Excerpt from this Substack post: https://nickrafter.substack.com/p/the-rent-may-always-be-too-damn-high
Everyone loves socialism, except for the word itself.
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
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Yeah, for most people politics is like the winter Olympics. They genuinely have no idea what's going on unless it's repeated ad nauseam over and over again or it gets slipped into some other media they're consuming.
They're also terrible at spotting what's fake or untrue.
It was fine when during their evening tv watch they got commercial promos for the top evening news stories each ad break, but those days are gone.
Goebbels, in essence: “If you want to make it in propaganda, you have to repeat the same trite phrases over and over again, no matter whether intellectuals contradict you and refute you. You convince scholars with clever arguments, and the masses with simple ones.”
They’re also terrible at spotting what’s fake or untrue.
It's not a small feat when it does feel like every fucking person on TV is lying to you constantly.
From NPR to the Houston Chronicle to BBC News One to the Joe Rogan Podcast, it's just mountains of bullshit and lies and jingoism and native advertising.
It was fine when during their evening tv watch they got commercial promos for the top evening news stories each ad break, but those days are gone.
Go back 30 years, and you still had this shit. It was just pitched to the Median Voter rather than some rarified hot house of partisans.
You still had John Stossel with his crypto-libertarian bullshit and Tucker Carlson screaming at James Carville on Crossfire, but always over something totally incidental. People like Rush Limbaugh and Rachael Maddow hadn't quite gone mainstream yet. Jon Stewart was confined to the back corners of a cable news comedy channel. FOX (the whole damned network, not just the news channel) was just getting off the ground. Everyone agreed gay people shouldn't get married, but women should be allowed to hold a credit card.
Everyone agreed Iraq had WMDs and Cuba is being run into the ground by Nazi Communist Fidel Castro and China is a backwards hellhole where Tianamen Square happens twice a day.
Now you've got Controversy as the focus of news rather than Consensus. So if CNN says the sun rises in the East, Newsmax will bring on Laura Loomer to tell people the CNN anchor rapes puppies, so don't believe them. And if the WSJ says the economy is booming, sixteen podcasters will release episodes about how we're a decade into the New Great Depression You Just Don't Know About.
People believe crazy shit because there is no consensus reality anymore.
Because lying gets more attention than the truth and we live in an attention based economy. Human attention is now the commodity that every tech overlord is fighting over and they amplify the influencers that get the most eyeballs and earballs hoping their platform will be at the top. That means the most unscrupulous and bombastic liars are shoved in our faces because those are the ones that rally engagement from both fans and haters. You can farm more engagement by being a piece of shit than by being a smart, interesting, or good person. Also, the media is totally complicit in this and will happily prop up these schmuck podcasters by tirelessly writing articles criticizing them. They cannot help but participate in the meaningless twitter feuds and gotcha online culture because that's what most people consume.
It is impressive how people don't question their own assumptions and beliefs.
They just believe that socialist support making things more expensive. They don't even know what that statement means. It's just a = b and that's it.
Not just American.
Have you seen the news of the Italian 4 year old girl who died from diphtheiria, a disease for which there has long been a vaccine (mandatory in Italy, even) and which hadn't been seen in that country for more than 3 decades due to vaccination, but her parents thought that vaccine gave autism to that kid's cousin so didn't got her vaccinated.
Curiously, the mentioned vaccinated cousin also got infected and survived.
A young child literally died because her parents were gullible braindead morons who (doubtless via Social Media) got fed the same shit that's fed to American braindead morons and actually believed that even though it originates from a country which is a postcard for Idiocracy.
Well, guess they did indeed made sure their child won't ever have autism ...
(All this shit makes me so fucking furious!)
This vaccines giving autism shit all because of facebook.
So the way to make them vote for socialists is to talk about costs. Looks like an easy win.
That, and just say what you're going to do, rather than labelling yourself.
I always think of taking the angle of "people can call me whatever they like but I stand for these principles -" is always the right approach. Labels are much easier to subvert in people's minds than actual plans of action.
Well, it seems like the propaganda and defunding schools worked as intended. These are the vote-cattle the right are working towards.
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The secret hidden in this article is that talking about the cost of living, cost of groceries, cost of gas resonates across party lines stronger than any culture war distractions. The way to bring down fascism is to simply talk about how expensive things are and why there is no help.
Also to not use ANY of the conservative buzzwords they have conditioned them to hear and associate with certain things. Also don't say anything related to all their Thought Terminating Cliches.
Don't say: Socialism, Communism, Capitalism, Immigrants, anything LGBTQ, anything economy, anything equality, anything related to DEI, anything they fixate on.
Instead, use actual basic terms and explanations without using the shortcut words that they have been conditioned/brainwashed with. It's a minefield, but can be done. Don't say the economy is bad, say the cost of food is very high and I wish we had better pay or cheaper prices. Don't say you want democratic socialism, say it would be great if medical costs were fair and we had more help with everyday things we all want and need.
For all of Trump's bullshit I credit his grade 3 level speaking with most of his success.
The man speaks like an adult talking to a 5 year old (intentionally or not) and the American electorate responds to that.
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This has been my biggest takeaway of the past ten years. The electorate wants more social democratic policies, but they are afraid of the name. Fox News has made the mention of "social" anything or "liberal" anything toxic to a not-insignificant portion of the US population, and calling these policies by their generally agreed upon designations (be it from political science, philosophy, or academia), that group will just shut it down because those words just trip something in their brains.
Anecdotal as it may be, I got my MAGA mother to agree that a single payer healthcare system was better explaining in small words what "a common sense, good system" would look like. She was totally on board. Will she vote for "Medicare for All," now? No, because "that's socialism!!!!!1!1!!1," but an identical program that got explained was "just common sense."
In the end, I've found that MAGA people fall into three camps: bigots, idiots, and the selfish. Bigots will never be reasoned with; they're there to hurt people. The selfish are too rich to benefit from any good policies. Idiots, though, can be reasoned with, but you have to reason with them in the language of a 10 year old. It sounds condescending (and to a degree it is), but it's the only way to get through to them.
It seems insane from an outsider's perspective, but I think that we could get some European-esque policies passed in the US if instead of using "normal" terms, we use super mega-deluxe 'Murican cowboy names and just play into the quirks of American culture.
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This is why both politicians and those who have a strong interest in politics need to chill with the jargon and labels.
People voted for Mamdani because they liked his ideas, his approach to things, not because he was a "socialist". Hell, most people, including me, aren't sure exactly what that means.
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I've also heard of such a "conservative" calling for the nationalisation of Google in order to save it from socialism.
...wh...what? What are the inner workings of that person's brain...
If you look at it very superficially, the "logic" is not actually that hard to follow:
- Socialism is bad
- Google is doing something the person considers bad (be nice to minorities, LGBT or something)
- The person therefore thinks Google is being taken over by socialism
- Trump is anti-socialist
- Person trusts Trump
- Trump is the government
- To stop Google from its evil socialism, the government should step in and take over
As long as you're unburdened by the slightest inkling of what socialism actually is, this line of "logic" makes some sort of sense.
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Ah, common clay of the new west
These are people of the land
You know... morons.
I don't know why there had to be some weird background but here's a still from the actual scene
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I mean it's exactly to Republican plan as those areas controlled by the party of Idiot America, tore apart education and the ability to have any critical thinking skills. You now have generations of people who will believe anything they hear without thinking for a single beat.
I wonder how many thought they voted for this guy:
This movie was actually how I was introduced to the Israel/Palestine conflict.
And thats what Trump and fascists hate art, it's a median where story tellers convey deep nuances about dumb shit happening in the world
You're right but Zohan is a bad example because it's more Israeli propaganda than art
It's anecdotal evidence. It's braindead to take this as a representation of conservatives.
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I think I understand the bizarre train of thought, something like:
- Democrats don't care about my interests.
- Democrats are socialists, because the TV said so
- This guy doesn't sound like other democrats
- That must be because he's not a socialist, like they are.
I know rationally that running on material interests can cut through culture war bullshit, but it's funny to see how it gets rationalized when it does.
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How do these white trash bootlickers even manage to breathe propely with th3ir "heroes" toying them around like puppets?
decades of demonizing education, attacking and undermining education by making sure it doesnt teach essential skills like critical thinking and punishing anything but blind acceptance and obedience, the abolition of the fairness doctrine to begin the locking of people into isolated information bubbles, social media and facebook that uses algorithms to maximize profits by serving inflammatory content to vulnerable people to further expand the the right wing information bubbles online with the happy little bonus of it bringing in billions of dollars and thus being a capitalistically selected for behavior of feeding innocent people into the hate machine because right wingers post more, see more ads, and click more ads, because of their constant engagement due to their constant manufactured outrage.
and, i mean, thats just the tip of the iceberg thats created these people, but I'm not gonna spend an hour highlighting every single thread in this blanket.
Republicans voting for Democrats because they don't watch Fox News and thought he was a super Republican? I hope I never runs into these weirdos.
Clearly the education system is getting too much funding. Somebody cut this waste.
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