As I wrote here, I have joined two new opposition groups in the county where I live. There are only thirty thousand people in the county and I’ve been active politically in the Democratic Party here for 25 years, so I know many of my new best friends are not actually Democrats. They’re sort of liberal-leaning but centrist, formerly normie…voters. What we have in common is we loathe Donald Trump. That’s enough for me!
So they’ve set up a Signal group which still seems sort of cloak and dagger and dramatic to me, but whatever, these are their groups and they make the rules. The thing is they post on our Signal group all the time and a lot of it is the sort of mild misinformation that normies talk about.
An example of the shit they post, from yesterday:
“Congress must participate in Social Security with the American people”
“Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just like Americans do”
“Congress must lose their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people”
They’re all high fiving this call to arms and almost none of it is true. Congress has participated in Social Security since 1984. Members of Congress do purchase their own retirement plan, if by “purchase” we mean “contribute to” and we do mean that. Congress already participates in the same health care system as the American people.
I would submit that these kinds of mild anti government invented narratives where we’re all called to resent Congress for getting paid are just as corrosive to “good government” among normie centrists as Obama’s birth certificate was to the far Right.
I haven’t responded to any of it yet. I’m blunt and I “write short” (even more so in text messages or emails) and I want these people to stay in the active opposition and perhaps even become voting Democrats so I may just let it ride in order not to offend them. But boy is it pernicious.
