^ I have a friend in the Raleigh DSA and he will say the same thing. There’s a schism actually on strategy whether to change course and go after electoral wins like Mamdani, or stand by principles. This is crippling the local organization and causing splinter groups. But also worth noting the DSA is not a centrally organized group. They have zero organizational structure or funding. Any group of people can say they’re DSA.

Side note I had ai evaluate if Mamdani is technocratic or populist and there’s a nice table with reasoning:
https://chatgpt.com/share/69165bec-3204-8011-b6fa-097081a7cb36

11/13/2025 5:31:20 PM

It’s comforting to know that I’m not the only one who spends way too much time having pointless debates and doubling down on petty thought experiments with AI.



[Edited on November 13, 2025 at 11:46 PM. Reason : we’re all doomed]

11/13/2025 11:42:34 PM

If you zoom way out, the Trump-Epstein pedo ring really does contain a lot of the elements that Dems are trying to message on and build narratives about. Powerful people preying on the desperate while big banks finance it all. I hope someone out there, more thoughtful and eloquent than I, can pull this all together and run with it.

Did you catch the story about the Epstein victim that fell into abuse because her mom had cancer and she thought Epstein could help? Has there ever been a story more perfectly crafted to frame healthcare policy as a moral question?

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/18/nx-s1-5471348/an-abuse-survivor-speaks-out-about-the-justice-departments-handling-of-epstein-files

Quote :

"BENSKY: Yeah. So I was a ballet dancer, and I went to a professional performing arts school in the city. And I was recruited at a very young age. I was not quite 18 at the time. And I met Epstein, and at first, it wasn't - you know, the abuse didn't start until a little bit later. And my mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She had an acoustic neuroma. I had been to the mansion before, and I knew that he had a model of a brain that was in - it was in sculpture form. So nobody knew where his money had come from at that point. All I knew was that he was a very powerful person, and it felt very intimidating, and he often manipulated us to feel that intimidation. So I didn't know where the money came from, and I thought that it came from neuroscience. And so when my mom had discovered that she had a brain tumor, I had gone to him and showed him the brain scans. And when I did, that was when everything evolved and the world kind of came crashing down for me in that he said, basically, OK, well, what will you do for this? He had said, you know, I know the top brain surgeons at Mount Sinai. You know, I have all of this power, and I can use it to help you, or I can make it really difficult for your mother. For myself, I was a teenager, and I was a young teenager, and I just felt like I had to go along with it for her safety, and so I did. And it was - that was when the abuse turned for me."

11/14/2025 10:00:12 AM

Americans already know Trump is a sleazeball. It will not move the needle.

11/14/2025 10:08:47 AM

Dems don’t need to beat Trump in 2026, they need to beat House Republicans (and hopefully pick off a few in the Senate too). The Trump-Epstein issue absolutely shreds their caucus unity and, depending on how they play it, will make them look complicit in coverup. Dems need maximum pressure in the House, I say turn the Trump-Epstein outrage up to 11.

11/14/2025 11:00:47 AM

^^ it very clearly is moving the needle

if it wasn’t, they wouldn’t have felt the need to put the full court press on Boebert

11/14/2025 12:06:17 PM

Quote :

"I agree that Dems need to spend a lot more time on using power when they have it to actually achieve things of value for the American people and spend a lot less time on "other side bad" rhetoric games"

Feels like they tried that and end result was Trump let off the hook and everybody decided whatever he did must have been blown out of proportion and not that bad

Republicans have a much better media/publicity arm to sell their views, Dems need something similar to take credit for the things they actually accomplish.

[Edited on November 14, 2025 at 1:25 PM. Reason : Also please look at a time based Trump approval poll]

11/14/2025 1:25:13 PM

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/opinion/shutdown-democrats-senate-midterms.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1E8.YpE4.ptzRjZVaBEXt&smid=url-share

Quote :

" If they win, Democrats will have to use their newfound authority to rethink, even dismantle, agencies like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. They may need to walk back the Bush-era decision to consolidate those agencies and others under a single department, given the wild abuses perpetrated under this administration and its predecessors. It will need to give serious thought to major political and social reform, including D.C. statehood, a federal ban on partisan gerrymandering, a new voting rights act and federal protections for reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, including the rights of gender and sexual minorities. Democrats will also need to embrace the legislature's constitutional authority to structure the executive branch and the judiciary, up to and including Supreme Court reform. If they win next year, Democrats will need to treat the next Congress not as a return to the status quo ante but as the beginning of a new era in which the principal task is to roll back the president's effort to create and consolidate a personalist dictatorship. They'll need to fortify the American political system against future attempts to play dictator and lay out a project of genuine democratic renewal. None of this is possible without a willingness to use power rather than just hold it. What we've seen this week is that there are still too many Democrats whose instinct is to retreat to normalcy rather than face the conflict at hand."

[Edited on November 14, 2025 at 2:36 PM. Reason : .]

11/14/2025 2:36:17 PM

^

11/14/2025 2:53:40 PM

Great ideas! Bring in some of the culture war issues that you keep slaughtered over!

11/14/2025 11:05:10 PM

Quote :

"Americans already know Trump is a sleazeball. It will not move the needle. "

I think the problem is democrats didn’t connect Trump being a sleazeball to bad outcomes for Americans.

But this recent Epstein release draws a straight line. We clearly see bondi doing goofy things to protect Trump, we see her and kash flopping around like a fish on the Epstein files, we see Epstein talking about how much leverage he has on Trump… with other world leaders even.

Democrats need to connect the dots for people that having someone like this isn’t merely a moral rot or ethical lapse, it means he selects unqualified people who would rather defend him than act in Americas interests. Democrats should be demanding the immediate resignation of bondi and Patel for their obvious lies a few weeks ago at a minimum.

11/14/2025 11:38:13 PM

^^ curious to know what caused you to post that after reading that excerpt

11/15/2025 1:57:46 AM

Abolish ice

Quote :

" If they win, Democrats will have to use their newfound authority to rethink, even dismantle, agencies like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. They may need to walk back the Bush-era decision to consolidate those agencies and others under a single department, given the wild abuses perpetrated under this administration and its predecessors. It will need to give serious thought to major political and social reform, including D.C. statehood, a federal ban on partisan gerrymandering, a new voting rights act and federal protections for reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, including the rights of gender and sexual minorities. Democrats will also need to embrace the legislature's constitutional authority to structure the executive branch and the judiciary, up to and including Supreme Court reform. "

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/opinion/shutdown-democrats-senate-midterms.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1E8.YpE4.ptzRjZVaBEXt&smid=url-share

11/15/2025 9:21:23 AM

stop with the ablish ice nonsense. Dems DO in fact need to be in favor of enforcing our immigration laws, because you know what they say...if Liberals won't enforce borders, Fascists will





[Edited on November 15, 2025 at 10:54 AM. Reason : .]

11/15/2025 10:53:09 AM

^I would think dissolving ICE and replacing it with a newer, more humane version would be an option. We do not need to keep ICE. In fact, I think it may be necessary to replace it, to some extent: It's gonna be really hard to erase this huge fucking blemish it now has. In the future, it should absolutely be rebranded and presented as a new agency. Bury the old wounds inflicted by ICE.

[Edited on November 15, 2025 at 11:09 AM. Reason : ]

11/15/2025 11:09:11 AM

98% of people who chant abolish ICE are not saying it bc they want to replace one 3-letter aconym with a more humane 3-letter acronym. they're saying it bc they think it's mean that some Americans don't want to let in to the country every single person who wants to come here.

and i get that sentiment, i really do. i'm on team One Billion Americans. i want as many people as possible to play for team America, to have their children grow up and be taught Enlightenment Liberal values here, and to contribute to the shining city on the hill. and 98% of people who want to immigrate here are doing it for Good reasons and we should welcome them. but we HAVE to be able to do that clear-eyed and understand the real life disruption that can and does happen when you have significant shifts to an ecosystem, or that SOME percentage of people who come here are doing it for Bad reasons. we're not making that kind of argument. we're just saying "trump and maga and white nationalist nazis herp derp"

[Edited on November 15, 2025 at 11:39 AM. Reason : 98% is for directional effect only. yall can tell me what the actual # is. make america think harder]

11/15/2025 11:26:56 AM

Make America ask an AI chatbot for a made up number again!

But things would be so much easier if we had Manifest Destinied ourselves up through Canada and all the way down to Panama. I think we could handle border enforcement there (with a big assist from the Darien Gap).

How is Marco Rubio coming along with getting us back the Panama Canal, at least?

11/15/2025 11:33:26 AM

agreed. we need a better way for states to be able to opt in to border changes. everybody is still so traumatized bc 98% of border changes throughout history have been coerced via military action. people are missing out on the positives!

11/15/2025 11:44:29 AM

can’t fathom seeing videos of ICE disappearing/attacking innocent people, including some who are religious leaders, and not wanting to get rid of the agency completely

smashing car windows, dragging a teacher out of school, pointing their weapons at protestors, traumatizing families, etc….

you can’t fucking appease the fascists

11/15/2025 12:33:48 PM

ok let me know if you've ever seen a video of a member of Hamas raping murdering and abducting peace activists and your reaction was abolish Islam.

11/15/2025 12:48:21 PM

What a terrible comparison

11/15/2025 3:38:49 PM

Quote :

" stop with the ablish ice nonsense. Dems DO in fact need to be in favor of enforcing our immigration laws, because you know what they say...if Liberals won't enforce borders, Fascists will "

Abolish ice is the only logical position. You must not be paying attention to who is running ice and who they’re hiring. From an organizational psychology perspective you can’t pick and choose the bad people and just pluck them out. If you think taking a bunch of people, training them to be Nazis, then new leaders saying “actually stop acting like nazis” will work your head is in the sand.

The agency needs to be scrapped, the mission rewritten outside the trauma of 9/11 in which it was created, and the new leaders need to interview everyone they hire on.

11/15/2025 4:14:19 PM

Yup. Fire literally everyone in the organization. Allow folks to re-apply for their positions on the condition that their past actions will be thoroughly scrutinized for unConstitutional and illegal behaviour, and they will be prosecuted for any such actions found. Anyone found to have been hiding their identities is presumptively disqualified. .

11/15/2025 8:41:32 PM