"Some residents argued that outdoor sirens blaring warnings in the event of a flash flood would ruin the natural feel of the area that many prized. “The thought of our beautiful Kerr County having these damn sirens going off in the middle of the night,” one county commissioner at the time, Buster Baldwin, said during a 2016 meeting. “I’m going to have to start drinking again to put up with y’all.” (Mr. Baldwin died in 2022.)"
I'm thinking hard here, but I'm reasonably sure this is at least in the top-5 most moronic short-sighted, selfish, brain-dead things I've ever seen in my life. Possibly even top-3. Yeah, I'd join Buster in the bar to drink ourselves in a coma.
NIMBY is the most powerful political force in every western country.
It's far easier killing off any new economic and public development at the local level than any national level environmentalist or small government movement could ever dream for.
This is not "NIMBY". Warning systems need to be where they're needed, and if that's your backyard then that's your backyard. Complaining about "damn sirens going off in the middle of the night" during a life and death scenario is on an entirely different level.
> “I’m here to ask this court today to send this money back to the Biden administration, which I consider to be the most criminal treasonous communist government ever to hold the White House,” one resident told commissioners in April 2022, fearing strings were attached to the money.
> “We don't want to be bought by the federal government, thank you very much,” another resident told commissioners. “We'd like the federal government to stay out of Kerr County and their money.”
In fairness, a similar issue has traditionally existed with tornado warnings, which they likely have in that part of the US. Most of the people affected by the warning are not actually at risk because the warnings are poorly targeted or the risk doesn’t meaningfully materialize. Over time, people get warning fatigue and they start ignoring them. It becomes a “boy who cried wolf” situation which makes the loud sirens that much more of a nuisance.
The spam-y nature of many disaster warning systems is widely understood to be an issue. If these people have existing experience with other low hit-rate warning systems like for tornados, it isn’t surprising that they would find even more warnings to be a nuisance. The false positive rates that people experience is too high by an order of magnitude to be an effective system.
If they have warning sirens that are ineffective at conveying real risk, they stop being warnings and become background noise.
Several months ago, in Southern California, we had a cell phone earthquake alert.
Essentially it was “An earthquake is coming now, seek cover”.
I picked up my phone, read it, gave it a kind of WTH look, and, indeed, an earthquake hit. And it was a notable quake.
I rode out the quake at my desk.
And that’s the thing. Where I’m at, we get hit all the time. Rollers, shakers, slammers. We had a week or so last year where we got hit by a swarm of a dozen of them.
But they’re small. Close 3s. During the swarm, I felt for the folks about 2 miles away. All of them originated beneath them, so they were getting more than I was.
So, it’s hard to take an earthquake warning very seriously. First, I didn’t even know we had warnings. Second, we’re (I’m) used to just riding them out. With that kind of warning, all we can do is duck and cover, assume the worst, hope for the best.
I will say this, next time I get that warning, I’ll heed it. The quake that hit us was interesting enough to justify caution should they send another one, and, one way or another, it’s going to be over soon. So the overall precaution in response to the warning is quite low.
On the other hand, we also get the flash flood warnings. They’re broadcast over a huge area, 95+% of which is, honestly, not susceptible to the flooding.
These are long lasting warnings. With 12 hour durations. The most interesting one is the one for a local river basin. That warning goes off when crossing the river on the freeway.
There are certainly areas susceptible to flash floods. Lots of mountains and canyons. Especially in the foothills in the deserts. Down here in the greater LA, Orange, Inland Empire regions, it’s less of an issue. 100 years of development, dams, and flood control infrastructure actually do the job quite well.
Spamming us with flood alerts just numb us to alerts in general when things might really go bad.
I can't speak to tornado warnings, but here in NZ we've been getting tsunami warnings once every year or two and it didn't take long for people to go "yeah yeah yeah" instead of "oh crap".
Kerr county didn't balk at the cost of flood sirens. Biden sent them 10 million dollars for this exact purpose, and they refused to spend it, because it would have let the federal Democrats do something useful for their constituents. [1]
> "Accepting the ARPA money and putting our County under existing and future executive orders would federalize us and make us all slaves."
These people are certifiably insane.
The 10 million did eventually get spent on new police radios and bonuses for the sheriff's department. [2]
When a state like Texas is so gerrymandered that no political competition is really possible, and ignorance is celebrated, why would be surprised that ignorant people elect stupid people to govern them?
I’m sure that they claim to “back the blue” while refusing to put the communications tools that keep them safe in place as well.
What people of this ilk have done to our nation makes me sick.
They refused to spend the money because it was from Biden (also "climate change"), then refused to return it because it might go to a blue state. First I'm hearing they actually spent it, but not surprised where it ended up
>Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who has instituted a new requirement that she personally approve expenses over $100,000, did not renew the contracts until Thursday, five days after the contracts expired.
Your classic manager who feels they are so important that hey HAVE TO be involved in X,Y,Z but they are not a responsible enough person to actually do the job.
FEMA has "Emergency" in the name. Traditionally, it's supposed to come in when the normal rescue infrastructure has failed, due to earthquake, weather, etc. You're not optimizing for cost here. You're optimizing for reliable emergency management -- and that's going to cost money.
If you wanted a different agency, like one that prioritized "recovery after 6 months", well, it would help to inform the nation that FEMA is no longer the nationwide emergency management agency. It's up to the local and state governments.
And Texas voters overwhelmingly voted for politicians who caused this and still make excuses for these same politicians. I am tired of caring for people who vote for people that harm them.
The people deserving of compassion and sympathy are dead. The people who killed them are busy explaining why despite the repeated warnings and tax payer funding, this actually wasn't their fault.
The town that was flooded rejected _free funds_ from the federal government during Covid because they were choking on a red pill of conspiranoia. Destiny (the streamer) did a recent streaming session where he watched the video of the town feedback regarding accepting / rejecting federal government funds from the American Recovery Act (for sirens and standardized first responder comms systems). The short version of the plot is the people were propagandized to distrust the Biden Admin, so they rejected the free upgrades. The voters pressured the town council (one was an actual threat of violence, followed by threats of “consequences”) if the town council accepted the federal funds.
There are consequences to voters and representatives who no longer believe in our shared objective reality.
I don’t blame the little girls, but with freedom comes responsibility. Their parents were responsible for choosing the camp they went to. The camp owner and staff made the risk evaluations of allowing them to sleep in a flood plain during a storm. The local town voted for their representatives and those representatives rejected federal funds which would have given them a chance to survive without cell coverage.
Ultimately your parent comment wasn’t necessarily assigning individual blame. In a democratic republic, the voters / citizens / residents (in aggregate) are ultimately responsible for the actions that elected representatives take in their name.
I thought that there was a bar somewhere, a line that would not be crossed, but there isn't, it's just straight up identity politics, or owning the libs, whatever you want to call it.
Please remember to take the statements posters make in the best possible light.
My interpretation of such is that they're sick of voters who expect a double standard. Don't do something ''I'' don't like when it helps other people, but when ''I'' need help godspeed.
The best possible light is that he cares about the lives of the little girls and many others that Trump and Musk and Noem and DOGE killed more than owning the libs and canceling NOAA.
I think the political spectrum is dangerous because people expect the Paradox of Tolerance and similar correlations to silence the left in places where the right will happily speak.
Kristi Noem is a DEI hire because her only qualification is that the first four letters of her gender are "FEMA".
That, and she's an expert at killing puppies and bragging about it by writing a book.
In her next book she'll brag about all the little girls she killed in Texas, reminiscing about her experience directing FEMA: "It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done."
Trump VP contender Kristi Noem writes of killing dog – and goat – in new book:
>“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.
>“At that moment,” Noem says, “I realised I had to put her down.”
>Noem, who also represented her state in Congress for eight years, got her gun, then led Cricket to a gravel pit.
>“It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realised another unpleasant job needed to be done.”
Which directly led to her current unpleasant job at FEMA.
I once worked for a company that had a founder who was cancelling all contracts on a yearly basis, including renting the office. They were proud of cutting costs that way. After two times, the property owner said, "Great! I have a company that asked me about the space and is willing to pay much more" and the company of several hundred people had to move on very short notice.
Yes, it was very rich, but it did disrupt operations a lot and the new space wasn't as nice - we moved from team offices to an open layout, with my boss praising the open layout - we then found out he would get a private office.
I call people like this "octopuses". They need to have their tentacles everywhere, need to be involved in everything, no matter how little they're needed.
Phrasing matters. using "didn't" puts a bad light on FEMA but if they used "couldn't" it changes things. no idea which it is but i'd bet it should read "couldn't"
That's what's supposed to happen. The Trump administration is shutting down FEMA. Emergency response is now a state responsibility. The interim head of FEMA who told Congress this was a bad move was fired the next day.[1]
Federal disaster relief is now a gift to be given at the whim of the President. Usually, only red states get it. See the list of major disaster declarations here.[2] More details.[3]
> On July 5, as floodwaters were starting to recede, FEMA received 3,027 calls from disaster survivors and answered 3,018, or roughly 99.7 percent, the documents show. Contractors with four call center companies answered the vast majority of the calls.
> That evening, however, Ms. Noem did not renew the contracts with the four companies and hundreds of contractors were fired, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter.
> The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or roughly 35.8 percent, according to the documents. And on Monday, July 7, the agency fielded 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, or around 15.9 percent, the documents show.
Everyone wants to blame social media. People knew exactly what they were getting from Trump. He had been in office for four years. They wanted Trump and he still has an almost 50% approval rating. Despite what Michelle Obama said, this is who this country has always been.
No, I think the companies running vast propaganda campaigns for the sake of their favored candidate so that they can pay 1% less in taxes and/or fuck around with the country as a side project deserve the blame.
This was many, many moons ago, but I still vividly remember learning that the vast majority of people who fought in the confederate army didn't own slaves.
It might be a bit of a silly point, but somehow it seems even worse to go to war for other people's slaves.
It’s become increasingly clear that at least some of them did not consider the negative impacts of a second Trump term’s policies on their personal lives and are now having to bear the violent results of that awful realization.
The outrage and culture wars are not what the 100k deciding voters across 3 states based their choice on. Half of voters pay zero attention to the news and politics.
It was mainly prices, which historically has been a very common deciding factor. If people feel pain in their pocket book, they will give someone else a shot. They also remembered feeling better financially pre-covid
If you are trying to imply democrats should be nicer to republicans, that was disproven over years.
Conservatives consistently prefer the most offensive insulting person around. And calls on left to make it nicer just move overtone window to the right. Conservatives interpret it as a weaknees.
Plus, it causes forever shift where republicans are euphemismed around, sanewashed and consistentky made to look better. That is failing strategy.
Because your feelings get hurt when the con artist you chose as your champion has his own words and deeds described accurately? And this justifies spitefully wrecking the country by supporting an unhinged autocrat whose motives sit somewhere between manic dementia and serving foreign interests? And still rather than acknowledging this might have been a poor idea, you double down with some idea that it was justified simply to have expressed yourself, even though the first question out of every second Democrat's mouth is how to reconcile and find common ground with Republicans?
Look man, I'm a libertarian. I get the frustration and I totally understood why someone would vote for Trump in 2016. But after seeing his first round of abject failure and wanton dividership and then voting for even more of that, you deserve every ton of criticism heaped on you. This was really the time to put country above partisan squabbling, and you failed horribly.
https://archive.ph/J35lH
Here's some local and national reporting I found interesting.
1. Kerr county balked at the cost of flood sirens. [0]
2. Kerr county didn't alert all cell phones of the emergency. [1]
3. Kerr county repeatedly asked the State of Texas for flood help and the state said no. [2]
4. Kerr county was in the bottom half of property taxes in the state of Texas in 2017. [3]
[0] https://www.wowt.com/2025/07/11/small-texas-community-where-...
[1] https://www.nbcdfw.com/investigations/fema-records-kerr-coun...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/us/politics/texas-flood-a...
[3] https://www.uttyler.edu/academics/colleges-schools/business/...
> Kerr county didn't alert all cell phones of the emergency.
Might not have helped. Camp Mystic campers were not allowed cell phones.[1]
[1] https://www.campmystic.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/FINAL-...
Staff surely had them.
If there’s anything I know about summer camp it’s that everyone diligently follows the rules, especially those regarding contraband.
From that NYT article:
"Some residents argued that outdoor sirens blaring warnings in the event of a flash flood would ruin the natural feel of the area that many prized. “The thought of our beautiful Kerr County having these damn sirens going off in the middle of the night,” one county commissioner at the time, Buster Baldwin, said during a 2016 meeting. “I’m going to have to start drinking again to put up with y’all.” (Mr. Baldwin died in 2022.)"
I'm thinking hard here, but I'm reasonably sure this is at least in the top-5 most moronic short-sighted, selfish, brain-dead things I've ever seen in my life. Possibly even top-3. Yeah, I'd join Buster in the bar to drink ourselves in a coma.
NIMBY is the most powerful political force in every western country.
It's far easier killing off any new economic and public development at the local level than any national level environmentalist or small government movement could ever dream for.
This is not "NIMBY". Warning systems need to be where they're needed, and if that's your backyard then that's your backyard. Complaining about "damn sirens going off in the middle of the night" during a life and death scenario is on an entirely different level.
“Those people” probably live on the flood plain. Up on the hill, you don’t want to disturb your beauty sleep.
It's NIMBYism alright. After all, if they're in your backyard, it's an eyesore, or in this case, an earsore.
And what do you call this? https://www.texastribune.org/2025/07/10/texas-kerr-county-co...
> “I’m here to ask this court today to send this money back to the Biden administration, which I consider to be the most criminal treasonous communist government ever to hold the White House,” one resident told commissioners in April 2022, fearing strings were attached to the money.
> “We don't want to be bought by the federal government, thank you very much,” another resident told commissioners. “We'd like the federal government to stay out of Kerr County and their money.”
> “We'd like the federal government to stay out of Kerr County and their money.”
Translation: Not in my back yard.
In fairness, a similar issue has traditionally existed with tornado warnings, which they likely have in that part of the US. Most of the people affected by the warning are not actually at risk because the warnings are poorly targeted or the risk doesn’t meaningfully materialize. Over time, people get warning fatigue and they start ignoring them. It becomes a “boy who cried wolf” situation which makes the loud sirens that much more of a nuisance.
The spam-y nature of many disaster warning systems is widely understood to be an issue. If these people have existing experience with other low hit-rate warning systems like for tornados, it isn’t surprising that they would find even more warnings to be a nuisance. The false positive rates that people experience is too high by an order of magnitude to be an effective system.
If they have warning sirens that are ineffective at conveying real risk, they stop being warnings and become background noise.
Several months ago, in Southern California, we had a cell phone earthquake alert.
Essentially it was “An earthquake is coming now, seek cover”.
I picked up my phone, read it, gave it a kind of WTH look, and, indeed, an earthquake hit. And it was a notable quake.
I rode out the quake at my desk.
And that’s the thing. Where I’m at, we get hit all the time. Rollers, shakers, slammers. We had a week or so last year where we got hit by a swarm of a dozen of them.
But they’re small. Close 3s. During the swarm, I felt for the folks about 2 miles away. All of them originated beneath them, so they were getting more than I was.
So, it’s hard to take an earthquake warning very seriously. First, I didn’t even know we had warnings. Second, we’re (I’m) used to just riding them out. With that kind of warning, all we can do is duck and cover, assume the worst, hope for the best.
I will say this, next time I get that warning, I’ll heed it. The quake that hit us was interesting enough to justify caution should they send another one, and, one way or another, it’s going to be over soon. So the overall precaution in response to the warning is quite low.
On the other hand, we also get the flash flood warnings. They’re broadcast over a huge area, 95+% of which is, honestly, not susceptible to the flooding.
These are long lasting warnings. With 12 hour durations. The most interesting one is the one for a local river basin. That warning goes off when crossing the river on the freeway.
There are certainly areas susceptible to flash floods. Lots of mountains and canyons. Especially in the foothills in the deserts. Down here in the greater LA, Orange, Inland Empire regions, it’s less of an issue. 100 years of development, dams, and flood control infrastructure actually do the job quite well.
Spamming us with flood alerts just numb us to alerts in general when things might really go bad.
I can't speak to tornado warnings, but here in NZ we've been getting tsunami warnings once every year or two and it didn't take long for people to go "yeah yeah yeah" instead of "oh crap".
Kerr county didn't balk at the cost of flood sirens. Biden sent them 10 million dollars for this exact purpose, and they refused to spend it, because it would have let the federal Democrats do something useful for their constituents. [1]
> "Accepting the ARPA money and putting our County under existing and future executive orders would federalize us and make us all slaves."
These people are certifiably insane.
The 10 million did eventually get spent on new police radios and bonuses for the sheriff's department. [2]
[1] https://www.chron.com/news/article/kerr-county-flood-funds-2...
[2] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/07/10/texas-kerr-county-co...
When a state like Texas is so gerrymandered that no political competition is really possible, and ignorance is celebrated, why would be surprised that ignorant people elect stupid people to govern them?
I’m sure that they claim to “back the blue” while refusing to put the communications tools that keep them safe in place as well.
What people of this ilk have done to our nation makes me sick.
This reads like an exaggerated parody. It is unfathomably depressing that it is the actual state of affairs :(
They would cut off their nose to spite their face. Look around, half the people in the country have this same level of brainrot.
"Insane" is much too mild a word. "Sociopathic" is slightly better, but still not specific or intense enough.
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They refused to spend the money because it was from Biden (also "climate change"), then refused to return it because it might go to a blue state. First I'm hearing they actually spent it, but not surprised where it ended up
Most people don't consider giving yourself a bonus to be "spending" money.
10 million designated to be spent on early warning sirens get spent on sheriff bonuses and police radios, where's the dishonest cheap shot?
>Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who has instituted a new requirement that she personally approve expenses over $100,000, did not renew the contracts until Thursday, five days after the contracts expired.
Your classic manager who feels they are so important that hey HAVE TO be involved in X,Y,Z but they are not a responsible enough person to actually do the job.
FEMA has "Emergency" in the name. Traditionally, it's supposed to come in when the normal rescue infrastructure has failed, due to earthquake, weather, etc. You're not optimizing for cost here. You're optimizing for reliable emergency management -- and that's going to cost money.
If you wanted a different agency, like one that prioritized "recovery after 6 months", well, it would help to inform the nation that FEMA is no longer the nationwide emergency management agency. It's up to the local and state governments.
And Texas voters overwhelmingly voted for politicians who caused this and still make excuses for these same politicians. I am tired of caring for people who vote for people that harm them.
Not every person in the state voted for this. The dead children didn’t vote for anyone. Have an ounce of compassion or empathy.
The people deserving of compassion and sympathy are dead. The people who killed them are busy explaining why despite the repeated warnings and tax payer funding, this actually wasn't their fault.
The town that was flooded rejected _free funds_ from the federal government during Covid because they were choking on a red pill of conspiranoia. Destiny (the streamer) did a recent streaming session where he watched the video of the town feedback regarding accepting / rejecting federal government funds from the American Recovery Act (for sirens and standardized first responder comms systems). The short version of the plot is the people were propagandized to distrust the Biden Admin, so they rejected the free upgrades. The voters pressured the town council (one was an actual threat of violence, followed by threats of “consequences”) if the town council accepted the federal funds.
There are consequences to voters and representatives who no longer believe in our shared objective reality.
I don’t blame the little girls, but with freedom comes responsibility. Their parents were responsible for choosing the camp they went to. The camp owner and staff made the risk evaluations of allowing them to sleep in a flood plain during a storm. The local town voted for their representatives and those representatives rejected federal funds which would have given them a chance to survive without cell coverage.
Ultimately your parent comment wasn’t necessarily assigning individual blame. In a democratic republic, the voters / citizens / residents (in aggregate) are ultimately responsible for the actions that elected representatives take in their name.
I thought that there was a bar somewhere, a line that would not be crossed, but there isn't, it's just straight up identity politics, or owning the libs, whatever you want to call it.
Please remember to take the statements posters make in the best possible light.
My interpretation of such is that they're sick of voters who expect a double standard. Don't do something ''I'' don't like when it helps other people, but when ''I'' need help godspeed.
The best possible light is that he cares about the lives of the little girls and many others that Trump and Musk and Noem and DOGE killed more than owning the libs and canceling NOAA.
And they are going to vote for them again. Next November is a million years from now. Though for that matter this will be forgotten by the November.
Putting this out in the world doesn’t help.
I think the political spectrum is dangerous because people expect the Paradox of Tolerance and similar correlations to silence the left in places where the right will happily speak.
Kristi Noem is a DEI hire because her only qualification is that the first four letters of her gender are "FEMA".
That, and she's an expert at killing puppies and bragging about it by writing a book.
In her next book she'll brag about all the little girls she killed in Texas, reminiscing about her experience directing FEMA: "It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done."
Trump VP contender Kristi Noem writes of killing dog – and goat – in new book:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/26/trump-kristi-n...
>“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.
>“At that moment,” Noem says, “I realised I had to put her down.”
>Noem, who also represented her state in Congress for eight years, got her gun, then led Cricket to a gravel pit.
>“It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realised another unpleasant job needed to be done.”
Which directly led to her current unpleasant job at FEMA.
I once worked for a company that had a founder who was cancelling all contracts on a yearly basis, including renting the office. They were proud of cutting costs that way. After two times, the property owner said, "Great! I have a company that asked me about the space and is willing to pay much more" and the company of several hundred people had to move on very short notice.
Did it survive?
Yes, it was very rich, but it did disrupt operations a lot and the new space wasn't as nice - we moved from team offices to an open layout, with my boss praising the open layout - we then found out he would get a private office.
She was busy with higher priorities this week:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DLyjaZ5s51o/
There were some dogs that desperately needed shooting?
Somehow, one of the least unhinged things that woman has ever done.
Advocating for competent governance is partisan!
Heck of a job, Brownie
I call people like this "octopuses". They need to have their tentacles everywhere, need to be involved in everything, no matter how little they're needed.
Phrasing matters. using "didn't" puts a bad light on FEMA but if they used "couldn't" it changes things. no idea which it is but i'd bet it should read "couldn't"
That's what's supposed to happen. The Trump administration is shutting down FEMA. Emergency response is now a state responsibility. The interim head of FEMA who told Congress this was a bad move was fired the next day.[1]
Federal disaster relief is now a gift to be given at the whim of the President. Usually, only red states get it. See the list of major disaster declarations here.[2] More details.[3]
[1] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/3405810/...
[2] https://www.fema.gov/
[3] https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/trump-disaster-policy-tr...
https://archive.ph/J35lH
Yeah, there's reasons for that:
> On July 5, as floodwaters were starting to recede, FEMA received 3,027 calls from disaster survivors and answered 3,018, or roughly 99.7 percent, the documents show. Contractors with four call center companies answered the vast majority of the calls.
> That evening, however, Ms. Noem did not renew the contracts with the four companies and hundreds of contractors were fired, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter.
> The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or roughly 35.8 percent, according to the documents. And on Monday, July 7, the agency fielded 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, or around 15.9 percent, the documents show.
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[flagged]
There's enough blame for both, and then some.
> Don’t blame the tech companies
I'm fine with blaming Peter Thiel and Elon Musk personally.
The tech companies pushed propaganda through social media
Everyone wants to blame social media. People knew exactly what they were getting from Trump. He had been in office for four years. They wanted Trump and he still has an almost 50% approval rating. Despite what Michelle Obama said, this is who this country has always been.
Blame the traitors who carry the water for the tech companies and post mindless mendacious propaganda defending them by deflecting blame.
No, I think the companies running vast propaganda campaigns for the sake of their favored candidate so that they can pay 1% less in taxes and/or fuck around with the country as a side project deserve the blame.
And people didn’t know exactly what they were getting? Trump is exactly who America is and who America has always been.
Speak for yourself. Nobody I know is on board with anything that is happening from this administration, or congress or scotus.
And if people you know represented the majority of americans, you'd have a point.
There’s enough blame to go around, Americans.
We have been effectively divided by the billionaires, oligarchy, and foreign autocrats
This was many, many moons ago, but I still vividly remember learning that the vast majority of people who fought in the confederate army didn't own slaves.
It might be a bit of a silly point, but somehow it seems even worse to go to war for other people's slaves.
[flagged]
Depending on which flavor of outrage you prefer, this could apply to either party.
No, it really couldn't. I don't know why you think it could.
The voters very much put Trump in office. He won the popular vote. They knew exactly what they were getting.
A majority of voters voted for candidates other than Trump.
It’s become increasingly clear that at least some of them did not consider the negative impacts of a second Trump term’s policies on their personal lives and are now having to bear the violent results of that awful realization.
[flagged]
[flagged]
The outrage and culture wars are not what the 100k deciding voters across 3 states based their choice on. Half of voters pay zero attention to the news and politics.
It was mainly prices, which historically has been a very common deciding factor. If people feel pain in their pocket book, they will give someone else a shot. They also remembered feeling better financially pre-covid
If you are trying to imply democrats should be nicer to republicans, that was disproven over years.
Conservatives consistently prefer the most offensive insulting person around. And calls on left to make it nicer just move overtone window to the right. Conservatives interpret it as a weaknees.
Plus, it causes forever shift where republicans are euphemismed around, sanewashed and consistentky made to look better. That is failing strategy.
Because your feelings get hurt when the con artist you chose as your champion has his own words and deeds described accurately? And this justifies spitefully wrecking the country by supporting an unhinged autocrat whose motives sit somewhere between manic dementia and serving foreign interests? And still rather than acknowledging this might have been a poor idea, you double down with some idea that it was justified simply to have expressed yourself, even though the first question out of every second Democrat's mouth is how to reconcile and find common ground with Republicans?
Look man, I'm a libertarian. I get the frustration and I totally understood why someone would vote for Trump in 2016. But after seeing his first round of abject failure and wanton dividership and then voting for even more of that, you deserve every ton of criticism heaped on you. This was really the time to put country above partisan squabbling, and you failed horribly.
Hey, whatever happened to those Epstein files Trump promised?
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