Ah yes. A quarterback who earned $44M in the NFL pressured one of his endorsement companies to discontinue a product that offended him. This conduct is somehow not speech or a corporate version of a heckler's veto. Got it.
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I'm bowing out of the Off Topic sub-forum for a while, probably permanently.
Not sure what I expected out of this thread, but it's clear to me that this thread has run its logical course: social conservatives are always wrong -- obviously -- because they are dumb and just not well informed enough. If only they had some wiser people who could dissect their posts into fifteen parts, explaining incrementally, and with glittering vocabulary, why their opinions are just so dumb. That would really help the small-brain conservative understand how foolish he is.
You see, social liberals are free, independent thinkers. They don't toe the party line on everything. It's just logically obvious that the only correct opinion is that Kaepernick was not disrespecting the flag; that the Betsy Ross flag is, in fact, a white nationalist hate symbol; that Elizabeth Warren didn't use her Native American shtick to advance her career (go look at the Harvard law faculty and find me another professor who went to RUTGERS for law school); that trans women should be able to compete with women; on and on and on.
These are all independent thoughts, I swear it. It's not just toeing the party line and sticking up for their own. It's just the obviously correct opinion.
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I'll sign off with what I've said in many other posts. Social liberals are going left, left, left, and leaving the middle of the country (me) behind. I'm from Youngstown. I'm one of the fortunate ones here in that I run a profitable law practice and my wife is a licensed professional.
Yet my wife and I pay $900/month for shitty healthcare ($8k deductible per person). Can you understand why we -- and especially people who have it worse than we do -- won't support a party that will provide subsidized insurance to undocumented immigrants? Both sides of my family and my wife's family fought in the Civil War and WWII. Can you understand why it turns us off when the democrat party constantly demeans America, its founding, its history, and its achievements? I could go on.
Never, ever, ever in a million years did I think Youngstown would start leaning toward the GOP. Mahoning County has been +25-30% democrat for fifty years. If my memory is right, Hillary won Mahoning County by three percent (3%!!!!) in 2016. I can't even describe how absolutely staggering that is.
For every Youngstown there is a Lima; Findlay; Sandusky; Erie; Harrisburg; Flint; Gary; etc. These towns are made of people, and these people feel like they have been abandoned by the social left, which seems to be concentrating evermore in New York, San Francisco, DC, and academia.
I can't tell you how many people I know who were Democrats for life who voted for Trump. My older brother's voting history is Kerry, Obama, Obama...Trump. My old boss's voting record was Clinton, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama, Obama...Trump.
These are not anecdotal stories. The common theme is that the left is some combination of self-righteous (as demonstrated in this thread), America loathing (thinking the Founders were on the same level as Hitler), and anti-anything that disagrees with the modern far left.
Trump is probably going to get re-elected on the backs of his support in cities like mine. He's not going to get my vote (he didn't in 2016, either). But there are a hell of a lot of people who are tired of, well, the exact discourse in this thread.