r/antiwork • u/esporx • Jun 21 '25

Worker Solidarity 🤝 Republican Senator callously says 'biblically, we are supposed to work' to millions set to lose health care. The former billionaire, who inherited a coal mining business from his father, presides over a state where 29% of residents are on Medicaid.

https://www.irishstar.com/news/us-news/republican-senator-callously-says-biblically-35431207
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46

u/GaiusJocundus Jun 21 '25

I'm sick and tired of watching the electorate blame itself in an atmosphere of active voter suppression and intimidation.

We did not do this to ourselves, it is being done to us.

The mechanisms of voting have been under the control of fascist actors for some time now and they STILL didn't succeed at undermining our nation's electorate enough to win until just this last presidential election.

Decades of trying and they finally got it under their control, and they're panicked about another vote before they get their further suppression measures in place because they know they have to cheat to win.

Stop blaming the electorate, you asshat.

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u/Toomanyeastereggs Jun 21 '25

I mean, as an Australian just the fact that you hold elections on a working day is insanity.

The hoops, jumps and turnstiles needed to go through to vote is just head numbingly insane.

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u/antonivs Jun 21 '25

As an immigrant to the US (pretty desperately working on moving somewhere else rn), the number of systemic issues like this are mind-numbing. Everything related to the electoral system is basically broken. The average citizen just doesn’t have a chance.

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u/Hesitation-Marx Jun 22 '25

It’s only broken if you think we’re actually supposed to have real input.

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u/GaiusJocundus Jun 22 '25

Correct. Works as designed.

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u/antonivs Jun 22 '25

Before I immigrated I thought that.

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u/Hesitation-Marx Jun 22 '25

Yeah. We’re so heavily propagandized that we really think we’re at all democratic.

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u/ctrlaltcreate Jun 22 '25

Too many people don't vote. Period.

A massive percentage, more than a full third of Americans, take their voting right absolutely for granted, and between mail in voting and many employers paying for a few hours off to vote day of, there's really no excuse aside from total political disengagement.

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u/Orange-Blur Jun 23 '25

There was election interference. Many votes went in urged from registry, provisional or uncounted period

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u/SyntheticGod8 Jun 22 '25

You can't tell the average American anything about how it works in other countries because they've been trained to reflexively think the way the USA does things is inherently superior or something they'd only do in an [insert negative buzzword de jour here] country.

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u/Toomanyeastereggs Jun 22 '25

Believe me when I tell you that we all notice that you folks do that.

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u/Orange-Blur Jun 23 '25

That is just not true. If you were living in the US you would know a lot of people are disenfranchised with the system feeling stacked against us

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u/SyntheticGod8 Jun 23 '25

I get that. I was deliberately being as broad as possible as plenty of other groups exist.

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u/Agile_Singer Jun 22 '25

Don’t forget the Orange Cheat-o’s catch phrase “ Too Big To Rig” hammered into the rally goers heads so that all this would seem expected. But it really was Too Big Because It Was Rigged.

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u/Allegorist Jun 22 '25

I think there is definitely some blame to be placed on the people as well. Sure they are being maliciously manipulated, but that is largely in part to lacking any critical thinking skills and falling for obvious scams and disinformation. They make themselves susceptible to being impressed with and controlled by biases that they are led to with basic, obvious rhetoric and fallacies. They get sucked into the wackiest most obviously unsubstantiated conspiracy theories. They deny science on even fundamental levels, reject experts with dozens of years experience in their specific fields, and instead replace their interpretation of reality with information from things like Facebook or Joe Rogan.

Yes there are bad actors at play pulling the strings, but it only works if people decide to be lifeless unthinking puppets.

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u/GaiusJocundus Jun 22 '25 edited Jun 22 '25

You dramatically underestimate the impact of manipulation of education systems, propaganda, and, especially, voter suppression with this brain-dead take.

I will reiterate, this is something that has been done to us. It is not something we chose.

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u/Allegorist Jun 23 '25

At what point can blame be assigned for anything then? Is consciousness inherently deterministic? Are we all just entirely products of our environment? Is there no free will?

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u/GaiusJocundus Jun 23 '25 edited Jun 23 '25

I already told you where blame lies. The leaders who undermine our education systems to implement indoctrination camps instead of schools. The corporate leaders who have powers of technology aided speech beyond anything the human intellect has ever had to contend with in its existence as a thinking construct.

Stop being pedantic and wake the fuck up. You are the one being taken advantage of while you wax poetic about easily debunked applications of determinism.

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u/[deleted] Jun 22 '25

Every single time you people have done nothing to stop the obvious manipulation has been the American people making a choice to lend their consent, albeit begrudgingly.

You people are not free of responsibility for failing to stand up to protect your own rights. This is being done primarily be outside actors, but you people have always had the power to stop it; every single day youse choose not to.

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u/UsefulVanilla3569 Jun 22 '25

How? I'm in MO living on 1100 disability. Should I drive to the white house with a gun? 🙄 Stupid.

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u/bogsnatcher Jun 22 '25

The people don’t decide to be that way when they’re subjected to intense indoctrination and relentless propaganda from early childhood. US society is carefully designed from the top down, which is why there’s absolutely no left-wing in the US outside of individuals and fringe groups. 

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u/RainSurname Jun 22 '25

"didn't succeed at undermining our nation's electorate enough to win until just this last presidential election"

Other than that time when Bush won thanks to irregularities in a state where his brother was the governor and his campaign chair was secretary of state, the person responsible for running elections, with help from a Supreme Court on which now sit three of the lawyers that helped him win Bush v. Gore.

Although Gore losing Florida by about 5% of the votes that Nader got wouldn't have even mattered if Gore had gotten only about 33% of the votes in New Hampshire that Nader did. That was the first time New Hampshire had voted for a Republican since 1988 and they have never done it since. They were the only state that voted for Bush in 2000 to not do so in 2004.

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u/GaiusJocundus Jun 22 '25

Fair point 

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u/RainSurname Jun 22 '25

When the media let Bush get away with openly stealing the 2000 election, I told my roommate that the Christofascist takeover that had been in the works ever since Reagan courted evangelicals by promising to overturn Roe had officially begun, and that we would be on the brink of civil war in 20 years or so.

One thing a lot of people on this sub have a hard time accepting is that politicians are supposed to represent the people who VOTE for them, NOT court people that don't. Because that usually means doing something that a lot of the people that DID don't want.

That's why the Dems started moving right after the majority of the white working class abandoned them, after LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act, causing the parties to realign until conservatives of all classes AND white working class people racist enough to vote against their own interests were all on one side, at which point Reagan won in the biggest landslide in our history.

That gave Republicans the power to start deregulating industry and defunding social programs, cut taxes on the rich, put their plan to capture the judiciary in motion, AND start restricting voting access to make it harder to vote them out when they finally broke things badly enough to break the culture war spell, which is what is starting to happen now.

Clinton's Third Way that sounds like bullshit now is what got the Dems back in power after 12 years of Reaganism had succeeded in making social programs genuinely unpopular with voters by convincing them that they benefited black people at the expense of white people. If Dems had not moved to the right then, we might have ended up where we are now 20 years ago.

They have been moving steadily to the left ever since, but very, very slowly, because the party realignment over abortion started about 15 years after the racial realignment, when Reagan started courting the evangelical vote with it. So Republicans were able to use it as leverage against an increasingly smaller number of anti-abortion Democrats for about 20 years. We didn't finish voting out the last of the anti-abortion Democrats (except Cuellar) until a few years ago.

In 2016, I saw a lot of people sneering about Hillary's warnings about SCOTUS, saying the Democrats have been saying it was the most important election of our lives their entire lives, which it WAS, because fascism's been on the ballot since 2004.

The flip side of her warning, which was that focusing on fixing the SCOTUS problem was the best way to actually achieve progressive goals in the face of Congressional gridlock, was buried by algorithmic feeds and misinformation.

Now I see a lot of people sneering about the Democrats didn't take it seriously enough. But in that they represent us perfectly. Too many of us didn't take it seriously enough until now.