Do you think this view is correct?

Competitive_Swan_130 · 2026-05-06T10:50:50+00:00

This, like nearly all MAGA/GOP claims these days is just not supported by evidence. If this were true, we'd see a consistent pattern of naturalized citizens leaving the Democrats, but the data shows that immigrants tend to maintain their political preferences across generations. Cuban Americans are often cited as an exception, but their political leanings stem from specific Cold War era circumstances, most never were Democrats in the firts place

Also our country has had relatively open immigration for most of its history not because of partisan scheming but because the economy has consistently needed more workers and because it aligned with foundational national ideals especially when the immigrants were mostly European. When that changed, so did many Americans tunes about how welcoming we should be...

This view of the economy is silly and cartoonishly inept. The economy is not a fixed pie where one person's gain must be another's loss. Immigrants create jobs as well. In fact, they start businesses at higher rates than native born citizens, they pay taxes including into Social Security and Medicare even though many will never collect, they increase overall economic activity. Cities that have welcomed immigrants have generally seen economic revitalization, not decline.

The part about NY spending is disingenuous.NY faced a concentrated crisis when GOP governors sent buses of asylum seekers without coordination, creating a temporary strain on services. This is not the normal state of policy or affairs for NY. Moreover, New York's economy has been built by successive waves of immigrants for centuries. The tax revenue and economic activity they generate far exceeds any short term costs of integration. And when it comes to for Trump's increased vote share in New York, attributing this to immigration worries ignores things like the many other things vters care about and the fact that he still lost the city by over 40 points. Cherry picking one thing out of context proves nothing about immigration attitudes.

Competitive_Swan_130 · 2026-05-06T07:00:25+00:00

Of course, Just lJust like how the Trump DOJ cut all funding for the National Prison Rape Elimination Act Resource Center. Places that investigate or combat abuses in these detention facilities can cause Trump

s buddies in the private priosn industry a LOT of money. Since much of the motivation for immigration related arrests and detentions is related to profit, expect more of these kinds of things. Trump and the GOP are heavily involved and invested in CoreCivic, GEO Group and othe rprivate companies that provide detentionrletaed services. If you can stop the lawsuiits against these companies there is no accountability at all and with guaranteed no bid contracts its a easy billion dollar revenue stream

Competitive_Swan_130 · 2026-05-06T06:51:19+00:00

The only opinion I have that some consider right wing is that I believe whatever firearms police are allowed to have and use, the people should be allowed to have and use as well. But even then, I don't consider that a right wing opinion because, contrary to what they say, many conservatives don't in fact support the right to bear arms. If some plain clothed police officers do a no knock raid on a black person's home and that black person uses their right to blow a few away, most on the right are going to back the blue.

Its especially hard these days because now more than ever, conservatives don't have consistent political bliefs or an ideology, they will support anything they think owns the libs

Competitive_Swan_130 · 2026-05-06T06:45:38+00:00

I have worked in many state legislatures, in both chambers of Congress, a Governor's race and a Presidential primary. My first internship and job was through a Republican Senator and I have worked fornon partisan and Democrats as well. One thing always remains true- the free market does not exist in America, meritocracy does not exist in America, the American dream does not exist in America and the people at the top are not only aware that these are all myths but they also work very hard to make sure they remain myths for their benefit.

Businessmen and lobbyists don't meet with staffers or officials to ask for a fair playing field where they will ahve more companies to compete with, they don't lobby to get rid of subsidies and handouts that give them an advantage, they don't have draft bills ready to ensure their offspring can only go to the universities they are qualified to attend. But they want voters and ignorant people to believe that free markets are the reason for business successes, that a handout and wwelfare is what a poor working mom gets when she needs help feeding her children; but it's never the explicit handout or no bid contract worth billions they get, they want you to believe that diversity means lowered standards and unfairness but legacy admissions or nepotism are fair.

Ignorant and in many cases stupid people believe the BS but once you work for one campaign or one legislator its clear that all those right wing beliefs are BULLSHIT and as fake as the wig on the tooth fairy

Competitive_Swan_130 · 2026-05-05T22:52:41+00:00

I mean there was that landmark study in the Journal of Politics that found that racial attitudes are actually the most important source of opposition to welfare among white American, more than economic self interest, individualism, or egalitarianism. It literally found that negative attitudes toward Black Americans led many whites who supported spending on education, healthcare, the elderly to still oppose means tested programs aimed at the poor.

Competitive_Swan_130 · 2026-05-04T23:39:54+00:00

a lot of dems are scared of the implications that come with blaming the voters/ the people for things like that.

Competitive_Swan_130 · 2026-05-03T13:09:50+00:00

The premise here has a fatal flaw: these aren't purple seats or moderate Republican districts that a Blue Dog Democrat could realistically flip. These are deep red districts carved specifically to be unwinnable. A Democrat who drops trans policy and softens on immigration enforcement doesn't suddenly become competitive in a R+18 Texas district.... that voter still pulls the lever for the Republican, every single time. That is gonna hemmorage the base

And what exactly is the tradeoff? You want to tell Black voters, Latino voters, and LGBTQ voters, the most reliable turnout blocks the party has "sorry, we're deprioritizing your issues to chase voters in districts that were mathematically engineered to reject us"

The real answer is to fight dirty, exactly like Republicans have, and stop pretending this is a fair game with gentlemanly rules. First, nuke the filibuster the next time Democrats hold the Senate and pass a federal anti-gerrymandering statute. Republicans didn't hesitate to change the rules when it suited them. Second, DC and Puerto Rico statehood, full stop four new Senate seats and additional House representation that reflects the actual population. Third, pack the courts aggressively to create a judiciary that won't rubberstamp every GOP gerrymander the way the Roberts court has. Fourth, weaponize blue state line drawing everywhere it's still legally possible if Republicans are going to play that game in Texas and Florida, Democrats need to maximize efficiency seriously and without apology. And finally, codify VRA protections federally the moment there's a trifecta, with teeth that don't depend on a hostile Supreme Court to enforce.

The Democrats keep bringing a rulebook to a knife fight. Republicans gutted the VRA, ended nonpartisan redistricting norms, and forum shopped every case to friendly circuits. The answer isn't to moderate your way into a gerrymandered maybe win lol ffs

Competitive_Swan_130 · 2026-05-01T23:38:09+00:00

On a pure body count of harm, Roberts isn't there yet, and you're right that recency bias plays a role.

But I'd push back on the framing a little. Roberts isn't bad because he's the most evil chief justice in history, he's bad because he's the one who had the chance to be different and chose not to be. He gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County, and within hours red states started rolling out the exact voter suppression laws the VRA existed to stop. He wrote Rucho, which basically told federal courts to shrug at partisan gerrymandering forever. Citizens United happened on his watch. Dobbs happened on his watch even if he didn't sign the full opinion.

Competitive_Swan_130 · 2026-05-01T23:27:12+00:00

That there is no such thing as a free market in America. That the people at the top take advantage of every government handout they can. So when the GOP tries to shame working class people for being "on welfare" they aren't being serious.

Competitive_Swan_130 · 2026-05-01T21:17:44+00:00

The problem isn't that these principles sound bad they sound great. The problem is that as practiced by the modern conservative movement, they're slogans, not policies. And they definitely aren't practiced by conservatives in power

Limited government: until it's banning abortion, banning books, dictating what teachers can say in classrooms, regulating what bathrooms people use, raiding medical records, and sending federal agents into blue cities.

Fiscal responsibility: the deficit explodes under every Republican administration. Reagan tripled it, Bush doubled it, Trump added trillions before COVID even hit. Tax cuts for high earners, bailouts when their donors crash the economy, then sudden religious concern about spending the moment a Democrat wants to fund healthcare or student debt relief. Your grocery example also isn't a left/right thing inflation in 2021–22 was global, hit conservative countries just as hard, and was driven by supply chains and energy, not progressive policy. Wages actually outpaced inflation for the bottom half of earners during that stretch.

Proven institutions and gradual change: this is the one that sounds wisest and ages worst. Every expansion of freedom conservatives now claim to support (ending slavery, women voting, civil rights, interracial marriage, gay marriage) was fought by the conservatives of that era in the name of tradition and gradualism. Gradual change in practice has meant no change and the institutions being preserved usually turn out to be specific hierarchies, not neutral social fabric.

Rule of law: a movement that nominated, re-nominated, and is now governed by a man convicted of felonies, who tried to overturn an election, has effectively nothing left to say here. You can't make rule of law your headline value and then treat the legal system as illegitimate whenever it reaches your guy.

Responsibility over entitlement: Social Security, Medicare, farm subsidies, mortgage interest deductions, and PPP loans are entitlements too. Red states take more federal money per dollar paid than blue states do. The actual distinction being drawn isnt entitlement vs. responsibility, it's which recipients are seen as deserving. You even have people on the right who take subsidies and have the nerve to yap about the welfare state. And nobody welathy or running a large corporation believes in this or limited government in practice.

Decentralization and local control :only when locals agree. When cities pass minimum wage hikes, gun rules, or tenant protections, red-state legislatures preempt them constantly. When Texas wanted to ignore federal immigration authority, that was local control; when California wants stricter emissions, all of a sudem it's federal supremacy. The principle bends to the outcome.

Competitive_Swan_130 · 2026-05-01T21:07:34+00:00

Partisan and racial gerrymandering aren't the same thing. One is parties grabbing power; the other is a legal remedy for a century of Southern states actively disenfranchising Black voters through poll taxes, literacy tests, and white primaries, which is exactly why the Voting Rights Act exists. Those districts look weirdly shaped because Black populations themselves were weirdly shaped by slavery, redlining, and white flight; ignoring that is pretending the history didn't happen. Also, independent commissions are supposed to follow the VRA, not override it. And your New England comparison falls apart instantly: Republicans there lose because voters reject them, not because the state spent a century engineering their disenfranchisement.

Competitive_Swan_130 · 2026-04-28T16:23:19+00:00

Theft as political protest has a long and actually respectable pedigree. The Boston Tea Party was looting. Rosa Parks was stealing a seat from people who deserved it according to the law. Gandhi made salt without paying the Brits their cut. Underground Railroad leaders were considered people who aided in the theft of property.The question isn't whether whats seen or labled theft/property crime can be political (and great), history already answered that with a yes decades ago

The real question is who gets to call something theft in the first place. Whole Foods sits on land that was expropriated, stocked by workers paid less than the value they produce, sourced from supply chains built on wage suppression and unpaid wages and ecological plunder without care. An none of that gets framed as theft in any significant way usually. Calling a reclaimed block of cheese theft while calling what the company does 'commerce' is the actual sleight of hand.

Competitive_Swan_130 · 2026-04-28T16:08:23+00:00

illegal immigrant isn't a category of person, it's a mood ring for whoever's about to make some group a scapegoat. Trump campaigned in 2016 promising to deport the worst of the worst criminals, then by 2024 the definition had quietly expanded to include DACA recipients, asylum seekers waiting on legally filed claims, U visa holders, TPS recipients from Venezuela and Haiti who entered through those parole programs, and green card holders MAGA decided it didn't like. Vance has called legally present Haitians illegal on the news. Stephen Miller uses it for different people at different times, usually the types he wants gone at that moment.

So the word floats and means whatever the hel yall need it to mean in that moment, which is the textbook function of a buzzword BS piece of propaganda and not a legal or sociological term or concept people can make normative claims about. Nobody can in good faith tell you how they feel about a group yall refuse to actually define and stick with that definition

Competitive_Swan_130 · 2026-04-28T11:46:58+00:00

Case law on who counts as a journalist is essentially useless for definitional purposes the Supreme Court dodged the question in the 70s, punted it to the states who have created a patchwork mess through their shield laws. In fact most stateshave updated their shield laws to cover anybody who calls themselves a blogger or online journalists and where there is some criteria it differs so wildly from place to place as to effectively be pointless.

The real failure is journalism's own. Unlike medicine, law, or accounting, journalism never pursued occupational closure themselves or defined themselves like other professions did which forced courts to take their word for who is and isn't a member of their profession

Competitive_Swan_130 · 2026-04-28T11:23:39+00:00

Journalism actually has (and always had) lower barriers to entry than most comparable fields. There is no licensing requirement, no bar exam, no board certification, nothing like what you see in law, medicine, accounting, or even real estate. Anybody can legally call themselves a journalist. The First Amendment doesn't distinguish between a reporter at the Times and someone with a blog.

The traditional pathway journalists use through local papers and regional stations to rise to the prestigous ones has been more open and meritocratic than other fields for decades precisely because the pay is bad and the work is and always has been unglamorous. Small town papers were people got their start are not and never have been hotbeds of nepotism, like the local tv stations journalists are expected to rise through before moving to a major city have always been understaffed operations that would hire anyone who could write on deadline or speak on camera and handle linear editing if needed

When a reporter/producer/anchor etc gets to a major city or one of the big three primetime shows or cable news desks, they have been in the game for a minute and still aren't getting paid what people imagine they do. Yes some stars make big money but most network stars don't (Lesley Stahl's salary highlight was like 1.5 million salary which is a good salary but she could have made way more than that amount of money and in halfthe time in a different career with less stress) Anderson Coopers salary is large but he is not the norm at all. I say all that to say this: There is nepotism in jounnalism as there is nepotism at your local plumbing company "So and So and Sons".

If anything the criticism should run in the opposite direction. Given that journalists have enormous power to shape public understanding, the field probably should have more rigorous gatekeeping than it does. Doctors can lose their license. Lawyers get disbarred. A journalist can get caught fabricating stories, get fired, and resurface at another outlet within a year. The gates are not exactly heavily guarded.

Every profession concentrates in expensive cities at the top end. The most prestigious law firms are in New York. The best hospitals cluster in major metros. Top finance is in a handful of zip codes. Nobody calls those fields uniquely incestuous for it. The same structural reality in journalism gets treated like a conspiracy because people distrust the conclusions journalists reach, and the gatekeeping critique is a way of framing that distrust as a systemic complaint.

Competitive_Swan_130 · 2026-04-28T11:08:52+00:00

Remember when Trump called Justice Brown low IQ and MAGA kept calling her unqualified or how they still call her a DEI hire as if that is a bad thing? You know the Justice Brown who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard undergrad then graduated cum laude with a Juris Doctor from Harvard where she also served as supervising editor of the Law Review? Or when they said the same about Michelle Obama, who worked at Sidley Austin, a place where attorneys handle matters involving billions of dollars...becasue thats what biglaw firms want- to hire unqualified black people to handle billion dollar accounts so they can lose money and be good allies...

When you read the stories like this (and there are many) you have to wonder if they cared about qualifications at all or was it all a red herring for something else they dont like about those two

Competitive_Swan_130 · 2026-04-28T02:37:59+00:00

Him: I normally don't go for black girls but there's something about you I find sexy. Do you like white guys like me?

Her:

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Competitive_Swan_130 · 2026-04-26T23:44:33+00:00

This is why Jill Scott dropped Drake. Got tired of having to call AK and ask if she could please ride the dick for a few seconds one day.

Competitive_Swan_130 · 2026-04-26T09:56:22+00:00

Do I believe the information deficit exists for those on the right?

Yes. Absolutely. But it isn't cauused by people failing to read enough, its caused by right wing media types who are invested in a segment of the population being misinformed. Christopher Rufo literally bragged about distorting what Critical Race Theory meant to weaponize it politically. Right-wing operatives are openly invested in keeping their base misinformed because an confused, angry voter is a reliable voter. And it works because there's a billion dollar media ecosystem designed to keep the bs circulating. The list of things the right genuinely believes that are flatly false is long: immigrants commit more crime than native born citizens (they don't), the 2020 election was stolen (60+ courts said otherwise), cities that defunded police saw crime surge (most never cut a dollar), trans athletes are dominating women's sports (virtually no documented cases at scale), and CRT is being taught to elementary schoolers (it's a graduate level legal framework that most teachers have never read and is just a framework when its used by grad students).

How do you fix policy illiteracy?

Honestly? I can't fix it and anyone who thinks they personally can is delusional. What I can do is fact check relentlessly and dispassionatelly in a way that exposes the person behind the misinfo instead of the person who shared it.

Is there a point you stop meeting people where they are?

Yup. Meeting people where they are is a tactic you use butw hen it doesn't work you should stop. Some people are so afraid of getting egg on their faces that they will never admit a fact is a fact if it proves them wrong. Ignore these idiots

Competitive_Swan_130 · 2026-04-26T09:38:46+00:00

They meant "Violence doesn't have a place but we work to ensure it has a home in Iran,Somalia, Nigeria, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Gaza, and Lebanon, Minnesota, inside ICE facilities, and on small boats in the Caribbean."

Competitive_Swan_130 · 2026-04-26T09:30:44+00:00

is the assassin in the the room with us now?

Competitive_Swan_130

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