YouTube Stuff

Link - James O'Keefe and Project Vertias: 10 Years of Truth 4 part video series

Link - Orange Man Indeed Bad: 100 Years of Trump

Link - The "Great Replacement" isn't real

Link - How "Cultural Marxism" became the Far-Right's Scapegoat

Link - An All ⭐ Left-Tube Salute To Cancel Culture!

Link - Freedom phone was a scam basically with the only intention of milking money from MAGA dumbass crowd rather than having anything to do with "big tech" or "censorship." Candace Owens promoted it and told people to buy it (using her 10% code that netted her $50 every time it was used) but she still uses an iPhone - her tweets say "Twitter for iPhone." The phone itself was even made in China and is just a knock off of an existing phone at a higher price point, God how stupid are the people buying this? It was nothing more than an opportunity for the Candace Owenses of the world to capitalize off how stupid the MAGA crowd is and make money off them by selling them bullshit they themselves don't even use.

Other

Link - George Carlin talks about how he is put off by marginalized groups being the butt of jokes and how most people who like them (or the people who these jokes appeal to) are insecure men who feel threatened by such groups - women, gay people, etc...

Link - Dave Rubin complains that he can't watch Bette Midler again because she called him a "chump" on Twitter. A person getting upset that they were called a name over the internet and now can't consume certain media? How fragile.

Link - Trump supporters crying (mainly Tik Toks) thread. Here is a link to another supporter crying regarding Biden's election. Here is a link to a parent making her child cry.

Link - Trump forgets the name of the White House, calls it a "building."

Tweet - PragerU defends slavery, stating statues of Confederate general Robert E. Lee stand because he crushed slave rebellions. Video. UPDATE - PragerU deleted the video but it is preserved here.

Link - "Gun girl" Kaitlin Bennett goes to college campus to harass students, acts like a victim when students turn the tables on her, chanting "shit your pants."

Link - Fragile Steven Crowder harasses black man, accuses him of being racist because he insulted his haircut, and then calls police.

Link - Candace Owens argues against free speech and attacks freedom of expression, saying men can't express themselves in a certain way because they just aren't allowed to.

Link - "Wake up call" for Republicans - not everyone who votes for a presidential candidate has the same psychotic need to let other people know they support them like Trump supporters do.

Link - Proud Boys vandalize a church.

Link - Televangelist Pat Robertson says the election is over, that Biden is president, that Trump "lives in an alternate reality," "is very erratic," and should not run again in 2024.

Link - Media outlet OAN tells viewers to stop listening to the media.

Link - Emotional dude calls into Rush Limbaugh's show in tears because no Republicans showed up to an event he attended (I guess that hurts his feelings) and says he's willing to die for Trump.

Link - Kayleigh McEnany claims that there was no peaceful transition of power for Trump in 2016, video then cuts to Trump thanking the Obamas for a peaceful transition of power in 2016. Another link to a different video with no subtitles or text.

Link - Trump claims he and his supporters are "victims." I guess he and the MAGA idiots have the victim complex now?

Tweet - Epic Superman thing from the 50s about how talking badly of someone for their race, religion, or national origin is un America. DC Comics has confirmed this is a real thing.

Tweet - Conservative running for Congress tells others to assault Democrats.

Tweet - Conservatives state that they don't think everyone should be able to vote.

Tweet - Conservatives get triggered over a drop down menu asking a person's gender on new White House website.

Tweet - Candace Owens says .com websites exists only to make money. She has a .com website.

Tweet - Nick Fuentes deleted a tweet calling Martin Luther King Junior Day a "rapist anti white piece of shit day."

Tweet - Charlie Kirk claims if you are an American you are not oppressed. Later Tweets that Conservatives are being oppressed on college campuses.

Tweet - Josh Hawley promotes a book that is anti-big tech... with a link to Amazon (big tech) on Twitter (big tech) which he tweeted from an iPhone (big tech).

Tweet - PragerU tweets that all the freedom we'll ever need are in America's founding documents. Evidently they don't consider the abolishment of slavery, due process, voting rights for women and minorities, and other things as necessary.

Tweet - MAGA idiot claims courts don't decide who the president is, "we the people do," despite the fact that Trump and his allies are trying to use the courts to decide who the president is. If it's people who decide who the president is then why is Trump using the courts? Hmmm.... curious.

Tweet - MAGA idiots initially like Amy Coney Barret, then don't like her after Supreme Court rejects Trump and Texas' lawsuit to overturn election results.

Tweet - Ian Miles Chong lies about a video, Tweets "yeah I lied to make a point."

Tweet - Ian Miles Chong says he thinks media is the enemy of the people (Tweeting this, he is using media) and journalists are activists or propogandists juxtaposed with Tweets of his in which he has lied or misrepresented a situation, doing the very same thing he thinks is the enemy of the people.

Tweet - Ian Miles Chong quote tweets a Tweet, then calls someone quote tweeting his tweet "targeted harassment" as if he wasn't doing the same thing.

Tweet - Steven Crowder dressed as a woman. Here he is again in a racist Asian cosplay.

Tweet - The Quartering likes a tweet quoting Hitler.

Tweet - Dumbass Josh Hawley claims he was harassed by "Antifa," but video shows a few people holding a candle lit vigil and talking with a bullhorn, and police say they were peaceful. Apparently it was not that big of a deal and there were no arrests made.

Tweet - PragerU defends slavery, stating statues of Confederate general Robert E. Lee stand because he crushed slave rebellions. Video. UPDATE - PragerU deleted the video but it is preserved here.

"Fact-checking wasn't a thing until the truth started getting out" - Politifact was established in 2007 and FactCheck.org was established in 2003, so I guess George W. Bush and Obama are the sources of all truth?

Liberals and leftists get fact-checked too

As you'll see below in Figure 23, tweets claiming that Democratic politicians had won an election prior to the results actually being finalized and announced were given the same disclaimer as the tweets about Trump's loss in the presidential election. As you'll see in Figure 24 when you try and copy the link to the tweet or sent it through direct messaging you also get a warning about it. The tweet, still with the disclaimer as of July 4th, 2021, can be viewed here.

Fact-checkers and fact-checking websites will also rate stuff Joe Biden says as false if it's not true. You can see this below in Figure 25 which comes from this Washington Post article. Snopes will even fact-check embarrassing things or gaffes that Biden has made - like calling Putin president Trump - and rate them as true. Another popular fact-checking website, Politifact, ranks 17% of Biden's statements as "false" and only 12% as "true" as of July 4th, 2021. See this below in Figure 26. You can comb through all the false rankings here. If the concept of fact-checking things is liberal bullshit or whatever then why are these fact-checking agencies confirming embarrassing stuff about Biden to be true and rating erroneous claims he has made as false? Wouldn't it be the opposite?

Furthermore, if fact-checking is liberal bullshit then wouldn't all fact checks serve to support liberal ideas and theories? Take the idea that Kyle Rittenhouse had his mom drive him to the Kenosha riot and give him a weapon that some on the left seem to believe. PolitiFact, the AP News, and FactCheck.org all dispel this notion.

It is worth mentioning that conservatives do get "censored" or fact-checked more than liberals but that is likely because conservatives will say dumb, erroneous, shit lacking context or shit that violates a platform's terms of service (they're not gonna "conform" to the rules of using Twitter and think a private company enforcing it's own rules and regulations as to the type of content it allows its users to post, which they must agree to prior to using the service, violates the First Amendment) more often than liberals.

If someone is getting mad about the idea that statements should be, or are being, examined to determine their accuracy then they are kind of telling on themselves, as only someone who knows what they are saying is flawed and won't hold up against scrutiny should be taking issue with "fact-checking." I theorize that conservatives are so opposed to the idea of checking to see if a statement is factually accurate because many of the arguments and reasoning behind their beliefs are emotionally driven and not fact-driven. For example, a leftist could use the data found under the "Racial Bias in the Legal System and Law Enforcement System" on the BLM page to argue that black people are treated worse than white people in the legal and law enforcement system but conservatives would counter with an emotional appeal about black people behaving worse or that their culture is more violent and worse because rap music.

Here's another example of conservatives making emotionally driven arguments: Someone will express a leftist belief that conservatives don't like and they'll invent new words and phrases that act as insults to describe why it's bad ("virtue signaling") or why the person expressing them is not to be believed ("woke," "social justice warrior") rather than actually giving factual or logical reasons why the belief itself is bad or wrong. Conservatives seem to rely a lot on name-calling and ad hominems when trying to refute something they don't like or agree with.

Study from the Social Psychological and Personality Science Journal - "Attitudes Toward Presidential Candidates in the 2012 and 2016 American Elections: Cognitive Ability and Support for Trump"

• This study used data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) to investigate whatever relationship or connection there may be between cognitive ability and attitudes towards candidates in the 2012 and 2016 US presidential election, ultimately finding that "analyses revealed the nature of support for Trump, including that support for Trump was better predicted by lower verbal ability than education or income." The study used the Wordsum vocabulary test to asses cognitive ability and skill.

  • The 2016 study "included 4,271 participants, of which 1181 were interviewed face to face and 3090 answered an online survey," and were random samples.

• There was a strong negative relationship between verbal ability and support for the Republican candidates, with Trump having a stronger negative relationship than Romney: "Verbal ability was associated negatively with support for the Republican candidate in both elections. However, its association with support for Trump was stronger than its association with support for Romney"

  • Negative relationship here meaning that as support for Trump increases, verbal ability decreases.

  • The study also identifies that there is generally a strong negative relationship between verbal ability and the Republican party but Trump was a special case, as his negative relationship with verbal ability persisted even after controlling for party affiliation: "the negative association between verbal ability and support for Romney is largely due to the negative association between verbal ability and support for the Republican Party: When party affiliation is controlled, the negative association between verbal ability and support for Romney, but not for Trump, disappears."

    • "For Trump, there was a negative association between verbal ability and attitude. For the other three candidates, the association with verbal ability was either positive (for Obama and Clinton) or negligible (for Romney)."

• Also associated negatively for Trump? - education.

  • "Education was associated negatively with support for Trump, but not for Romney."

• Overall, the study concludes that "We believe that the present work suggests that cognitive ability may be a most basic explanatory variable underlying the apparent effects of socioeconomic variables on support for Trump." It also recognizes that certain left-wing and right-wing attitudes which are associated with higher cognitive ability are a "sharp contrast" to Trump's platform.

Study/Article from the New Political Science Journal - "The Cognitive and Emotional Sources of Trump Support: The Case of Low-Information Voters"

• This article opens with this statement: "This article provides empirical evidence for the hypothesis that Donald Trump distinctively attracted unprecedented levels of support from 'low-information voters.' The findings suggest that his campaign exploited a void of facts and reasoning among these voters that made them more vulnerable to relying on emotions, fear, anxiety, hate and rage, about Mexican immigrants, Muslims refugees, African American citizens and their disdain for the first African-American president Barack Obama."

• The data this article analyzes comes from the American National Election Studies 2016 Pilot Study.

• The article identifies that Trump voters "were more vulnerable to responding to emotional appeals that exploited their fears and anxieties"

• Even more so than Mitt Romney in 2012, Trump was able to attract a large number of low-information voters who were swayed by emotional appeals: "among whites something distinctive happened in 2016--low-information white voters had come to be disproportionately concentrated in the Trump constituency. In fact, the findings suggest that Trump was able to draw low-information white voters away from Clinton by using emotional appeals to people’s racial and ethnic anxieties, making his reliance on these voters much greater than 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney."

• After analyzing specific data from a January 2016 American National Election Study Pilot Survey, the article found evidence that "Trump’s overwhelming white support was comprised disproportionately of low-information voters, whose lack of basic facts about politics (and also lack of interest thinking about ideas more generally) made them vulnerable to relying more on their emotional fears and resentments about immigrants, Muslims, and blacks (but not their anxieties about the economy)."

• "Low levels of political knowledge may well be associated with disinterest in relying on ideas and critical thinking skills to process reasons for deciding to support a candidate." This means that many Trump supporters who have a low level of political knowledge (as seen in Figure 4) may lack critical thinking skills and are more open to emotional appeals.

  • "A lack of political knowledge and a de-emphasis on cognitive processing create an opening for emotions to predominate in the decision-making process."

  • It can't get any clearer than this: "it is distinctly possible that Trump attracted a relatively high number of low-information white voters compared to his opponent Hillary Clinton and his predecessor as the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney. Further, it is likely that these low-information voters had a low Need for Cognition, and that given their lack of information and low levels of reliance on cognitive processing, these voters relied more on emotions in their vote decision, making them more vulnerable to acting on the basis of fears and anxieties regarding Mexican immigrants, Muslim refugees, African Americans, and even President Obama. And with emotions replacing facts and reasoning, this base of supporters for Trump may well have been more willing to ignore his deficiencies as a candidate and find themselves vulnerable to not being able to challenge his consistent misstatements, untruths and outright lies."

• Trump attracted more low information voters with who engage little in activities which require thinking than Mitt Romney: "not only have low information voters decidedly favored Trump in 2016, this appears to be a phenomenon that is unique to the 2016 election, and not based on a general tendency of low information voters to support the Republican nominee. Compared to Romney, who was arguably a more conventional Republican candidate, Trump has attracted significantly more support from low-information voters."

• The article finds that people who were less likely to engage in and enjoy activities that require thinking (a need for cognition - NFC) and a low level of political knowledge had "relatively 'warmer' feelings toward Trump, compared to those with higher levels of NFC and political knowledge."

  • "as we move to those with low NFC and political knowledge, a clear preference for Trump emerges."

• In regard to the charts referenced below:

  • Figure 3 displays how voters with lower NFC (people who engage in activities which require thinking) are much more likely to favor Trump over his 2016 candidate Hillary Clinton.

  • Figure 4 shows how voters with less political knowledge (answered two questions regarding US policies wrong) were more likely to favor Trump over Clinton.

Study from the American Politics Research Journal - "The Dynamics and Political Implications of Anti-Intellectualism in the United States"

• Studies the political implications of anti-intellectualism using "cross-sectional General Social Survey (GSS) data and a national election panel in 2016," and ultimately finds that it is associated with "the rejection of policy-relevant matters of scientific consensus" and support for politicians like Donald Trump.

• The study identifies that the trend of anti-intellectualism is growing and quite prominent on the right: "while anti-intellectualism may seem like it has been a unique feature of Donald Trump’s rhetoric in the 2016 campaign, recent research suggests that anti-intellectual attitude endorsement has been growing in the mass public for decades, especially on the ideological right."

  • "Unsurprisingly, at the individual level, conservatism has been shown to be a strong predictor of distrust toward scientists and experts. Relatedly, conservatism has also been shown to be associated with skepticism about the research experts produce even on issues where consensus does not contradict or even supports conventional conservative values and political opinions (e.g., the mass production of genetically engineered food)."

• Conservatives have cognitive styles which are not as diligent or detail oriented when compared to liberals: "conservatives tend to hold cognitive styles associated with less scrupulous information processing than liberals."

• In one of the models used in this study it was determined that anti-intellectualism was associated with an increase in support for Trump: "anti-intellectualism boosted positive affect toward Trump in the multivariate models, relative to Clinton, by 5% in the July wave of the CSPP Study, 9% in the September wave, and 8% in the October wave."

• Trump's campaign for president in 2016 was, at least initially, shaped by anti-intellectualism.

  • "the effect of anti-intellectualism might best be thought about as initially shaping support for Trump, which is then highly stable over time."

Research from Cambridge University - "The cognitive and perceptual correlates of ideological attitudes: a data-driven approach"

• This research aimed to investigate and evaluate whether cognitive disposition sculpts worldview and did this by exposing more than 330 US-based participants aged 22 to 63 who were to a slew of tests – 37 neuropsychological tasks and 22 personality surveys – over the course of two weeks. Their findings? - "Conservatism and nationalism were related to greater caution in perceptual decision-making tasks and to reduced strategic information processing, while dogmatism was associated with slower evidence accumulation and impulsive tendencies." Essentially, the further right someone is the more they suck at these mental tasks.

  • Furthermore, "Extreme pro-group attitudes, including violence endorsement against outgroups, were linked to poorer working memory, slower perceptual strategies, and tendencies towards impulsivity and sensation-seeking—reflecting overlaps with the psychological profiles of conservatism and dogmatism."

    • The research re-iterates this point later, stating "Interestingly, the psychological profile of individuals who endorsed extreme pro-group actions, such as ideologically motivated violence against outgroups, was a mix of the political conservatism signature and the dogmatism signature."

  • "these findings suggest that ideological worldviews may be reflective of low-level perceptual and cognitive functions," essentially saying that the Conservative worldview may be reflective of low cognitive and low perceptual functions.

• Specific excerpts on conservatism being associated with low cognitive function:

  • "Political conservatism was best explained by reduced strategic information processing, heightened response caution in perceptual decision-making paradigms, and an aversion to social risk-taking."

  • "the finding that political and nationalistic conservatism is associated with reduced strategic information processing (reflecting variables associated with working memory capacity, planning, cognitive flexibility and other higher-order strategies) is consistent with a large body of literature indicating that right-wing ideologies are frequently associated with reduced analytical thinking and cognitive flexibility."

  • The research draws similarities between conservatism and religiosity, stating that "The psychological signature of religiosity consisted of heightened caution and reduced strategic information processing in the cognitive domain (similarly to conservatism)"

• The Guardian published an article about this with the title "People with extremist views less able to do complex mental tasks, research suggests" which wrongly attributes the findings of the research to "extremist views" rather than conservatism but even in the article the authors of the research state that "the 'psychological signature' for extremism across the board was a blend of conservative and dogmatic psychologies" when interviewed for the article.

Research from the Psychological Science Journal - "Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes: Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact"

• Please note that I link to the full text on SciHub, as Sage Journals offers no free access to the full text.

• Ultimately the study finds that low intelligence in childhood "predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology" based on large scale data sets from the United Kingdom and a US data set "confirmed a predictive effect of poor abstract-reasoning skills on antihomosexual prejudice, a relation partially mediated by both authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact." Essentially, racism/prejudice and some aspects of conservatism are liked to low cognitive ability and there is a correlation between the right-wing and prejudice. The study also notes that it controlled for education and socioeconomic status.

• The authors state "We propose that right-wing ideologies, which are socially conservative and authoritarian represent a mechanism through which cognitive ability is linked with prejudice."

• The study finds that "individuals with lower cognitive abilities may gravitate toward more socially conservative right-wing ideologies that maintain the status quo and provide psychological stability and a sense of order" and state that their findings are "consistent with findings that less intelligent children come to endorse more socially conservative ideologies as adults."

• The study uses g as a synonym for general intelligence and finds that links between low g (low general intelligence) and right-wing ideology: "Together, the well-established theoretical and empirical links between lower g and greater right-wing ideology and between greater right-wing ideology and heightened prejudice suggest a mediating mechanism by which lower g may be associated with greater prejudice." The study proposes a mode in which lower g (general intelligence) predicts greater right-wing ideology, which then predicts more prejudice attitudes (Figure 5).

  • Ultimately, "individuals with lower cognitive ability may be more attracted to right-wing ideologies that promote coherence and order, and because such ideologies emphasize the maintenance of the status quo, they may foster greater outgroup prejudice."

  • Also: "a review of the literature reveals meta-analytic evidence supporting a relation between lower g and greater endorsement of right-wing ideologies"

• In the data sample from the US, the authors note that "Lower levels of abstract reasoning also predicted greater right-wing authoritarianism, which in turn predicted elevated prejudice against homosexual." That is to say a person with limited or little ability to quickly reason with information to solve new, unfamiliar problems (that is what abstract reasoning is) was more likely to be attracted or apart of the right-wing. Conversely, "Individuals who had a greater capacity for abstract reasoning experienced more contact with out-groups, and more contact predicted less prejudice."

One of the most obviously ways in which conservatives display this low cognitive ability is through their reliance on name calling as criticism. All too often you'll see conservatives attempt to "criticize" an ideology by calling it "woke" or a product of "wokeism" or criticize a person by calling them a "social justice warrior" or "woke." The "criticism" ends there - they don't engage with the ideology or arguments presented, nor do they bring up any facts, data, or logic to show why the ideology or person is wrong/bad. It simply is wrong/bad because it's "woke" or the person is a "social justice warrior." Imagine you make a claim like "Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback of all time" and you get two responses from people that disagree: one person just says "that's stupid" while the other responds by saying "I disagree. Brady benefitted from having one of the greatest coaches ever, a consistently great defense, and had some pretty lucky calls in his career. Peyton Manning has more MVPS, some of the greatest statistical seasons by a quarterback in NFL history, and almost always had a subpar defense but still managed to make it to four Super Bowls with four different head coaches." The second is obviously more convincing while the first person can't even articulate why they disagree and may not even know why they disagree past a knee jerk reaction. The only people the first response would be convincing to would be those that already have some bias against Tom Brady or already think Brady is not the best QB of all time. It's just preaching to the choired. Name calling - saying something is "woke" or stupid - is what someone does when they disagree with something but have little to no facts or logic to disprove it. Conservatives may also resort to this because name calling is an appeal to emotion - ethos - rather than an appeal to facts and logic - logos - and it's been established that some Trump voters were swayed more by appeals to emotion than logic. This leads me to believe that conservatives are just making words/insults up to hide the fact that they have little to no facts or logic to support their beliefs or refute leftist beliefs. It is worth mentioning that leftists can engage in this too, calling things they disagree with racist, homophobic, or transphobic but there is a difference: terms like racist, homophobic, and transphobic have been in the vernacular for a while and all have specific and firm definitions while terms like "woke," "wokeism," or "social justice warrior" are all words that have been made up in the past five or six years with vague definitions.

Racism/racial resentment stuff

Research Article from the American Political Science Association - Why Did Women Vote for Donald Trump?

• This article finds that, while party affiliation was a important predictor of men's and women's vote, sexism and racial resentment had a much larger impact on voters and the influence was about the same for men and women.

  • In regard to Trump voters, "female voters, like their male counterparts, were most powerfully influenced by the degree to which they held racially resentful and sexist attitudes. Thus, the women who voted for Trump did so largely because they were not the equality-minded individuals emphasized in the gender-gap literature."

  • "The results clearly show that racial bias and sexism had virtually identical influences on male and female voters."

• While it draws from previous research, this article also uses the American National Election Study (AENS) like much of the other research it cites and research cited on this website.

• Through their analysis the authors identify that "Men who voted for Trump had significantly higher mean authoritarianism, racism, and sexism scores than men who voted for other candidates," and "Similar gaps existed among women"

  • Additionally: "Trump voters held significantly more anti-egalitarian attitudes than non-Trump voters." Egalitarian meaning "relating to or believing in the principle that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities."

• Those who voted for Trump are more likely to have sexist and racial racially resentful attitudes that voters for any other candidate: "Women who supported Trump, for example, were more Republican than those who did not. However, and more important, they held sexist and racially resentful attitudes more similar to males supporting Trump than to their female counterparts supporting other candidates."

• In their analysis the authors found that "Females with the highest levels of racial resentment were more than four times as likely (i.e., 68% versus 16%) to support Trump than those with the lowest levels of racial animosity."

  • Much like previous research this article finds that prejudice was a better predictor of support for Trump than partisanship: "Moreover, there is no evidence to suggest that Trump’s female supporters voted for him primarily because of partisanship rather than prejudice."

• Regarding support for Trump the aforementioned racial resentment and sexism are vastly more important than demographics like age, class, college education, and sex, which were not statistically significant. So when predicting support for Trump most demographics are statistically insignificant, with things like sexism and high levels of racial resentment being better indicators. This reinforces the ideas of other research which finds that attitudes were better indicators of support than demographics.

  • "Despite the prevailing narrative about Trump’s electoral base composed of older, working-class, not-college-educated men, none of these demographic indicators—including gender—attained statistical significance in the full model."

• Ultimately the article concludes that "it appears that attitudes hostile to gender and racial equality were more decisive motivators of vote choice in 2016," and "our analyses instead show that the women and men who supported Trump were strikingly similar with respect to the role of prejudice in determining their vote choice."

Research article from the Political Science Quarterly journal - "Understanding White Polarization in the 2016 Vote for President: The Sobering Role of Racism and Sexism"

• Please note that I cite the full text on SciHub, as the publisher does not offer a free version of the full text.

• The article touches on some things we already know: Trump attracted a large portion of non educated whites with racism and/or sexism which was effective considering the presence of an African American president (Obama) and the first major-party female nominee (Hillary Clinton).

  • "A second explanation is that Trump’s willingness to make explicitly racist and sexist appeals during the campaign, coupled with the presence of an African American president and the first major-party female nominee, made racism and sexism a dividing line in the vote in this election. This led less educated whites, who tend to exhibit higher levels of sexism and racism, to support Trump, while more educated whites were more supportive of Clinton."

  • "there is reason to think that Trump’s strategy of using explicitly racist and sexist appeals to win over white voters may be followed by candidates in future elections."

  • "Explicit racist and sexist appeals appeared to cost Trump some votes from more educated whites, but it may have won him even more support among whites with less education."

  • This was the biggest polarization between college educated and non college educated whites for a Republican candidate going back to 1980 and it's the largest gap since 1964 (as seen below in Figure 20).

• Using two national surveys from the 2016 election the article finds "that while economic considerations were an important part of the story, racial attitudes and sexism were much more strongly related to support for Trump; these attitudes explain at least two-thirds of the education gap among white voters in the 2016 presidential election."

• Support for Trump was better predicted by sexism and denial of racism than economic factors: "While the economic variables in our models were significantly associated with vote choice, those effects were dwarfed by the relationship between hostile sexism and denial of racism and voting for Trump."

  • Essentially, the more sexist or racist/racially resentful/dumb a person is the more likely they would support Trump.

  • "these effects hold even when we control for other related concepts, such as authoritarianism, populism, and stereotyping toward racial and ethnic minorities."

• After their analysis of the two national surveys the authors conclude that "The 2016 campaign witnessed a dramatic polarization in the vote choices of whites based on education. In this article, we have demonstrated that very little of this gap can be explained by the economic difficulties faced by less educated whites. Rather, most of the divide appears to be associated with sexism and denial of racism, especially among whites without college degrees."

Other stuff

Article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America - "Ethnic antagonism erodes Republicans’ commitment to democracy"

• This article, written by Vanderbilt University political scientist Larry Bartels, suggests that Republicans value whiteness over democracy. Note here that "democratic" is not used to denote the Democratic party, but democracy and the policies and ideals that align with it.

• In the abstract, the article states that "The corrosive impact of ethnic antagonism on Republicans’ commitment to democracy underlines the significance of ethnic conflict in contemporary US politics." In layman's terms, ethnic antagonism - Republican's feelings towards nonwhites like immigrants, Latino individuals, and black individuals - makes Republicans hold more antidemocratic beliefs.

  • The author notes that they measure ethnic antagonism by "incorporating not only unfavorable feelings toward Muslims, immigrants, and other out-groups, but also—and especially—concerns about these groups’ political and social claims." Essentially ethnic antagonism means racial resentment.

• This article analyses the "responses of 1,151 Republican identifiers and Republican-leaning Independents interviewed in January 2020 to survey items contemplating transgressions of a variety of essential democratic principles, including the rejection of violence in pursuit of political ends and respect for the rule of law and the outcomes of elections" and found that many respondents endorse undemocratic positions.

• In it's analysis the article finds that "in every case the factor most strongly associated with support for antidemocratic sentiments is ethnic antagonism," and the "results suggest that ethnic antagonism has a substantial negative effect on Republicans’ commitment to democracy."

• The article notes a strong association between ethnic antagonism and antidemocratic attitudes. In every Republican subgroup analyzed - men, women, people with and without college educations, people in cities, people in rural areas, those with more favorable views of Trump, those with less favorable views of Trump, those with more favorable views of Fox News, those with less favorable views of Fox News, those with more favorable views of the National Rifle Association, those with less favorable views of the NRA - ethnic antagonism is strongly related to antidemocratic attitudes, even after statistically controlling for other factors.

  • "Nor is the strong association between ethnic antagonism and antidemocratic attitudes limited to specific segments of the Republican rank-and-file."

  • "Some of the parameter estimates are significantly larger for men, people with college education, and (especially) those most favorable toward the NRA. However, in every subgroup ethnic antagonism is strongly related to antidemocratic attitudes, even after statistically controlling for other factors."

• In the discussion section of the article, the author notes that antidemocratic attitudes are most likely associated, or primarily attributed, to ethnic antagonism: "The support expressed by many Republicans for violations of a variety of crucial democratic norms is primarily attributable not to partisan affect, enthusiasm for President Trump, political cynicism, economic conservatism, or general cultural conservatism, but to what I have termed ethnic antagonism."

• Ethnic antagonism is hardly as pronounced in Democrats: "The powerful effects of ethnic antagonism on Republicans’ antidemocratic attitudes underscore the extent to which this particular threat to democratic values is concentrated in the contemporary Republican Party. Seventy-eight percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independents in the 2020 survey had ethnic antagonism scores below the fifth percentile of the Republican distribution (−1.43), while 98% had scores below the Republican average."

  • "In this respect, among others, the attitudes of Republicans and Democrats are sharply polarized."

• Essentially, the more likely a Republican is to see immigration, or darker skinned people in general, as a threat to the "traditional American way of life" the more likely they are to threaten that tradition American way of life themselves by holding antidemocratic attitudes.

  • "The relationship reported here between ethnic antagonism and expressions of support for violations of key democratic norms suggests that the effects of millions of White Americans’ concerns regarding the prospect of demographic, social, and political change may not be limited to the electoral sphere."

  • "it is not fanciful to suppose that expressive support for bending the rules or resorting to force to protect one’s 'way of life' is consequential for actual behavior—or that it could become even more consequential under inflammatory circumstances"

Research from the Group Process and Intergroup Relations journal - "The threat of increasing diversity: Why many White Americans support Trump in the 2016 presidential election"

• The abstract states things pretty clearly: "This experiment demonstrates that the changing racial demographics of America contribute to Trump’s success as a presidential candidate among White Americans whose race/ethnicity is central to their identity. Reminding White Americans high in ethnic identification that non-White racial groups will outnumber Whites in the United States by 2042 caused them to become more concerned about the declining status and influence of White Americans as a group (i.e., experience group status threat), and caused them to report increased support for Trump and anti-immigrant policies, as well as greater opposition to political correctness."

• The researchers set out to test what effect reminding white Americans about diversity has on them - " the current study tested experimentally whether reminding White Americans of the increasing racial diversity in the US: (a) affects their political preferences in the U.S. presidential elections, (b) whether it does so by increasing group status threat, and (c) whether ethnic identification and/or political party affiliation moderates these effects" - using data collected from a survey.

• The researchers found that "Whites high in ethnic identification reported marginally greater positivity towards Trump and a significantly greater likelihood of voting for Trump," and participants who read a press release which indicated that racial minorities will outnumber non-Hispanic Whites in the US by 2042 instead of one which just talked about geographic mobility had "increased group status threat, support for Trump, and support for anti-immigrant policies, and somewhat (but not significantly) decreased support for Sanders, but only among Whites high in ethnic identification."

• The research touches on how whites seem to view racism as a zero-sum game: "Many White Americans in the US view race relations as 'zero-sum,' in which status gains for minorities means status loss for Whites and less bias against minorities means more bias against Whites. The belief that Whites are losing out to ethnic minorities is particularly prevalent among Trump supporters." Essentially, some white people are scared that they will become a minority in America and because of their views on racism then believe that society will treat them much worse simply because they are in the minority so they'll endorse more conservative political views and show greater fear/anger towards minority groups, among other things. Damn these mfs are obsessed with race.

Research Article from the Association of Critical Psychology - The Anger Games: Who Voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 Election, and Why?

• Please note that I cite the full text on SciHub, as the publisher does not offer a free version of the full text.

• The article uses data from the 2016 American Election National Study (AENS) to create a "multifaceted" profile of the white individuals who voted for Donald Trump in 2016. They article ultimately finds that Trump voters "voted for him mainly because they share his prejudices, not because they’re financially stressed." Essentially, a sharing Trump's prejudices was one the best, if not the best, predictor of support for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. An intolerant attitude is a better predictor of support for Trump than any demographic like class, age, education, sex, or financial situation: "The larger story of the 2016 election is that attitudes came to the fore and eclipsed demographics."

• In their analysis of the 2016 AENS data the authors note that prejudice was "highly predictive" of support for Trump. They also find that authoritarianism, defined as taking aim at despised groups and "support for intolerant leaders, because they are intolerant," was strongly associated with support for Trump.

  • Sharing Trump's prejudices was a better predictor of support for him than class background, age, financial situation, sex, or education level: "Trump’s white base is more readily found among voters who want domineering and intolerant leaders than among voters of any particular class background. Whether rich or poor, young or old, male or female, college or non-college educated, white voters supported Trump in 2016 when they shared his prejudices, and very seldom otherwise."

  • More on how attitudes and prejudice(s) were great predictors of support for Trump: "The decisive reason that white, male, older and less educated voters were disproportionately pro-Trump is that they shared his prejudices and wanted domineering, aggressive leaders more often than other voters did. Why these prejudices and preferences are unevenly distributed remains to be explained. But what we know now is that these attitudes are found across the demographic spectrum, and that wherever they appear, they prompt support for Donald Trump."

• The article references a study which found that 72% of Trump supporters agreed with the following statement: "Because things have gotten so far off track in this country, we need a leader who is willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set things right." So much for the party of law and order.

• As previous research has shown, Trump's base is uneducated and through their analysis the authors find that "Less educated voters show more negativity toward every stigmatized group at every percentile," particularly women and minorities. So essentially, less educated voters, who are more likely to be voters who are pro-Trump, have negative attitudes towards women and minorities.

• These eight attitudes best predicted support for Trump: support for domineering leaders; fundamentalism; prejudice against immigrants, African Americans, Muslims, and women and pessimism about the economy.

  • "Overall, what we see is that a spectrum of attitudes inspired pro-Trump voting, and that many of these attitudes are particularly common among older, less educated, and male voters."

Research Article from Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology - "Authoritarianism, Outgroup Threat, and Support for Antidemocratic Policies"

• In the abstract, the article states that, through the author's research and data analysis, "those higher in authoritarianism were more conservative, more Republican, more likely to support Trump, and more likely to perceive Mexicans and Muslims as threatening. In addition, we found that those high in authoritarianism and outgroup threat perception were more likely to support antidemocratic policies targeting outgroups (such as implementing a Muslim registry and profiling Mexicans) and to abandon the rule of law by postponing elections and fast-tracking the deportation of illegal immigrants."

  • A definition of authoritarianism can include enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom. The authors define it as "an ideology that favors conformity, deference to authority, and conventional values—as well as supports harsh punishment for those who violate ingroup norms and authorities." The authors also note that "authoritarians tend to support antidemocratic policies such as restrictions on civil liberties and the targeting of 'non-conforming' minorities."

    • "In short, those high in authoritarianism are less supportive of democratic norms and are more likely to perceive outgroups as threatening."

    • "authoritarianism reliably correlates with perceptions of outgroups as threatening and predicts prejudice, political intolerance, and antidemocratic tendencies."

  • Essentially, conservatives, Republicans, and those who support Trump are very likely to have political intolerance, antidemocratic attitudes, advocate for losses of personal freedoms due to their fear of an others.

• In the abstract the authors also note that "while perceptions of outgroup threat explain more unique variance for implicitly antidemocratic policies (those where the public might not realize that the policies violated democratic norms), authoritarianism explained more unique variance in support of more explicitly antidemocratic policies (those where the public knew the policies were unconstitutional." So, since it was just established that those who are conservative, Republican, and support Trump are very likely to support Trump, this means that many conservatives, Republicans, and Trump supporters support explicitly antidemocratic policies that infringe on personal freedoms.

• As examples of some of Trump's authoritarianism, the article notes his previous comments on Muslims - "during the campaign Trump suggested that the U.S. government should implement surveillance of U.S. mosques, should ban Muslim immigration, and should implement a Muslim registry" - and Mexicans - "he launched his presidential campaign by implying that many Mexican immigrants were drug dealers, criminals, and rapists."

  • The article goes on to suggest that those who support Trump "may be receptive to implementing policies that violate democratic norms by targeting outgroups based on their ethnic or religious identity." Basically the same thing as stated above in the abstract: that many conservatives, Republicans, and Trump supporters support explicitly antidemocratic policies that infringe on personal freedoms.

• To reach their conclusions, the authors analyzed answers from two surveys, one which was conducted in late 2015 through early 2016 (comprised of mostly white men and participants were roughly equally Democrat or Republican) and another which was conducted from late 2017 through early 2018 (comprised mostly white women and participants were about equally liberal and conservative).

• Through their analysis, the authors conclude that measures of authoritarianism are positively correlated with Republicans and conservatives. In all of the regression models, authoritarianism was a significant predictor of support for implicitly and explicitly antidemocratic policies.

  • "In all regression models, both authoritarianism and threat perceptions were significant, unique predictors of support for implicitly antidemocratic policies."

  • "In every regression, authoritarianism and perceptions of threat were significant, unique predictors of a willingness to support explicitly antidemocratic policies that challenge the rule of law."

• The article finds that aggression and conventionalism are "significant unique predictors" of support for antidemocratic policies. The article also notes that conservatives and Republicans are more likely to be higher in aggression and conventionalism.

  • "when regressing on support for a variety of implicitly and explicitly antidemocratic policies, aggression and conventionalism consistently emerged as significant unique predictors"

  • "These same two components of authoritarianism were also the primary contributors for ideology and partisanship, with those higher in aggression and conventionalism being more likely to self-identify as conservative and Republican."

  • "Furthermore, both aggression and conventionalism are significant contributors to political affiliations as a conservative and as a Republican."

  • So essentially Republicans and conservatives are more likely to be high in aggression and conventionalism, thus making them more likely to support antidemocratic policies.

• Overall, the results of the analysis show that conservatives and Republicans are more likely to be authoritarian.

  • "Our results show that ideology and partisanship are moderately correlated with authoritarianism, with those who are more conservative and more strongly Republican more likely to be higher in authoritarianism." Those who are high in authoritarianism are also more likely to support antidemocratic policies: "we find that those high in authoritarianism are more likely to support policies that restrict the rights of outgroup members or that accept an infringement on the rule of law in the face of perceived outgroup threat."

    • "Support for these more explicitly antidemocratic hypothetical policies involving violations of the rule of law draws more on authoritarianism beliefs than on outgroup threat."

  • Additionally, the results show that conservatives and Republicans are more likely to find Muslims and Mexicans threatening: "We have also shown that perceptions of outgroups as threatening are strongly related with political affiliations. That is, conservatives and Republicans are more likely to perceive Muslims and Mexicans as threatening."

Research from the Sociology of Religion Journal - "Keep America Christian (and White): Christian Nationalism, Fear of Ethnoracial Outsiders, and Intention to Vote for Donald Trump in the 2020 Presidential Election"

• Using data from the 2019 administration of the Chapman University Survey of American Fears (CSAF), which has been collected annually since 2014, with the goal of documenting a wide variety of social, political, and psychological fears among the American public, this research finds that the strongest predictors of support for Trump were political party, xenophobia, a negative association with identifying as African America, political ideology, Christian nationalism, and Islamophobia.

• Regarding Christian Nationalism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia: "Strong, positive relationships between each of these variables and Trump voting are readily apparent. Notably, for all three measures, of respondents who scored at the maximum on the respective indices, 100% reported an intention to vote for Trump. The strongest relationship is found for the xenophobia index"

• The research also finds that self-identifying as black is negatively associated with Trump: "Liberal political views (b = −.784; p < .001) and Democratic partisan identification (b = −1.232; p < .001), as well as self-identification as black (b = −2.422; p < .001) or Hispanic (b = −1.359; p < .001) are all strongly and significantly related to lower odds of Trump voting. Compared to African Americans, white Americans have 11 times higher odds of intending to vote for Trump, a reflection of the fact that only 3.3% of black respondents reported they would vote for Trump."

A survey from the American Survey Center found that 39% of Republicans believe violence is necessary if a leader "fails to act," whereas only 17% of Democrats believe political violence is necessary. This means that Republicans are 2.3x more likely than Democrats to endorse political violence.

“Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community

I think most white people get so defensive when the topic of racism comes up because deep down they know that it’s bad and know that white people did a lot of it in America but they’re too embarrassed or fragile to actually address it so they must pivot or deflect. Kinda like how if you had a family member do really bad stuff - like RJ Stern from season 5 of Last Chance U whose grandfather was a convicted pedophile and did some pretty nasty stuff - you'll get embarrassed and what to change the subject or avoid talking about it and acknowledging it. Or you could look at it like when someone brings up something bad or cringe you did in the past, deep down you know it was bad, but are too embarrassed to discuss it even much later and do whatever you can to change the topic.

Using "whiteness" to critique things and not elaborating is also just very lazy. Conservatives do the same thing with terms like "woke" or "virtue signaling" and act as if just calling something that name is a legitimate criticism. Furthermore, white people are not used to receiving criticism, and criticism that seems to be solely about them being white will immediately turn them off of what you're saying. You gotta use more inclusive language when talking about this stuff (ironic considering conservatives hate that kinda stuff) and kinda dumb it down. I talk more about the term "whiteness" and how it should only be used in specific settings under the "Shut up About 'Whiteness' (For the Most Part)" section on the Leftist Cringe page.

Research from the Politics, Groups, and Identities Journal - "Examining whites’ anti-black attitudes after Obama’s presidency"

• Please note that I link to the full text on SciHub, as the publisher does not offer a free version of the full text.

• Using data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) the research finds little evidence that any level of racial resentment among whites decreased after America's first black presidency, rather "These findings suggest that Obama’s rise to power increased whites’ perception that blacks threaten their dominant position in the United States."

• Using a stereotype battery that has been used by the ANES since 1992 the authors are able to determine that between 2008-2012 "we do not see evidence that contact with Obama had a positive influence on white attitudes towards blacks as a group"

  • Also: "The mean level of white sympathy for blacks actually decreases from 0.44 in 2008 to 0.30 in 2012 (p < .001), the mean racial resentment score on the standard four-item battery changes little from 0.65 in 2008 to 0.64 in 2012 (where high values indicate more resentment), and the mean warmth toward blacks on a standard feeling thermometer decreases slightly from 0.66 in 2008 to 0.63 in 2012 (p < .001). Taken together, these analyses yield little evidence that white attitudes toward blacks improved during Obama’s first term as President, and there is even some evidence to suggest that prejudice may have increased."

  • Essentially, white opposition to Obama was "roughly equivalent" in 2008 and 2012. It's also "not clear that the effect of prejudice on vote choice meaningfully changed between 2008 and 2012."

• Crazy stat here: "The data reveal that in 2008, 38% of whites reported that Obama made them feel afraid, and while this proportion was slightly lower in 2012 at 36%, the two are statistically indistinguishable (p < .38). In short, it appears that four years of exposure to and contact with the nation’s first black president via the media did not meaningfully reduce whites’ fears about him."

• Using ANES data from 2008-2009 panel survey which "allows us to examine the same set of individuals over time rather than relying on analyses of two separate groups of people from the ANES time series," the authors finds an increase in the effect of racial attitudes on policy opinion over time: "Considering this finding in combination with our cross-sectional data, we find scant evidence that racial prejudice declined during Obama’s first term in office even with whites’ regular exposure to the president. Indeed, on the topic of discrimination in the labor market and support for affirmative action, the association between prejudice and whites’ policy opinion actually became stronger over time. These results are consistent with the interpretation that Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency was perceived as a threat to whites’ superior group position: in the age of the first black president, the impact of prejudice on public opinion about racialized policies increased, even when Obama did not explicitly associate himself with such policies."

• It's pretty much the same story for Obama's second term.

  • "In 2008, 57 percent of whites rate blacks less favorably than they rate whites, on average, on the stereotype battery. In 2012 and 2016, 58 percent do."

  • "the levels of anti-black stereotypes remain high after Obama’s second term"

  • There is "a substantively large increase from the association between prejudice and policy opinion in 2008 and 2012."

• In conclusion, the research states "Contrary to the idea that the nation’s first presidency increased white tolerance of black people, in none of the five areas of white opinion and behavior examined here — opposition to Obama, opposition to policies intended to aid blacks, prejudice against blacks, the relationship between prejudice and opposition to Obama, and the relationship between prejudice and opposition to policies intended to aid blacks — did we witness meaningful decreases during Obama’s time as president."

  • "In fact, the relationship between prejudice and policy opinion actually increased in some cases over Obama’s first term – even for policies with which Obama was not clearly associated – as evidenced by both cross-sectional and panel data. Obama’s rise to the presidency resulted not in the decline of prejudice but in its activation."

  • "Furthermore, additional analyses indicate that the above findings are robust to: (a) measures of prejudice other than stereotypes, such as racial resentment"

  • In short, having a black president made a portion of white America more racially resentful and more prejudiced. The effect of prejudice on opinion about policy has increased for some white Americans from 2008-2016.

• While prejudice influences opinion about policy, it is important to note media affects this as well when covering Obama-era policies like Social Security and Medicare. Research from the Politics, Groups, and Identities journal found that between 2007 and 2017 "news magazines portray these well-liked social programs by overwhelmingly highlighting white beneficiaries. Further, the media often depict these white recipients in a sympathetic and positive manner. This is in sharp contrast to media coverage of poor people that disproportionately, inaccurately, and unsympathetically focuses on black citizens."

Research from the Perspectives on Psychological Science Journal - "Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing"

• Please note that I cite the full text on SciHub, as the publisher does not offer a free version of the full text.

• The authors write "We propose that Whites’ belief about the increasing prevalence of anti-White bias reflects a view of racism as a zero-sum game, as evident in the comment above by Senator Sessions during a recent Supreme Court nomination hearing, which can be summed up as ‘'less against you means more against me.'"

  • This research builds on previous research: "previous research suggests that White Americans perceive increases in racial equality as threatening their dominant position in American society with Whites likely to perceive that actions taken to improve the welfare of minority groups must come at their expense."

  • Zero sum game definition: a theory in which one person's gain is another person's loss. In theory, white people see decreasing racism against black people as increasing racism against white people.

• The authors test this hypothesis that whites would view racism "as a zero-sum game, such that decreases in perceived anti-Black racism over the past six decades would be associated with increases in perceived anti-White racism" by surveying a large national sample of black and white Americans regarding the extent to which they felt each group was discriminated against. Their findings? - "we observed a complete reversal over time in White respondents’ views of racism." To whites, racism between white people and black people has an inverse relationship: where racism against one group decreases, racism against the other increases.

• "our results revealed that Whites see racism in zero-sum terms. For White respondents, ratings of bias against Whites and Blacks were negatively and significantly correlated for each decade, suggesting that, within each decade, Whites linked lower levels of anti-Black bias with higher levels of antiWhite bias."

• The findings also suggest that "Whites also linked the decrease in anti-Black bias over the last half century to an increase in anti-White bias over the same time period."

  • "Both within each decade and across time, White respondents were more likely to see decreases in bias against Blacks as related to increases in bias against Whites—consistent with a zerosum view of racism among Whites—whereas Blacks were less likely to see the two as linked."

  • The authors suggest that "Whites think more progress has been made toward equality than do Blacks, but Whites also now believe that this progress is linked to a new inequality—at their expense."

Research from Oxford University Press - "Privilege on the Precipice: Perceived Racial Status Threats Lead White Americans to Oppose Welfare Programs"

• This research aims to "test a theory of how perceived macro-level trends in racial standing shape whites’ views of welfare policy" and while it focuses only on welfare policy the results are still interesting. It uses American National Elections Surveys (ANES) data from 2000-2012 and two different Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) surveys/experiments to test the theory.

• In the first of three studies, the authors find that the racial resentment among white people increased in 2008 due in part to Obama's election and the economic downturn. White people's opposition to welfare also increased around this time.

  • "Using representative survey data, we find that the period beginning in 2008 has seen changes in Americans’ attitudes toward welfare, and these changes differ by race. While minorities show more positive attitudes toward welfare in 2008, whites’ attitudes became somewhat more negative."

  • "The result is that 2008 marks the beginning of a widened divergence among whites and minorities’ attitudes toward welfare. In addition, we find that whites’ racial resentment rose beginning in 2008. These findings are consistent with our claim that feelings of racial threat—particularly, the perception of increased political power among minorities during a period of economic recession—helped shape whites’ welfare attitudes in recent years."

  • "we found that whites’ and minorities’ welfare attitudes diverged in 2008, the year of the candidacy and election of President Obama and the financial crisis, and whites’ racial resentment rose during this time as well."

• In the second study, the authors find that presenting information to white people about the perceived decline of a white majority in the United States increased their opposition to welfare and was mediated (brought about) by racial resentment.

  • "In this study, we found that white participants responded to information suggesting that whites are losing their majority status—and hence their power as a voting bloc is declining—with increased racial resentment, which led to greater opposition to welfare."

  • "This mediation result is particularly noteworthy because it provides evidence that the link between whites’ racial resentment and welfare attitudes is not spuriously driven by individualist or conservative principles, since white participants expressed greater racial resentment under conditions of threat to racial status. Further, this effect was unique to whites, and we found no evidence that whites reported more conservative opinions on non-racial issues."

  • "white Americans who saw a demographic report emphasizing the decline of the white majority tended thereafter to voice greater opposition to welfare, and this effect was partially mediated by increased racial resentment."

• In the third study, the authors find that "threatening" white people's sense of their economic advantage over minority groups led white people to have greater opposition to welfare programs but only if those welfare programs were framed as benefiting minority groups more than whites.

  • "In this study, we provide evidence supporting the final link in our logic: that racial threats lead to anti-welfare sentiment among whites because they perceive such programs to mostly benefit minorities. Where a welfare program was portrayed as primarily benefiting whites, threatened white participants reported almost identical support for welfare as unthreatened white participants. These findings provide discerning support for our claim that whites’ opposition to welfare following racial threat is due to increased racial resentment."

  • "information threatening the white economic advantage resulted in increased opposition to welfare programs when whites perceived those programs to primarily benefit minorities, but did not affect support for programs portrayed as benefiting whites."

  • Essentially this is saying that if white people are reminded or informed that they could lose their majority status in America they will oppose welfare programs that are presented as helping minorities (but not oppose welfare programs that are presented as helping whites) due to a racial fear or resentment.

• The authors conclude that their findings "provide consistent support for our claim that white Americans’ welfare attitudes are shaped by concerns about the status of their racial group in American society."

  • Also: "We provide evidence that racial resentment rises in response to macro-historical trends that threaten whites’ standing in the racial status hierarchy, particularly in eras of economic decline. We demonstrate that racial resentment rather than in-group identification drives the relationship between racial threat and opposition to welfare."

Research from the Political Research Quarterly journal - "Prejudice or Principled Conservatism? Racial Resentment and White Opinion toward Paying College Athletes"

• Please note that I cite the full text on SciHub, as the publisher does not offer a free version of the full text.

• This research looks at the attitudes of white people towards the issue of paying college athletes and uses a large survey of over 55,000 Americans from the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Ultimately it finds that "racially resentful whites who were subtly primed to think about African Americans are more likely to express opposition to paying college athletes when compared with similarly resentful whites who were primed to think about whites. Because free-market conservatism, resistance to changes in the status quo, opposition to expanding federal power, and reluctance to endorse government redistributive policies cannot possibly explain these results, we conclude that racial resentment is a valid measure of antiblack prejudice." So, much like the research above regarding welfare, it seems white people are pro-something when it is framed as beneficial to white people and anti-something when it is framed as beneficial to minority groups.

  • Also: "we find evidence not only that racial resentment items tap racial predispositions but also that whites rely on these predispositions when forming and expressing their views on paying college athletes."

• Looking at the 2014 CCES survey the authors find that a majority of white people (57%) oppose paying college athletes and that racial resentment was the most powerful predictor of that opposition among the different predictors the authors measured: "As Table 1 shows, racial resentment was among the strongest predictors of white opinion on NCAA compensation policy. Indeed, movement from the least resentful to the most resentful position on our index yielded a .23 increase in opposition to paying college athletes."

• To see if this white opposition was merely a result of conservatives being more likely to uphold the status quo and oppose change the authors of the research conducted their own experiment in which respondents were given one of three different statements. A control group was given a race-neutral statement about paying college athletes while two other groups were given either the same statement accompanied with either a picture of black college athletes (who had stereotypical black sounding names) or white college athletes (who had names that were derived from a list with the most popular white American names). The results:

  • The experiment based on the CCES data showed that as racial resentment increased so to did opposition to paying college athletes for both black and white athletes at about the same rate.

• The authors then applied the same framework to the first of two different Amazon Mechanical Turk surveys but with some changes: "In our March 2016 MTurk experiment, we attempted a more subtle racial priming by diversifying our treatment images and eliminating the stereotyped names associated with those images. Specifically, respondents in our experiment were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: an “all white faces” condition (featuring the same three pictures used in the “all white names and faces” treatment of the CCES experiment) and a “mixed faces” treatment (featuring two of the white faces and one of the African American faces from the CCES experiment)." The pictures were also edited so it looked like the subject was wearing an athletic uniform and there were no names attached. There was also no control group. The results:

  • The least racially resentful white people in the "mixed faces" condition were generally supportive of paying college athletes while the most racially resentful whites in the “mixed faces” condition were strongly opposed to changing the NCAA’s current compensation policies. The level of racial resentment mattered much less in the "all white faces" condition. As seen below in Figure 21 racially resentful white people were almost twice as likely to oppose paying college athletes when shown "mixed faces" rather than "all white" faces.

• The authors then did a third experiment using the second Amazon Mechanical Turk survey. This experiment used no pictures: "rather than use both stereotypical pictures and names to prime racial attitudes, we did not show respondents any pictures and only included names in the text of the question." White names were Connor Woods, Jake Sullivan, and Cody Myers and the black names were DeShawn Washington, Marquis Jefferson, and Darnell Booker. The results:

  • Basically the same results as the previous experiment based on Amazon Mechanical Turk data. Racially resentful whites in the “black names” condition were less supportive of paying college athletes than similarly resentful whites in the “all white names” condition. At low levels of racial resentment, no such treatment effect emerged. Figure 22 below shows this data.

  • "these results lead us to conclude that racial resentment items measure antiblack prejudice far more than they measure political conservatism."

• The authors conclude that "racial resentment influences NCAA policy opinions in a way that is only consistent with racial resentment serving as a measure of antiblack prejudice. No other plausible explanation—racial resentment as a measure of support for limited federal power, racial resentment as a measure of opposition for government redistributive policies, racial resentment as a measure of resistance to change, or racial resentment as a measure of free-market conservatism—can explain the pattern of results uncovered in our data."

  • "The results presented here show not only that racial resentment measures prejudice against African Americans but also that prejudice against African Americans determines how whites feel about increasing compensation for college athletes."

In comparing statistics from the US Crisis Monitor and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (the ACLED), The Guardian was able to determine that "Police in the United States are three times more likely to use force against leftwing protesters than rightwing protesters." Specifically, police used force - tear gas, rubber bullets, baton beatings, et cetera - at 511 left-wing protests and 33 right-wing protests. 4.7% of left-wing protests were met with force whereas only 1.4% of right-wing protests were met with force. Focusing solely as protests deemed peaceful, 1.8% of peaceful left-wing protests were met with force whereas 0.5% of peaceful right-wing protests were met with force. Are left-wing protests more violent, thus justifying this use of force? Not really: 93% of the Black Lives Matter protests and demonstrations over the Summer of 2020 were found to be peaceful in a study done by the ACLED. Also interesting to note is the fact that the majority of political violence in America is attributed to the right-wing (please see the "Right Wing Extremists Account For Most Political Violence" section under the Crime Statistics tab for research and data on this claim).

FiveThirtyEight reports similar findings regarding the ACLED's data. Between May 1st and November 28th, 2020, police were more than twice as likely to break up left-wing protests than right-wing protests and in those situations 51% of left-wing protests were met with violent force whereas 34% of right-wing protests were met with violent force.

Tweet - PragerU defends slavery, stating statues of Confederate general Robert E. Lee stand because he crushed slave rebellions. Video. UPDATE - PragerU deleted the video but it is preserved here.

Tweet - PragerU tweets that all the freedom we'll ever need are in America's founding documents. Evidently they don't consider the abolishment of slavery, due process, voting rights for women and minorities, and other things as necessary. Also remember that the Supreme Court, in 1857, ruled that documents like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were written specifically to exclude black people and not give them rights so PragerU here is basically saying "Hey you know that stuff that written specifically to exclude black people and not give them rights? That is all we need in the country!"

Link - Candace Owens argues against free speech and attacks freedom of expression, saying men can't express themselves in a certain way because they just aren't allowed to.

Link - Candace Owens said that the Juneteenth holiday - which commemorates the end of slavery in America and is celebrated on June 19th because that is when Major Gen. Gordon Granger told the people of Galveston Texas that the Civil War had ended and all enslaved people were free - is "meaningless" in a tweet. She also says that she'll only be celebrating independence day because she's an American but apparently forgets that had she been alive in America on the first 4th of July she would not have been considered an American and would have likely been enslaved. In another tweet she says independence day is July 4th, inadvertently saying that in America black people do not deserve rights or any independence. I guess she also forgot that Trump pledged to make Juneteenth a holiday during his campaign? In another tweet she references something Joe Biden said that equates to "racism is bad and it happened in the past" as "emotional programming." She then later tweets that "black Americans are considered the dumbest ethnic group with the lowest emotional IQ. In other words, the easiest political pawns to destabilize America from the inside out." Yikes. Either she didn't think that one through or she's dogwhistling to actual white supremacists and racists to tell them that the mere existence of black people is a threat to their America and livelihood because black people are so stupid. She is eluding to some "they" - Jewish people, SJWs, or some other group - who are apparently using black people, because black people are so dumb, as the muscle to attack whites. Her whole BLEXIT movement is about black people being the pawns of the Democrats so in a way she's doing the Jewish Question - a Nazi belief that Jews use black and brown people (basically minority groups) as pawns to topple society - but rather than the clever Jews using black and brown people to achieve their goals and destroy the world or white society or whatever, Owens suggests that it is white liberals who are using black and brown people to destroy the world or whatever. For some racists, immigration is not just a natural product of demographic shifts or a functioning/failing country but evidence that the Jews - or some other "they" group - are deliberately forcing black and brown people into majority white countries to take control over them and/or destroy white people. This then leads into the white genocide or white replacement theory. Maybe I am reading too much into this but idk.

Despite talking about how racism doesn't exist and how black Americans shouldn't live in the past and have a victim complex over slavery, Candace Owens actually sued her high school for not protecting her against racist threats and apparently made an anti-bullying website.

Candace Owens said Hitler's activities were "ok" had they just been kept to Germany, stating "If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well — OK, fine." She continued, stating "The problem is he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German.” The full clip can be viewed on Twitter here.

Link - Ben Shapiro claims that there is no scientific reason for homosexuality to not be a mental illness/disorder. Shapiro lists a few reasons why homosexuality is a mental disorder: high suicide rate and depression in gay men, high rates of substance abuse, "statistically deviant" (whatever that means lol he offers no explanation of what that is and no statistics for it or any of his claims), and homosexuals cannot reproduce naturally. Apparently a man or woman who is infertile due to age or some condition has a mental disorder according to Shapiro. In case that gets taken down you can see a screenshot of the article below in Figure 27.

Tweet - PragerU claims victim mentality is destructive, yet engages in it themselves.

Tweet - Dennis Prager says that the only thing stopping him (and all other men, apparently) from raping and abusing women is the fact that it's illegal.

Tweet - Charlie Kirk claims if you are an American you are not oppressed. Later Tweets that Conservatives are being oppressed on college campuses.

Tweet - PragerU features an anti-Semitic Nazi-type in one of their videos.

Link - In a column Dennis Prager wrote he says a married man has to "deny his sexual nature" due to being married and by denying their husband sex their husband will have an affair. He also argues that women would rather their husbands be hard worked or have ambition instead of showing them kindness. He also argues that a woman who denies a man she loves sex "is not kind." He also argues that if a woman is not in the mood for sex she should not reject it. A "happy home" to Prager is a woman submitting herself to her husband's every sexual desire and need so that the husband can then give her love. A woman's role to Prager is to sexually fulfil her husband, nothing more.

Link - In a follow up to the aforementioned column, Prager argues that a woman should have sex with her husband "even when she is not in the mood for sexual relations." He lists eight reasons "for a woman not to allow not being in the mood for sex to determine whether she denies her husband sex."

A former National Field Director for TPUSA, Crystal Clanton, texted this message to another employee: "I hate black people. Like fuck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story," as per the New York Times. After these remarks went public she was removed from TPUSA. The woman who replaced her also made some more than questionable racial comments, tweeting out the n word a few times as well as one tweet which was just "I love making racist jokes."

Tweet - Charlie Kirk claims if you are an American you are not oppressed. Later Tweets that Conservatives are being oppressed on college campuses.

Tweet and another Tweet - Charlie Kirk says that a US athlete who did not look at the flag should not be allowed to be on team USA. This is him basically saying "conform to what I think or you can't play sports." Dan Crenshaw echoed a similar sentiment.

Candace Owens said Hitler's activities were "ok" had they just been kept to Germany, stating "If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well — OK, fine." She continued, stating "The problem is he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German.” The full clip can be viewed on Twitter here.

Link - Candace Owens said that the Juneteenth holiday - which commemorates the end of slavery in America and is celebrated on June 19th because that is when Major Gen. Gordon Granger told the people of Galveston Texas that the Civil War had ended and all enslaved people were free - is "meaningless" in a tweet. She also says that she'll only be celebrating independence day because she's an American but apparently forgets that had she been alive in America on the first 4th of July she would not have been considered an American and would have likely been enslaved. In another tweet she says independence day is July 4th, inadvertently saying that in America black people do not deserve rights or any independence. I guess she also forgot that Trump pledged to make Juneteenth a holiday during his campaign? In another tweet she references something Joe Biden said that equates to "racism is bad and it happened in the past" as "emotional programming." She then later tweets that "black Americans are considered the dumbest ethnic group with the lowest emotional IQ. In other words, the easiest political pawns to destabilize America from the inside out." Yikes. Either she didn't think that one through or she's dogwhistling to actual white supremacists and racists to tell them that the mere existence of black people is a threat to their America and livelihood because black people are so stupid. She is eluding to some "they" - Jewish people, SJWs, or some other group - who are apparently using black people, because black people are so dumb, as the muscle to attack whites. Her whole BLEXIT movement is about black people being the pawns of the Democrats so in a way she's doing the Jewish Question - a Nazi belief that Jews use black and brown people (basically minority groups) as pawns to topple society - but rather than the clever Jews using black and brown people to achieve their goals and destroy the world or white society or whatever, Owens suggests that it is white liberals who are using black and brown people to destroy the world or whatever. For some racists, immigration is not just a natural product of demographic shifts or a functioning/failing country but evidence that the Jews - or some other "they" group - are deliberately forcing black and brown people into majority white countries to take control over them and/or destroy white people. This then leads into the white genocide or white replacement theory. Maybe I am reading too much into this but idk.

Despite talking about how racism doesn't exist and how black Americans shouldn't live in the past and have a victim complex over slavery, Candace Owens actually sued her high school for not protecting her against racist threats and apparently made an anti-bullying website.

Link - Candace Owens argues against free speech and attacks freedom of expression, saying men can't express themselves in a certain way because they just aren't allowed to.

Charlie Kirk said that ordering weed delivery, or weed delivery in general maybe, is "actual slavery."

At a TPUSA conference, a dude yelled “The only thing the Nazis didn’t get right is they didn’t keep fucking going!”

Riley Grisar, president of TPUSA’s University of Nevada chapter, praised white supremacy, saying, “We’re going to rule the country! White power!” and used the n-word in a video.

Republicans being pedophiles

Republican Ben Gibson who was a QAnon supporter was charged with four counts of child porn.

Conservative judge and activist Tim Nolan, who was the official Trump campaign representative in Frankfurt and observed the ballots being counted in the March 2016 Kentucky GOP Caucus, was charged with 30 counts of human trafficking that went back over 50 years, one count of attempted human trafficking with a minor, one count of sodomy, and three counts of unlawful transaction with a minor.

Former senior leader of Trump's Oklahoma campaign Ralph Shortey has plead guilty to child sex trafficking. Police found Shorety in a hotel room with a 17 year old male and a police report indicated a search of the teen's tablet computer uncovered a series of sexually explicit exchanges in which Shortey referred to the teen as "baby boy" and offered him cash in exchange for "sexual stuff." In addition to all that, the FBI also found that Shortey had previously used fake names to send and receive child pornography and to go on Craigslist to seek casual encounters with males, the "younger the better."

George Nader, an advisor to Trump's 2016 campaign, has recently plead guilty to child porn and sex trafficking. Nader was first charged in 2019 for possessing pornographic images of children including some featuring toddler-age boys, baby goats and other farm animals and sex trafficking was added to the charge a month later when he admitted to to transporting a 14-year-old boy from the Czech Republic to Washington, D.C., in 2000 to engage in sexual activity with him . What's funny is that Nader had been charged with similar crimes several times before the Trump campaign brought him into advise. Nader served a one year prison sentence for sexually abusing minors in 10 different cases in the Czech Republic in 2003. He also was charged in 1985 for importing nude photographs of underage boys and engaging in a variety of sexual acts but evidence was conveniently thrown out.

Ruben Verastigui, a former RNC employee who is apparently pro-life and was an aide to Trump maybe, was charged with distribution of child pornography. The detailed indictment contends that Verastigui had engaged in discussion on a website where a group of users allegedly traded child sexual abuse material and that he had claimed, in messages obtained by federal investigators, “Babies are some of my biggest turn-ons.” In the criminal complaint, Verastigui asked another member of an online child porn website to come to D.C. “for the purpose of sexually abusing a minor.”

Caleb Andrew Bailey, a Trump delegate, was sentenced to prison for possession of child pornography, among other things.

Republican Matt Gaetz is under investigation by the Department of Justice for sex trafficking and having sex with a 17 year old. Gaetz apparently paid for the sex. The investigation was opened final months of the Trump administration under Attorney General Bill Barr according to two people briefed on the investigation. Also, Gaetz's communications director stepped down from his role. Apparently this dumbass used venmo, sending an accused sex trafficker - Joel Greenberg, who has been indicted on multiple charges - $900 on the platform. Greenberg then sent a total of $900 in three separate payments to three different girls. One of these women had just turned 18 and now apparently works in the porn industry. Seems to confirm the money for sex thing Gatez is accused of.

Trump appointed Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta exercised "poor judgment" when he resolved a federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein through a state-based plea agreement in 2008, the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility concluded in a report.

Nick Fuentes criticizes age of consent laws saying they're "the gospel, if you violate that, crucify the man." He goes on to elude to that because homosexuality and transgender people exists and are ok then dating or flirting with a child should also be ok, saying society should evaluate what is moral and is immoral sexuality (essentially saying a 38 year old having sex with a 17 year old or a 21 year old sexting/ flirting with a 16 year old is moral, homosexuality is immoral). Fuentes goes on to say that Gaetz's relationship with that 17 year old was "very traditional." He also says that Gaetz being in favor of weed legalization and gay adoption is more offensive than him paying to have sex with a 17 year old.

Republican Anthony Bouchard shared that he impregnated a 14 year old when he was 18 (an adult).

Lauren Boebert's husband (then boyfriend) was charged with indecent exposure to a minor in 2004 at a bowling alley of all places. Lauren Boebert was there when it happened, Here is the arrest report.

Republicans being against banning child marriage

While he was governor of New Jersey in 2017, Chris Christie declined to sign a measure that would have banned child marriage, as per Reuters. Politico also reported on this.

In 2018 the Tennessee GOP killed a bill that would have banned child marriage in the state, as per The Hill. The Tennessean also reported on this. Apparently they made some excuse that they couldn't do it because gay marriage or something dumb. This bill eventually was signed into law though thankfully these idiots didn't persist against it that long.

In 2019 Idaho Republicans spoke out against a proposed bill that would ban child marriage and ultimately voted the bill down, as per the Idaho Statesman. The Idaho congress is mostly Republican, as Newsweek identifies.

In New Hampshire Republican lawmaker David Bates argued against raising the minimum age to get married up from 13 for girls to 18 (I guess the next best thing for a 13 year old to do after getting pregnant is for her to be force her into a marriage), basically arguing against a bill that would ban child marriage. He complained that the law letting 13 years olds get married had been on the books for over a century and was brought to their attention by a girl scout. This dude voted no on repealing gay marriage but wants kids to get married I guess.

In Louisiana the Republican controlled house took issue with a bill that would ban child marriage.

Not based in fact

Host of Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News Tucker Carlson was taken to court over a defamation case and the results of it prove just how little he engages with actual facts. Karen McDougal, one of those people Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen paid hush money to, sued Carlson after he stated that she extorted the president. Tucker's defense team took the position that the "'general tenor' of the show should then inform a viewer that he is not 'stating actual facts' about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in 'exaggeration' and 'non-literal commentary.'" This statement can be found on page 11 of the court documents. You read that right: Tucker Carlson's defense team and employer successfully argued in court that he's so obviously lying that he can't be sued for defamation because viewers should realize he's just making stuff up. A federal judge dismissed Karen McDougal's defamation lawsuit against Fox News and Tucker Carlson, who successfully argued that Tucker's reputation is so bad reasonable viewers know to be skeptical about his claims. So Fox News believes, and successfully argued, that Tucker Carlson expresses views that no "reasonable" person would believe he can't be sued for slander. From The Courier Herald: "The lies Tucker Carlson tells on his Fox News show aren't slanderous because any reasonable person who know that he lies. He is protected under his First Amendment free speech rights."

Says Biden is feminizing the military, uses example from Trump's tenure

For whatever reason, Tucker Carlson takes issue with women being in the military and thinks that Biden is taking steps to "feminize" the US military. He also claims that pregnant women will fight our wars with no evidence. As an example on his show he used an image of a pregnant women in a flight suit. Funnily enough, this "evidence" of Biden "feminizing the military" is something that happened while Trump was president. Air Force Material Command released the image along with some text on November 18th, 2020 and also stated that in 2019 "the Air Force updated its policy to reduce barriers on pregnant aviators who perform flight duties and have uncomplicated pregnancies. This update allows many women the choice to keep performing flight duties during their pregnancy, maintain currency, and prevent postpartum re-qualification training." Just to remind you, Trump was president in 2019. Furthermore, in the Summer of 2020 (while Trump was president) pregnant women were approved to attend professional military education. Still, there are some idiots who believe that pregnant women are being shipped out to combat or something which is hardly true. Martina Chesonis, a spokeswoman for the Service Women’s Action Network, told Military Times that pregnant women are not authorized to fly in combat in the first place and no pregnant woman is being sent to fight in war. Rather, some pregnant women can be allowed to participate in training flights required to stay proficient.

Tucker's comments also exposed a large number of people who think the military is now "woke" because they value diversity. The military likely values diversity because it finds strength in diversity.

Additionally, the military recently let a Christian man wear long hair for religious reasons but I don't see Carlson or other conservatives getting triggered over how this change will make the military less ready or how the military has gone "woke" because it made an exception or slight change to usual practices.

Other

Video of Tucker Carlson having a meltdown over a guest of his - a a former New York corrections officer - saying that what Derrick Chauvin did was "excessive" and "shouldn't happen" and then ends the interview right there because I guess he's such a snowflake that he can't handle that opinion. Literally can't handle the truth lol.

Wrongly claiming Planned Parenthood is racist

James O'Keefe had previously called a Planned Parenthood clinic pretending to be racist and says "the less black kids the better" in an attempt to expose Planned Parenthood as "racism" for accepting a donation from a racist. How is that racist though? - They're accepting money to use for a voluntary service. He then later goes on to claim (skip to 16:50 mark in the video) that it was the Planned Parenthood representative he spoke to that said "the bless black kids the better."

ACORN pimp videos

In 2009 O'Keefe released videos on ACORN, an organization which addressed social issues, locations in which he and Hannah Giles claim to be pimp and prostitute and are looking for funding and advice for a brothel which would employ underage girls (most people remember him wearing a pimp suit in the video but he never actually wore the pimp suit when he went to ACORN offices). The video is edited in a way that makes it seem that ACORN employees/directors are offering them help in how to start up this brothel and give them advice on how to avoid paying taxes. This is obviously bad and wrong (notably only the Washington DC and Baltimore locations he filmed at were the least edited and actually contained explicitly wrong stuff from the people associated with ACORN), but not necessarily reflective of the entire organization. Former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger did an internal review of ACORN and his report and found that "The ACORN employees captured on video were members or part-time staff. They were not organizers or supervisory level employees," so O'Keefe wasn't even talking to anyone with any power in the organization. O'Keefe didn't even release the videos in which he spoke with actual organizers. Additionally, the report found that "While some of the advice and counsel given by ACORN employees and volunteers was clearly inappropriate and unprofessional, we did not find a pattern of intentional, illegal conduct by ACORN staff; in fact, there is no evidence that action, illegal or otherwise, was taken by any ACORN employee on behalf of the videographers." He also notes how deceptively the video was edited: "The videos that have been released appear to have been edited, in some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voiceover for significant portions of Mr. O’Keefe’s and Ms. Giles’s comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding. A comparison of the publicly available transcripts to the released videos confirms that large portions of the original video have been omitted from the released versions." In a press release he also notes that "From our review of ACORN, we did not find a pattern of intentional, illegal conduct by ACORN staff. Instead, what we found was that the hidden videos represent the byproduct of ACORN’s longstanding management weaknesses, including a lack of training, a lack of procedures, and a lack of on-site supervision." This mismanagement, lack of training, and more is substantiated by a report conducted by the Government Accountability Project which found numerous auditing failures attributed to teams being understaffed (see page 22-23 of the report).

A second report was done by the California Attorney General Edmund G. Brown Jr. and had similar findings. In one video, O'Keefe even edited out significant context that made it seem like an employee, Lavelle Stewart, was helping them start a prostitution business with underage girls when in reality she had told them that ACORN could not help them with that, expressed sympathy for the backstory Giles had concocted for her role as a prostitute, and said she would contact people in the local sex business (pornography) to help Giles find work to get away from her fake pimp that had abused her (part of the backstory Giles made up). Essentially, O'Keefe and Giles exploited the compassion Stewart showed to someone she thought was in a desperate situation to get her to say something on camera that they would then edit out the context for. O'Keffe even ended up having to pay $100,000 to one of the people he secretly recorded - Juan Carlos Vera - to settle a lawsuit. Giles also had to pay him $50,000 as a result of the lawsuit. In the video O'Keefe even asks Vera if the conversational will be kept confidential, fearing that he is recording them with his phone. Highly ironic since O'Keefe is secretly recording and won't keep this confidential. O'Keefe said he "regrets any pain" suffered by Vera. Vera had called the police after O'Keefe and Giles spoke to him about sex trafficking and specifically took down their info to give to the police. O'Keefe even lied about this in a public appearance, stating (skip to he 1:03:34 mark of the video) that "In San Diego, ACORN employees helped me traffic young girls across the Tijuiana border in order to get them into the country so I could use them as child prostitutes." The report concludes that "O’Keefe stated he was out to make a point and to damage ACORN and therefore did not act as a journalist objectively reporting a story. The video releases were heavily edited to feature only the worst or most inappropriate statements of the various ACORN employees and to omit some of the most salient statements by O’Keefe and Giles. Each of the ACORN employees recorded in California was a low level employee whose job was to help the needy individuals who walked in the door seeking assistance. Giles and O’Keefe lied to engender compassion, but then edited their statements from the released videos."

O'Keefe would claim that he was just an independent journalist/filmmaker but in the lawsuit filed against him by Veras it would come out that he and a business partner were paid $120,000 by Andrew Breitbart.

Phone thing gone wrong

O'Keefe and three others he roped into this stupid scheme had attempted to pose as maintenance repairmen (except for O'Keefe who just wore a button up shirt and khakis because I guess he's a coward) looking to fix the phones in the office of a Louisiana senator - Mary Landrieu - who was a Democrat. Because entering a federal office under false pretenses is a crime, O'Keefe would be arrested and was sentenced to three years of probation, 100 hours of community service and a $1,500 fine after he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges. The FBI gives a detailed report on the situation.

Census bureau "exposed"

O'Keefe sought out to expose the census bureau, and in a video he did. Kind of. While the video did expose fraud, it was a pernickety type of fraud: on two training days in a certain office the staff were supposed to work until five but were let out early. His evidence for this was two days of training in which he was let out an hour early one day and an hour and a half early another.

Failed CNN caper plan

In 2010 a CNN news anchor, Abbie Boudreau, reached out to O'Keefe asking if she could interview him as a part of the network's series highlighting up and coming conservative stars. O'Keefe, angry at how CNN covered his arrest I guess, decided he'd agree but only to try and turn the tables on the anchor and prank her. This didn't happen because a female associate of his, Izzy Santa, warned Boudreau of the prank and Boudreau never interviewed O'Keefe, declining to talk to him because she never agreed to be videotaped herself and when they first met O'Keefe wanted to tape her. What was the prank? - O'Keefe planned to take Boudreau out on his boat and "fake" seduce her, setting up porn magazines, lube, condoms, a mirror above the bed, sex tape equipment set up, and a bunch of other stereotypical stuff. You can read the whole script and plan here but it was essentially luring a woman into a pornography den and hitting on her. This was incredibly cringe and dumb, and Andrew Breitbart even said the plan was gross and offensive and O'Keefe needed to explain himself to Boudreau and CNN. The coward would later state that he actually didn't like the plan and wouldn't have carried it out (despite still wanting to tape Boudreau right when they first met). The woman who alerted Boudreau would say that O'Keefe's denial of the plan was "clearly not true" and only put out for damage control.

NPR Muslim sting

Here are a few of the laws the Colorado lawmaker has broken

• In 2010 Boebert was ticketed for dog code violations.

• In 2015 Boebert was detained after a verbal altercation with police at a music festival, apparently urging underage drinkers to flee from police. Law enforcement officials asked her to stop yelling multiple times but she did not listen and she even tried to run away, per the police report. She was given court summoned but did not appear for two separate hearings on the matter. Her excuse the first time? - She forgot what day of the week it was. After the second no show she was arrested for by sheriff's deputies for failure to appear.

• In 2015 a restaurant owned by Boebert had it's liquor license revoked after serving alcohol to an underage (and undercover) Liquor Enforcement Division employee.

• At another restaurant owned by Boebert, Shooter's Grill, she let a 17 year old carry a gun, even though it is illegal to do so in Colorado. This is a class 2 misdemeanor. The minimum age for open carry in Colorado is 18.

• In 2016 Boebert again failed to appear in court, and this time it would land her in jail. Boebert was charged with carelessly driving and operating an unsafe vehicle. They were minor charges but she still skipped her court date, prompting the arrest warrant. She was arrested in 2017, fingerprinted, photographed, and fined. She would later plead guilty to the carelessly driving charges.

Boebert has also lied about her relationship with anti-government militia. She also lied about the death of a person in front of her restaurant who died of a drug overdose rather than being beaten to death like she said.

Boebert's husband (then boyfriend) was charged with indecent exposure to a minor in 2004 at a bowling alley of all places. Lauren Boebert was there when it happened, Here is the arrest report.

Lastly, here is a screenshot of Boebert on some talent website.

In Florida, critical race theory is banned from state classrooms in a push led by governor Ron DeSantis. He says it teaches kids to hate their country. Clearly, he has no idea what CRT is and I guess is assuming that children are just as fragile as he is and can't hear criticism of the country they live in. Very soon after this DeSantis would sign three more education focused bills to asses "view point diversity" which I guess is Republican code for forced diversity. The description of the bill even says that "House Bill 233 requires state colleges and universities to conduct annual assessments of the viewpoint diversity and intellectual freedom at their institutions to ensure that Florida’s postsecondary students will be shown diverse ideas and opinions, including those that they may disagree with or find uncomfortable," so this literally is forced diversity. One of these bills also requires state university faculty and students to be surveyed about their beliefs and viewpoints. Apparently this is to ensure diversity (again, forced diversity) but it is basically state surveillance on people's thoughts and ideas. Also, it is pretty strange that the state is controlling what a private institution does. What happened to small government? I guess conservatives really hate losing in the marketplace of ideas and have to make laws so their stupidity stays relevant. Commenting on these bills he said "We obviously want our universities to be focused on critical thinking, academic rigor," and "It used to be thought that a university campus was a place where you'd be exposed to a lot of different ideas." He is quoted as saying “We don’t want that in Florida, you need to have a true contest of ideas, students should not be shielded from ideas and we want robust First Amendment speech on our college and university campuses," in another article. Weird comments from him considering he pushed for the banning of an idea he didn't like in schools, and succeeded. He also says that parents worry about children being "indoctrinated" but these bills make it so that civics curriculums must include the "evils" of communism. Seems as if that portion of the bill is indoctrination, no?

Conservatives seem to hate the marketplace of ideas because whenever their views are not present somewhere or represented in something they whine about censorship or something rather than taking responsibility for the fact that many of their views are dumb, stupid, outdated, or just flat out wrong and thus not relevant for those reasons. They'll even go as far as to make laws which require that their dumb, stupid, outdated, and wrong beliefs are taught and that students and teachers must be surveyed on their political beliefs as Ron DeSantis recently did in Florida. They'll argue that students need to be exposed to a variety of ideas or all information should be made available for them to make decisions on their own but then cry about progressive ideas like "there was racism in America" or "sex is maybe bimodal rather than binary" being in schools and call them indoctrination. You'll never hear conservatives use this same "all info should be made available" logic for anything else, you won't see them campaign for science teachers to give just as much credibility to the theory that the earth is flat as the fact that the earth is round or for schools to teach children that magic rocks and crystals are just a effective as medicine and medical treatment. It's always "They're teaching kids racism is bad? Then they also need to teach them why racism is good so the kids can make up their own minds." Conservatives must make laws that ban ideas they don't like, such as Critical Race Theory, require the teaching of their own dumb ideas, and monitor the beliefs of students and teachers for conservatism to remain relevant.

Link - MTG says that AOC is a little communist and should be locked up. Apparently holing or having the "wrong" ideas or not conforming should get you imprisoned according to this conservative.

Marjorie Taylor Green said that she would not support removing a hypothetical statue of Hitler or Satan: "I would not want to say take it down, but again, it's so that I could tell my children and teach others about who these people are, what they did and what they may be about." Apparently this idiot thinks the only way to learn about history is through statues. Maybe read a book?

First reported by CNN, the GOP Congresswoman liked a comment that said "a bullet to the head would be quicker" to remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In other posts, Greene liked comments about executing FBI agents who, in her eyes, were part of the "deep state" working against Trump in 2019. In a response to a comment on one of her posts asking if Obama and Hillary Clinton could be hanged, she replied "Stage is being set. Players are being put in place. We must be patient. This must be done perfectly or liberal judges would let them off." In the comments of her Facebook posts Greene liked a comment that said "through removal or death, doesn't matter, as long as she goes in regard to Pelosi. She also liked a comment saying "hang that bitch" in reference to Obama or John Kerry. The GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy is apparently going to give her a talking to about this stuff. Axios has also reported on this and received a statement from one of McCarthy's spokespeople: "These comments are deeply disturbing and Leader McCarthy plans to have a conversation with the Congresswoman about them."

Mitch McConnell has said that Marjorie Taylor Greene’s embrace of “loony lies and conspiracy theories” are a “cancer for the Republican Party.

Taylor Greene is also a huge idiot in another capacity. She spent month railing against the Green New Deal and kept challenging AOC to debate her on it until she was finally able to talk to her in person. It turned out she had not even read the bill, by her own omission. What kind of idiot argues against something and demands a debate before they even do any research?

A study from the PEW Research Center which surveyed members of five generations - gen z, millennials, gen x, boomers, and the silent generation - found that gen z resembles millennials is practically every social and political issue. There is virtually no difference between gen z and millennials, compared to a substantial variance when comparing two other generations (i.e. millennials vs gen x, gen x vs boomers, boomers vs silent generation).

Variance between the generations on key issues:

• % who approve of Trump's performance as president (Figure 7)

  • gen z - millennial variance: 1

  • millennial - gen x variance: 11

  • gen x - boomer variance: 5

  • boomer - silent generation variance: 9

• % who think increased racial/ethnic diversity is beneficial (Figure 8)

  • gen z - millennial variance: 1

  • millennial - gen x variance: 9

  • gen x - boomer variance: 4

  • boomer - silent generation variance: 6

• % who see a bigger role for government (Figure 9)

  • gen z - millennial variance: 4

  • millennial - gen x variance: 11

  • gen x - boomer variance: 4

  • boomer - silent generation variance: 10

• % who recognize the link between human activity and climate change (Figure 10)

  • gen z - millennial variance: 2

  • millennial - gen x variance: 8

  • gen x - boomer variance: 3

  • boomer - silent generation variance: 7

• % who think there are better countries than the US (Figure 11)

  • gen z - millennial variance: 1

  • millennial - gen x variance: 7

  • gen x - boomer variance: 10

  • boomer - silent generation variance: 15

• % who approve of the NFL national anthem kneeling protests (Figure 12)

  • gen z - millennial variance: 2

  • millennial - gen x variance: 17

  • gen x - boomer variance: 8

  • boomer - silent generation variance: 7

• % who think same-sex marriage is bad for society (Figure 13)

  • gen z - millennial variance: 0

  • millennial - gen x variance: 10

  • gen x - boomer variance: 7

  • boomer - silent generation variance: 11

• % who think interracial marriage is bad for society (Figure 14)

  • gen z - millennial variance: 0

  • millennial - gen x variance: 1

  • gen x - boomer variance: 5

  • boomer - silent generation variance: 4

• % who think society is not accepting enough of those who don't identify as a man or woman (Figure 15)

  • gen z - millennial variance: 3

  • millennial - gen x variance: 8

  • gen x - boomer variance: 3

  • boomer - silent generation variance: 4

• Average variances

  • average gen z - millennial variance: 1.5

  • average millennial - gen x variance: 9.1

  • average gen x - boomer variance: 5.4

  • average boomer - silent generation variance: 8.1

So the difference between gen z and millennials is statistically insignificant when compared to the variance between other generations. Because gen z and millennials have overwhelmingly similar views on most prominent social and political issues in a way previous generations have not, it can be determined that people and society as a whole are getting more progressive/liberal/left-leaning, not that being young just means you'll automatically be more liberal. If this were the case - that being young makes you more liberal and you grow more conservative as you get older - then the variance between gen z and millennials should be like the variance between the other generations.

Following Trump's loss in the 2020 election there has been some dissent growing among the ranks of the Proud Boys. Newsweek reports that the group is split between real racist, white nationalist, people like Kyle Chapman and "American Supremacist" people wanting to defend western civilization like Enrique Tarrio (who apparently says Chapman was ousted from the Proud Boys). Chapman is apparently dissatisfied with the direction Tarrio, the chairman of the group, was taking it. Newsweek reports that Chapman announced that "he will be taking control of the far-right organization to address 'White Genocide' and the 'failures of multiculturalism,'" and wrote this in a telegram message to other Proud Boys members:

"We will no longer cuck to the left by appointing token negroes as our leaders. We will no longer allow homosexuals or other 'undesirables' into our ranks. We will confront the Zionist criminals who wish to destroy our civilization.

"We recognize that the West was built by the White Race alone and we owe nothing to any other race."

Chapman also stated that the reformed Proud Boys "would fight for white people to 'have their own countries where White interests are written into law.'" Newsweek references a tweet which seemingly has the full message. Raw Story has also reported on this.

Turning Points USA co-founder Bill Montgomery died of COVID19, forcing TPUSA to delete a meme mocking masks and the virus.

Yes, this is a real thing that happened. And of course it happened in Florida.

Nelson Gibson told a local television station that the cardboard cutout gives him comfort. He first brought a photo of Trump as his "comfort item," to his dialysis treatment, which he attends three days a week, but this escalated to a small cardboard cutout of he and Trump and then to a life size cardboard cutout of Trump. The station described the cardboard cutout as Gibson's "emotional support life sized cutout of President Donald Trump." Upon being told he could not have the life sized cutout with him, Gibson said nothing and left. You read that correct: this man skipped his dialysis treatment because he couldn't have his emotional support Donald Trump cardboard cutout. His own family even said they were unsure when he would return for treatment.

A North Carolina county - Sury County - that Trump won in both 2016 and 2020, as per The Hill, banned Coke machines from government facilities. That is right - Republicans banned something because it was critical of something Republicans did (Georgia voting laws) one time. "Wrong" speech can get stuff banned in Republican America I guess. Sury County Commissioner Ed Harris said that Coca-Cola was proving it supports "the out-of-control cancel culture and bigoted leftist mob." So they're pushing back against cancel culture by depriving people of access to a product, in essence "cancelling" Coke? Harris apparently thinks his heavily Republican county is so fragile that they can't even see something with the logo of a company that said something critical of Georgia Republicans and must be deprived of their choice of drinks. Or maybe he is just that fragile himself.

Common sense = this is something many people believe - its common - therefore it is true. This is dumb.

"Common sense" should not be used to justify political beliefs or social issues or support policy anything like that. One of the biggest problems, and handicaps, with using "common sense" as a form of thinking is that it is limited by personal experience. Additionally, "common sense" implies that because something is common - that most people think something - then it must be sound judgment, essentially if most people think something makes sense then it must be sound judgment. This is practically the original "sheep" or "sheepeople" thought process: everyone else believes it so it must be true. Anyone who makes an appeal to "common sense" to support their argument or idea is really saying "it's true because a lot of people think so." Dumb. It's common sense that cold water would freeze faster than hot water - it's already cold - but there are ways hot water can freeze quicker that cold water, called the Mpemba effect. It's also common sense that you should wear a coat to not get a cold but colds aren't the result of cold body temperature, you can only get a cold from coming in contact with someone who has a cold. Like COVID-19 a cold spreads through droplets in the air or sometimes from contact. Here's more info on how wearing a coat does not protect you from getting a cold.

Sure it might sound crazy and go against common sense that you can get a burn from ice or that in certain conditions a hot drink will cool you down quicker than a cold one, but something sounding crazy to you or it doesn't past the sniff test that doesn't automatically mean it's wrong and everything that supports it being true is fake news, biased, "marxist indoctrination."

Nobody should be drawing conclusions or making arguments based off of their personal experiences or what they think everybody else believes, as common sense allows. Rather, we should be making sound judgement based on rigorous study of an issue, as some dude in Psychology Today talks about in an article.

Apply this logic to literally anything else and you'll see how dumb it is. Don't like a few dishes at a restaurant? Never go there again, even if there is food that you like. Car has a some issues with the radio but a bunch of other features you're happy with? Just leave it on the side of the road and go buy a new one. You want to paint a wall in your house a different color because you don't like the current color? Just abandon your house altogether and go buy a new one. Just always give up at the first sign of adversity and never attempt to fix any issue or make things better for yourself and others. This logic really shows how conservatives need to view things in such simple, reduced terms or their little minds get too confused. People are either "US first American patriots who love their country" or "radical Marxist leftists that hate America and want to destroy it." There's no in between with these people, but because conservatives have lower cognitive ability that's the only way they can make sense of the world.

This is a statement made by many idiots who are unfamiliar with how a republic works. It roughly translates to, or I guess implies: "if you are a citizen of a country whose government does not represent your views or voice like it is supposed to, it's your responsibility to leave rather than see yourself represented in your government" which is dumb. It also could boil down to something like "you want America to improve/change in a way that doesn't uniquely benefit me? Fuck you leave the country I like it how it is." Somehow these idiots think that if a government which operates as a republic isn't attending to or representing the needs and concerns of it's citizens, it's somehow the citizens responsibility to leave rather than the government actually assuming its responsibility to represent their citizens and be attentive to their needs and concerns.

Often times protesting the gov or criticizing the president is considered "whining" by many idiots, however that's just how the system works. The people are not the president - the people are meant to ask politicians what they want and see their views represented. That is why we put politicians in office and pay taxes.

This sentiment of "if you don't like America, just leave" is often backed up by the argument there are other places that are worse or America was worse before. This is very dumb. It's no credit to America that other places may be worse and if we claim superiority to others then we should live up to these standards and not use suffering elsewhere as a source of endless self-gratification and justification. Think about this logic as if you were on a football team. You lose a playoff game in the first round, ending your season, and then criticize the team's performance and tell the coach what parts of the team aren't working and what needs to be improved based on your experience and from various statistics. The coach says to you "Why do you hate this team so much? Why don't you request a trade of retire if you hate this team? We aren't going to change anything because we're the best team in the league because there are others teams with a worse record. We don't need to improve because others are worse than us. Stop complaining." Again, this logic is quite dumb. Just because you're not miserable that doesn't mean you can't improve. If the football team that won the Super Bowl made no changes and didn't try and improve in the slightest they'd have a tough time even making the playoffs the next season. But this resistance to any criticism that suggests change, even if that change improves things, is something conservatives can't handle. There is too much mental anguish they experience having to process and conceptualize something new or a change so they just oppose it because using their low cognitive ability to try and understand something different is too hard.

This sentiment of "if you don't like America just leave" will often be used in conjunction with the accusation that a person hates America because they didn't conform by looking at the flag, standing for the national anthem, or saying the pledge of allegiance. This is quite dumb. Saying people who don’t stand for the flag or national anthem or don’t recite the pledge of allegiance hate America is like saying people who don’t eat turkey for thanksgiving hate Thanksgiving. Not participating in a tradition does not mean you hate the thing it’s celebrating. The people who “don’t like America” have as much of a right to express why they potentially dislike it and advocate for ways to make America more likeable for them as other people have to express how much they like America and how everything should remain the same. Their opinion as a citizen matters just as much as someone who likes America. Because conservatives dislike equality this idea that their opinion can matter just as much as someone they disagree with (someone they think hates America) is infuriating. A government, especially one like America’s which is supposed to view and treat people equally, gives people the right to freedom of speech, and has phrases like “this land is your land, this land is my land” in patriotic songs, has the same duty to all citizens whether that citizen likes the government/country or doesn’t like it.

Is college, higher education, or education in general liberal indoctrination? Yes and no. The answer is yes in the sense that most highly educated people are leftists and the answer is no in the sense that leftists just tend to rely on things education stresses - critical thinking skills, data, research, studies, logic, et cetera.

• At its core, education is about understanding the world/reality, questioning the world/reality, looking at the world/reality from different perspectives, and trying to figure out how and why we view things the way we do. Considering reality often has a liberal bias and questioning the world and the way in which we view it is poison to the conservative brain, it makes sense education "turns" people into liberals.

• One of the biggest reasons you don't see conservatives and conservatives views represented in education/academia is because if you have a really good, well rounded understanding of the world and history it suddenly becomes really difficult to be a conservative. Partly because if you understand the world well it'll stop being so scary.

• Considering conservatives eschew any kind of changes or "new" things it would also make sense that there aren't many conservatives in education, as education evolves as humans gain more knowledge and understanding. Education today looks wildly different than it did 100 years ago. Is this because the woke sjw Marxists infiltrated it? No, it's because humans did more research and collected more data that led to new discoveries, inventions, breakthroughs, theories, and more which in turn changed education because education needed to reflect these changes and new things. I talk more about this under the "Change and new ideas" and "Science bad" sections of the "More Thoughts on Modern Conservatism" part of the Miscellaneous tab.

This sentiment that college or education in general is where people go to be "indoctrinated" to become a liberal/democrat/socialist peddled by many Trump supporters and conservatives to try and make an excuse for how uneducated they are quickly falls apart when looking at the breakdown of the 2012 election. In the 2012 election the republican candidate Mitt Romney had more support than Obama among voters with some college experience or were college graduates (Figure 6). Obama received a higher percentage of the vote from people with high school or less education. So if college is "liberal indoctrination" then why did more college educated people vote for a republican in 2012?

While the Black Rifle Coffee Company has been kind of associated-ish with the right thanks to Kyle Rittenhouse wearing a shirt with their logo on it and some people at the January 6th riot at the Capitol wearing clothing with their logo on it like this guy. The founders seemingly had enough of this association with the far right and spoke to the New York Times about their frustrations. In the interview (I like to a Salon article because I don't have a New York Times subscription), Evan Hafer, one of the founders, said "This racist [expletive] really pisses me off. I hate racist, Proud Boy-ish people. Like, I'll pay them to leave my customer base. I would gladly chop all of those people out of my [expletive] customer database and pay them to get the [expletive] out." Some conservatives took offense to Hafer saying racism pisses him off and he doesn't want racists being part of his consumer base and claimed that he had turned on his consumer base, trashed his customers, and is trying to distance the brand from conservatives, essentially telling on themselves that they and conservatives are racist. See these tweets below in Figures 28 and 29. Yes, you read that right some conservatives saw a guy saying racism pissed him off and they're claiming he is trying to distance himself from conservatives. Some random dude even claimed they weren't patriots. So I guess true patriots are apathetic to racism? Hafer fired back, quoted as saying "I don't know how you can actually interpret that from the story even as you're reading it, but it's not [for] me to kind of weigh in on people's literacy levels," in the Military Times piece.

This shows how conservatives do "cancel culture" too - turning on something and throwing out insults because it said something slightly out of line with the dumb shit that they believe. Apparently, according to Military Times, the company and its employee have been receiving hate mail and been doxxed because of the comments made in the New York Times interview. It also shows how that, if you don't conform to exactly what the conservative hegemony believes in, your ousted, canceled, called deep state, mocked, doxxed, et cetera.

They previous spoke out against having any relationship with Rittenhouse, even saying it wasn't ethical to profit from what they called a tragedy, which angered some Conservatives but this interview seemed to trigger a lot of on the right. Conservatives were pissed about that too and some denounced the brand.

Also funnily enough Black Rifle is low key pro LGBTQ since they are "pro-individuality" according to this article in Military Times. One of the founders, Evan Hafer, also says this about people who believe in conformity and conforming to stereotypes: "If you think you have to conform to these humorous, exaggerated stereotypes, because that's how you think people actually live? Like, wow, how isolated and alone and miserable that person must be."

At one point in his life, Robert Byrd was a racist turd. There's no denying that. But there's also no denying that he changed these stupid, racist views later in life. Around the early 2000s Byrd not only renounced these views but told up and coming politicians to avoid the KKK. Byrd explained in a C-SPAN interview that he imagined himself in the place of a black person who stopped at a gas station to get water for his grandson or use the bathroom only to see a "whites only" sign. Byrd reasoned that black people loved their grandsons just as much as he loved his and the "whites only" sign wasn't right. Essentially, it was empathy and seeing black people as equal to white people (which they are) that made him reconsider his racist views. Upon his death the NAACP even recognized him and his change of views, putting out a tweet and while the statement linked seem to no longer be on their website (maybe they deleted it after some time because it was a press release, maybe it's been moved or archived) we can get a pretty good idea of what they said thanks to this article from The Hill. Here's the quote from the then president and CEO of the NAACP: Byrd even endorsed Obama for president. He also desegregated the US Capitol police force during the Kennedy administration, as this dude on CSPAN also identifies.

Some context: 17-year old Kyle Rittenhouse had traveled from his home state of Chicago to Kenosha, Wisconsin to protect other people's property he felt was going to be destroyed by those protesting the shooting of Jacob Blake and ended up shooting three people, killing two of them. Wisconsin open carry laws state that the minimum age to openly carry a weapon is 18. Rittenhouse was 17 at the time of the shooting, meaning he broke this state law and thus can be considered a criminal. This gun Rittenhouse illegally was carrying was not his, but belonged to a friend of his who lived in Wisconsin, according to one of his attorneys Lin Wood. Rittenhouse says he asked his friend to buy him the gun and that is what he used with the $1,200 stimulus check money. This is basically the "minors asking adults to buy them alcohol" situation but way worse. Wis. Stat. § 948.60 states that "any person who intentionally sells, loans or gives a dangerous weapon to a person under 18 years of age is guilty of a Class I felony." It also states "Any person under 18 years of age who possesses or goes armed with a dangerous weapon is guilty of a Class A misdemeanor." It is undeniable that Rittenhouse and his friend broke these laws. The National Firearm Industry Trade Association says that "You can never transfer a firearm directly to another person who is a resident of a different state. In that case, you must transfer the firearm through a licensed retailer in the state where the person receiving the gift resides." It is unclear if this process occurred and if not, there's another law Rittenhouse (and his friend) may have broken.

To me, the Rittenhouse situation is less about a white supremacist freely murdering people and instead about toxic American gun culture and bad parenting. I don't believe Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist. I believe he was an immature kid trying to LARP as a hero and ended up at the wrong place at the wrong time because his parents were stupid and irresponsible enough to let their kid go up to what was likely going to be a violent protest and his friend was stupid enough to give him a gun that he shouldn't Rittenhouse should not have been in Kenosha in the first place and should not have had a gun, and his own account of being scared for his life reflects this. It's stupid to go protect someone else's property with a gun you shouldn't have and even stupider to say you also went there to act as a medic despite carrying no first aid equipment. But he was there and ended up killing two people because he was scared. It still seems to be unclear what exactly made Rittenhouse fear for his life. What is certain is that the first person Rittenhouse shot and killed, Joseph Rosenbaum was unarmed, and Rittenhouse himself even testified that he knew Rosebmaum was unarmed. Now, Rosenbaum was acting aggressive - called a "babbling idiot" by a witness - and his actions can't really be excused either, but no one really knows his true motivations. Rosenbaum also may have had mental health issues and was checked out of a Wisconsin hospital that morning (he was checked in following a suicide attempt). Rittenhouse maintains that he shot Rosenbaum out of self defense and used self defense to justify the other people he shot that night. However, considering Rittenhouse went somewhere with a weapon with the intent of protecting property there is an argument to be made that he can't claim self defense at all since he was basically consenting to feel threatening and unsafe by voluntarily going to a dangerous riot. I don't know if this argument holds any merit. The other people were likely acting out of self defense themselves because they witnessed Rittenhouse shoot and kill an unarmed man. So, can Rittenhouse really claim self defense in response to a danger he created/provoked?

• I don't think there's enough of a case to charge Rittenhouse with murder, but probably a wrongful death lawsuit. And he should face some penalty over violating Wisconsin open carry policy. He did say he supported BLM which was weird and his forced crying act at the trial is a pretty bad look, but it's hard not to feel bad for someone who was seemingly so caught up in right-wing "BLM are terrorists destroying cities" rhetoric and that they made a lot of dumb decisions. And killed two people. It's like someone trying to impress their older brother or a celebrity they're obsessed with but they end up going go way too far.

• This article reflects much of my opinion on the matter and I agree with the message - Rittenhouse showcased very bad judgment.

I bring up the law Rittenhouse did break and the law he may have broken to prove a point about criminality. many idiots like to say the BLM movement, and I guess by extension the idea of protesting against police brutality and racism, "glorifies" criminals. However, no one is calling those who galvanized the recent movement like George Floyd or Jacob Blake heroes or anything like that. But you know who is calling criminals (like Rittenhouse) a hero? You guessed it, those same aforementioned idiots. Hashtags like #KyleRittenhouseIsAHero, #KyleRittenhouseDidNothingWrong, and #FreeKyleRittenhouse were trending on Twitter for some time after the news broke regarding the incident and an article from The Guardian identifies thousands of memes glorifying Rittenhouse. Ann Coulter went as far as to say she wants Rittenhouse as president in a tweet. I bring this all up to show how stupid and hypocritical these idiots are for saying the BLM glorifies criminals when they protest against police brutality, racism, and such but then call a criminal who broke the law like Rittenhouse a hero who did nothing wrong and should face no consequences for breaking the law.

A popular theory among the QAnon/MAGA idiot crowd is that Joe Biden is a clone or there are two of then or something like that because different, usually cropped or taken from an angle in which just one earlobe is visible, photos will show him a detached earlobe or an attached earlobe. This is theory is easily debunked when looking at a picture of Joe Biden in which both earlobes are visible. Biden has one attached earlobe and one detached earlobe, something that is genetically possible, per Stanford geneticists. This likely means that Biden is a chimera,

Some MAGA idiots clamoring for hope that Trump will retake the presidency or somehow still is the president post 2020 election point to the wallpaper in the Oval Office as proof Biden actually isn't in the White House, but a stage or set. However, Trump has been pictured in the Oval Office with the same wallpaper which adorns the walls in Biden's pictures. This can be seen below in Figures 16, 17, and 18.

Raw Story reports that a slew of truckers are threatening to strike because democracy didn't go their way. Apparently there is a private Facebook group called "StopTheTires2020" aiming "to mobilize a nationwide trucking shutdown during the holiday season." This was first reported by a Detroit radio station which reports that the group wants "to show America who runs the country" by I guess ignoring the elections results that determine who runs the country? TheTrucker.com also reported on this issue and includes some of the posts from the private group. Apparently they're upset over the Green New Deal and fracking, which Biden has said that he won't ban, rather not allowing any new fracking on federal land.

A caravan of Trump supporters have decided to block traffic, effectively shutting down roads, because ignoring traffic laws somehow shows support to Trump. At the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey, a caravan of Trump supporters just stopped their cars on the road, putting other drivers at a standstill while they got out of their cars and congratulated each other for inconveniencing other people. Officials of the New Jersey Turnpike Authority, which runs the Parkway, confirmed the event took place. Not sure how deliberately causing a traffic jam shows support for Trump, but ok.

A similar incident happened at the Cuomo Bridge in New York. In a video recorded by one of these folks, the man holding the camera says "...the bridge shut down - in the middle of the bridge - we did it again, shut this shit down," "shut down baby, completely shut completely shut," and "everybody is out of their cars, in the way, we do not give a shit we do not care." Quite proud of inconveniencing others and impeding traffic. Also, illegal: "Blocking traffic is an illegal, albeit effective method of protesting in the United States. When protesters block traffic, they are engaging in civil disobedience, a term coined by one of America's earliest freethinkers and intellectuals, Henry David Thoreau." In New York specifically, "you are not allowed to unlawfully obstruct traffic on New York’s roads. If you violate this rule and obstruct traffic, you could be faced with an obstructing traffic violation." The violation would have consequences on one's driving record and could incur fines.

Mississippi House representative Price Wallace tweeted "We need to succeed from the union and form our own country,” in response to Joe Biden winning the 2020 presidential election. Obviously he meant secede but words can be hard. He later would apologize for this "lack of judgement."

Truck owner loses job after driving around with "Fuck The N-----s" and "Trump 2020" painted on his back windshield

• The truck was spotted in Lincoln, Nebraska and after an image of the back windshield was shared, the owner was identified as 21 year old Austin J. Cordis. Cordis claims he didn't write it (sure) and says his vehicle was one of many vandalized in a mall parking lot, yet Lincoln Police Capt. Danny Reitan said Sunday that he could not find any reports of vehicles being vandalized that day and the mall security and manager said they hadn't heard of any vandalism to vehicles either. Cordis also claims that he doesn't even vote but is a registered Republican. Republican governor Pete Ricketts addressed the incident and tweeted "This is disgusting. Racism has no place in our society, and does not reflect Nebraska values. This language is wrong and hateful. We must all strongly condemn statements like this, and work to build greater understanding and love for our neighbors in our communities."

Restaurant owner changes menu item "blackened chicken wings" to "I can't breathe"

• South Florida man Brandon Gonzales quit his job after confronting his boss about the blackened chicken dish being changed to "I can't breathe." Gonzales noticed the change on a ticket and when he went to ask the owner about the change: "He's like, hey, we’re not gonna write blackened anymore, we’re gonna write, 'I can’t breathe' and he started laughing, and I stayed quiet," Gonzales told a local news station. The owner also came into the kitchen and explained the "joke" to the kitchen staff. Despite the employees of the restaurant being 90% black somehow the owner thought this was funny.

Man terrorizes black family because they had a BLM sign in their window

• Seemingly all because the black family had a BLM sign placed in their window, a white neighbor - Michael Frederick Jr - repeatedly vandalized their home over a three day period. This included slashing tires on their cars, and messages like "terrorist black lives matter," "not welcome," and "get the fuck out" spray painted on their cars, a swastika spray painted on a car, gunshots fired into the home, and a rock thrown through one of the home's windows. Fredrick repeatedly vandalized the home over a three night period in September prior to being arrested later in the month. He is accused of committing nine separate criminal acts.

The Biden-Harris campaign had to cancel an event in Texas after a pro-Trump convoy, which had been following the bus around key battle ground states and around stops within the state of Texas (I guess these Trump supporters don't have jobs?), rammed volunteer vehicles and and blocked traffic up to 40 minutes. Dallas representative Rafael Anchía also says that many of the members in the caravan were armed. Many events planned had to be cancelled due to security concerns. Is this not what "cancel culture" is? - harassing a person or group with the intention of taking away their platform? Which is exactly what these Trump supporters did, harassing the Biden-Harris campaign with the intention of keeping them from holding events, thus taking away a campaign platform?

On October 14th, USPS special agents conducted a raid on a Qanon aligned mail carrier in Pennsylvania who allegedly hoarded and thrashed several bags of mail they did not deliver. A local paper identified that the home of Sean Troesch was raided by special agents from the United States Postal Service, who confiscated eight large garbage bags of suspected undelivered mail. A local news station reported the same. Troesch allegedly had these eight bags of mail placed on his curb to be trashed. Scott Balfour, a special agent with the USPS Office of the Inspector General, has said that these bags of mail contained a variety of mail, including first-class and business deliveries.

In California, the GOP has been placing unofficial ballot collection boxes, which has since been ordered to be removed by the state. They don't plan to remove them. The attorney general said that those behind the “vote tampering” could face prosecution. While California state law allows allows county election officers to set up drop boxes throughout the county where people can drop off their ballots in person, state law only allows county election officials to set up official ballot drop boxes, with rules for how often the ballots are retrieved and these unofficial collection boxes placed by the GOP lack these protections and could be vulnerable to tampering. Yet the Republicans who placed these boxes have rejected allegations of wrongdoing, in defiance of what the state’s top election official and attorney general say is an illegal practice. The law in question here explicitly states that any individual can return a ballot to an official designated drop box. But they draw a distinction between a voter who has willingly given their ballot to another person for delivery and a voter who turned their ballot into a drop box they did not know was unofficial. The woman who wrote this law in 2018, assemblywoman Lorena Gonzales, says that what the GOP is doing is not legal in California and that the wording of the law does not give them legal standing to use these boxes.

Filmmakers Shaul Schwarz and Christina Clusiau, who are doing a docuseries on ICE for Netflix, got unprecedented access to the agency and interviewed agents about being seen as the "bad guys." One agent said, "We constantly look like we're the bad guys, when all we're doing is enforcing the laws and doing our job." Ironically, many Nazis also used this "we were just following orders and doing our job" defense following World War 2. Unfortunately, this argument didn't work out all too well at the Nuremberg Trials, as the judges at Nuremberg rejected the “following orders” defense. So, ICE agents say they're not the bad guys like the Nazis because they're just following orders like the Nazis.

Study from The American Journal of Public Health - "Economic Development, Political-Economic System, and the Physical Quality of Life"

• This study "compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development," and ultimately found that, "In 28 of 30 comparisons between countries at similar levels of economic development, socialist countries showed more favorable PQL outcomes."

  • The variables that went into determining PGL included "indicators of health, health services, and nutrition (infant mortality rate, child death rate, life expectancy, population per physician, population per nursing person, and daily per capita calorie supply)," "measures of education (adult literacy rate, enrollment in secondary education, and enrollment in higher education)," and "a composite PQL index."

  • The study found that socialist countries had better - "more favorable" - infant mortality rates, child death rates, life expectancy, daily per capita calorie supply, adult literacy rates, and rates of secondary and higher education: "However, at the same level of economic development, the socialist countries showed more favorable outcomes than the capitalist countries in all these measures."

    • "Our analysis of the World Bank's data supports a conclusion that, in the aggregate, the socialist countries have achieved more favorable PQL outcomes than capitalist countries at equivalent levels of economic development."

  • Overall: "the relationships between PQL and political-economic system deserve more serious attention than they have received in the past. Our findings indicate that countries with socialist political-economic systems can make great strides toward meeting basic human needs, even without extensive economic resources. When much of the world's population suffers from disease, early death, malnutrition, and illiteracy, these observations take on a meaning that goes beyond cold statistics."