To add context, the ads are on YouTube, I’m in North Carolina, they’ve mostly (all?) been regarding Medicare with a voiceover saying “He’s not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid” followed with him saying “None of that stuff is gonna be touched”
I can only imagine there’s some local elections or primaries that have his stink on it and some GOP candidate is trying to ‘roll down the windows’?
… Sadly, the first thing that comes to mind, upon reading your comment…
First, we take Manhattan… then we take Berlin.
… I am hopeful that I can make it either to, or at least nearer to Canada, into a blue state, within the next year…
I am fully expecting shit to get very bad, very fast now.
… At least I am white… as sickening as that is for me to say… it does make me less of a target.
…
Spent the better part of two decades telling my friends and family that what is happening now … is the trajectory we are on, and we must enact change now, while we still can, to avert this path.
… I don’t talk to any of them any more, as they all thought I was insane…
They didn’t believe ‘it could happen here.’
And now, it has.
And most of them would either entirely deny that it ‘has happened’, as they are neck deep in QAnon/MAGA insanity…
…or they would tell me that simultaneously they don’t remember me explaining how and why this could happen, how it became more and more likely as the years went by… and also, at the same time, just remember me being hysterical, about something, vaguely, for no reason they can remember.
I’m in multiple ways part of minorities, but luckily invisibly so, so I perfectly understand what you are saying with being “white” helping.
This year I started to learn some self defense, together with my wife. My gut feeling says we need to toughen up for whatever times are coming up, because in any case they won’t be good, that is for sure. I must say, no idea how much it would help in practice, and I hope to never find out, but it at least does help psychologically.
Having to watch all this insanity unfold on one hand slow motion (compared to movies) and also on ultra high speed (objectively / historically) and seeing where this is going without any ability to stop it leaves one feeling pretty helpless. Enact change… But how? Ultimately even hundreds of thousands protesters do not change a thing. We saw the same thing with climate change. Everybody knows what’s going on, nobody is really doing anything. Sadly, not only for such abstract threats but also very concrete and personified evils.
I think all we can do is try staying calm (but prepared) and remain decent human beings. I hope when the time comes I will have the courage and trust to help people who need and deserve it. Decent people helping each other could at some point be the only thing that remains, when all institutions have crumbed or gone rogue, and it’s crucial. Little actions by regular people can mean life or death. We cannot stop the storm, but we gotta try what we can in whatever sphere of personal influence we have. That’s all we can do and the best we can hope for. Everybody with a mind and heart keeping going and trying to do the right thing.
I wish you the best of luck to get through all this. Stay safe, stay sane.