I need people on the left, every flavor of the left, to understand this. Your passion right now cannot be for voting for whomever is making a stunt third party presidency bid because the passion on the right is to KILL us. Republicans are happily coalescing power with & through white supremacist terrorists who are murdering people regularly and terrorizing people daily, and they are creating policy to enable those killers and terrorists.

From: @wdlindsy
https://toad.social/@wdlindsy/110577447952690671

Electoral politics in the US right now is about choose your opponent, not choose your player. We lost our opportunity to play choose your player via poor ballot design in South Florida and a compromised SCOTUS.

Right now you have only ONE job in the voting booth: choosing the candidate with an actual chance of winning who isn’t going to worsen the climate catastrophe, destroy public education, abolish unions, destroy LGBTQ lives and arm every Nazi in the country.

It’s not a hard choice.

And do not argue with me that if everybody just voted their conscience then the green candidate or the socialist candidate or the working families candidate or whoever else you want to be able to squander your vote on could win.

No, they couldn’t. That is not reality.

That will not ever be reality until those parties learn how to build a party base and create electability and build candidates with strong public support from the ground up.

And do not talk to me about ranked choice voting, runoff voting, ending the electoral college or any other changes to our electoral system that do not exist and will not exist in time for 2024, probably not for 2028 or even 2032.

We all have to operate in the reality we have, not the hopes and dreams we don’t.

The right out-organized us by more than three decades. At the end of the 1980s they were holding trainings in church basements with the Christian Coalition, teaching people how to build what is the openly fascist Republican Party of 2023, using coded Christian language and appeals to white grievance to win seats on suburban school boards & town councils and from there, county level then state legislature seats, bypassing cities, then gerrymandering them to destroy their electoral power.

@amaditalks That’s a sign that it’s time to start taxing churches.

@AlliFlowers they weren’t church events. They rented the space. Churches are allowed to rent out their social halls and basement spaces to community organizations.

@amaditalks Maybe they should be taxed on money they make from renting their space out to non-church functions.

@AlliFlowers @amaditalks If you read this entire thread and the key takeaway you feel the need to comment on is, "We should figure out how to tax church income," I think you missed the point of the thread.

@jik @AlliFlowers @amaditalks No, the takeaway, "Nothing will ever change, you must choose between two right wing, pro-war, pro-fossil fuel, pro-big business parties, and if you don't choose the slightly less awful one, then you are a bad person," is so demoralizing that people simply want to change the subject, and talk about small areas where some progress might be possible.