I already got stuff prepared, but I'm curious on if anyone has any tips or ideas to make it more fun. What worked for you? I'm starting in NYC. My main concern is whether my players just go straight to the Ju-Ju House, since it seems pretty blatant that's where everything points, but that might also be Keeper Omniscience biasing me since I have the full scope.

I'm also running a more pulpy game, so if anyone has ideas on how to make it more action-packed, let me know, though I've prepared some scenarios.

Submission Statement: With the growing power of AI and the dwindling math and reading competency of students in the US, people have been turning eyes to new fancy "Alpha" schools that blend efficient AI use to tailor make students' experiences as optimally as possible. This is relevant for American education policy, which is at a loss for what to do with the rising utilization of AI in the classroom, as well as falling competencies in high school and higher-level education.

This article expresses skepticism of these AI schools but also takes into consideration what these schools argue it can do for student learning and test scores. But the article will correctly point out that rising test scores does not mean rising competency and tries to critically assess how Alpha schools would actually affect the growing dillema in US schooling. This issue is also relevant economically as more Alpha scools and Alpha-knock offs are being given charters from state-level governments, and some people think there should be a bigger push in this direction.

I'm making a post on this because the comment I was trying to make on the Ossoff thread wouldn't post for some reason, but I thought it important enough to highlight here. I'm guessing there might be a lot of new comers to the community or just voting age in general who didn't live through the shit show that was the 2020 election.

The 2020 Democratic primary was the most progressive in history with nearly every major candidate embracing policies that had previously been confined to the party's left flank at that time.

Nearly every major candidate supported:

• Universal Health Care of Some Type
• $15 federal minumum wage
• Climate change policy and the green new deal
• Universal pre-k, and most candidates even supported different forms of free public college
• Other labor rights: paid family leave, paid sick leave, easier collective bargaining, etc.
• drug decriminalization/legalization

And more.

However, anyone who was around the internet at the time and was politically savvy enough to know that, for online leftists, none of this was enough unless you were Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. The amount of constant smears and lies the left threw at all the candidates that supported pretty much everything they wanted was staggering.

Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren was one of the, if not the most, progressive senators back in 2020 (depending on whether you want to call Bernie a progressive or a socialist). She wasn't a socialist though, but she called herself a capitalist and was pro-free market. Regardless, she was essentially the closest ally DSA had next to Bernie.

There's a long history between Warren and Sanders that is mostly positive, but I'll just start with some of the rocky stuff between the two in the 2020 campaign.

Even Warren herself was eventually exiled from the leftist community because she dared to call out something Bernie said as coming across as sexist.

There was an incident where Elizabeth Warren claimed Bernie told her in a private conversation that a woman could not win the Presidency. Bernie later claimed that he was talking about how Trump would weaponize misogyny but that he never claimed a woman couldn't win. Warren indirectly called him out on this on one debate stage, which ended in them not shaking hands and in a confrontation (caught on mic) where she accused him of lying about what he said.

Of course, did leftist get concerned about Sanders potentially being sexist or how so many people were quick to accuse Elizabeth Warren, a woman, of lying about a man being sexist? Lol no. Bernie's base was quick to discard her into the trash and started calling her a snake, using little snake emojis 🐍 and hashtags like #neverwarren or #warrenisasnake.

This grew incredibly bad when she came out and endorsed Joe Biden instead of Bernie, which pretty much cemented the online left's opinion that she was the enemy.

Another incident was where there was a Bernie campaign script for Bernie staffers that attacked Warren by telling them to gout and say:

>People who support [Warren] are highly-educated, more affluent people who are going to show up and vote Democratic no matter what and that she's bringing no new bases into the Democratic Party.

Warren in response to learning about this

>Bernie knows me, and has known me for a long time. He knows who I am, where I come from, what I have worked on and more, and the coalition and grassroots movement. We're trying to build Democrats we want to win. In 2020, we all saw the impact of the factionalism in 2016, and we can't have a repeat of that.

So Warren explicitly called for a lack of factionalism and infighting in the left-wing. And what did she get? Well, the complete opposite because Sanders supporters were fucking unhinged and couldn't accept anything that wasn't Bernie.

Adding a lot of this because I want to drive home a point about how shitty the internet is going to get in 2028 by highlighting just a few things Pete Buttigiegieg had to go through.

There's more to it, but you really had to be around to see how degererate everyone online was to Warren and how they felt personally slighted when Warren decided to ally with non-leftists.

I can tell you personally, these reactions were basically what sold me that the left is a doomed project. Elizabeth Warren's camp should have been there strongest ally, and somehow they ended up making her and her followers turn against them. Like if Bernie's camp can't caucus with Warren, who the fuck could they work with. That's how fine they were with casting off their own kind. If they can do this to Warren, they will do this to anyone else.

Buttiegieg

So a lot of the 2020 Democratic primary contenders got hit pretty bad when it came to online leftist smears and lies. I have so many vivid memories of some crazy shit people would say and post, and even some really stupid animations people made. I couldn't find any of them when I searched, but it's probably better that way because they are mind-rotting.

Eitherway, the treatment of Buttiegieg stuck out to me because I felt he was everything a lot of progressive types would want. He was young, smart, gay, and support of many things like

More taxation on the 1%, universal health care, supreme court and electoral college reform, universal child care and debt free college for the lowest 80% of income, and more.

But somehow, he was completely thrown to the wolves as being too establishment and moderate. It wasn't clear why he was labeled this. Like literally, it wasn't clear if you asked anyone. This was one of the big things that made me, a 22-year-old progressive-leaning guy, really start questioning the progressive/leftist communities online AND offline because none of them could even say why when I directly asked them (granted, some of this might just be due to college-age stupidity, but I digress).

One of my favorite 2020 "scandals" when accusing Pete was when online leftists tried to pin Pete Buttigieg to the great Bread Pricing Scandal of Canada. Literally all because he worked for McKinsey in Toronto at the time. For context, people were saying he was a corporate shill or evil because he worked in McKinsey, and they justified him being evil by trying to tie him to this old scandal that happened in Canadian grocery stores.

Politico (2020)

>As part of his work advising various businesses and government agencies, Buttigieg completed a six-month assignment in Toronto in 2008 on behalf of Canadian supermarket chain Loblaws, analyzing “the effects of price cuts on various combinations of items across hundreds of stores.”

In 2017, Loblaws’ executives admitted to participating in a vast price-fixing scheme that began in 2001 and involved several top Canadian grocers and bread manufacturers inflating and manipulating the price of bread over the course of a decade.

Buttigieg lashed out when asked about the controversy by the Times’ editorial board, after journalist Binyamin Appelbaum asserted that the candidate had “been on the front lines of corporate downsizing” and “corporate price fixing.”

“Whoa, whoa whoa, that’s, that’s, I’m sorry, that’s —” Buttigieg retorted as Appelbaum continued his line of questioning.

“So the proposition that I’ve been on front lines of corporate price fixing is bullshit. Just to get that out of the way,” Buttigieg said.

“You worked for a company that was fixing bread prices,” Appelbaum replied.

“No, I worked for a consulting company that had a client that may have been involved in fixing or was apparently in a scandal,” Buttigieg said, going on to claim that he was “not aware of the Canadian bread pricing scandal until last night.”

Pete took even more smear after smear, people calling him fake gay, people calling him rat faced, people calling him a CIA agent plant (all serious by the way), and more

The Exit Interview from Indianapolis Monthly (2020) Showed some good reflection from Pete

>Reporter: You took a significant share of criticism on Twitter during the primary, particularly from members of your own Millennial generation, who saw you as a political opportunist, a corporate shill, and not being gay enough. Some even suggested you were affiliated with the CIA. What did you make of that?

Pete: You learn very early on in politics not to take criticism personally. I would much rather have somebody go online or write an article and say, “Your higher ed policy sucks and here’s why…” and critique it point-by-point. Then we could have a debate. But when it gets so over the top, the idea that I’m a CIA agent cleverly disguised as an intelligence officer in the military, or that I took down Blue Cross Blue Shield Michigan, or that I was somehow responsible for the Great Canadian Bread Pricing Scandal of 2002. Or perhaps the most bizarre one of all: That I had something to do with the app crashing in Iowa when no individual suffered more or was impacted more, I think, in terms of political trajectory as a consequence of that then than me and my campaign.

That’s where you learn that, okay, yes it is personal, but it’s still not about you. It’s about a cartoon character version of you that people are building up and then tearing back down as a way of expressing their frustration with things that are bigger than you or that you may remind them of. But it’s actually not about you, because the caricature they’re talking about doesn’t even resemble you.

The second paragraph by Pete is good restraint on his part, but I really wonder what his opinion of this stuff is now. I get that, as a politician, you can't really be burning the bridges with the populace, but after getting CPS called on him (which I would not be surprised turned out to be a leftist, but we don't know to be fair), you could see him getting fed up. I wonder if he knows he will never be accepted by these people. The Jubilee video of him against undecided voters is commendable, but many of the anti-democrat left-leaning people in that video would probably jump straight to these crazy accusations of him.

Also, on the

>That I had something to do with the app crashing in Iowa

For context, basically, Iowa had a voting app during 2020 to help with its dumb primary caucus rules, but it had technical difficulties during the Primary caucus. Pete won the Iowa Primary, so leftists accused him and his team of tampering with the app to rig the caucus in his favor. They did this sincerely, and the lie spread and stuck for a while. It was straight-up MAGA-level conspiracism in many of these communities.

Also on the rat face thing I mentioned before, here's some images people made of pete looking like a rat, and this is just what I found quickly on Google.

https://preview.redd.it/759pon1wmbeh1.png?width=3208&format=png&auto=webp&s=a7834d527d13c32c5c039752723c4528d919149b

This is some of the tamer stuff that you can find easily on Google. I can tell you from experience, there were a lot of really deranged Photoshop and videos of him made like this.

My point being in all of this, is that people like Pete were literally in favor of pretty much everything progressives wanted on paper. Literally, none of that was good enough for them because he didn't match what they all told each other a "perfect" progressive candidate needed to be.

Takeaway to 2028

So here is the main point. I see a lot of people speculating on Newsome, Ossoff, etc. in 2028 and already bemoaning that leftists are not supporting those candidates. I am just going to tell you straight up. They won't support any candidate that isn't there own deranged leftist messiah (whoever that might be in 2028). You will NOT be able to win over these people. I know this. I am sure Destiny knows this. I don't think other people in politics are very aware of this.

Ossoff could have a perfect candidacy and do his best to win over the leftists and DSA, but they would smear and actively try to destroy his campaign.

AOC could have everything these people want on paper, but since she is not beholden to every single beck and call of what they want, they will stab her in the back and nuke her candidacy. If you don't believe me, you clearly did not see what happened to Elizabeth Warren in 2020.

This happened in 2020, and these people have only gotten worse in 2028. Just know that whatever candidate you support, you will have to fight in the worst online trenches you have ever seen. Destiny should refresh himself with all the crazy shit that happened during 2020. It is easy to forget what the leftists were doing because we also had anti-vax anti-democracy screeching MAGA on the other side, but looking back at their behavior back then I think will give incite on what to expect.

Obviously, not everyone is terminally online and crazy. There might be some people who are left or progressive who will genuinely be chill and will collaborate with others in the party. I am concerned, as many of you are, about the normalization of the king goblins of these types of online people (e.g., Hasan) and bringing them to in-person Democratic events. I think it would be naive to assume that these types of attacks will just be coming from a terminally online place in 2028 because (unfortunately) everyone is terminally online these days. I can only imagine 2020 if TikTok had been around.

You could also make the argument of, well, just embrace them. If we had a Mamdani-type figure who was actually willing to engage and cooperate with everyone else in the party and not just completely shill for his brain-rot socialist agenda, then maybe. I doubt that will be their front runner, though, but I guess we will see.

I don't think most Democrats really understand the shit storm they are going to be walking into in 2028 in terms of the beligerent leftwing of the party. I mean, it's going to come either way, but at least they could better insulate themselves from it.

Anyways, those are my two cents. Shit is fucked, and I struggle every day trying not to black pill myself.

Idk if this means they've broken up, but it comes off as if there are issues and they don't want to talk about it.