▪️There is some truth to this meme, but it takes the numbers and trends out of context. According to the EIA, U.S. domestic oil production is expected to avg 12.76M barrels/day (bpd) by the end of the year, although those are projections, not actual numbers.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-crude-output-rise-record-1276-mln-bpd-2023-eia-2023-08-08/
▪️But under Trump oil production was already over 13M bpd by 2020. In Feb ‘20 it was at 13.1M and on track to avg well over 13M that year. Production then plunged during the pandemic & the yearly avg never got there. So basically oil production has returned to late 2019 levels and will probably reach early 2020 levels by next year.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=WCRFPUS2&f=W
▪️Keep in mind, when Trump came into office in 2017 oil production was at just 8.9M bpd, so it saw a dramatic nearly 50% rise to reach 13M in just a few years. The current levels are just returning to pre-pandemic levels with small growth projected in the future.
▪️Meanwhile, domestic oil consumption is forecast to rise to 20.5 bpd by 2024, meaning there’s still room for rapid growth just to meet US needs, let alone the rest of the world. We need more than another 50% growth just to keep up with growing demand,
▪️With $80+ oil (compared to $50-60 under Trump) a president would really have to clamp down to keep companies from taking advantage of the 60% price increase. It would take draconian restrictions to keep companies from producing more oil at these prices.
▪️Which, thankfully they haven’t done yet. So despite Biden’s stated promise to “end fossil fuels” in 2019, he hasn’t, likely for pragmatic reasons. The meme is correct in pointing out what few people know (oil production could soon reach record levels) but ignores that the administration’s rhetoric is also openly hostile to domestic oil production.
▪️This statistic is just made up. The reality is that there hasn’t been a real study on this since 2013, when Pew did a poll. They found that Democrats were actually more than twice as likely as Republicans to report ever using food stamps (22% vs 10%).
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/12/the-politics-and-demographics-of-food-stamp-recipients/
▪️Obviously, those percentages could have changed over the past decade, but it’s very likely that Dems still receive more SNAP benefits. Certainly, without an actual study or poll the claim should be thrown out, as it wildly contradicts a previous study.
▪️The meme probably comes from a 2024 analysis by Social Explorer, which found that 78.7% of US counties with the largest increase in SNAP since 2010 voted for Trump in 2020. But that tells us nothing about the actual number of Republicans (or Democrats) who are receiving benefits, just county-wide trends.
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▪️I was playing around with the new Grokipedia and it already seems much better than Wikipedia (which admittedly isn’t saying much). I was looking for a topic that is politically polarizing that I also knew a lot about, so used “Kenosha unrest shooting” to compare the two.
▪️A key component to the shooting was understanding the broader context behind the Kenosha riots and who Kyle Rittenhouse ended up shooting. Wikipedia simply says that Jacob Blake was shot by police and was paralyzed, thus unrest. Grokipedia gives a much more in-depth account so the reader can see that Blake was a serial criminal with a warrant who had a knife and was resisting arrest while fleeing with children in his car.
▪️When it comes to those who were shot, Wikipedia just gives the names and ages. Grokipedia goes in-depth on each person and about their violent criminal history and mental instability that night.
▪️Part of the left wing mythology over Rittenhouse was removing the context and ...
