Coffee Addict

Yeah when I first heard the reference myself I was pretty confused until it was explained to me. I didn’t make the connection to it being racist - mostly because I saw it being posted by left-leaning and liberal personalities - I was more just confused people were posting coconut and palm tree emojis and having no clue what was going on lol.

I do think it arose pretty organically and was pushed by genuine Harris supporters. People were saying they were “coconut-pilled” to show they were supportive of Kamala for at least a few weeks before Biden officially passed the torch.

I do expect the right to try and co-opt it into being racist, but I am not sure how effective that will be considering a lot of Harris’s supporters (and people who are just excited Biden passed the torch in general) seem to be having fun posting it.

I posted this in another thread, but this short video explains the coconut reference.

Basically, it comes from a speech she gave in May 2023 at a White House event about Hispanic excellence. In her speech, she also touched on how the democratic party can better support young leaders by understanding the context they grew up in.

This led into her personal anecdote from her mother, saying:

“My mother, she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?! (Laughs) You in exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.’”

This basically took off and got mixed up with the whole “pill meme” terminology. Those that wanted Biden to pass the torch to Kamala started saying they were “coconut-pilled” and the rest is history.

The demise of third party apps made me look for a Reddit alternative. I had been using Apollo for years, and it was so much better than the official app. I had been using Reddit for more than a decade when they made the API changes.

The official reddit app is trash. The’ve injected more advertisements, and now they’re even injecting ads into comment sections. it’s the very definition of enshittification.

This is all only stuff that’s visible on the surface, too. Under the hood, there’s definitely bots manipulating the conversation and posts that get upvoted and downvoted.

It’s still fine for smaller communities that are more niche, but that doesn’t change that Reddit has a monopoly over online forums and we really need alternatives. The fediverse seems like it’s able to do that, though it still needs to grow and diversify a bit more.

lmao I do admit I moved it to a word document once I realized how long it was getting.

Thanks!

Lol my comment actually is “off the dome.”

I took the deep dive into this question after Trump won in 2016; like many, I was absolutely floored that he won. My comment is an accumulation of information I found since then.

I feel the conservative news media was ultimately the biggest factor (of many factors) that led US conservatives and the United States into its current situation; as journalists, they failed to present the unbiased truth and knowingly distorted it. By constantly confirming their viewers’ priors, they basically constructed a different reality for them.

This is really long and for that I apologize. I think it really goes back to the whole of United States history. I’m going to focus mostly on news media and major political periods, starting with Nixon and the 1970s. Some stuff I am going to have to only mention in passing because it would require its own essay lol. I’ll try to keep it general.

The TLDR is the radicalization was slow and occurred over decades. They’ve been lied to and misled by their preferred news organizations for years at this point. They do not realize they have been radicalized. It all goes back to their media and the republican establishment trying to control the narrative.

The long story? I’ve heard it started with Nixon’s impeachment, and I think I agree. Republicans realized they needed news organizations to be in their camp to prevent something like Watergate from happening again. So, the genesis of right-wing news organizations really lies in the 1970s.

Then, you have Reagan’s decisive victory in 1980 and (especially) 1984. I am not a big fan of Reagan, but his charisma significantly grew the republican base. Personally, I think many of the problems with today’s government and economy have their origins in his presidency, but his popularity at the time is not deniable; he won 49 of 50 states in 1984 which is unthinkable today. As untrustworthy as the Reagan Administration was, he had the trust of most Americans.

Following that, you have the rise of republican Newt Gingrich in the 1990s during Bill Clinton’s presidency. As Speaker of the House, Gingrich made it republican policy to not compromise with democrats. To this day, that is still republican policy towards democrats.

So, even prior to the 2000 election, the foundation for partisanship was laid. Compromise had become a dirty word. But the critical moment was, in my opinion, Bush vs Gore, where the Supreme Court basically handed Bush Jr. the Presidency despite problems with the vote in Florida. Not coincidentally, that is also the year the democrats became “blue” and the republicans became “red”; prior to that election, they would swap back and forth each election cycle.

The 2000 election cycle ended in a way that was extremely divisive, and people ended up watching the news that most closely matched their point of view. From here, I would argue, is really the point in time where the news organizations started to seriously diverge from each other.

It started subtly. Fox News, for example, initially just had a slight conservative bent, so conservative’s preferred to watch it. Also, being cable television it (and I should also say that the majority of modern news media sadly follows this rule as well) was dependent on ad revenue and therefore had an incentive to increase viewership and engagement. This, combined with the fact that the republican establishment wanted to control the narrative, pushed Fox News (and others) in an even more conservative direction; with each passing election cycle, they presented the news ever more partisanly. Like an anglerfish’s lure, they pulled their audience with them.

The partisanship became even worse after Obama was elected in 2008. While many conservatives did not care Obama was a black man, many did and became determined to unseat him. It is difficult for me to say exactly how much a role Obama’s race played in the rise of the Tea Party, but it was definitely a factor. Their influence over the republican party began to grow and was immediately felt in the 2010 midterms. That being said, I argue that Mitt Romney getting the republican nomination in 2012 was the republican establishment suppressing the Tea Party’s influence in favor of a more polished, mellowed-down candidate that they felt was actually electable.

But as history would prove, that did not work out for them. Personally, I doubt any candidate the republicans fielded could have defeated Obama (who quite frankly was a superstar candidate).

I think it was after 2012 when many republicans and conservatives began to lose faith in the sort of “compassionate conservativism” that Bush or Romney promoted. Even by then, “Reagan conservatism” was becoming a distant memory and many young conservatives were not alive to see his presidency. An ideological power vacuum had opened up, and ultimately would be filled by Trump.

But back to conservative news media. This narrative would not be complete if I did not address media figures such as Glenn Beck. While there were others like him, he is the one that sticks out. It’s difficult to articulate the damage Glenn Beck has done. To my knowledge, he was the first, mainstream talk show host to actually give a platform to the alt-right, and many conspiracy theories he started are still a problem today. He took conservative’s distrust of government, validated it, and presented distortions to make them think the democrats were secretly communists that were hellbent on bringing about the downfall of the United States.

His show is the perfect example for a mainstream, Fox News talk show host that also basically taught people how to justify their own conspiracy theories. He pretty much walked everyone through his “thought process” on every show. He also did it in a way that radicalized people who originally were just disgruntled with, or distrusting of, government. I remember one time he even went so far as to have a purported “insider” come on the show as a black silhouette with a fake deep voice to “confirm” everything Beck was saying about Obama and the “Liberal Agenda.” How people fell for that is beyond me, but they did. Eventually, he got so out of control Fox News fired him. But the damage was done.

So, with Romney’s failure in 2012, the “moderate” republican establishment was rudderless and the rise of Tea Party continued. They basically became even more mainstream. Meanwhile, as Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnel continued and perfected Gingrich’s “obstruct and do not compromise,” and Fox News was a decidedly conservative platform. The stage was set for Donald Trump.

As far as republicans go, Trump is pretty much the opposite of Romney. Romney is polite, polished and presentable, whereas Trump is vulgar and derisive. Many conservatives had become convinced they must “save America from the socialists” and Trump was their strongman. It also did not help that the conservative media machine spent decades trashing Hillary Clinton, who was the democratic nominee. Conservative’s had their hated enemy, and their unlikely strongman hero.

The worst part of this narrative? Trump actually won. The mean, vulgar, derisive candidate won, and proved to many conservatives that his way was the only way they could win. Trump had beaten the republican establishment into submission and emboldened all the worst parts of America. Trump validated all their conspiracy theories and won. Their radicalization was complete.

Of course, there is a lot I am leaving out of this narrative such as the obvious racist and fascist undercurrents that have existed in the republican party ever since Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.” For more context, the democrats more-or-less ejected the racist “Dixiecrats” (southern white racist democrats) from the party with President Lindon B Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act. Nixon made it his mission to pick them up (and he did, turning the US southern states into republican strongholds). It also leaves out the sexist undertones that come with conservative traditionalism. There is also an entire religious component and the economic decline of rural America. Each of these would require its own essay lol.

But basically, the radicalization was slow and occurred over decades and now we are seeing the result.