When you start locking protesters up for a year, they’re going to start doing something worth getting locked up for a year.

Why does the US need to solve the issue?

I agree – the U.S. should stay out of the conflict by immediately ceasing all shipments of bombs and money to Israel.

If there’s a silver lining, I don’t think this is limited to leftist spaces, or even to online ones.

If you still think Democrats actually care about a potential mass deportation, ask yourself why Biden hasn’t simply pardoned all undocumented immigrants.

Immigration offenses are federal crimes, the president can pardon federal crimes, and you don’t actually have to be charged with anything or convicted to receive a pardon (see Nixon).

Everyone I know voted. No one I know irl felt democrats didn’t go far enough left.

Yeah, if they thought Democrats were too far right they probably were among the 11 million who voted for Biden but stayed home this time.

Harris didn’t run as a Republican and you know it.

She touted an endorsement from Dick Cheney, said she’d put a Republican in her cabinet, and said she’d pass Trump’s immigration bill.

for a party supposedly fighting against the rise of fascism, they didn’t try very hard at all.

They’re also still in power until late January. Settling aside the very large question of “why would you willingly hand over power to fascists?”, does anyone think they’ll do anything to even make it harder for Republicans to do all the awful things they ran on?

Biden could pardon every person charged with a federal immigration crime tomorrow, with the stroke of a pen. He could then order everyone in ICE custody released immediately and fire everyone he can in that agency. If I was seriously concerned about Republicans deporting tens of millions of immigrants, this would be the bare minimum I’d do.

Yeah, having more than half the US population vote for fascism

Far fewer than half of eligible voters voted for Trump. This election was decided by people choosing to stay home rather than vote for Harris. Trump got about 74 million votes in both 2020 and 2024, but Biden got 81 million votes while Harris got only 70 million.

Americans are not getting more fascist, Democrats are just completely failing at offering them anything positive.

“Ignore the problem, hope you get rich enough to keep ignoring the symptoms”

About 16 million, I believe.

Bernie’s coalition was filled with the exact type of voters who are now flocking to Donald Trump… It turns out, the Bernie-to-Trump pipeline is real!

Except this election wasn’t decided by voters switching sides, it was decided by something like 16 million Biden voters not showing up for Harris or Trump, who himself lost about 2 million votes from his 2020 total.

For those 16 million who sucked it up and voted for Biden in 2020, the choice this time wasn’t Harris or Trump, it was Harris or staying home.

people that voted democrat in 2020 voted republican this time

Both parties lost millions of voters since 2020. Trump lost about 2 million, Harris lost about 16 million.

It wasn’t people switching parties, it was people not voting because Biden didn’t make a difference in their lives and Harris promised more of the same.

“The Democratic Party cannot fail, it can only be failed”

-Smart people who are interested in winning

About 16 million more people voted for Biden in 2020 than voted for Harris in 2024. The Democrats found a way to take 16 million people who cared enough to vote last time and get them not to vote this time.

Shit, Trump lost 2 million voters from 2020, too. This should have been a layup.

Biden wasn’t close to perfect. He wasn’t hard enough on Netanyahu, opting to express frustrations with him privately rather than through policy, because being pro-Israel is a popular view in the US.

Biden circumvented Congress and violated standing law to fund a genocide. The bare minimum was not aiding Israel in any way, and he did not even entertain that.

Setting aside that Israel’s ongoing genocide isn’t actually popular, say it was for the sake of argument. That still doesn’t mean you support it. You may have to actually do your job as a politician and shape public opinion on an important matter, or even do the right thing despite it potentially harming your career. Again, bare minimum stuff.

If you want to blame someone for making Trump a serious candidate, blame Democrats:

So to take [Jeb] Bush down, Clinton’s team drew up a plan to pump Trump up. Shortly after her kickoff, top aides organized a strategy call, whose agenda included a memo to the Democratic National Committee: “This memo is intended to outline the strategy and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican presidential field,” it read.

“The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party,” read the memo.

“Pied Piper candidates include, but aren’t limited to:

Ted Cruz

Donald Trump

Ben Carson

We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously."

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/hillary-clinton-2016-donald-trump-214428

I think it’s important to differentiate pacifism as a strategy – the total renunciation of anything that could be considered violence, often including even mere property damage – with non-violence as one tactic among many.

Many movements have had success using non-violence as a tactic in certain situations, so long as those movements don’t take the possibility of ever using violence completely off the table (pacifism).

It’s also worth noting that Mandela founded the ANC’s guerilla branch. Western media today portrays him as a purely non-violent, MLK-like figure, but in reality he was central to the ANC’s decision to begin an armed struggle against apartheid.

It’s almost as if:

During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.

The people violently resisting a genocide are also good guys.

If someone is trying to kill you and everyone who looks like you, shooting back is good.

repairing harm through dialogue between victims, offenders, and community members

What if the person who committed the crime doesn’t want to engage in this process? What if the victim of the crime doesn’t want to? What if a person accused of a crime maintains their innocence? There are plenty of cases where restorative justice can work, but many others where it won’t.

addressing root causes like poverty, mental health issues, and substance abuse

the goal is to create a society where crime is less likely to occur

I think this is a much better framework to work with than prison abolition. Picking up the pieces after a crime has been committed is expensive and usually leaves you choosing from a range of bad options.