Antitrust Reformers Debate Partnering With Bigots To Take On ‘Big Tech’
from the with-friends-like-these... dept
While the press and some policy circles have made a large stink the last few years about massive new “bipartisan support for antitrust reform,” we’ve noted that the push isn’t quite what’s being advertised. While some of the bills being proposed might help correct some competitive imbalances online, the push in general is bizarrely narrow and only targets some tech companies under some circumstances.
As a party that’s coddled monopolies (see: telecom, banking, airlines, insurance) for literally 40 years, the GOP support for “antitrust reform” has always been performative. The GOP largely sees “antitrust reform” as a way to gain leverage over social media giants so they can mandate the carriage of race-baiting propaganda, a cornerstone of GOP power in the face of shifting demographics and an aging electorate.
Democratic activists and lawmakers, hoping to push some of these antitrust bills across the finish line, have been debating whether crushing ethics underfoot is worth it. Case in point: some Democrats have chosen to partner with The American Principles Project on antitrust reform, despite the fact the group is jam-packed with no shortage of obvious bigotry:
APP President Terry Schilling has called pediatricians who provide gender-affirming care “groomers,” meaning pedophiles, and referred to transgender women as “biological males who believe they are women.” The group has also delved into racial issues, describing the Black Lives Matter movement as a “rhetorical Trojan horse” pursuing “an identiarian race-based caste system” for the U.S.
Matt Stoller, the guy who thought Josh Hawley was the future of modern politics and antitrust reform until everybody realized Hawley was a confused, opportunistic, authoritarian knob, argues that the bills being proposed are worth throwing all other ethical considerations in the toilet for:
“Consolidated corporate power is the biggest problem that we’re facing right now in our politics,” said Matt Stoller, research director at the anti-monopoly group American Economic Liberties Project, who regularly works with populist figures on the right, including APP. He said divisions within both parties about antitrust changes mean that supporters “have to cobble together a majority.”
There’s productively working with people you disagree with across the aisle, and then there’s… this. Authoritarians aren’t your friends. It doesn’t usually end well. And, as some other activists note in the piece, allying with bigots who literally want to destroy your constituents and everything they stand for just to pass some very limited reform laws (several of which have very concrete problems) isn’t worth it:
“It doesn’t make sense to work with someone that doesn’t share our values and doesn’t share our goal,” said Jeremie Greer, co-founder and executive director of economic rights group Liberation in a Generation. “I don’t think we’re fighting for the same thing.” Greer argued that the push for antitrust reform is essentially about increasing equality and strengthening democracy — and a group fighting against LGBTQ and minority rights is fundamentally opposed to that work.
Again, having some slightly more fair app stores or more competitive Amazon product listings isn’t going to mean a whole hell of a lot should authoritarians gain power and begin dismantling the law and numerous societal systems in a bid for complete and total domination of their political enemies. And make no mistake, while groups like this dress up far right authoritarianism and bigotry as a rosy-cheeked concern for family values, authoritarianism is very much what we’re talking about.
At the same time, if you’re a large U.S. company in any of a dozen heavily monopolized U.S. industries terrified of antitrust reform of any kind, highlighting these kind of issues in a bid to fracture delicate alliances is something you’d most certainly have your K Street policy and PR shops engaged in right now.
That said, if we’re going to tackle antitrust reform, let’s tackle antitrust reform. Instead, what we’ve wound up with is a bunch of extremely narrow bills that only meaningfully target a handful of companies that the GOP is mad at for belatedly policing political propaganda. And even then, this being the rabidly obstructionist GOP, there’s no guarantee they’ll show up to vote for a bill that actually does anything.
The entire recent “antitrust reform” effort literally pretends that sectors packed with natural monopolies (see: telecom) don’t exist. And while, yeah, I get the argument that some fairly minor progress in one industry is better than no progress at all, that’s not actually true if making that progress involves throwing your entire belief apparatus in the toilet and putting democracy and civility at risk.
Filed Under: antitrust, antitrust reform, authoritarian, big tech, gop, josh hawley, lgbtq, propaganda
Comments on “Antitrust Reformers Debate Partnering With Bigots To Take On ‘Big Tech’”
Oh look, you just gave them a knife and turned your back...
On top of the already problematic idea of partnering with lunatics and bigots the question that should really be asked of anyone considering such a move is ‘Do you think that they’re willing to work with you because they expect it will leave them worse off?’
Fact check, please!
“APP President Terry Schilling has called pediatricians who provide gender-affirming care ‘groomers’, meaning child sex abusers…”
FTF Politico (I can’t comment there). The vast majority of actual paedophiles stay away from children so as not to give in to their desires. Those who actually do have sex with kids are either in the minority or they’re simply a pervert who finds it easier to take advantage of a vulnerable person in the way that Jimmy Saville and Stuart Hall (amongst others) did and still do today.
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I don’t think your objection really hits the issue. Even with what you have said, groomers could still fall under the designation pedophile, being the minority who don’t isolate.
My objection is groomers, while undeniably abusive, do not necessarily commit sexual abuse meeting pedophilia in the law or psychiatry. Groomers manipulate minors, grooming them for later abuse, which often occurs when they reach sexual maturity or pass the age of consent. Grooming is a serious concern because of how the manipulation breeches the ability of the abused to genuinely consent, and such abusers often wait until such abuse is considered legal and does not meet even the casual definition of pedophile as any statutory rapist.
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My issue with what was said is that it implies two things: (1) that all groomers are paedophiles, and (2) that all paedophiles are groomers. How can children and other vulnerable people be most effectively protected (by themselves and others) unless such inaccurate information is countered and supplanted with the facts?
Re: Re: Forgot to add:
Groomers do not target just pre-pubescent children. They also target vulnerable adults, including women who use wheelchairs.
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Poisonous Wokeness
Wokeness is pernicious poison, so partnering with people who oppose it is good.
The “grooming” allegation about woke gender ideology is that woke gender ideologues are encouraging children with mental health problems or the simple confusion that adolescence brings to pursue abnormality rather than helping them grow into normal adults. People are only ever the sex of their bodies, so teaching children that sex and gender are choices is both false and dangerous; the normal kids are being taught lies and the troubled kids are being encouraged to pursue harmful life choices.
Whether the particular laws being proposed are good is a separate issue, but there’s nothing wrong with partnering with people who share one interest but not another.
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Cultural sensitivity is not at all the same thing as ‘wokeness’, Hymen Rosan, but I guess a walking hate crime like you is just too obtuse to understand the difference.
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Re: Re: Culturally Sensitivity
It’s culturally sensitive to refer to crazed, drug-addled, stinking, possibly dangerous bums as “homeless” or “unhoused” but we shouldn’t teach young children that becoming such a person is a life choice as good as any other.
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So, you oppose veterans getting help, LGBTQ+ being considered people, possibly blacks getting treated like human beings and poor white trash who are basically fucked because the economy is gonna screw them over?
Because “the homeless”, are rarely homeless by choice.
Also, you probably hate the First Amenment too, since you also oppose choice as well.
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I’m interested to know where you got the phrase “teaching kids that sex and gender are choices” from, it’s an intentional misdirection from what it’s all about.
What is dangerous to society are people like you. You do far more damage to society with your bigoted and intolerant views. That you think only some children are normal tells me that with the right push you would happily support “the final solution” for the undesirables.
I know that it’s hard or almost impossible for bigots like yourself to actually accept that people are different and teaching kids this is a good thing.
Interestingly enough this just works fine in other countries, which is why it can’t possibly work in the US – the land of “we can not”. /s
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Re: Re: Normal
Not all people, children included, are normal. Some are mentally retarded. Some believe that eating a bite of food will make them obese. Some have auditory hallucinations that they believe are real external voices. Some believe that their thoughts are being monitored. And some believe that they are a gender different from their bodies. For some reason, woke gender ideologues have decided that this particular delusion is different and that everyone must be forced to pretend that this delusion is real. But it isn’t.
When people have a mental illness where they believe falsehoods about reality, it is appropriate to treat them so that they learn to see their delusions for what they are. If they can’t, they will constantly rub up against the incongruity of their beliefs with the real world. Woke ideologues have adopted Orwell as a manual rather than a warning and believe that if they can force everyone into saying that 2 + 2 = 5 then reality will bend to their will. But it will not. Facts are stubborn things.
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Examole: Everyone here debunking Hyman Rosen’s mental illnesses.
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Your problem is clearly that you refuse to acknowledge that there could ever be more than one way to solve a problem. Your demand that all of society must you YOUR preferred solution, even if others exist.
If someone’s mind does not match their body…you can change their mind, or you can change their body. We’re not so great at that kind of precise brain manipulation, but we’re pretty good at plastic surgery. Seems quite logical that some people would prefer to choose the latter option.
These people aren’t trying to deny reality; they’re trying to correct it. That’s what humans have done since we first evolved. Would you tell the guy who first learned to harness fire to stop denying the reality of human existance in his time? Go back to your cave.
Re: Re: Re:2
That’s crazy talk that is, everyone knows that if someone is born a certain way that’s how they’re meant to be, that’s why anyone with poor vision is told to suck it up and corrective means(I suppose they could be called ‘glasses’ due to being made of that substance) were never invented, anyone who loses or wasn’t born with a fully functioning limb is completely out of luck and don’t even get me started on the plethora of medical conditions that aren’t tampered with since addressing them with drugs would be a perversion of nature.
Re: Re: Re:3
This needs a sarc mark. Individuals like Hymen Rosan will be just too obtuse to get it.
Re: Re: Re:4
I considered it but figured if someone read it and thought I was being serious a sarc mark isn’t likely to do them much good at that point.
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Re: Re: Re:3 Born This Way
People who get corrective lenses do not say that they have perfect vision without them, and their vision after getting them is objectively measured. Diabetics who control their symptoms with insulin do not claim that they are not diabetic. And so forth. Maybe the best analogy for your side are bald men who undergo hair replacement of various sorts and then say that they are not bald. But as anyone knows, almost all of the time it is easy to see that the men have had work done.
People who claim to be a different sex than their bodies cannot become the sex they want to be regardless of the amount of medicine, surgery, or costuming they undergo. A transwoman is never going to menstruate, become pregnant, get ovarian cancer, go through menopause, or have any of the other experiences that real women have by virtue of their bodies.
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Re: Re: Re:2 Mind and Body
No one can know that their mind does not match their body, because people only have access to their own mind, and they cannot “know” that they are a different sex, both because they do not have the ability to experience the minds of other people so that they know that their beliefs are correct, and because if there is anything universal about being “a man” or “a woman”, it is because of those people’s bodies.
Re: Re: Re:3
Well, there goes the field of psychiatry, psychology and the DSMV.
Aka, the very fields that deal specifically with that.
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The problem with your outdated reasoning is that it has been proven wrong again and again.
“It’s horrible that they want to teach sex-ed in school, it’ll make the kids have sex before they marry!”
“Voting rights for women? How preposterous, everyone knows that women are hysterics and their place is in the kitchen!”
“Gay people aren’t actually gay – they suffer from mental illness and delusions.”
“Black people are sub-humans and can’t be taught anything of value, they are only good for manual labor.”
All of the people who said the above thought the same way you did, they had the irrational fear that if they actually acknowledged that these groups of people had the same rights and needs it would destroy society. History tells us it’s the opposite, your type of view destabilizes society because it promotes inequality and misery.
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“Some have auditory hallucinations that they believe are real external voices.”
There’s the projection we were all looking for.
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That flies in the face of EVERYTHING we now know about mental illnesses and mental health.
You know you’re spouting bullshit when even the insurance industry is at least taking the experts’ opinion at face value.
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Your desire to dictate how other people should live their lives is more damaging that the cultural acceptance practiced by tolerant people.
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Define “wokeness”
APP is not the opposite of wokeness. They’re literally bigoted authoritarians.
Ah, so you, who has demonstrated no understanding of, well, anything, over your short time in these comments is now the arbiter of what is a “normal adult.”
Dude you’re abnormally stupid. I hope someday you grow up to be a normal adult and realize how embarassing your posts here are.
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Re: Re: Wokeness
Wokeness is a left-wing belief system consisting of a constellation of ridiculously false claims about reality, with the common factor of “wishing will make it so” and refusal of accepting the evidence of one’s eyes and demanding the silencing of anyone speaking about the falseness of these claims.
Looters, rioters, and arsonists are “mostly peaceful demonstrators”. Black people shooting each other in numbers wildly disproportionate to their population ratio is the fault of “white supremacy”. Crazed, drug-addled, stinking, possibly dangerous bums are simply “unhoused” and just need government-supplied apartments. Illegal aliens are merely “undocumented immigrants” who just need some paperwork. People are “assigned” a sex at birth rather than having their sex observed and noted, and that sex can be changed. Criminals should be released after being caught regardless of their record. Law enforcement is the enemy of the people.
Re: Re: Re: Rebuttal
“Looters, rioters, and arsonists are ‘mostly peaceful demonstrators’.”
Please link to the article on Techdirt where that was claimed in the body of the article (comments by trolls and griefers don’t count).
“Black people shooting each other in numbers wildly disproportionate to their population ratio is the fault of ‘white supremacy’.”
If that’s actually happening, then how is there still a black population in the US? What you’ve just described amounts to auto-genocide.
“Crazed, drug-addled, stinking, possibly dangerous bums are simply ‘unhoused’ and just need government-supplied apartments.”
The vast majority of homeless people are neither crazed nor drug-addled, and therefore not ‘possibly dangerous’. And if they are stinking, that’s the fault of state governments not providing for all their citizens. If you want something done about homeless people, start by being less prejudiced, then lobby your representative for more shelters providing a roof, hot food, advice, and guidance to those who need it.
“Illegal aliens are merely ‘undocumented immigrants’ who just need some paperwork.”
Actually, it’s ‘undocumented citizens’. Try searching ‘Dreamers’.
“People are ‘assigned’ a sex at birth rather than having their sex observed and noted, and that sex can be changed.”
Actually, a person’s sex is observed and noted, then a gender is assigned according to what has been observed. It’s not just trans people who suffer from this, either. Search ‘intersex humans’.
“Criminals should be released after being caught regardless of their record.”
If there’s insufficient evidence that they committed the crime for which they were arrested, of course they should. Do you honestly believe that someone who robbed a bank twenty years ago should go to prison because a bank in their home city got knocked over whilst they were on vacation two states away?
“Law enforcement is the enemy of the people.”
No, law enforcement is not the enemy of the people. The fact that some law enforcement personnel are the enemy of the people and some legislation is used as a club by bad actors in both the public and private sectors doesn’t make law enforcement the enemy of the people, and no one writing articles on Techdirt has ever claimed that it is.
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Dude, your entire comment is a constellation of ridiculously false claims about reality. Every. Single. One.
You are a delusional. And, as you noted in another comment, when you see someone with a mental illness you should treat them as such. You appear to have a serious mental illness, fed by nonsense peddlers and liars, who you are too stupid to understand are lying to you.
You’re a sheeplike follower of people who are profiting off your stupidity and eagerness to buy into blatant lies to serve the powerful.
You’re a sad, pathetic shell of a tool.
Re: Re: Re: We should start calling you IMAX
“Wokeness is a left-wing belief system consisting of a constellation of ridiculously false claims about reality, with the common factor of “wishing will make it so” and refusal of accepting the evidence of one’s eyes and demanding the silencing of anyone speaking about the falseness of these claims.”fucking epic level of projection on display here
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To the first paragraph, no. Actual COMMUNISTS like Stalin were more than happy to send people to their deaths who didn’t conform to his brand of Marxism. Mao too.
Even disregarding the fact that actual COMMUNISTS aren’t practicing in America today, the same practice of “wokeness”, ie, WHITE MAN’S BURDEN and more recently, AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM, is a colonial-era mindset that has nothing to do with communism or differing right-wing ideologies.
So tell me, how much money did your Russian handler pay you to spew this garbage.
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Wokeness, or more accurately, “white man’s burden”, is a result of treasonous curs like you raising the woke generation.
And very few people liked it when the fucking BRITISH did it.
Once laws are passed to force extreme or hate speech on platforms it’ll be worse for everyone as most people will avoid using websites that allow spam racist language or fake news and websites like reddit could move servers to the UK to be outside the remit of this law
Republicans are happy with telecom monopolys that provide mediocre services at a high price since they get donations from them
they are simply angry at Google Facebook for removing users who post racist or extreme content
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Ah, yes, let’s trot out the old trope: Anyone who doesn’t align with my politics is raaaaacist.
As the old saying goes: “Those who see the world from a politically ideological viewpoint is guilty of shallow thinking.” Cue the crybabies who’ll accuse this apolitical actor of being a “trumptard” for not thinking in a binary fashion, proving my points.
It must be comforting living in an echo chamber of naval-gazing and breathing in your own farts, for which the writers and posters of this website are known.
Take a deep breath! (NPC crying meme)
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It’s not simply an echo chamber. We have some trolls who post here too. You know, people who post comments without any real substance, accusing everyone else of things they haven’t said, and proclaiming how they are above all that. … while posting here anyway.
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Said by no one here. This post discussed a specific group that has made it clear that they are extreme racist bigots.
This website is not anything even remotely close to an echo chamber. The writers often disagree with each other. The site regularly criticizes politicians of both parties and calls out hypocrisy across the board. What sort of echo chamber is that?
Re: Re:
It’s an anechoic chamber when it comes to drivel.
Re: Do I get to use this now?
[projects facts not in evidence]
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As someone who DID join a community of navel-gazers and idiots who did breathe in their own farts, ie, 4chan, this place is hardly an echo chamber.
I mean, have you seen the illustrious donors? One of them is the Charles Koch Foundation. Who are, you know, funding insurrectionists and gullible/desperate Democrats.
Interestingly, the post didn’t use the term racist. You picked up that shoe and put it on yourself.
It used the term “bigot” rather than try to place a label because the hatred these individuals promote generally is varied. But the direct examples of bigotry presented by the article are not simply racism, rather anti-trans commentary, like accusations of grooming and pedophilia and the conflation of grooming and pedophilia and the conflation of sex and gender. Indeed, the anti-trans concerns were positioned with more prominence than say the lies about BLM.
It then spends time specifically highlighting why the stated goals of those labeled as bigots makes their positions harmful to the supposed goals of the push for anti-trust reform from the Democrats.
The reason I note this is you did not engage with any of this. You simply saw the word bigot and maybe the claim that BLM is seeking to implement a race-based class system and wrote your comment.
That’s political. I don’t care what your claimed partisan allegiance is, I don’t care that you claim not to have one. Your position on the ability to point out bigotry informs political decisions you make. And by posting here, you’ve proven that this political position over rides a general apolitical position – you have engaged in advocacy for the position that Techdirt ascribed racism to APP.
The article didn’t assert racism against AAP. It factually noted the position AAP took. Rather than defend the position as being something other than about race, rather than prove the superiority of your apolitical ideology, you’ve attacked anyone who thinks differently than you.
“pursuing “an identiarian race-based caste system””
So bringing back ‘Jim Crow’??
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Proof
Your quote that you are using to prove “obvious” bigotry is several statements of fact that are just real science with no bigotry whatsoever. They only thing that is obvious is you think it’s bigoted to say that men who think they are women are calling themselves transgender. And calling BLM a Trojan horse is truthful not bigoted.
Both concepts and many more are subject currently to radical differences of opinion, and that’s what ALL of them are: matters of opinion. Saying a person whose opinion is different than yours is a bigot is infantile and fales, and makes you seem like a little spoiled kid who can’t get his way other than calling names.
Cut it out. Let coalitions of groups of all opinions gather to remove all trusts from US tech and the public square.
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Re:
Boy, Resltess… sure am glad your comment was flagged by Masnick’s small, perverted, but powerful band of sycophants and obsequious bootlickers.
So much ‘abuse, trolling, and spam’ in your comment.
Someone here nearly came within a hairs-breadth of experiencing an opinion with which they disagree! Phew.
Techdirt is for “Free Speech”, ha ha!
What a strange way to spell “homophobic, racist bigotry in Congress”.
And I’m not sure which is the biggest problem between that and corruption.
Anything
To declare is the problem. FIX that and then we can fix this. THAT made this worse.
In the reality of Mankind, NOTHING IS NEW of what one person will/would/can/has done/will do, To each other. In any shape or form, or with any other animal.
This is Like “SOMETHING NEW” has caused a problem, lets get RID of this “Something NEW”.
IT AINT A NEW THING. it has always been there.
The difficulty is finding A’ truth and listening to it. The Problem is THERE ARE TO MANY VOICES IN MY HEAD, ON TV, ON THE NET, on the radio.
We have already seen so much of this Blame game that its to the point, that we Just TURN everything off.
And our Gov. ISNT any better.
WE can fire everyone of them. get rid of them all. LEt everyone wishing to Vote on a Subject, Vote themselves.
Register every person with a Number so they can Vote. If there are Any duplicates, we go find all of them and FIND out who is cheating.
A well-trod path for Stoller
Longtime Stollerheads will remember 2015’s “How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul” in The Atlantic.
Wright Patman was the Democrat Texan head of the House Banking Committee who was deposed by the ‘Watergate Babies’ coming in the wake of Nixon. Now, Stoller devotes an entire half sentence to Patman’s avid support of segregation and the Vietnam war as a potential cause for the new liberals (“weaned on campus politics, television, and affluence”) to seek his ouster and the following six paragraphs to the true cause: Patman representation of “a Democratic political tradition stretching back to Thomas Jefferson, an alliance of the agrarian South and the West against Northeastern (((capital)))”
In case you think I’m exaggerating:
“The story of Patman’s ousting is part of the larger story of how the Democratic Party helped to create today’s shockingly disillusioned and sullen public, a large chunk of whom is now marching for Donald Trump.”
If only those silly affluent college libs had understood, Stoller argues, that the bigotry of the modern GOP was spawned by the Dem’s unwillingness to let an avowed segregationist warmonger remain in leadership. If only they’d looked past his bigotry to embrace his populist economics, they’d have prevented Trump.
This Patman hagiography, along with Stoller’s yearslong fawning over Hawley, makes one wonder if his pleas to work with the bigots has more to do with his own abhorrent views than any economic principle.
Re:
If you lie down with fascists, you get up with sleaze.
Quick note for the usasians
In the uk, when we call someone a nob we tend to omit the k. A copy of viz magazine would set you right on all your uk profanities.
This is not an advert.
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“shifting demographics” (vis-a-vis purported GOP concerns)
What exactly does that mean, Bode? What “demographics” are “shifting”, precisely ? To quote one of your sycophantic commenters, “And be specific.”
The funniest part about you anti-White leftists is your belief that the GOP is somehow on the side of Americans. No. Americans understand the GOP is fully compromised and infiltrated by your side.
Believe me, when it’s time for actual Americans to dole out repercussions, the traitors in the GOP will be the first to experience hemp on skin…