mindlar

As does silencing a large majority of people that either correctly or incorrectly believe that there was massive electoral fraud that resulted in Biden being elected president.

If you are trying to incite a civil war, this is a good way to help push it along by silencing people.

Some of the local ones have done well. The Des Moines, Iowa poll has been pretty close.

The national polling firms are only getting airplay if they give the "right" result, the few groups that have been pretty accurate in 2016, 2018, and 2020 got very little media coverage due to not being close to the high profile ones and not having the results that CNN, ABC, NBC, etc. wanted to broadcast.

That coupled with comments from some prominent Democratic politicians that they want to make lists of Trump supporters presumably to punish them for their actions, has a significant chilling effect on people being willing to vocalize their support for Trump to non-friendly or unknown people.

California is a single party state with a supermajority of delegates. This means that Democrats can pass pretty much any law that they want without any real opposition.

The unions in California are unhappy with Uber/Lyft employees not being union members since their presence is an alternative (read danger) to some of the unions (teamsters/taxis). Unions have a lot more power with Democrats since they are some of their biggest supporters, so the legislature tends to do things that benefits unions.

Since California is effectively a single party state, the legislators that voted for this don't need to worry about things like being reelected because they are unlikely to actually see real opposition outside of a primary challenger.

Patreon would have been fine if they hadn't cancelled a comedian for having political views that they don't like. Pretty much every comedian has said things that others find offensive.

The Patreon arbitration is the beginning of the revolt against cancel culture and the censorship of conservative voices on various platforms.

The 1918 flu pandemic also came at the tail end of World War 1, when the youngest and healthiest were in incredibly close proximity and likely had compromised immune systems from a few years of warfare.