Lemmy is one of the most intense echo chambers out there. It’s very funny that a self-professed anti-hierarchical, decentralized message board site like this falls in line so neatly behind whatever candidates the corporate media tells them to and then browbeats anyone who dares to consider alternatives. Americans’ refusal to vote third party plays a big role in why the two major parties are so completely unresponsive to the public’s interests and desires. They won’t win, of course, thanks to FPTP, but voting for them pressures the two parties to change their platform to win over their voters.
This is precisely why the corporate media is so invested in vilifying third party voters. Every election from now until the end of recorded history will be “the most important election ever” (or “the last election ever,” as they’ve been painting it recently) and anyone who refuses to vote for the lesser-of-two-evils candidate is a willful apostate who’s worse than a Trump voter. And the masses buy into it, and then it’s naked tribalism and hysteria from there.
This is ludicrously alarmist. I mean, archive whatever you want (it’s good practice to back up things you think are important), but the United States is hardly a fascist dictatorship anymore than it was in 2017 (or 2021 or 2013…). The opposing party wins sometimes, and it hasn’t ended the republic yet. Federal funding might be cut to new gender research, but nobody’s going to go around to universities, confiscating copies of existing studies to be burned.