Also, the term "welfare" has had so much work done on it over the decades so that it is so racially coded at this point. I bet anything that is measurable in focus groups. A lot of whites tend to not know/conveniently forget that the largest group of welfare recipients are....white.

I fully believe that even the stuff that the left focuses on is actually encouraged by the right because it's the most in your face contentious stuff

Can you give a more specific example or two of some grating behavior or contentious claims/statements that demonstrate this problem?

mixed with "don't communicate with the right they're Hitler's all of them"

While I don't believe the right is all Hitlers, are we able to agree that at least some small subset of them and of their leadership have truly disturbing ideals and goals that could fairly be compared to those of Nazis?

How do you address individuals who support those people - whether knowingly or in ignorance - without upsetting them, offending them, or putting them on the defensive?

But the left are so fucking grating and have their heads so far up there own asses that they never actually problem their views effectively.

I would not say all, or even most of them. But some of the most vocal and the ones with some of the most influence on some platforms certainly are. Endless lecturing and gatekeeping. Struggle sessions, Oppression Olympics, and a cloying sense of superiority about ticking off certain identity boxes. [1]

No wonder some people peel off and start getting red-pilled by the likes of Rogan, FFS. The left has got to get back to the basics - and honestly, some of these most strident cases should be marginalized. I think many are afraid to do so or else the entire circus will be pointed at them next.

The fact that Zohran Mamdani resonates with a whole lot of people has little to do with him being who he is (male, Muslim, Asian, I'm supposing cishet, etc.) and more about his ideas. Same goes with Bernie [2] and AOC. The left should keep this in mind at all times, IMHO.

[1] As always, I point to the former comment section (BBS) of BoingBoing as an example of this. It was cartoonish-level. Xitter is really fucking bad whenever I dip into it, but on BoingBoing, the moderators were completely in the tank for this nonsense. Some of the BB subreddit threads cover the clusterfuck that was the BBS...

"This is a policy Eisenhower endorsed in 1956. Are you saying Ike was a Communist?"

Work should provide ownership. Worker-owned co-ops should be the default form of business organization. We should write it into corporate charter law that any business over a certain number of employees must gradually transition to a worker-owned co-op. For example, maybe every company over 30 employees must transfer 2% of its equity to its employees each year. This would mean after about 35 years, the business would be majority owned by its employees. Business founders and investors can still make plenty of profit, but you prevent the accumulation of generational wealth. You prevent the formation of an aristocracy by slowly transferring the ownership of company's from their founders to their employees over time. (And obviously you have a lot of other policy details to make this work, such as not just having a flat threshold. Always have to point this out as the "umm aktually" brigade likes to confuse aspirational policy descriptions for actual legislation.)