Why Liberals Have to Be Like the X-Men
Trump, Republicans rip off voters, sell policies that screw them over
John Fugelsang, the witty host of Sirius’ “Tell Me Everything,” once made a very intelligent comment about the battle between liberals and conservatives.
He said liberals have to be like the X-Men from Marvel comics and movies. For those who don’t know, the X-Men are mutants, who society sees as monsters because of their special powers. However, the X-Men, led by the altruistic Prof. Charles Xavier, who was based on Martin Luther King, decide to fight in favor of a society that hates them.
According to Fugelsang, liberals need to take the same approach toward conservatives. We have to save them from themselves. That concept became very pertinent when I considered the latest scandal from MAGA world. According to a New York Times article, several Trump followers now realize they’re being ripped off by the advertising on Truth Social.
The Truth Social Rip Off
“Between posts about conspiracy theories and right-wing grievances was an unusual advertisement: a photo of former President Donald J. Trump holding a $1,000 bill made of gold, which he was apparently offering free to supporters. But there were a few catches: The bill was not free, it was not made of gold, and it was not offered by Mr. Trump,” according to The Times.
Because Truth Social is way down the pecking order of social media sites, it can’t attract blue-chip advertisers. (Truth Social only attracted about 1.7 million monthly users (N.Y. Times,) while Facebook racked up 2. 9 billion, according to Hootsuite!) So, most of the ads on the site are linked to scammy products such as gold purchases and vitamins that don’t do anything.
Some Truth Social users have regretted buying products or advertising on the site.
Other companies aren’t excited about joining the site or advertising their products.
“Maxwell Finn, an online marketer, said in a YouTube video that he was one of Truth Social’s top advertisers, spending more than $150,000 on ads, including those for Trump-themed hats, shirts, coins and novelty bills,” according to The Times. “In the video, he called the ad platform ’frustrating’ and ‘bare bones,’ adding that it lacked even basic functionality, forcing his company to manually track ad performance — a method that would prove impossible for advertisers with larger budgets.”
Juicing the Rubes
However, this is a running theme in the treatment of Trump followers. They’re constantly being exploited, abused and bled dry by their so-called leader. At Trump rallies, cult members’ info is harvested and then used to hit them with never-ending requests for money.
Republicans might think we liberals are a bunch of blood-drinking pedophiles who want to make your son put on a dress, but the only thing most leftists want is to give everyone health care.
As I’ve stated before, the former president has a certain level of contempt for his followers. To him, they’re just marks, simple dupes to be bled dry until he can find a new market to fleece. Another example of Trump’s contempt for his followers was seen in his handling of the coronavirus.
He covered it up and tried to prevent the knowledge from getting out. By doing so, he showed he didn’t care about the millions of Americans who died. To him, the coronavirus was a bump in the road that prevented him from winning reelection in 2020.
Even as he was spreading COVID misinformation, telling people not to wear masks and saying they had a right not to take the vaccine, he got inoculated! You wonder how many of his followers died, like neocoon pundit Diamond of “Diamond and Silk” fame, because they believed Trump’s COVID lies?
The Great Distraction
I don’t hate Trump voters; I think they are sadly misguided. I don’t wish them dead; I want them to live long and healthy lives. That’s why we liberals hope they eventually see the light. Trump and conservatives don’t care about them.
We liberals have to keep trying to get this message to Trump supporters; dump the right-wing propaganda and come into the light. The people in your party don’t care about you.
This lack of concern about working-class people is also common throughout the conservative movement. Conservative policies don’t benefit working-class people because for them to get their much-vaunted tax cuts, they have to slash social services which many working-class people depend on.
That’s why they come up with culture war issues such as the war on Critical Race Theory, bathroom bills and with Florida, a war against Black history.
There’s a reason why Gov. Ron DeSantis promotes these issues. Apart from raising his profile and helping his 2024 presidential efforts, it also distracts Floridians from the fact that he wants to slash social services such as Medicare. That would make him very unpopular in a state where almost one in 5 people are senior citizens. According to Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, DeSantis “would slash what’s left of the safety net and use the proceeds to help the rich stay rich.”
But DeSantis’ culture wars are a convenient bait-and-switch. While people vote for him because they think he’s going to keep trans kids out of bathrooms, one day they’ll wake up and realize that their life-saving medical services have been cut. But by then it will be too late. Republicans might think we liberals are a bunch of blood-drinking pedophiles who want to make your son put on a dress, but the only thing most leftists want is to give everyone health care.
Universal healthcare benefits everyone, and its way more efficient and cheaper than the nightmarish system we have right now. If we liberals hated Republicans as much as they think, we’d leave them with their crappy for-profit healthcare that condemns them to die buried in medical debt!
Much like the X-Men, we have to try to convince the other side we aren’t monsters. If we really hated them, we’d leave them to keep voting for people like Trump and DeSantis, who want to cut their healthcare and rip them off. We aren’t the real enemy.
