Yes, you’re right. Depending on the bubble, you’ll get a lot of push back, though.

There are multiple checkpoints that need to be cleared. First, gotta have the overwhelming blue tsunami. It won’t happen quite like some people suggest. There will be wins, maybe overwhelmingly so, but there will be losses. At the national level, it will take only a strategic win or two by Republicans to undermine almost any chance of progress. Not to mention the THOUSANDS of state and local level elections happening, and I can tell you that the Democrat party is way weaker at those levels, especially in rural areas and red states.

We’re literally in a situation where everything has to go according to an exact plan or there’s no real hope of success. It’s a tough position to be in.

All that aside, even if there’s a clear blue tsunami and literally every race goes to Democrat / progressive candidates, the American people are still going to have to hold those elected officials accountable and force them to actually fight back, make progress, and work for the people. Guarantee it. Money from corporations and the ultra wealthy in this country is far more powerful than our votes, our opinions, and our lives.

And nothing of consequence will be done.

They can’t really spy on me b/c I don’t have it connected to the internet and I’m 99.999% sure that whatever they might discover by spying on me isn’t worth the price of a cellular network card and ongoing costs associated with that.

Honestly politics is just that, tit for tat.

Maybe try distancing yourself from the people who associate with you and who you pander to? Cause they certainly have no qualms about flying the Confederate flag and people on the same political spectrum cheering on. Kinda seems like a ya’ll problem and not just the problem of a single individual. That’s just me, though.

As long as you have a plan in place to accomplish this and don’t foist it onto your family members or friends, go for it.

My irritation is that more than once in my family I’ve seen someone refuse to talk about or plan for their end of life care in any serious manner, but they tell everybody things like “if you’re going to put me in a nursing home, just go ahead and put a bullet in my head first”, and then inevitably they end up unable to care for themselves such that family members have to be the bad guy who put them in a home. Then that issue causes all kinds of friction and fighting in the family because “Danny didn’t want to be in a home” even though the people most vocal about defending Danny’s wishes aren’t stepping up to take care of him and pay his bills, so…

Yep. A few years ago there was that whole spiel about how Democrats were putting litter boxes in public school classrooms so that the kids who identify as animals would have a place to relieve themselves. I heard someone actively talking about it while grocery shopping at one point.

Trump himself has claimed children are getting gender affirming surgery IN SCHOOL and I can tell you that there are men and women out there, this very year in 2026, who have made statements implying they would kill the teachers involved. Like, it’s complete fantasy, they just love to be angry and act tough about stuff that’s not happening and never will.

No doubt. Although when so many people in this country don’t even understand their constitutional rights, there are times I wonder if it would matter one way or the other for the average citizen.

I literally had a MAGA person tell me I had no right to protest in a public space. She came up to me, asked to read my sign, and then said “You have no right to be out here.”

I very directly told her, “You’re wrong, I have the first amendment right.” Fortunately that was enough to make her back off on that point, but trust me, everything else she said to me was equally as uninformed and ignorant.

Really depends on what the “old tech” is and who those people are, but the majority of people, the average person with average equipment, they’re not going to regret it at all.

Most of that old tech equipment is essentially just junk taking up space to the average person. Even if they had a use for it, new stuff (particularly low-end new stuff) is still relatively cheap. Like a quick peek at corporate retailer #4’s website and I see brand new tablets for less than $200 and laptops for less than $300. May not be good stuff, but generally good enough for typical non-techie users who are just simping for MAGA on Facebook while watching the Baby Yoda on their Disney+ account.

I’m very likely to become one of those people without health insurance.

The situation this year was pretty abysmal. The ACA plans increased in price dramatically, while also cutting back on coverage and benefits. The loss of the subsidies was a double whammy.

I went ahead and signed up for insurance this year, but it was practically a coin flip for me at the end and I’m half convinced I fell for the sunk cost fallacy. Basically, I had to spend so much time comparing plans, looking at what was covered, figuring out if I could actually afford the premiums, comparing my estimated total costs (which is not really truly possible because you literally cannot get your hands on that information), etc that it felt like I needed to sign up just so that the whole process wasn’t a waste of time.

In the end, I went with a plan that said it covered my regular prescriptions and for which my current providers were in-network. Only thing is, when it came time to actually get my prescriptions filled, turns out they don’t actually cover them all like they stated when I signed up. Some required prior authorization, and when my provider tried to get that, it was denied. So now I pay out of pocket for that on top of having to pay the health insurance premiums.

And in the end, this is kind of a situation where as bad as 2026 is for health insurance coverage / plans, the sad thing is, this is probably as good as it’ll ever be from here on out until working class folks actually start organizing and working together (across party lines) to change things. So, good luck with that in the USA.

Are you actively looking for information about protests?

The media doesn’t generally cover them, particularly small protests and/or those opposed to the media ownership’s political persuasion. This applies not only to traditional media platforms, but modern ones as well. You won’t find much on them if you’re only looking here on Lemmy. For one, the user base is so small and not US-centric, so you’ll find very little organizing / advertising going on here for that sort of thing. Additionally, a huge portion of the Lemmy user base is actively hostile to any methodology that doesn’t involve murder.

Currently, the opposition/democrats are a minority party at the federal level, as Republicans control all 3 branches of the federal government. That certainly limits what they can achieve from a legislative, executive, or judicial standpoint.

However, there’s also a midterm election coming up, and being so close to the election, nearly all of these folks are investing a lot of time, effort, money, energy, etc towards getting more Democrats elected, fundraising, get out the vote, etc to help restore some power to the party. Without solid majorities in congress, I’m not sure what anybody thinks they can do.

At the state level, things are much more complicated. All of the states that have federal congressional elections coming up, the federal and state Democrat parties are going hard on getting out on the streets to canvass, phone bank, and motivate people to vote.

Local & county levels, it’s much the same story. Though things like healthcare access (at the level and scope we’re talking about) are usually not controlled at the county / local level. It’s still important to get Democrats involved at this level and to support them, because you’re essentially building the next generation of state and federal level politicians here.

As for social media, platforms like Meta and X are very biased and the big players are all pay-to-play. Democrats and left-leaning organizations generally receive only a fraction of the donations that conservative and right-leaning organizations receive, so the pay-to-play nature naturally drowns out the progressive / left-leaning outreach efforts there. Then there are places like Lemmy and Bluesky, but almost nobody uses those, so you don’t see as much time or effort put into outreach on those platforms as it’s often a waste of time.

That part is a huge issue that I don’t see many of us bringing up, so thank you.

If the cuts in funding had been tapered over a reasonable amount of time, federal contractors like my former employer would have at least had the chance of pursuing alternative funding that would have saved jobs (like mine) and lives (like these women and children).

Even if you take it at face value that abolishing USAID was the right thing to do and saved the US tax payers money, which you shouldn’t but for the sake of argument let’s go with that, it could have easily been done in a way that preserved lives and livelihoods.

And so as bad as it is that lives and jobs were lost the astoundingly evil and questionable legality of the way that it happened makes it even worse.

One of the biggest issues I see on the ground is that voters aren’t stepping up. This is even at the local level. This is a problem all across the USA. Good people aren’t willing to run for a lot of these local offices. Nobody’s preparing the next generation / replacements to take over once older candidates age out or move up the chain. Then even if you get multiple people to run for a local office, these voters who are supposedly tired of the 2 party system don’t volunteer, donate, or even bother to show up to events where the candidates are making themselves available for dialog. They aren’t interacting with candidates’ social media. So realistically, if voters don’t change, nothing’s going to change about the 2-party system.

There’s like a million and a half or more pieces of evidence that this country is at a minimum bordering on the edge of being cooked, and the Medicare For All / Healthcare For All topic is definitely in there.

In a nearby county, there’s a hospital that will almost certainly close once the Medicare cuts take effect. It’s a well-known thing. Only hospital in that county. Next closest hospitals for most residents are 20 - 30 miles (30 - 50 km) further away, which translates to at least an additional 20 minutes for emergency transport.

We’re out there trying to make people aware of the situation, and decided to have a “protest” which was basically just holding up signs along the main road. Some people had signs like “Medicaid for all” or “healthcare for all”, things like that. I know of at least 3 passers by who shouted out their windows some variation of “How are we going to pay for it?”

Honestly, just vile and willfully ignorant people exist in this world. Irredeemably evil. And you know they’ll be the first ones whining on TV when their son or wife or daddy died because they didn’t make it to the hospital in time.

Really, I hope charismatic progressives can help change enough minds that the evil cowards against the greater good no longer pull the strings because those people are such shits that they won’t even stop to have a respectful conversation that might actually answer the question they posed about how to pay.

it’s going to show a part of the first lady that hasn’t been seen yet

I’m taking bets on the predictive market. It’s either gonna be the cloaca or the ovipositor.

Guys, guys, guys. He’s already popular enough, you really need to stop campaigning for him. Give some other pedophiles and grifting criminals a chance, please!

They said if I voted for Kamala the prices would be high and we’d be in more wars. Well, they were right!

This is not so much a celebration as it is a pertinent and completely factual statement: Lindsey Graham, like the bulk of drivers in South Carolina, was simply a menace to society.

Something that annoys me is the number of people who claim they don’t read/watch the news (except the weather) or use Facebook/social media anymore because it’s all bad news – and yet they still seem to have an opinion on everything that’s happening AND they still vote based on that opinion.

But I suppose that’s also bad news in and of itself, so I apologize for that.