Doesn’t matter how much Orange Juice you drink, I know your family used to drink milk. This whole country was milk drinkers. You’ve got calcium in you, it’s in your bones, you’ll never live it down
FDR and JFK would be aghast at what passes for policy in their beloved Democratic Party. Although both were upper class they understood that victory for their party depended on working class voters. Current party leaders distain the “deplorable” and “racist” members of the working class.
A laundry list of things for Democrats to keep and to dump if they ever want to win again nationwide.
Keep a woman’s right to choose for the first trimester. Dump abortion until birth unless the mother’s health is at risk or the fetus is not viable.
Keep a concern for climate change and grow nuclear power. Dump intermittent, unreliable renewable energy.
Keep and develop new effective vaccines. Dump vaccine mandates.
Keep equality of opportunity for all. Dump equity of results based on discriminating against men, whites and Asians in a futile attempt to compensate for past discrimination against women and blacks. Recognize that D.E.I. Is unconstitutional.
Keep the protection of gay and lesbian rights. Dump men in women’s sports, private spaces and prisons. Oh, and mutilating children who might grow up to be gay.
Keep an opportunity for selective high value immigration. Dump sanctuary cities and open borders.
Keep helping the homeless find jobs and a place to live. Dump camping in cities, shitting in the streets and allowing open drug use.
Keep a concern for due process in criminal justice. Dump letting shoplifters and other petty thieves off the hook and releasing predators back on the streets without bail to kill and maim again.
Do all of the above and they might find their way back to power.
It doesn't involve compromise....it's pulling up your sleeves and doing the work. The problem is that the Dems find a noble issue and instead of spending the $$$$ to correct the issue, they first have to do studies, and then based on the studies, they have to set up "systems" (bureaucracy), and then they have to find facilities, and then they decide to build the facility. By the time they get around to doing anything meaningful, it's 10 yrs down the line, the money is mostly gone ($tudies and salaries for systems), and the problem is worse.
It's like USAID! Go ahead and feed the hungry during the famine....it's a good and noble cause! Nope, they have to set up a bureaucracy in order to do it and then the $$$$ gets siphoned off to the NGO's and systems managers and what's left of the funding gets spent on the starving people. But in the meantime, the problem got worse and now it needs continued "funding" even though the famine is resolving.
I like the orange juice analogy, and I share the anger obvious towards the end of the article, but I think it's actually worse than this. I think that the message of anti-racism was fine insofar as it was about being against racism, but they (Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DeAngelo, for example) went further than that in espousing an extreme and radical variation of social justice. Had they just worn us out insisting we talk about social justice all the time, that would be bad enough, but in addition to this some of the ideas pushed were harmful and poorly thought out. So your analogy is not strong enough.
It would be that they insisted upon us drinking orange juice, but slipped in some drug which they thought was beneficial, but which actually made some people sick or they just didn't want. And then they insisted that it was healthy because, after all, it was orange juice. And if you were against it you just hated orange juice, while not addressing the drug laced within.
I’ll admit, your analogy made me wince in recognition. There’s an uncomfortable truth here about how movements—even ones rooted in undeniable moral stakes—can alienate people through sheer overzealousness. The “orange juice fatigue” phenomenon you describe is real. When messaging becomes performative, absolutist, or dismissive of nuance, it risks turning allies into skeptics. I’ve seen friends (and myself, at times) default to knee-jerk sloganeering instead of listening, which only deepens divides.
There’s a lesson here about the dangers of conflating moral clarity with moral superiority—how even the most righteous cause can sour when it weaponizes shame or demands ideological purity. The professor hiding his apple juice? The Sprite-drinkers exiled to digital Siberia? Yeah, that’s a familiar flavor of counterproductive zeal.
Best of luck to you. Me, I'm pretty sure I'm all full up on OJ for the rest of my life. The sight of it makes me nauseous. In fact I avoid orange colored liquids in general. I wouldn't burn down the orange groves, but if they did burn down, I'd shrug.
I think the worst part of this, and the one that is biting the left the hardest right now, is that they were the ones who made all the normies tune out. They forced the normies to leave public discourse to avoid a worse cancelation (like from their jobs), and now the left is confused why normies aren't taking to the streets.
That presented the left with a problem too... now their base was comprised mostly of educated professionals employed by government/government dependent or adjacent institutions... and that is both at a time when institutions aren't doing so great at their jobs (and so associates the Democratic Party with that failure) and it makes then vulnerable to a top down counter revolution by our elected officials. Not a great place to be, but a place they put themselves in.
The story is even more serious in Europe, where immigration was rapid and massive, and where the concerns of voters went completely ignored until they started voting en masse for far right parties.
You're timeline is way off. DEI, under one name or another has been with us for a long time, long before Obama was even a senator. In general, the idea that Democrats try to expand their base by recruiting more diverse people, especially immigrants from other countries is a retarded conspiracy theory. If someone believes it it is a sign that their brain is malfunctioning.
Bush was right to tell us not to buy into conspiracies. I live in an area with a lot of Muslim immigrants and they are perfectly nice people.
USAID is an organization that provides life-saving food and medical aid to other countries. It's destruction by DOGE is a national disgrace.
George Soros, big foundations, NGOs, etc, were just minding their own business doing work to make the world a better place, when they were suddenly targeted by a bunch of knuckle-dragging crackpots for no good reason.
Although I think this is valuable for showing the outside perspective on what happened, for me where the analogy loses its power is that Trump genuinely always was a threat.
Like, if you told any Republican ten years ago that they’d be cheering the way they just did for his SOTU, they’d be horrified and accuse you of TDS, and they’d also be WRONG.
Likewise, the outsiders who just wanted the orange juice nonsense to be over might have been forgiven the first time… but at some point they have to own their own decisions.
That’s NOT me trying to put the blame all on them. But because every action is preceded by some other action, we can literally just play the tit-for-tat “they made me do it!” blame game all the way back on up to the Almighty Himself, which means that it’s pointless. The true moral of the story is that EVERYONE has to be responsible for their own decisions. The juicers, the neofascists, and the people in the middle who dug their heads in the sand.
It’s important to remember that while the orange juice people are disempowered, they are still numerous, dangerous, deranged, and filled with hatred for others.
My goal is to keep up the pressure in making their views as cringe as possible for as long as possible so that I am long dead by the next time they feel confident enough to make a comeback.
Consider one final step in your hypo: Some people claim to identify as orange juice, and the left asserts that therefore they ARE orange juice; anyone who questions whether a person born a human being can actually be orange juice is denounced as the worst sort of bigot.
I’m no defender of identity politics but if you feel that a Clinton victory would have been a good thing you do legitimately, and I don’t say this in hostility, not understand the history of the party you argue for. This is the woman who was pushing for direct armed conflict with Russia over Syria and proudly masterminded the fundamentalist coup against Qaddafi — turning Libya from a fairly successful state with things like universal health care and ambitious public water infrastructure — certainly remarkable by the standards of a region that’s been subject to a long history of colonial violence — into a chaotic mob state and hub for slavery. I agree that identity politics has been a catastrophe but I don’t think the answer is turning around and saying that the party that has abandoned the working class and is just as hawkish as the republicans was on the right track in 2015.
Hmmmm… I was pretty different kind of Democrat in 2016, so I’m having to think hard about my response to this. I was no Clinton fan, even then. But I was fully behind her as the alternative to Trump. I think I’d still make that call today, but 2016 was, in a lot of ways, the beginning of the end for me. It was when I starting getting impossibly fed up with being browbeaten into voting for candidates I didn’t actually like and who didn’t represent my values. I haven’t given a lot of thought to what the world would be like if Clinton had won then. Maybe that’s a topic I should explore more fully.
Doesn’t matter how much Orange Juice you drink, I know your family used to drink milk. This whole country was milk drinkers. You’ve got calcium in you, it’s in your bones, you’ll never live it down
FDR and JFK would be aghast at what passes for policy in their beloved Democratic Party. Although both were upper class they understood that victory for their party depended on working class voters. Current party leaders distain the “deplorable” and “racist” members of the working class.
A laundry list of things for Democrats to keep and to dump if they ever want to win again nationwide.
Keep a woman’s right to choose for the first trimester. Dump abortion until birth unless the mother’s health is at risk or the fetus is not viable.
Keep a concern for climate change and grow nuclear power. Dump intermittent, unreliable renewable energy.
Keep and develop new effective vaccines. Dump vaccine mandates.
Keep equality of opportunity for all. Dump equity of results based on discriminating against men, whites and Asians in a futile attempt to compensate for past discrimination against women and blacks. Recognize that D.E.I. Is unconstitutional.
Keep the protection of gay and lesbian rights. Dump men in women’s sports, private spaces and prisons. Oh, and mutilating children who might grow up to be gay.
Keep an opportunity for selective high value immigration. Dump sanctuary cities and open borders.
Keep helping the homeless find jobs and a place to live. Dump camping in cities, shitting in the streets and allowing open drug use.
Keep a concern for due process in criminal justice. Dump letting shoplifters and other petty thieves off the hook and releasing predators back on the streets without bail to kill and maim again.
Do all of the above and they might find their way back to power.
The problem is they don't understand political compromise.
It doesn't involve compromise....it's pulling up your sleeves and doing the work. The problem is that the Dems find a noble issue and instead of spending the $$$$ to correct the issue, they first have to do studies, and then based on the studies, they have to set up "systems" (bureaucracy), and then they have to find facilities, and then they decide to build the facility. By the time they get around to doing anything meaningful, it's 10 yrs down the line, the money is mostly gone ($tudies and salaries for systems), and the problem is worse.
It's like USAID! Go ahead and feed the hungry during the famine....it's a good and noble cause! Nope, they have to set up a bureaucracy in order to do it and then the $$$$ gets siphoned off to the NGO's and systems managers and what's left of the funding gets spent on the starving people. But in the meantime, the problem got worse and now it needs continued "funding" even though the famine is resolving.
I like the orange juice analogy, and I share the anger obvious towards the end of the article, but I think it's actually worse than this. I think that the message of anti-racism was fine insofar as it was about being against racism, but they (Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DeAngelo, for example) went further than that in espousing an extreme and radical variation of social justice. Had they just worn us out insisting we talk about social justice all the time, that would be bad enough, but in addition to this some of the ideas pushed were harmful and poorly thought out. So your analogy is not strong enough.
It would be that they insisted upon us drinking orange juice, but slipped in some drug which they thought was beneficial, but which actually made some people sick or they just didn't want. And then they insisted that it was healthy because, after all, it was orange juice. And if you were against it you just hated orange juice, while not addressing the drug laced within.
I’ll admit, your analogy made me wince in recognition. There’s an uncomfortable truth here about how movements—even ones rooted in undeniable moral stakes—can alienate people through sheer overzealousness. The “orange juice fatigue” phenomenon you describe is real. When messaging becomes performative, absolutist, or dismissive of nuance, it risks turning allies into skeptics. I’ve seen friends (and myself, at times) default to knee-jerk sloganeering instead of listening, which only deepens divides.
There’s a lesson here about the dangers of conflating moral clarity with moral superiority—how even the most righteous cause can sour when it weaponizes shame or demands ideological purity. The professor hiding his apple juice? The Sprite-drinkers exiled to digital Siberia? Yeah, that’s a familiar flavor of counterproductive zeal.
Best of luck to you. Me, I'm pretty sure I'm all full up on OJ for the rest of my life. The sight of it makes me nauseous. In fact I avoid orange colored liquids in general. I wouldn't burn down the orange groves, but if they did burn down, I'd shrug.
I think the worst part of this, and the one that is biting the left the hardest right now, is that they were the ones who made all the normies tune out. They forced the normies to leave public discourse to avoid a worse cancelation (like from their jobs), and now the left is confused why normies aren't taking to the streets.
That presented the left with a problem too... now their base was comprised mostly of educated professionals employed by government/government dependent or adjacent institutions... and that is both at a time when institutions aren't doing so great at their jobs (and so associates the Democratic Party with that failure) and it makes then vulnerable to a top down counter revolution by our elected officials. Not a great place to be, but a place they put themselves in.
Everything we’ve experienced the last 15 years has been top down.
After 911 Bush told us not to buy into conspiracy about the religion of Islam.
He than proceeded to import hundred of thousands of Muslims into our communities.
Then along came Obama. He need to expand his base. Enter - DEI
It’s been off the rails every since.
Now, we know how they was able to pull it off. NGO’s, Universities, USAID, George Soros, big foundations.
All of it was Top Down. Unbelievable propaganda.
The story is even more serious in Europe, where immigration was rapid and massive, and where the concerns of voters went completely ignored until they started voting en masse for far right parties.
You're timeline is way off. DEI, under one name or another has been with us for a long time, long before Obama was even a senator. In general, the idea that Democrats try to expand their base by recruiting more diverse people, especially immigrants from other countries is a retarded conspiracy theory. If someone believes it it is a sign that their brain is malfunctioning.
Bush was right to tell us not to buy into conspiracies. I live in an area with a lot of Muslim immigrants and they are perfectly nice people.
USAID is an organization that provides life-saving food and medical aid to other countries. It's destruction by DOGE is a national disgrace.
George Soros, big foundations, NGOs, etc, were just minding their own business doing work to make the world a better place, when they were suddenly targeted by a bunch of knuckle-dragging crackpots for no good reason.
Although I think this is valuable for showing the outside perspective on what happened, for me where the analogy loses its power is that Trump genuinely always was a threat.
Like, if you told any Republican ten years ago that they’d be cheering the way they just did for his SOTU, they’d be horrified and accuse you of TDS, and they’d also be WRONG.
Likewise, the outsiders who just wanted the orange juice nonsense to be over might have been forgiven the first time… but at some point they have to own their own decisions.
That’s NOT me trying to put the blame all on them. But because every action is preceded by some other action, we can literally just play the tit-for-tat “they made me do it!” blame game all the way back on up to the Almighty Himself, which means that it’s pointless. The true moral of the story is that EVERYONE has to be responsible for their own decisions. The juicers, the neofascists, and the people in the middle who dug their heads in the sand.
It’s important to remember that while the orange juice people are disempowered, they are still numerous, dangerous, deranged, and filled with hatred for others.
My goal is to keep up the pressure in making their views as cringe as possible for as long as possible so that I am long dead by the next time they feel confident enough to make a comeback.
Uhhh based?
Amusing - I would have chosen “organic”. More insidious.
Consider one final step in your hypo: Some people claim to identify as orange juice, and the left asserts that therefore they ARE orange juice; anyone who questions whether a person born a human being can actually be orange juice is denounced as the worst sort of bigot.
The best lack all conviction while the worst
Are full of orange juice
Apologies to WB Yeats
The orange-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned…
In orange juice.
But … orange man bad?
orange man still bad. but orange juice less good after too much.
A brilliant allegory!
This was very enjoyable
Glad you liked it!
I really enjoyed this. Lots to think about. Great work!
Thanks for reading! I’ll keep trying to churn it out!
I’m no defender of identity politics but if you feel that a Clinton victory would have been a good thing you do legitimately, and I don’t say this in hostility, not understand the history of the party you argue for. This is the woman who was pushing for direct armed conflict with Russia over Syria and proudly masterminded the fundamentalist coup against Qaddafi — turning Libya from a fairly successful state with things like universal health care and ambitious public water infrastructure — certainly remarkable by the standards of a region that’s been subject to a long history of colonial violence — into a chaotic mob state and hub for slavery. I agree that identity politics has been a catastrophe but I don’t think the answer is turning around and saying that the party that has abandoned the working class and is just as hawkish as the republicans was on the right track in 2015.
Hmmmm… I was pretty different kind of Democrat in 2016, so I’m having to think hard about my response to this. I was no Clinton fan, even then. But I was fully behind her as the alternative to Trump. I think I’d still make that call today, but 2016 was, in a lot of ways, the beginning of the end for me. It was when I starting getting impossibly fed up with being browbeaten into voting for candidates I didn’t actually like and who didn’t represent my values. I haven’t given a lot of thought to what the world would be like if Clinton had won then. Maybe that’s a topic I should explore more fully.