility, dignity, honesty and democracy. After the debacle in Iowa I could no longer take for granted that the left were "the good guys" no matter how much I wanted to. The cycle of the Democratic Party manufacturing my consent was coming to a screeching halt, but I still felt the need to vote blue no matter who in this one election to get Trump out.
Then Bernie started to win. Then, he kept winning. Despite the fact that he was the frontrunner, the media kept treating him like garbage. I heard insane rants about Hitler and gulags and bread lines. More than one MSNBC host outright stated that they preferred Trump to the Democratic frontrunner.
When the DNC changed the rules to let a Republican into the debates for the sole purpose of crushing Bernie I finally figured it out: the reason the Democrats "suck at politics" is because they've been throwing fights.
When every other viable alternative to Bernie had been virtually guaranteed second place or lower, they decided to back Trump instead so he could continue to be the demon that scared people into donating huge amounts of money for another four years.
I couldn't take that, so I desperately hoped he would win… and he kept winning. Bloomberg was knocked out of the race almost immediately and proceeded to completely screw his staff, which was pretty disgusting to me because I had seriously considered joining the Bloomberg campaign for the money. It would have been a great help to many, many people in this extremely shitty time.
Then, Biden started winning. There was a lot of talk about noteworthy election irregularities and exit poll discrepancies above 4% but it wasn't enough to prove that the primaries were being rigged in his favor. I still don't know what to think. If the Iowa Caucus hadn't been very, very obviously unfairly decided I wouldn't have to wonder if the DNC would rig an election, but we live in a world where the Iowa Democratic Party refused to fix known bad math and fell back on the weak excuse that "it would be illegal" while the DNC allowed that decision to stand.
So Biden, the very obviously mentally ill candidate we had all written off as a loser, went on to become the frontrunner and Bernie dropped out early. It became clear at that point that Bernie's campaign had been pretty horrible and he essentially let his friend Joe win through sheer incompetence and cowardice. It felt pretty shitty to watch that happen but I couldn't blame Biden or the Democratic Party for it. I knew enough to be terrified for the future, though.
Fascist dictatorships tend to be the product of two things: an authoritarian strongman willing to lie and act as a false savior, and a deeply painful fall from grace that convinces a majority of the population to trust him. We're not quite there on either front, but COVID19 has ensured that the economic fall from grace most white Americans have suffered through over the last fifty years will come to a terrifying conclusion by the end of the decade. It's also led a lot of people to believe that Trump is too broken as a person to properly take the throne as a dictator, which I'm unsure of. I don't think he's going to stay in power long enough for us to find out, though.
Unfortunately, even if Biden wins he's not likely to do nearly enough about the rapidly increasing flood of poverty as the economic sand beneath our feet collapses. Then, in eight years when Trump's successor is elected, he would likely be the true end of American democracy, causing untold damage and destruction across the world in the process.
Of course, the country could fall apart in the next four years regardless under Trump, and there was no way I could sincerely believe that such a severely handicapped old man was guaranteed a win regardless. I decided to continue telling people to vote for him regardless and vowed that I would look for a way to immigrate to some other country within the next eight years, to protect my small family from the hell that the coming years would bring. Then the Tara Reade story hit.
The way the mainstream media handled it was truly shocking. They blatantly tried to bury the story in defense of Biden, inadvertently tossing most of the progressive movement into an emotional kiln while they gaslighted us with their silence for week after week, in stark abandonment of all of their loud and proud feminist principles. That was when I grew to hate Joe Biden. I hated him because the liberal media's blind defense of him came across as an admission of guilt. He was so guilty that the whole Democratic Party had to torch its principles to hide his obvious guilt. I guess in retrospect that doesn't make as much sense as I'd hoped, but when you're being gaslighted strange, harsh thoughts dart across your mind and the part of you that gives people the benefit of the doubt vanishes. It probably also didn't help that I was stuck at home doing nothing but staring at a screen out of fear that COVID19 would kill me or my loved ones, so I heard Tara describe her rape at least ten times across multiple interviews. It made the media's refusal to cover the story even more painful but I felt the rage was justified after all the disgusting garbage I'd seen over the last year's election cycle. Weeks passed. I stopped searching for stories on the rape allegation because I'd decided that it was no longer worth giving any of the media outlets that covered for Biden a chance. They were all in on one of the most disgusting conspiracies I'd ever witnessed, a conspiracy of silence to protect an outrageously weak presidential candidate.
Privately I told friends the following:
I don't know if I can vote for Joe Biden in November. If he gets elected he'll just further facilitate the Democratic Party's transformation into a more corrupt version of the Republican Party from ten years ago, and eight years of Biden is likely to drive Trump supporters to vote in someone even more extreme in 2028. …And that's not even mentioning the mountain of actual problems with him as a leader, or the fact that he's basically guaranteed to lose. Am I really supposed to be that asshole who voted in a braindead pedo/rapist after four years of complaining about Trump's failings in those areas? I was one of those people who, even though I never openly endorsed "vote blue no matter who" had internalized it and was never going to vote for anyone else because I didn't want to increase the chances of Trump being reelected even slightly. It makes me wonder how many more people Biden will alienate in the coming months.
I looked into third party candidates and found a graveyard of potential. In the end I decided that I would bite the bullet and vote for Biden, because there literally was no other choice.
In the last week a substantial amount of new evidence fell into my lap and the possibility that Biden would be forced to resign significantly increased. I couldn't allow myself to hope that Bernie would unsuspend his campaign because I knew the DNC would inevitably shoot him down… but literally anyone else would be better than Biden, a candidate so broken that he now used his wife as a crutch in every single post-COVID interview, often having her speak for him because he was unable to.
…And now, here we are. I present reasonable criticisms of the worst political candidate since Joe Exotic and watch as people blindly swat them away, calling obvious facts fascist conspiracy theories. You're acting exactly the same way every Trump supporter did when I quoted them chunks of the Muller Report, or laid out the case for impeachment, or Sharpiegate, or complained about all the ridiculous pardons, his blatantly obvious love of Putin, his disastrous COVID19 response and constant lies for weeks about how the whole thing was a Democratic lie, or literally anything he ever said on Twitter. Only instead of telling me I have Trump Derangement Syndrome, you say I'm a secret Trump supporter and all of my arguments are smears made in bad faith.
You quote me saying that it's Trump's race to lose as if it's some sort of masterful zinger that proves your point once and for all, when in reality it's incredibly obvious. You'd have to be stupid to believe that a candidate who can barely speak without a helping hand and a teleprompter had any chance of unseating an incumbent president that didn't rely entirely on said president's failures. It is literally Trump's race to lose because Biden is worthless as a candidate. Fifty five percent of his support is purely anti-Trump and not pro-Biden, and most of the remaining forty five percent only like him because they want Obama back. His only path to victory is if so many things go wrong in the coming months that a good percentage of Trump's cult abandon him. I can't imagine the logic leaps that led you to the conclusion that Biden was in any way someone we could pin our hopes on, and not the Democratic Party's first step down into a very dark grave. A grave that we will all lie in if he's allowed to fuck up the one job he was hired for but is totally incapable of actually doing.
…And when he fails Bernie supporters will be blamed for another four years.
I spent the last four hours writing this post and you're probably not going to read it because it's too long, but at least I feel a little better after writing it.
Someone is probably also going to shit on me again for telling it like I see it, but oh well.