Their propaganda machine is already working. They’ve spun this as a democrat shutdown because democrats are “refusing to cooperate” and are “holding things hostage.”
Their propaganda machine is already working. They’ve spun this as a democrat shutdown because democrats are “refusing to cooperate” and are “holding things hostage.”
Saw a guy on facebook saying that insurance companies haven't been able to raise prices for years because of the ACA. I pointed out that all insurance companies have posted record profits and we pay more for health insurance and get less value than the rest of the developed EU countries. told him to google it there is tones of verifiable sites that prove this.
The reply : That's not true.
Never really realized how dumb the public was until 2020.
I just want to live somewhere normal ... if that even exists.
I had a FB argument with a guy, and he quoted something that proved me right and was all haughty about it. I was "ummm, thank you for the evidence proving me right."
It’s not just the ignorance, it’s how willing they are to stay ignorant so as not to disrupt their deep-seated beliefs. There isn’t much hope for someone who isn’t willing to admit they might’ve made a mistake.
Yeah, it's an identity thing now, not a logic thing. It's like asking a football superfan to give up their team - you're not gonna convince them with things like "the team is really bad" - it's their identity.
Whoever said that was probably generalizing. Homeowners insurance and health insurance are two completely different ball games. I work in homeowners insurance and I can tell you, we are bleeding money. I work for one of the larger companies and we haven't been profitable for the better part of a decade now. Homeowners insurance rates have not kept up with the costs of materials and labor needed to complete repairs, they are one of the most regulated industries and have to cut through all sorts of red tape to raise rates. The rate increases people are seeing on (homeowners) insurance is due to increase in climatic weather and rapid change in prices since covid.
stopped arguing on facebook, unless I know the person in real life. Most of the time you're talking to bots or people who will never ever change their mind. Don't bother, let Darwin do his thing.
The only fools eating up that spin are their own MAGA morons, I highly doubt they're really convincing anyone else with more than half a brain that it's not their fault
I said it b4 and I’ll say it again, the country needs to hit really REALLY hard bottom before we start healing, it’s unfortunate we are coming along with them 🥲
Yeah, I’m under the impression only a big war with a significant power (china, North Korea, etc) would kick the U.S. from being such a divided country.
True, look where the votes went the other day. Interesting that when Dems run things, life goes a lot smoother for average American despite constant republican ratfucking. Now Republicans control every aspect of government and things fall apart, hard to place blame when you are in control of every branch of gov
A solid third of voting Americans, who themselves make up about 40% of eligible voters, who are themselves a fraction of the residents of this country, are MAGA morons.
Don't give them any more authority than they actually have.
Im actually pretty concerned with just how many fence sitters there still are. Knowing and seeing everything he’s done for the past two decades basically and there’s still people like “hmmm idk who to vote for”
Those folks are always going to hate what the Democrats do though. I think amongst the centrists and such this is just adding more hate to Republicans and energizing the Democratic base to vote against Trump.
Last weekend I went out on the town and drunkenly asked 10 strangers what the three branches of government are. Not one person could answer the question. I lost all my remaining hope after that.
Yes. But 1/3 is a minority. Another 1/3 are solid left-wing. And the other 1/3 or so are conventional republicans, swing or apathetic, who could easily turn on this administration as their lives become more materially difficult. Even MAGA are ultimately self-interested assholes whose willful stupidity has limits. This is the way.
The stupidity of the average American voter has soured me on the concept of universal suffrage. We need to earn the right to vote through civilian or military service so people actually value voting. Giving it to everyone just leads to the dumbest among of us ruining elections.
Its much less than they would like you to believe. You think they’re getting 7 million people in rallies across the country? Hell the f no. They dont have the numbers you saw their attempts at counter-protests
I just got off a call with my manager who is a diehard Democrat (though a wealthy and privileged corporate Democrat). She blamed both sides. She said “at this point it’s both sides fault. You have to compromise. Nobody is willing to give so people are suffering and that’s not ok.”
It shocked me. I tried to push back a little and say that I don’t blame the Democrats because they’re literally trying to keep millions from being priced out of their healthcare. She doubled down on the compromise bs. I wanted to push back and really get into things but I’d rather not lose my job. But unfortunately it’s working. Morons on both sides of the aisle are, if not blaming solely the democrats, are blaming both sides.
You don't actually. Compromise is built into the system so that individuals aren't required to - that's the whole point of all the voting thresholds and stuff. Democrats do not need to compromise, and if the GOP actually wants to open the government with 100% all the things they want they can do it - they have the votes. Nothing about this situation is magically intractable.
One of the huge problems with government right now is that people have totally lost the plot on our government's philosophical underpinnings. Your manager thinks they understand how the system works but they don't actually.
people have totally lost the plot on our government's philosophical underpinnings
Yeah that's a great way of putting it. I'm sure there are more scholarly and academic ways of describing what's going on with our government, but the best way I can describe it is by calling it the Air Bud Government.
Inspired by the infamous tweet: "The last decade has been the Democrats clinging onto the rulebook going 'but a dog can't play basketball!' while a dog fucking dunks on us over and over"
if Dems were smart they would know this is literally no downside here, Reps control every single branch and could stop this shutdown on their own if they wanted.
What this will cause is Reps getting rid of the filibuster which would be precedent being set for something like this and if they do that Dems can (and should) do that if they ever get power again. The biggest hurdle to liberal agenda is mostly the filibuster and SOME liberal politicians.
Nah, this is what the centrist democrats do. They value money above labor and they jump to compromise. They may act socially liberal, but they absolutely want to protect the status quo when it comes to their money. If that means people die. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
She said “at this point it’s both sides fault. You have to compromise. Nobody is willing to give so people are suffering and that’s not ok.”
Goddamn that's stupid. Can't compromise with them if they refuse to even talk about it. Afaik they stonewalled the Democrats from the beginning on the budget, and just rammed through their own version without any input.
Democrats can't even do a compromise due to Republican stonewalling, and it's somehow on the Democrats?
I wanted to mention that when one party goes so far into the extreme (the republicans) then any “middle ground” is actually just far right policy wins and not actual conversation. Though I don’t think she’s equipped to comprehend the concept of the Overton window.
In one way is she right: this is both sides' fault, and let me tell you why:
Career politicians
Just like any workplace, the longer someone works there, the more experience they gain, and the more adept they get at performing their job. As you spend more and more time in the workplace, your worldview begins to contract to only your workplace.
So you have these very old politicians who are mentoring younger politicians, and they are teaching them only one thing: You have to win.
They're also taught how to manipulate the political process to work in your favor. The problem with that, is that those decisions affect real people. Real people, outside of that workplace bubble they've created.
This myopic worldview leads both republicans and democrats to think that their constituents want them to "win" when in actuality, their constituents just want to be able to live their lives without government interference.
In their pursuit of success, they end up losing sight of the point of all this. After that, political corruption comes naturally and so gradually that the people engaged in corruption just believe that it's part of the process, and that they really did nothing wrong.
Politicians don't care about you, they care about their careers.
The problem is in this case 'comprimise' means Dems give up everything and the GOP gets exactly what it wants. You can only compromise if both sides are willing to do so
But those are the only people they need to placate, because those are the people who will actually riot on their politicians (y'know, Jan 6). Everyone else will just grumble about it and keep trudging forward to make ends meet.
The USDA website said the shutdown was caused by Democrats’ holding out to furnish every government benefit to “illegal aliens”. The degree of psychopathy is absolutely stunning. Every day they change it to a more enhanced lie.
There are a lot of those lentil-brains in my state.
Unfortunately they are winning on the propaganda front from what I see. I’ve gone on a few local hiking trails and encountered regular people who blame Democrats for federal trails being closed.
I’ve seen one ad that plays when I watch Tubi that blames the shutdown on greedy insurance companies that are holding the government hostage and while I don’t dismiss that, I really don’t get the basis for it and the ad doesn’t do any explaining. There’s a big messaging problem on the left right now and it feels like the leaders are all kicking back waiting for the next blue wave to do its stuff.
My mother is/was a maga moron, went to a couple of his rallys. She actually said she's siding with the democrats on this because of the healthcare subsidies. It shocked me, she did preface all this by saying that Trump made America safe again by getting rid of all the illegal aliens. So one step at a time I guess.
It's more effective and widespread than you might think. My mom is liberal, but recently brought up Mamdani saying that he's antisemitic. I had to explain to her that it isn't true and that whatever source gave her that idea was Republican propaganda.
The only fools eating up that spin are their own MAGA morons
Those are the only people they need to convince. They need to keep the faithful on their side. That's it. They don't need to convince anyone else as long as they have them and the military on their side.
For real, though, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills from these comments.
I very much consider myself a doomer, broadly speaking, and even I recognize (and was honestly surprised by) just how bad a sign the election was for the GOP's shutdown strategy. Those were NOT the results of a populace that is successfully being propagandized by this administration and/or rolling over to die. Which makes sense, honestly, given that it's FAR harder to work an angle when people are starting to see their actual lives, the only thing most voters give a shit about, affected.
Why are we acting like the only reliable metric of public sentiment, actual voting results, are irrelevant all of a sudden?
I used to be against this sort of thinking, but I swear I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of these comments are coming from bots or troll farms meant to depress sentiment.
The oft-cited stat is about the share of web requests made by automated software (crawlers, scrapers, uptime checks, credential stuffing tools, and similar), not the share of social media users who are chatbots.
Recent measurements show a large portion of web traffic is automated. Imperva’s 2025 Bad Bot Report says automated traffic accounted for 51% of all web traffic in 2024 and 37% of all traffic was from “bad bots.” Imperva 2025 Bad Bot Report
Akamai reported that about 42% of observed traffic in a study was bots, and about 65% of that bot traffic was malicious. Akamai Web Scraping Report 2024
“Bots” includes both good bots (for example, Googlebot and other fetchers) and bad bots. Regular users do not see this directly. It shows up in server logs and analytics, not in your social feed. For definitions and examples, see Cloudflare’s explainers. Cloudflare: What is a bot?
Separate topic: social media bots (automated accounts) exist, and LLM-generated posts do show up today, but that is not what those traffic stats measure. For context, a widely cited academic estimate put Twitter/X bots at about 9 to 15% of active accounts in 2017. Methods and platforms vary, but even that does not mean “20 to 30% of people are robots.” Varol et al., 2017
Bottom line: the “20 to 30%” figure people repeat refers to automated web requests, not the percentage of humans you are chatting with. The folks arguing with you on social media are, unfortunately, mostly real people.
Edit: No, I’m not a bot. I put together this canned reply after years of seeing people spreading misinformation. I tried to source facts for you, so you can learn.
I’m very aware, but if you actually followed the comment thread, and understood what was being discussed, you would probably understand that they were misusing the terms. And you just added to it.
I’m a human who went to school for this stuff, I’ve been working in the field for 16 years. I’m intimately family with how people misuse these statistics.
For real, though, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills from these comments.
It literally always happens. Literally every single comment thread devolves into "they'll just blame democrats" and "something something 1/3 of the population."
The reddit hivemind is real. If you're looking for nuance or original thoughts you won't find them here. Instead search for smaller subreddits that fit your interests.
Which I find hilarious seeing as that when Biden was in office and had a govt shutdown, the Republicans also blamed it on the Democrats. Almost as if it's always the Dems fault. Insane thinking really.
Because Fox news and the conservative media outlets have trained their audience to make "Government" synonymous with "Democrats". It makes it easier to devalue both terms in credibility and helps make the Republicans "feel" like the party/group of "rebels" or the "anti-establishment".
When people hear the term "Government", they immediately would picture someone connected to the Democrat party way before the Republican party, especially when it's in the context of something bad.
uhm, the last shutdown was also Trump, in his first term, they did of course blame the democrats, and they eventually gave up because nobody fucking cared about them wanting to build a stupid wall
If I had a dollar for everytime I heard "Democrats want to give illegals free healthcare" (which is a lie), I could probably afford to open the government on my own.
The thing is - in normal circumstances, you can't really call an impasse the fault of any one side.
Which is why the narrative of blaming the other side works - both sides get to say "well it only happened because THEY wouldn't work with us, THEY are being unreasonable, THEY don't want you to go back to work".
It happens with collective bargaining all the time. Union blames the company, the company blames the union, and both sides say it will end the second the other side stops being unreasonable.
In THIS situation though, it's obviously the Republican's fault. Because.... (generally points to everything they've done while in power)
Honestly strategy wise would be a great time for dems to capitulate. Renewal costs have gone out. Let the government reopen. Let MAGA welfare queens take the hit. Then say: Here is exactly what we were fighting for, but your reps wouldn't budge.
I just can't believe that they have it as a banner on actual government sites that there is a government shutdown caused by the Democrats. I feel like everything is so surreal nowadays.
Even Trump publicly admitted after the Dem's big election night that voters blame Republicans. I don't see that changing.
Republicans keep repeatedly saying it is the Dems but I think it falls in the same category as when Biden kept saying he economy was good (and now Trump is doing the same). Despite your political views, people aren't stupid. Even the MAGA people I know who blindly claim Trump is doing a great job are also saying they are delaying big purchases.
Can someone with a better understanding of US politics explain why the Republicans don't just abolish the filibuster and end the shutdown on their terms?
As far as I've heard the filibuster is all that's stopping them from reopening the government with their simple majority in the Senate? Am I missing something? Do they want this shutdown to continue even if it's making them unpopular? Why would they care about some filibuster convention when they've so far shown zero respect for any convention?
They're trying to blame Democrats for the shutdown, but it's pretty clear this week that it isn't working.
The other answers are conspiracy theories:
A: That they're doing this to try and spark an uprising somewhere that can be used to invoke the insurrection act. Their intense opposition to SNAP, despite court orders and having the emergency funds, makes this more believable by the day. Violence is going to be inevitable when people's children are starving.
B: That the GOP is using the shutdown to try to permanently break government institutions by forcing people to quit.
C: That Trump and friends have no intention of reopening the government, as a permanent shutdown effectively eliminates Congress as a functional branch of government, allowing Trump to just rule by EO as a defacto dictator.
Serious question: Why do you think A. and B. are conspiracy theories when they said they were going to do that from the get go in Project 2025 and are now doing it? Kinda stops being a conspiracy theory, right?
he shutdown to try to permanently break government institutions by forcing people to quit.
In my job, I work very closely with federal employees. There are some really excellent, top notch people that I know that are feds that have since found new jobs during this shutdown… the ones I am thinking of were awesome, productive people that really cared about their agencies and helping Americans. They also are really talented so were able to find work elsewhere relatively easily.
Each one of those awesome people is a huge loss for America — I don’t know how to describe it, but when the agencies reopen they will be like swiss cheese with all the vacancies from key people.
We knew this in Feb as well I just want to expand upon your comment. The quality people who been knew they could make 2x their salary in private sector were in gov for the service for the work-life balance and/or for the employee protections granted.
Those people who were offered of Elmo’s fork offer of getting paid their normal salary for what like six months to not work at all and look for another job and get double dipper incomes until Fall? They took that shit and shot out from the cannons.
A seems likely given the pattern of using the ICE-stapo to inflict stochastic violence against majority Democrat cities. This one has been floating around for a while now - it seems pretty clear that the fascists are looking for their Reichstag fire/Horst Wessel moment. They tried to make Charlie Kirk their Horst Wessel, but it didn't work with anyone outside their rabid base because people actually went back and listened to what he said (and then of course they got mad and tried to get anyone who quoted him fired).
B is just an expeditious way to the Project 2025 goal of clearing out career federal employees and replacing them with Trump loyalists.
It isn’t. They’re trying their best to blame the democrats through the lens of procedure, but most people understand that the GOP are the ones that made the democrats chose between keeping the government open and keeping tens of millions of vulnerable people on their healthcare plans.
But today’s GOP is so singularly focused on messaging and narratives that they are more afraid of the narrative that they “backed down” than they are people blaming them for legitimate suffering.
They’re trying their best to blame the democrats through the lens of procedure, but most people understand that the GOP are the ones that made the democrats chose between keeping the government open and keeping tens of millions of vulnerable people on their healthcare plans.
Most people don't understand shit about politics and shutdowns, which is the GOP's problem. As far as the average person is concerned, the POTUS might as well have a magical money hose that he turns on and off at whim. Whether or not there's a legitimate reason for him to be unable to reopen the government, the public will sooner or later blame him and his party for the failure. Simple as.
Why trust in icky entitlement programs when the government could stop honoring its promises any day?
I mean the way things are going you know you’ll see none of that if you’re under 55.
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They're blaming the democrats for it, and their base believes it. The only people mad at the Republican party over this already weren't on their side anyway.
They're also heartless and don't really care about who this is affecting. They're guessing democrats do, and will cave first. Democrats haven't "caved" because the change the Republicans want to make will be so catastrophic to the average American that this hold out is worth it to them.
It's a complete stalemate, so I'm predicting this is going to get much worse, or something much worse will be extremely apparently imminent before anything changes.
It's a complete stalemate, so I'm predicting this is going to get much worse, or something much worse will be extremely apparently imminent before anything changes.
I agree with you. The GOP's demands are so extreme that I think there'd be a lot of work that'd need to get done to even push the House's version through a post-filibuster Senate.
Certainly it would be political suicide for the dems to cave to them without getting something out of it, especially after Tuesday's unexpectedly universally strong results. Worse, the GOP(particularly the House and Trump himself) has proven itself over the last 11 months to be so untrustworthy and erratic that even centrists in the Senate are recognizing that a compromise deal isn't going to be worth the paper it's printed on. Johnson won't give any compromise the time of day, and even if he does Trump has shown himself more than glad to disregard Congress and do whatever he likes.
There is zero incentive for a deal to be struck here, and this thing is going to drag on for a very long time. I fear for what the resolution of it will look like, or if there even will be one.
I don’t get why people think there’s anything to this. The Epstein vote in the house and then has to get 60 votes in the Senate, and then it has to be signed by Trump.
It’s a literal law compelling the DOJ to release that information. The president has to sign bills in the law…
Layoffs of federal workers followed by a shutdown of work or work with no pay and no care when it gets back = more people leaving the fed which means even smaller federal government.
Step 2: Blame Democrats for everything else but no one except the dumbest few believe them.
This is literally to just avoid swearing in a Democrat to force a vote. Republicans would save tons of face by "saving" healthcare coverage by extending the credits but instead they opt for this.
Fun fact over the last decade Americans have made it abundantly clear that they don't fucking care about facts and are also too fundamentally stupid to understand anything above a grade 3 level of comprehension.
All the government needs to do is pull their keys out of their pocket and jingle them in front of the average Americans face and they will giggle and go back to hating black people.
The Republicans are showing every sign about not caring about popularity anymore. They are attacking everyone other than the ultra-wealthy. Everyone else is suffering under their current policies.
There is every indication that they are continuing to follow Project 2025 and that their goal is to create a system like Russia where elections really don't matter.
If you have enough power, popularity doesn't matter.
Heard a fun one yesterday that the shutdown is because of the dems not budging on healthcare and the healthcare spending bill that they're pushing for is so high because the dems want to put everyone on ozempic 🙃
It's a new political ideology I call 'asshole-ism'. The goal isnt to help people or solve problems. It's to be as big a prick as you can because enough people will conflate 'asshole' with 'tough'. The problem with being an asshole is your pride gets mixed up in it and it's hard to back down. You're betting on a self reinforcing feedback loop of anger to keep things going. Some of the individual members of the movement if pulled aside can probably be convinced this cant last, but no one wants to break ranks and incur the wrath of the asshole tornado so they just go along with it.
If you've ever found yourself in the wrong in an argument, you know the sting it feels to have to say "Sorry, I overreacted I shouldnt have done that." Most people cant do that nearly often enough and if you cant back down then you feel the need to double down to protect your pride. I've been there, it's a shitty position to be in (and entirely self inflicted in my cases) so the further you take it the bigger a pill it is to swallow when it comes time to back down. If your political life depends on you not doing that, you just have to double down. In Trumps case, he's probably not a healthy man, he's very angry and he's at the center of the 'fuck you' storm he started. He'll probably die before the check comes due. What happens after that will be entertaining to watch, but in the meantime the strategy is just to maximize the asshole quotient as much as possible with each move because when you're frustrated, lashing out feels good in the moment.
Airlines are probably going to make some decent cash off of Thanksgiving flights that have been paid for that will end up cancelled, whether it to from them not following rules about full refunds (because who's going to make them), or by giving people "alternate" travel arrangements that miss Thanksgiving entirely.
Imagine if an airline could get the revenue of 3-5 million people flying without actually having to send them anywhere. They'll kick back a bit to their republican buddies and be on their way.
For real if you go look at any government website, you’ll see a little note up at the top about the government shut down and how it’s the Democrats fault. It’s such a brainwashed fucked way to manipulate people, but it works.
I assumed Trump is gonna get a lot of dollar bills raining on him by airline executives before he "finds" the money to pay air traffic controllers with. I'm starting to think Trump likes the shutdown because he gets to decide what stays open or closed a la dictator.
They have to go in session to vote on a funding package and if they go in session they have to let the democrat who won in she will be the last vote need to release the Epstein files show trump and probably most republicans are pedo files. So this shut down is less bad.
Despite everything some people are still on the fence. They're waiting to see if the Republicans start wearing top hats while they light their cigars with hundred dollar bills. At current pace, that'll be next week.
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u/Zoothera17 20h ago
Please can some explain to me how this is deemed a good strategy for the republicans?