u/Initial_Chemist_7616

Summary: AOC calling "w o k e 1" crazy — and laughing while doing it — is not an apology people will accept, because there is no apology people will accept.

Perhaps AOC was doing standard politician work: distancing herself from a movement that has become toxic without alienating a base still attached to it. That's roughly the ceiling of what anyone in her position can offer, and it satisfied no one.

Run the counterfactuals and nothing changes. Drop the laugh, and critics object that "crazy" understates what happened — jobs lost, lives ruined, cities burned.

Issue a full-throated apology, and the think pieces keep coming. Stage a televised self-flagellation, blood and tears included, and the pit still doesn't fill, because what's being demanded isn't better wording. It's retribution.

The underlying dynamic is identity-based: people who define themselves in opposition to w o k e read any statement from a former participant adversarially, parsing it for sincerity versus opportunism.

Trump is the mirror Image. As his final term ends, Republicans will attempt the same impossible pivot — distancing from the movement's worst elements without losing the base — and it will fail on identical terms with those scarred by January 6th.

What will actually happen is that everyone slides past and the history gets memoryholed. That's framed as the acceptable outcome, since a society that lets one faction execute justice on another is worse than one where people get away with things. Two decades on, a new crisis will arrive and a new generation forms its politics around it — while the people personally humiliated by the original era never get over it.

Commentary: So this article is of a kind with others that have been sharing, some of which have been taken down for what I call some rather dubious reasons which seem to me to amount to some people complianing that 'criticising' w o k e is either 'not centrist' or 'so inflammatory to centrism' that it doesn't belong here.

But here is my poisiton: This article's thesis is wrong because it creates a false dichotomy. That we either demand a self flagelatting punishment of those who transgressed during w o k e 1, or we let them slide and slink and memory hole the hole affair.

The third option my fellow wisconsinsite misses is Truth and Reconciliation. Recognition of wrongdoing results in guilt, guilt leads to learning, learning leads to growing. And the other side has a job just as big in forgiving the guilty.

And here I think it is important to point out the difference between guilt and shame. Guilt is the emotion that people should feel when they do bad. It helps them learn and grow. Shame is the emotion people feel when they are told that they are bad. There are only two things the human ego can do with shame, became angry and defensive or depressed and self loathing.

Feel guilty if you took part in the actions of w o k e 1, not shame. Learn, grow, do better. Or to disagree with Mr. Wisconsin, make up for W o k e 1 by becoming better.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-211709626

Subhead: By demanding the purification of the individual and branding broad swathes of the public as oppressor classes, 'Woke 1' besmirched the average Americans who Democrats once championed.

Summary: The worst damage from the 2018–2021 period known as "WOKE 1" period wasn't any particular policy but a habit of mind: treating ordinary, unremarkable people as stand-ins for oppressor classes, and therefore as legitimate targets for prominent commentators and celebrities.

Two specific non-policy incidents can help us draw this conclusion: the 2019 Covington Catholic viral confrontation, where journalists treated a teenager's expression as a matter of national significance, and a 2019 pile-on by well-known authors against a South Dakota college graduate who had criticized one novelist's books in a small local paper. In both cases a private individual was recast as an avatar of structural power, which inverted the actual power relationship between the accusers and the accused.

This instinct is fundamentally anti-populist. "Defund the police" told the public not to want protection it demonstrably wanted; Francesca Hong's "cancel Thanksgiving" post indicted people simply for enjoying a holiday. Mamdani's specific, explained reversal on policing is exactly how to treat the excesses of this period. AOC's vaguer distancing, andHong's continued adherence are less acceptable and will likely result in lost voters.

Note: For the substack haters: Josh Barro is an American journalist who has previously worked for the New York Times, New York Magazine, Bloomberg, and Business Insider, among others. A Republican until 2016 and a Democrat since, he writes primarily as a center-left critic of progressive orthodoxy.

https://www.joshbarro.com/p/woke-1-was-anti-populist-and-not

Summary: The forming narrative — that DSA-branded Democrats systematically underperform their polls — doesn't hold. Abdul El-Sayed isn't actually DSA, just coded that way, and he blew a 13-point polling lead down to a one-point win; Hong, an actual DSA member, hit her number.

The pattern that does hold is racial. Haley Stevens performed with Black voters and El-Sayed didn't. Hong won college towns but ran behind Crowley in Milwaukee, where he's been county executive since 2020. Black voters are the backbone and dead center of the Democratic coalition, and they're less drawn to DSA-forward candidates than other parts of it — so winning Democratic primaries runs through them. Crowley is also the better general-election matchup against Tom Tiffany in a wave year.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/advice-for-democrats-find-black-voters-go-there-wisconsin-francesca-hong-david-crowley

Note: The overzealous titling guidelines won't let me use the word [Stupid] because it feels like its insulting, so this is what we get for the title.

Summary: A decade of politics built around systemic oppression peaked in 2020, and Democrats absorbed all of it — the kneeling photo ops, the corporate DEI programs, the universities confessing complicity — letting themselves become the party of defunding police, abolishing ICE, and rewriting gender. Most of it has since collapsed: cities restored police budgets once murders climbed, and universities with elaborate oppression bureaucracies proved useless against campus anti-Semitism.

What hasn't happened is a reckoning. The dominant strategy is silence. Harris tried a variant, reinventing herself leftward in 2020 and quietly reverting in 2024 while insisting nothing had changed. Ocasio-Cortez is previewing a third: treating the era as a punchline rather than answering for it — and that she feels compelled to do so from one of the country's most liberal districts measures how toxic those positions have become.

The evasion won't hold. DSA-aligned candidates are winning primaries without softening anything: one likely incoming member of Congress is a prison abolitionist who won't say murderers belong in jail, the Wisconsin gubernatorial front-runner has criticized Thanksgiving on colonialist grounds, and the platform still calls for reparations, abolishing police and prisons, and unlimited amnesty. Only the emphasis has moved. And even absent all that, Republicans would keep the issue alive — anti-wokeness is the connective tissue of a party Trump otherwise remade beyond recognition, and it works, as the sharpest ad of 2024 showed with nothing more than "they/them" against "you."

Ideas go dormant rather than dying, and refusing to extirpate this one now invites a 2028 primary that replays 2020's race leftward, with Ocasio-Cortez potentially learning the cost firsthand.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/aoc-democrats-wokeness-republicans/688241/

Summary: Republican money is the primary force elevating DSA member Francesca Hong in Wisconsin's Democratic gubernatorial primary. A group believed to be Republican-funded has spent close to $1 million on pro-Hong television advertising; the Hong campaign itself has spent nothing on TV. The Republican Governors Association has spent an additional $3.6 million on ads nominally targeting Hong, which in left-leaning markets serve to 'inform' voters that she opposes Trump's immigration agenda and would return the Democratic Party to its progressive roots — messaging that functions as promotion rather than attack.

This is cross-party primary interference, a tactic both parties employ and a problem in its own right. Its more significant implication concerns electability. Republicans treat the question as settled: moderates are harder to beat than leftists. They do not debate it internally, and they commit substantial money and political capital on the assumption that they are correct. The debate exists only on the left.

The counterclaim that "a socialist would have won" is structurally unfalsifiable, since Democrats overwhelmingly nominate non-socialists; every moderate loss becomes retroactive proof of a thesis that is never tested.

The strategy may succeed. Polling shows Hong leading Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, and the Republican preference for her has been publicly reported for at least a week, including in a widely circulated tweet. Wisconsin Democrats may nominate her anyway — a legitimate choice if made with clear eyes, since voters sometimes prefer a candidate over a more electable alternative. What is not defensible is the expectation that Hong would ride a wave of popular support into the governorship. Her campaign lacks the resources to compete in general-election television spending, and the assumption of her strength is a self-serving myth promoted by leftists, believed by some Democrats, and shared by no Republicans.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-210511817

Summary: Wisconsin's Democratic gubernatorial primary is being framed by state party figures as a national-stakes contest rather than an ideological skirmish. Because the governor certifies both presidential and Senate results — the role Evers filled during Trump's 2020 challenge — the office functions as a procedural safeguard. The presumptive GOP nominee, Rep. Tom Tiffany, carries an extensive election-denial record and has not conceded that Trump lost in 2020, which party leaders argue makes proper certification in 2028 an open question. A secondary but substantial prize is redistricting: a Democratic trifecta would enable a 2027 redraw of a delegation currently split 6R–2D, while a Republican trifecta would allow the reverse. Wisconsin is an open seat, unlike Arizona and Pennsylvania, where comparable GOP nominees face incumbents.

The immediate problem is that establishment Democrats appear to be losing the primary to Francesca Hong, a DSA candidate whose platform they consider a general-election liability. Her position owes less to left-wing momentum than to a sequence of establishment failures — Rodriguez's withdrawal over campaign finance mismanagement, Barnes's exit amid press reporting, and Crowley's late re-entry — compounded by millions in Republican-aligned super PAC spending designed to elevate her. With the polling lead judged insurmountable, the party's internal conversation has shifted from stopping Hong to rehabilitating her as a credible general-election candidate, on the argument that a favorable national environment and Tiffany's proximity to an unpopular president leave the seat winnable. The piece's closing worry is that voters have not internalized any of this.

Personal Note: If she's the nominee I will vote for Hong. But I know more than a couple people who don't generally vote GOP who will not. Something sober primary voters should keep in mind.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/what-happens-when-an-election-denier-runs-crucial-swing-state-wisconsin-governor-primary

Summary: Michigan is a Democratic state. Democrats have held both Senate seats almost continuously since 1979, won open seats, won during Republican wave years, won even when Trump carried the state at the top of the ticket. So any generic Democrat should take this open seat in a favorable midterm environment — meaning El-Sayed loses only if he runs at least 1.5 points behind a replacement-level candidate.

Does he? Mixed evidence. He's a genuine political talent who beat the entire state establishment while outspent 11 to 1 and pulled 1.5 million primary voters. But he won by a point after polling at +13, and he lost Wayne and Oakland — the urban counties whose margins are the foundation of every statewide Democratic win. He lost Macomb by 7, and he'll need to keep that under 10 in November. The rural results are the encouraging part: he never fell below 30 percent anywhere, and in a race last decided by 19,000 votes, holding rural losses to 30 rather than 40 points is how Democrats win.

Rogers, meanwhile, isn't a tomato can. He already took 48.3 percent statewide in 2024 against a strong opponent, has survived the scrutiny of a high-profile race, and — on the John James precedent — has a floor around 47.

Conclusion: winnable, probably a win, decided by fewer than 50,000 votes. Not a gimme.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-case-against-el-sayed-doomerism

Summary: Drawing on Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World, Klein describes the trickster archetype — Loki, Coyote, Hermes, Odysseus — as the figure who violates taboos, says the unsayable, and injects disorder into order. Cultures need this (they can't survive change without creativity) but it's dangerous: the damage can produce renewal or just ruin. Hyde argued in 1998 that Americans love a con man because he embodies what the culture can't admit about itself. The essayist grants that this had force when institutions were ossified, but says the condition no longer holds — almost nothing is unsayable now, and disruption has curdled into desecration.

Casting Matt Damon — a man of one way, not many — signals that Nolan isn't making a trickster movie. The bigger move is the film's "law of Zeus": treat the stranger as you'd want to be treated. Classicists have pointed out that's not the ancient xenia obligation, which was narrower and enforced by fear of gods in disguise, not compassion. Nolan has smuggled the Golden Rule — read in Leviticus, Hillel, the book of Matthew — into a pre-Christian honor world, making a worn moral cliché feel strange and demanding again.

The modern right doesn't just fail that ethic, it disdains it as "suicidal empathy." Stephen Miller's claim that the world is governed by force is the iron law displacing the golden rule; Klein ties this to Caesarism, the Rome fixation, and Yarvin. More speicfically Musk's agreement that universal suffrage means universal suffering, and Carney invoking Thucydides at Davos. In the film, Helen is a pretext for a war really about trade routes — read as a gloss on coercive trade policy. Odysseus's horror at the sack of Troy is read against October 7 and Gaza, with Netanyahu's "Athens and Sparta" and Harari's retort: if Jews just become Romans, what were the 2,000 years for?

Odysseus's realization is that he and his men were the barbarians, and their barbarity bred more of it — Agamemnon murdered, Ithaca overrun. Likewise a movement promising to restore Western civilization has betrayed its inheritance, and the world now sees America as the barbarian. Hyde's answer to when trickster tales end in regeneration rather than ruin: when severed worlds can be rejoined (Hermes) rather than left bound and poisoned (Loki). The prescription is for the opposition to reclaim religious, patriotic, and founding language — cruelty is weakness; order without ethics is authoritarianism — and the closing claim is that Nolan's Odysseus isn't a trickster but a man living in the ruins tricksters made, as are we, and the appetite for this film suggests the trickster age is ending

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=livIbni7x7o

Summary: The online right's campaign against Emily Wilson's 2017 translation of The Odyssey — the one behind Nolan's film — rests on almost no engagement with the text itself. Figures like Bronze Age Pervert and Raw Egg Nationalist read her as a feminist vandal defacing a monument of the white, male Western canon, and the case against her starts with her rendering of polytropos as "complicated."

But "complicated" carries no negative charge; it's a refusal of the flattening into hero or villain that the poem never performs. And Odysseus genuinely is complicated: a slaveholder, a raider, a mutilator of enemies, a serial adulterer. Wilson's version insists he remains worth reading anyway, which is a more serious defense of the poem's continued relevance than her critics manage.

The claim of infidelity to Homer collapses under comparison. In the scene where Telemachus orders twelve enslaved women killed, Fagles — the translator conservatives recommend as rigorous and unmoralizing — inserts words like "Sluts" and "Whores" that appear nowhere in the Greek; Wilson omits them and is thereby the more literal of the two.

What actually distinguishes her edition is technical: she matched the Greek line-for-line and wrote throughout in iambic pentameter, constraints that forced a spare, unornamented style. The result reads as flat only to those who mistook earlier translators' rhetorical embroidery for Homer, and who find a 2,700-year-old poem's moral ambiguity harder to sit with than they admit.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-208219622?selection=dc50370f-f09c-4695-95ba-4de691502751#:~:text=Her%20translation%20makes%20the%20case%20that%20Odysseus%2C%20despite%20all%20the%20sexism%20and%20slavery%2C%20is%20still%20a%20character%20who%20can%20speak%20to%20all%20of%20us

Summary: Suavity has gone missing from the American presidency, and a brief encounter between Barack Obama and Caitlin Clark shows what its absence costs. Obama dropped in on WNBA All-Star practice at his presidential center in Chicago, chatted with players about their seasons, and told Clark not to let the surrounding noise steal her joy — noting that his own fame arrived late in life and that she's shouldering an unusual burden for someone his daughter's age. It was a small act of grace, encouraging her while gently nudging her to accept the bad calls and just play. That same weekend, Trump stood at the White House Correspondents' Dinner podium and dismissed CNN's Kaitlan Collins's award as fake before working to demean her, while his administration and congressional allies have used the WNBA as raw material for culture-war fights over transgender athletes and supposed racial violence against Clark. Not suave, and not winning.

The season itself has been hard to watch — racial tension, toxic fans, and endless carping over officiating, a microcosm of a country fighting dirty in every arena. Clark is a genuinely extraordinary player, the fastest to 200 threes and a passer good enough to make defenses look lost, and she does get mauled — but that's the time-honored way to stop anyone that good, not proof of racial targeting. She has her own hard edge too, with seven technicals and a suspension one away. The real unfairness falls on Black players: Alyssa Thomas drew death threats and racial slurs after an inadvertent foul, and Chelsea Gray posted the racist message she received so people could see what she deals with. Obama chose not to corner Clark on any of that, and precisely because he extended her grace, she may extend more of it herself. She already knows how to win; he taught her how to be winning.

Personal Note: This is why character matters. In addition to the Trumps, people like Chevalier on the left and Fishback on the right could never dream of acting with the dignity and professionalism that Obama showed. Mamdani can and does. Endeavor to vote for politicians that embody the dignity and grace of the community they seek to lead.

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/07/obama-caitlin-clark/688073/

Summary: The rise of the Democratic Socialists of America is rooted less in the traditional working class than among highly educated people with modest incomes. Education and income are not interchangeable measures of class: many college graduates possess cultural status but remain indebted, economically insecure, or excluded from the professional success they expected. Voters with postgraduate degrees and household incomes between $30,000 and $60,000 are among the most Democratic and liberal groups in the country, and they closely resemble the DSA’s base of teachers, nonprofit workers, social workers, and public employees.

This explains why economic socialism and cultural progressivism overlap so strongly. Highly educated, lower-income liberals are especially engaged by immigration, race, LGBTQ rights, environmentalism, and Israel–Palestine, while successful non-college voters are often more Republican. The central political divide is therefore not simply rich versus poor, but cultural status versus economic position. Socialism gives economically disappointed graduates an explanation for their frustration, while cultural conflicts provide the moral identity and political energy that draw them into the movement.

Personal Note: This may seem like rage bait to poke at the DSA crowd, and honestly it probably is. But it is also, in my opinion, very useful and enlightening to know where the 'extreme leftist' energy is coming from, and why it won't work. People don't want priveliged PhD's that failed in the private sector being their political leaders.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-207869387

Summary: Winning over voters in conservative or swing states requires more than nominating candidates with an authentic working-class image. The strongest-performing candidates combine economic populism with culturally moderate positions on issues that resonate across party lines. Dan Osborn's 2024 Senate campaign in Nebraska illustrates this approach: his platform emphasized middle-class tax cuts, protecting Medicare, breaking up healthcare monopolies, balancing the federal budget, consumer protection, and a tough stance on immigration. Rather than advancing ideologically progressive proposals, his agenda focused on policies with broad bipartisan appeal, allowing him to significantly outperform a typical Democrat and attract large numbers of crossover voters.

The contrast with Graham Platner's campaign in Maine highlights the limits of relying on identity alone. Although Platner projected a rugged, blue-collar persona, his campaign centered on issues and positions associated with the progressive left, including abolishing ICE and a heavy emphasis on Israel and Gaza, while making few attempts to appeal to moderate or Republican-leaning voters. The broader lesson is that electoral success depends less on a candidate's personal background than on adopting a policy platform capable of attracting persuadable voters. Barack Obama and Donald Trump each won large numbers of working-class voters despite vastly different personal backgrounds because they took positions on key issues that resonated with those voters, demonstrating that issues ultimately matter more than identity.

Note about the author for those he hate substack: Ben Krauss is a political writer and analyst focused on Democratic electoral strategy, populism, and campaign messaging. He is affiliated with Slow Boring (Matthew Yglesias's publication) and has also written for CommonWealth Magazine, Crooked Media, and other political outlets.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-207066463?selection=f7d6f1b6-8827-4d5a-9f70-6d12d72f1068#:~:text=Inside%20the%20Democratic%20Party%2C%20Osborn%20is%20a%20sort%20of%20Rorschach%20test

Personal Comment: I think we as a country can do better, and her walkback is the lamest non-apology I have ever seen.

Summary: CNN reviewed Darializa Avila Chevalier’s archived Twitter account, which revealed a pattern of pro-communist and Marxist posts from 2020–2022, which she had deleted in June 2022.

She has responded by saying she has grown since those tweets and is focused on her community’s future, and declined to engage when President Trump publicly accused her of being a communist, saying “I won’t be reactive.”

Tweets

- Retweeted a post defending communism against the “not enough soup” critique of the system
- Called the animated film Anastasia “an explicitly anti-USSR kid’s movie”
- Called a Sheryl Crow song “bootstrap capitalist propaganda”
- Retweeted a post arguing for democratic worker control of wealth, ending with “you can call that communism, you can call it socialism, you can call it pancakes”
- Said most political theory she’d read was communist, and that “the pyromania associated with anarchism is very intriguing to me”
- Posted calls to “seize the means of production” and to abolish police, prisons, and borders
- Said Black and Arab men are both “fetishizing ugly colonizer women”
- Described wiping her dirty hands on the American flag in lieu of a napkin
- Reposted a quote from Assata Shakur expressing preference for communist leaders like Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro over Marx and Lenin
- Lamented that banned books sections rarely feature Stalin’s collected work

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/06/29/politics/darializa-avila-chevalier-communism-tweets

Summary: Trump's second term has been genuinely dangerous, with the Republican Party enabling essentially unchecked executive misconduct. However, Trump has also badly overreached, particularly on economic policy and tariffs, giving Democrats an opening they didn't earn so much as receive. The progressive movement, meanwhile, has largely squandered this moment by channeling energy into intra-party fights in safe districts rather than focusing on the competitive races that actually determine control of Congress.

On the specific Senate and House races, there is a mixed picture: bright spots in Alaska (Peltola), Iowa (Turek), and Texas (Talarico), but serious self-inflicted wounds in Michigan (where Whitmer declined to run and a weak primary field may hand the nomination to a Bernie-aligned candidate) and complications in Maine. The bottom line is we can have cautious optimism: flipping both chambers is possible but not probable, and it depends heavily on octogenerian Trump continuing to stumble while Democrats avoid making things worse for themselves.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-201578658

*Summary*: Michelle Goldberg's piece argues that Senator Jon Ossoff has emerged as a favorite for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination—even though he insists he isn't running and is focused solely on his 2026 re-election in Georgia. Kicking off his campaign in Atlanta, Ossoff sidestepped his Republican opponents to hammer Trump's "Mar-a-Lago mafia" and systemic corruption, spotlighting specific examples like a Kazakhstan tungsten-mining deal that allegedly enriched Trump's sons. Rather than tacking to the center in a state Trump won, Ossoff has doubled down on excoriating Trump's profiteering in a way that bridges the party's progressive-moderate divide, while pairing that attack with an earnest, pluralist patriotism that counters the administration's white nationalism. Goldberg frames him as a lab-built ideal candidate: young, telegenic, a Southerner with a record of courting Black voters, and a Jewish critic of Israel positioned to heal the party's rift over Zionism.

The deeper appeal, Goldberg contends, lies in Ossoff's strategy, which political scientist Adam Bonica says mirrors the anti-corruption playbook that has toppled autocrats abroad—from Marcos to Orban—by uniting society against a "rigged system" rather than fighting on the usual left-right axis. Ossoff's background running international corruption documentaries informs this approach, as does his mentorship under civil rights icon John Lewis. He traces America's dysfunction to Citizens United and favors a constitutional amendment to remove dark money from politics, a deliberately non-partisan reform. Goldberg also draws parallels to Barack Obama: both introverts who genuinely disavowed presidential ambitions, both willing to take politically risky stands (Obama on Iraq, Ossoff on arms to Israel) that later looked prescient. The implication is that Ossoff's very reluctance—appearing as someone who must be persuaded to run—may ultimately strengthen his position.
 
*Personal Note: This matches what I have been saying ever since Trump won reelection. John Ossof literally checks every box.
✓ Appeals to both Centrists and Leftists
✓ Youthful energy and Charisma
✓ Good voting and policy record
✓ Critical of Israel while impossible to accuse him of anti-semitsm
✓ Not beholden to damaging votes on culture war issues
✓ Can win in swing states
✓ He is, objectively, a hottie.
 
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/08/opinion/jon-ossoff-president.html

Because some commenters seem to think that it is impossible to criticize leftists to being super-annoying while the right is literally destroying the economic fiber of our society. (Also the mods seem to think calling the left super annoying doesn't fit the rules of the Sub? Not really sure about that, but to quote a wise man "The boss isn't always right, but he is always the boss")
 
Summary: Recent political and legal events reveal a growing disconnect between America’s democratic ideals and how institutions actually operate. The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the targeting of Virginia state senator Louise Lucas after she fought Republican gerrymandering efforts, the normalization of rhetoric from white nationalist Nick Fuentes, and continued voting-rights rollbacks all point toward institutions applying legitimacy, outrage, and accountability selectively rather than consistently.
 
For many younger Americans — especially Black people and other marginalized communities — these are no longer isolated hypocrisies. They increasingly look like evidence that the system is functioning exactly as designed. Younger generations came of age watching voting rights weakened, reproductive rights rolled back, affirmative action dismantled, environmental and labor protections eroded, and highly visible racial injustices treated inconsistently, all while institutions continued insisting that democracy and fairness remained intact.
 
At the same time, political and media narratives apply different standards depending on who is involved. A controversial left-wing social media post is often treated as representative of Democrats broadly, while openly racist rhetoric associated with the political right is compartmentalized as fringe or unserious. Black political demands for voting access, educational opportunity, and equal participation are framed as divisive “identity politics,” while white backlash politics are routinely treated as culturally authentic or economically understandable.
 
Traditional political media often worsen this problem by focusing on polling, strategy, and horse-race narratives instead of confronting the underlying erosion of democratic legitimacy. Endless tactical analysis and partisan spectacle feel detached from the lived reality many people experience as institutional trust steadily deteriorates.
 
Simply telling people to “vote harder” or trust institutions more is no longer persuasive to many younger people because it ignores the depth of the legitimacy crisis. Rebuilding faith requires honesty about institutional inconsistency and acknowledgment that democratic systems are increasingly viewed as selectively accountable and structurally unequal.
 
Restoring belief in collective action will require creating tangible forms of participation outside traditional institutional structures: community action circles, mutual-support efforts, rapid-response networks, local organizing, and other forms of grassroots engagement that give people a direct sense of agency and belonging. The goal is not simply electoral victory, but rebuilding the belief that collective action and democratic participation can still produce meaningful power and accountability.
 
The core danger is that institutions increasingly appear more committed to managing the appearance of legitimacy than earning genuine public trust. And once a generation begins to see institutional inconsistency as the governing logic itself, restoring that trust becomes far harder than winning elections or controlling a news cycle.
 
https://www.contrariannews.org/p/young-people-know-when-institutions

*Summary* Artificial intelligence may ultimately have the opposite effect from what many critics predicted. Rather than destroying any remaining sense of shared truth, large language models like ChatGPT, Grok, and Google’s Gemini may actually help reconstruct a common reality by centralizing how people access and interpret information.

Users increasingly rely on AI chatbots to fact-check claims they encounter online. People ask Grok whether viral political claims are true, whether sports rumors are accurate, or whether pricing complaints are legitimate. This behavior suggests that AI is starting to function as a real-time arbitration layer for public discourse. Instead of everyone independently sorting through scattered articles, social posts, and partisan commentary, many users are now turning directly to AI for synthesized answers.

This contrasts with earlier fears surrounding the internet and generative AI. Critics long warned that technologies like Photoshop, social media, and deepfakes would dissolve society’s ability to agree on basic facts.

However, AI may instead become a centralizing force, much like the printing press. While the printing press initially appeared decentralizing because it allowed many more people to publish ideas cheaply, it also produced strong centralizing effects. Printing standardized language, enabled centralized bureaucracies, strengthened states, and helped establish common cultural norms. The same technology that empowered the Protestant Reformation also facilitated the growth of nation-states and administrative systems.

AI may follow a similar pattern. Although the internet decentralized information production, frontier AI models are extraordinarily expensive to build and operate. Only a handful of large corporations and governments possess the computing power, engineering talent, and infrastructure necessary to train advanced models. As a result, a small number of institutions increasingly mediate how information is summarized and interpreted for hundreds of millions of people.

This concentration is reinforced by changing user behavior. Studies cited in the essay suggest that users are increasingly satisfied with AI-generated summaries and are less likely to click through to original websites when AI overviews appear in search results. Rather than exploring a decentralized web of sources, users increasingly accept AI-generated syntheses as sufficient answers. The essay argues that this represents a major structural shift in information consumption.

Large language models naturally gravitate toward mainstream consensus because of how they are trained. Their datasets heavily emphasize sources like Wikipedia, scientific journals, patents, newspapers, and major publishers. During post-training, developers also intentionally guide models toward authoritative and moderate-sounding responses while discouraging fringe or extremist viewpoints. Consequently, when AI systems make mistakes, they generally err in the direction of mainstream institutional thinking rather than conspiracy theories or radical ideologies.

This dynamic also explains why attempts to create overtly right-wing or anti-“woke” AI systems have struggled. Efforts by Elon Musk and xAI to make Grok less politically constrained have not succeeded. Some experimental modifications reportedly caused the system to generate extremist and antisemitic content, forcing rapid reversals. Despite such efforts, analyses still tend to find Grok broadly aligned with liberal or mainstream Western values. This happens because the underlying corpus of English-language training data is itself shaped heavily by liberal-democratic norms, academic institutions, and mainstream media sources.

This does not necessarily mean AI-generated consensus is objectively true or morally ideal. Centralized systems can reinforce biases, suppress dissent, or promote flawed orthodoxies. The concern shifts from “everyone believes different realities” to “a few powerful institutions define reality for everyone.” Whoever controls dominant AI systems could wield enormous influence over public understanding, cultural norms, and political discourse.

AI is the opposite of social media. Social platforms drastically lowered the cost of publishing information, creating an explosion of fragmented voices, conspiracy communities, and epistemic chaos. AI, by contrast, is extremely expensive to develop and tends to compress information into coherent summaries generated by a small number of centralized actors. While AI certainly hallucinates and sometimes produces errors, those errors usually resemble mainstream misunderstandings rather than fringe extremism.

Technologies that create shared realities can still produce violence and upheaval. The printing press helped enable literacy, science, and modern society, but it also contributed to centuries of religious conflict, imperialism, and large-scale warfare tied to nation-state formation. Similarly, AI may eventually enable greater social coordination and technological progress while still producing enormous disruption and conflict during the transition period.

https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/are-you-there-grok-its-me-margaret?r=2zspum&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true