I feel bad for AOC. She has to work with people daily that actively and vocally wish her harm and who have a rabid cult as followers. She honestly has a lot of guts to do what she does and say what she says. She is one of the few in Congress who actually deserve to be there.
I mean… her story about what happened on J6 is frankly pretty fucking harrowing. Don’t get me wrong - being a Bronx bartender as a young, attractive woman must be pretty damn sketchy at times, but as a singular event, especially after becoming an extremely well known and (depending on political affiliation) adored/reviled politician, I daresay this might take the cake.
And I don’t mean to diminish her past experience of assault by saying that either. All I mean is that a relatively sudden, unexpected assault, while traumatic, has a much different mental context than knowing “there’s a group of people who have HATED me for my entire term, and they’ve broken in, and the don’t just want to relish in their power over me if they catch me, but they will want to torment me as long as possible, and they will definitely kill me, and it won’t be quick”.
I'll never understand why people think Trump is "less establishment". He's been a gazillionaire his whole life and backed by literally the richest man on earth. How more establishment can you get?
He's not part of that political elites circle, he's part of the rich kids circle. Why anyone thinks that is a substantial improvement is a mystery to me
E: the establishment political elite is allowing business to exploit people and take in billions! We need to stop electing them, let's instead elect the people directly benefiting from those fucked up policies! I'm sure they will vote against what made them and their friends rich and feel special and better than the plebs!
I might argue the rich kids circle is even worse than the political elites'. At least a politician has to occasionally throw their constituents a bone here or there.
I mean, not just dumb enough to talk about it, anyone for whom most of their wealth is in publicly traded companies (which is most rich people) has public record of how much.
Yup, Putin is probably richer and then you've got oil royalty as well whose wealth is unknown... Tesla is worth a lot, but how much is the Saudi's oil industry worth you think?
Trump doesn't fit in with republicans because he's objectively insane and will disregard any and all rules and conventions to get what he wants.
AOC doesn't fit in with Democrats because she's not from a rich family, seems to have actually had a minimum wage job and seems to want to actually improve the middle and lower classes lives instead of submit to corporations and collectively disregard what the voter base actually wants.
It is so depressing people see both of these as equivalently important.
People want someone who will reform politics, get rid of the two party system and get billionaires and corporations to pay their unfair share for decades of exploitation of workers.
They will even give up their individual rights and vote for Trump to try and get it.
Now is the time for AOC, Bernie, Walz and Whitmer to form the SPA (Socialist Party for America)
Unfortunately it seems that some people don't want to get rid of the 2 party system. Here in Colorado we voted no 55 to 45 to switch to ranked choice voting. I'm very disappointed by those results.
Issue is a 3 party system is only going to give us a far right wing party, a right wing party and a centrist party that has to vote for right wing party or the far right wing party will win. A 3rd party won't help. Election reform has to happen first. The only thing we can hope for is a progressive movement inside the democratic party. That sweeps then getting election reform. Then we can get ranked choice or whatever system .
So I wanna point out that while mathematically with FPTP a two party system is inevitable, which two parties aren't decided. They can and do get replaced.
I feel like her direct communication vow is not the right deal. They need to hook into social media just like Republicans did. Door-to-door might help but not as much as they think.
The Internet in general, but especially social media, is a cesspool of AI slop, bots, algorithm manipulation, and less exotic/high-tech forms of disinformation. How about instead of telling our politicians to meet us there we get the fuck off of it and meet each other in the streets. They can join our party if they want but we're starting it.