Voter Education (pt 1)
While we we have a lot of data as to who the voters were, it’s also possible to categorize the voting public into three broad groups: (1) those who knew what they were doing, (2) those who didn’t know what they were doing, and (3) those who were angry about Covid-era inflation.
One thing about group 2 is that it’s hard to determine whether or not someone is misinformed or whether or not they prefer to sit in a kind of silence as things happen around them. For the sake of argument, let’s frame this hypothetical person like this: they’re the kind of person who googled, “Did Joe Biden Drop Out?” on election day. They’re the kind of person who offhandedly wrote, “Trump won?” on a Dallas Subreddit. They’re the kind of person who voted for Trump because they believed that the man who overturned Roe V. Wade wasn’t going to ban abortion. This is the group who have nothing other than what appears to be the confidence of their own self-regard.
To that end, I want to offer up two bits of information to the void of the internet in the hopes that it will reach this kind of voter.
The first is a paragraph from this subreddit on what life is currently like in Hungary.
… while other countries progress, the nepotism and cronyism holds Hungary back - money increasingly goes into vanity projects and not the essential services people actually use. A complete lack of imagination in a government stuck in the past means the country becomes a hub for low paid labour. A small core group of people have become fantastically rich, while economic mismanagement send the huf down the toilet and cost of living/inflation way higher. Constant noise and childish nonsense from the government, Orban spending more time creating conflict with allies and neighbours for his own ego and relevance.
I offer this up because Hungary could be a model of what’s to come. It very well might not be, but this kind of uncertainty now comes with the territory.
The second thing I want to share is the beginning of a lengthy comment as to why the FDA is worthwhile —
Remember back in the 50s and 60s when the drug Thalidomide was widely prescribed as a treatment for a whole bunch of conditions like insomnia, coughs, and even some cancers? Then it was discovered that using Thalidomide shortly before or during pregnancy led to all kinds of horrific birth defects? It was a huge deal around the world and tens of thousands of children were born with debilitating birth defects because of Thalidomide.
The most notable wealthy country where Thalidomide was not a major problem was the United States specifically because the FDA refused to approve it for sale and use here. The manufacturer and distributor both applied for FDA licenses for Thalidomide multiple times, even trying to apply political pressure to the FDA to approve it. But the FDA refused and only 17 children in the US were born with Thalidomide related birth defects (compared to the tens of thousands around the world).
I’m sharing this because Robert F. Kennedy Jr has been on television talking about how whole departments of the FDA ‘have to go.’
Again: this could all amount to naught. Things could suddenly take a different path, shift suddenly, but it’s important to try and make sense of a range of possibilities based on what people say or have said. This is an attempt to do that.
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Elsewhere: Voter Education (Part 2) /