Donald Trump is at it again, and he is not alone. It’s just like professional wrestling. Heel, vs. Hero. This feud he’s got going with the Squad, that being the famous and infamous four-person bloc of socialist junior Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and to a lesser extent Ayanna Pressley (who somewhat unfairly is often lumped together with the rest, even when she herself did nothing wrong) is the single most difficult problem facing Democrats today. Donald Trump has turned the four of them into his own personal Goldstein a la 1984, a bogeyman to stir up his base with. They themselves stir the pot at every turn.
And we’ve got to clean up the slop; a Democrat’s due.
As if that lot needed any more stirring! We won’t need to remind anyone of the slaughter in El Paso, Texas recently, or in Dayton, but one day it could be useful to note this was written in the aftermath of those shootings. It all ties together, rather horribly so.
To support these four women, strong and intelligent though they be, in a proportion commensurate both with their own behavior and with the significance they bear to all this in mind is not easy, even though you’d think it would be. I want to support them. I support many others like them who get little press because they don’t go around attention-grabbing, grandstanding about grand political theories; eighty-four women received congratulations and articles of support from me, including the Squad. They’re Millennial Democrats, after all, same as me. It is natural that I would want to support them. And yet, their entanglements with socialism, Bernie Sanders, and their own unfortunate tendency to flap off at the gums whenever it suits them make that impossible.
It’s a real nightmare, and no mistake; the only thing in this whole entire shebang that I have really had to think about very much. It presents a philosophical problem, an actual problem, and a strategical problem. Plus plenty of personnel problems. But the big problem, the deal-breaker problem, is with these guys, the Justice Democrats, like Cenk Uygur down there in the picture, and their sister organization the Democratic Socialists of America, not to be confused with Nordic social democracy no matter how many times they try to trump it up.
Not our friends.
This is close to the heart of the problem and is good to talk about in heading toward the root of the rot. We cannot fully accept AOC and the other Squad members without fully embracing their often-insane policies, statements, and socialistic views. All of them are close to the heart of the problem, which is good to talk about in heading toward the root of the rot. This is not arbitrary, nor do we have anything less than the most compelling reasons for crafting our policy
How Putin helped Bernie- and why.
The campaign of Bernie Sanders was even more infested with insincere infiltrators and acidic agents than Trump’s was. In fact, his campaign manager, Tad Devine, was the first witness called to testify at the trial of Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort. Turns out they’d been working together for a dozen years, fixing elections at Putin’s behest in Ukraine. Along with Rick Gates, that makes three major strategists involved in opposing Hillary Clinton’s run for the presidency who had been doing Putin’s bidding in this regard for more than a decade.
Yeah.
This is a shame because they are adding relevant and important topics into the national dialogue. They are also women of color who got elected on the tide of the Blue Wave in the Year of the Democratic Woman, which we wrote about every day for months. And even when Ilhan Omar shot her mouth off in the most insensitive manner (referring to 9/11, the greatest tragedy in our country’s history, as ‘something’ people did, without a single word spoken in condemnation of Islamic terrorism, which is every bit as despicable and criminal as white nationalist terrorism), we stood with her because Trump was shooting off his mouth so bad we were afraid some ‘lone gunman’ would kill her. That’s the exact truth, and God forgive this country that it should be so.
That is why I’m writing this, even now, to explain why I won’t support her to half my team while explaining to the other half why I won’t join in to crush her.
This is not a half-measure, either. It’s just assorting elements and factors and weighing them. There’s a lot of danger being presented to those girls, and while they may feel exhilarated and invulnerable now, there’s a lot of crazy people out there. Making them front line targets like this is a pretty cold-blooded strategy, even if it does work. But that didn’t much seem to bother the so-called “Democratic” socialists who made them, and who are guiding their hands as they craft policy going forward. Heedless and reckless, and more work for us. One disaster after the next.
Surely, you say, this must be a small price to pay for such energetic new young allies- would that it were true! That would indeed be the case if they didn’t want to spend all their time attacking Democrats. AOC’s first act after getting elected was to go start a protest in Nancy Pelosi’s office- across the nation from them, on the taxpayer’s expense- over climate change which we were doing anyway. She seemed disappointed when she found that out, as if she’d really been looking forward to a good fight-with her own people, during the Trump era.
That is the kind of trouble we have had with the Squad, ever since the Blue Wave hit home hard last November and even before. They want to sit on the sidelines, voting with the Republicans unless we will insanely join them on calling for the abolition of ICE. Ocasio-Cortez did that first when the government needed to be reopened. She said she had made a ‘tough, nuanced call’. ICE funding wasn’t even on the bill! No one had a clue what she was talking about, and that was bad enough. So were dozens of other times she’s shot off her mouth, like when she went on Firing Line and talked about the Israeli “occupation of Palestine (sigh).
But then when it came time to vote on whether or not little children on our southern border, the ones locked in DOG CAGES, ought to receive basic amenities like soap and toothpaste, the socialists stood against us in a bloc and voted no, I was so disgusted I could barely speak for days.
This is how it’s gone for nearly four years now; we try to build something, like a more accurate public portrayal of Democratic sanity and they undermine and destroy it for no reason at all. Now we can’t even come together on little kids being treated not like animals.
We have been stabbed in the back until there’s no more room for fresh scars by the people who promoted and created the Squad in the first place. That means organizations like the Justice Democrats, Brand New Congress, and the Democratic Socialists of America. Each is owned and operated by radical left extremists who hated Hillary Clinton worse than Trump and all but said so every day, as loud as they could. We are not going to forget that, over here. Count on it.
I will never forget.
Ocasio-Cortez got her start in politics working on the Bernie Sanders campaign. All her top strategists were previously his. They were underestimated by Crowley, he got slammed; maybe he had gotten complacent and his time was meant to be over, that’s what they’re saying, but when you’re talking about the seats of high power in the world? The United States Congress? I will take decades of experience and a bad judgment call born of inertia over a bartender socialist who worked for Bernie Sanders, any day of the week, month, or year. I say we got the worst deal imaginable, and the Squad had better own up to that fact and do something to change things drastically, while they still can.
These are the Bernie or Bust believers who rioted in the streets of Philadelphia, without a single regard for ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters’ as Paul Simon played it outside. That is the problem. Their rioting and nonsense made all this possible. It was done on purpose, and it was done for a cause. That cause is to replace Democrats by taking them out from below. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was discovered and created by these people, savvily rabid promoters, for this purpose and this alone. She was used as a poisoned dart to get rid of Joe Crowley, one of the best Democrats we had in the House of Representatives, and she continues to allow herself to be employed for this terrible purpose.
So while we welcomed her arrival on the scene- we wrote her a congratulatory article, along with some good advice- it’s been a risky bet from the get-go. AOC’s presence thus far has caused more trouble than it’s worth. We look forward eagerly to a day where this statement can be recanted- but when that day is coming, who can say?
Whether this trouble has been done at her behest or in her name really doesn’t matter. So long as she’s got her name in their roster, so long as they’ve got the unnecessary and random “Justice” on their scrolling marquees and business cards, so long as she is advocating for this repugnant new hybrid system of state called “democratic” or corporate socialism but is really just state capitalism like in China, we are never going to get to a point where we can take the Squad in as we might like to.
This could change, of course. It wouldn’t really take much, either. Tell all your people to quit acting like lunatics and make sure they’re registered to vote Democratic. We genuinely would like nothing better than to see the Squad mend their wicked ways, God knows we need the help. But it’s help we can’t accept if they won’t quit acting up.
No one candidate or set of candidates can ever be worth letting either yourself or your Party become polluted, a vector for the plague that is socialism. That will destroy us for 2020 and maybe leave us flat on our backs forever afterward if democracy really does collapse all the way here. We’re not living in a full democracy now, according to the World Freedom Index, and haven’t been since 2016. If we want to see our way of life recover, we had really better come together now.
Going forward, it’s going to be more and more important that we’ve got a solution to the problem posed by the Squad. It just keeps coming up, so we’ve got to have a clear answer. So here it is.
We support them as people, as millennials, and as Democrats. When it comes to their socialistic nonsense and their ravening friends, however, it should be separated from them neatly, packaged like a diaper, and thrown down a well so deep it has no bottom. The political moderate will feel the truth in this approach.
We have to draw a clear line between sticking up for them as human beings when attacked by a cowardly bully and accepting their poisoned bait, a type of ideological Trojan Horse of a time bomb, too deep in the fold to avoid lethal damage should it go off. The stakes are too high for all this messing around. Hopefully they see that before it’s too late.
In the end, you’ve got to take one day at a time, resolve to be fair, and make the best of it. The Squad is who and what they are, and we’ll have to make room for them anyway, so we might as well at least let them know there’s a spot for them on our bench, waiting, one that would be bigger had they themselves not been so impetuous and quick to blow atomic with their mouths.
I just hope I am not doing wrong myself in refusing to throw any boots into the stomping. Socialism!! Socialism, no less. Never ever shall I see the day. You Squad, you! Stop landing this crap on us!
Although even Socrates has argued strongly for the State taking a benevolent stance toward gadflies, this cannot be expected to apply to the African tsetse fly which carries sleeping sickness. You’ll end up looking like Bernie Sanders if you get a bad enough case of that stuff.
It is with a great many emotions contending in my heart that I wrote this eulogy, commemorating the life of one of the bravest, kindest, and most determined people I have ever had the privilege of knowing, Democratic activist and organizer Roneen A. Henn. Sorrow, loss, relief that her pain is over, and a lifelong resolve to carry on her work and make the dream she fought for whole.
When the disaster of 2016 happened to us all, when hearts were down and the trenches were emptying, Roneen stayed. When the going got rough, especially in 2017 when the troll invasions began and the hard fighting was constant, she knew she was needed and she stepped up to the plate without even being asked. That’s who she was. She helped everyone who asked her, she brought cheer, she was there every day when a lot of others were not. She was more than just another colleague. She was my friend, and many others as well; I really miss her. It was hard for me to write this. Regardless of our views on politics or anything else, a great many people who she counseled and cared for and loved are bowing their heads, united in our Democratic Memoriam, one at last. That’s what she would have wanted.
Roneen is survived by her mother, Noreen Peters, and many that she took under her wing over the years, and the cause that she gave her entire life to. She passed down a great deal of accumulated knowledge and wisdom, and her method of running a big-tent organization such as one of our most venerable and lively institutions She was one of us. Although she was many years my senior, she was a Millennial Democrat with all her heart. We would not be where we are right now without her because she helped to shape the debates that have crafted our philosophy, and helped to visualize the worldview that we now represent, and have come to the national discourse to offer.
Each one of us matters, we are stronger than we know, and the work we do endures. Roneen was passed a torch and she never dropped it, but rather handed it to us, who will forever be honored by her trust and by the love she bore for all. As we resolutely approach the task of carrying that torch forward, we will have her in our hearts and minds.
I went to sleep on Saturday night with a troubled spirit, thinking about Donald Trump and Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, thanks to a soon-to-be-forgotten Trump-supporting scumbag terrorist who shot more than forty people in El Paso, Texas. A mother of three, an army veteran, a teenage kid. That’s who he was killing.
When I woke up and heard about another double-digit shooting committed by a maniac from deep within Trump country, this time in Dayton, Ohio, I took a deep breath and realized. It may well be beginning.
Folks, they’re killing us out here. Keep your eyes open, and be ready. It’s coming down like hailstorms all around us.
We tried to tell them, back then. The Jill Stein bots, the Bernie or Busters, etc. You people, I say to them, are the biggest morons to have ever disgraced God’s green earth, by the way; this is just as much your fault as it is the ones who support Trump outright. Vote for Hillary Clinton, or none of this will be stoppable. The strength of our coalition will only last so long without money or leadership. At this point, it’s just the sheer guts and toughness and endless determination of the people committed to Resistance keeping this alive.
Anyone out there thinking of dropping the torch ought to remember that. And Ilhan Omar, please remember next time your Party needs you all the times we’ve had to #StandForIlhan because you shot your mouth off and made yourself a Nazi target doing so. We’re just as against socialism as anyone else, probably more so. But you don’t want to be that guy who said nothing when they came for the Communists. That mistake has already been made. We’re all in it together, at this point. Up to our necks.
Speaking of Nazi-like mistakes, like support for Donald Trump, which wasn’t something you could be open about in 2016. It wasn’t safe to be an openly white nationalistic Nazi pig, and that’s how it should be. Nazi symbols and propaganda are illegal in most of Europe, and it ought to be here. While we don’t condone or advocate for people doing things like vandalizing cars or refusing to help Trump supporters stranded on the road, we can sure understand them. They were done to deter what is happening now.
Anyone who heard how Trump was talking leading up to the November disaster that was his illegitimate victory, coincidentally sharing its date with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles ninety-eight years prior, could not help but think of Adolf Hitler and his Nazis- and the Holocaust.
Back then, there was a particularly vile Nazi who went by the name of Julius Streicher. His newspaper was sexually perverse and went by the name of Der Sturmer- the Stormer.
These days a model of originality called The Daily Stormer exists in sour tribute to that one.
Andrew “weev” Auernheimer is one of the key contributors to the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer. He wrote in the comments of a post on The Daily Stormer called “Full Text of Alleged Manifesto of El Paso Shooter” that violence against non-whites is “desirable.”
“Random violence is not detrimental to our cause, because we need to convince Americans that violence against nonwhites is desirable or at least not something worth opposing anyways, because there’s no way to remove a hundred million people without a massive element of violence,” Auernheimer wrote.
Back in the days of Nazi Germany, it was all unacceptable, right up until it wasn’t. Adolf Hitler was no billionaire like Trump, nor was he much like Trump in other ways, stupid, slow, slovenly. He was a pervert and a psychopath, but it must be conceded by any metric that the man was incredibly able. Intelligent, ruthless, and cunning. I worry every day about someone like him taking up the Trumpism torch.
But he did have the same sort of man-of-the-people air about him that Trump does, which is why-much like here- the political elites of Germany didn’t find it thinkable to accept him as the leader of the country. His movement was noisy, loud, common, and led by a former bum from the streets of Vienna. To call such a man their leader was not, in the beginning, quite the plan.
The final president of the Weimar Republic, Paul von Hindenburg, used to refer to him contemptuously as “that Austrian corporal”, and would not until the final days of his life even consider the idea of making him the Chancellor, the second-highest position in the German government. But Hindenburg was old, disorder ruled the day. Democracy had never held a high place in the hearts of the German people, who grumbled about jobs and the trains running on time. Hitler used this to overthrow the social order entirely.
Hindenburg died not long after changing his mind, and when he did Hitler acted with a ruthlessness history has not often seen, purging the members of his own Party as well as other internal enemies in the Night of the Long Knives and setting himself up as Fuhrer, Supreme Leader of the German People. In just over a year and a half the Republic was no more.
In the process, Hitler laid out a set of blueprints that every dictator in the world has studied since. How to destabilize, terrorize, and coerce a country’s people into going along with things that should have been unthinkable. The Holocaust is the term for the slaughter of six million Jews. No one in history before had ever thought to wipe out an entire race of people. But now they have, and it’s on the mind of all these mass-murdering swine here in America, who are using the same propaganda tricks and lies to raise support and enthusiasm for a similar race war on North American soil.
Conventional wisdom since the war ended has said that it could never happen again. People know what the costs could be, whereas in the past they did not. Besides which, this is America. Land of the free and the home of the brave. No way would people ever be so cowardly here as to think they had to pick up weapons and set out to slaughter their neighbors. The Stanford Prison Experiments? Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority studies? Ah, only eggheads know about that stuff, what a bunch of weirdos.
Look where we are now. So much for conventional wisdom.
The Washington Post ran an article entitled ‘Shoot them!’: Trump laughs off a supporter’s demand for violence against migrants.”
A policy statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics this week warned of racism’s devastating effects on children. It showed another study proving the stress of Trump’s rise to power caused more high schoolers to start doing drugs that year. Conventional wisdom is not doing America any good. It’s time to change our conventions.
The El Paso massacre began just as the fatal attacks earlier this year at mosques in New Zealand and a San Diego-area synagogue did. A racist manifesto and an announcement on the anonymous message board 8chan, one of the Web’s most venomous refuges for extremist hate. It’s as clear as anything ever has been in the history of all mankind this place is a terrorist recruiter’s dream come true. Our reasons for not treating it like one? The cops don’t want to. ‘
There is a direct correlation between then and now, and that is what this article is saying.
This can all be viewed as having taken place on a timeline. After Germany lost World War Two, American democracy was up against a group of thugs and criminals who had murdered even more people than the Nazis had, the Soviet Union, of which Russia was the central state (So clearly, we get it, but still).
On the way to that period of time, we got to take a trip through the wonders of Watergate and the Richard Nixon presidency. We went all over this during Robert Mueller’s Russiagate investigation, which had a sad end. Mueller went before Congress and said that Trump knew the Russians hacked our election, welcomed their help, and expected to benefit from it. Total disregard of morality in the pursuit of power is the key at the heart of fascism.
The kinds of things that were done by Nixon’s thugs from the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) were no different, and many of the same characters were involved, e.g. Roger Stone. All were from the Nazi playbook. Agent provocateurs, break-ins, blackmail, the political dirty trick campaigns known by Karl Rove’s old mentor, Donald Segretti, as “ratf*cking, as in, f*cking a DemocRAT.
G. Gordon Liddy, the guy who actually executed the break-in, was a neo-Nazi himself. The case study of this one guy will spin your head about what’s going on with the Nazis in our government, who have almost always made their home in the Republican Party.
I read his biography, WILL. He admits openly his inspiration for the title was the famous 1934 Leni Riefenstahl film that became hugely influential as a propaganda film for Hitler and the Nazis, Triumph des Willens, or The Triumph of the Will. Apparently, his mother used to sing it to him as a child. He also boasted of having walked naked down the tier in the Washington, D.C. country jail while singing the Horst Wessel song, Raise High the Flag, which made a national martyr out of a Nazi pimp. Yet for all that he was a tough guy and supposedly trusted by Nixon, he was beaten like an animal by two men who got right out of jail again, shortly before announcing he would never, ever testify. He didn’t mention that part.
It goes on and on. Operation Bluebird and MK-Ultra were mind control experiments done with the hope in the mind of creating super-soldiers known as Manchurian candidates. We can’t even rule out that the CIA may have actually invented crack cocaine to fund Nicaraguan armies of contras.
How do you shoot yourself twice in the head with a shotgun? I don’t know, but Gary Webb does. He was the investigative journalist who broke the story. Supposedly that’s how he took his own life.
As for Trump himself, his connections to white nationalism run bone-deep. His father was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1927. Notorious political hamstringer Roger Stone has said of Fred Trump that he was a member of the John Birch Society, which was founded by Fred Koch, father of the infamous Koch Brothers who built a near-billion dollar political machine in this country according to researcher Jane Mayer. He was an oilman who built refineries for the Nazis. Trump was raised at a time in New York when “conservatism was on the cutting edge”, according to conservative historian Rick Perlstein. This stuff was “in”.
Obviously in the mind of this president, it still is.
We don’t have all the answers as to what is going on in this country. It remains to be seen if there is anyone alive who does. Only one thing is beyond doubt. Things have to change. America has become a powder keg, and Donald Trump’s rhetoric looks more like a fuse every day.
When I read that Tulsi Gabbard, of all people, had reviled her fellow 2020 presidential candidate Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) as someone “Not Qualified” to be President of the United States of America, I was disgusted so thoroughly that I was all but beside myself. I couldn’t believe it. You have got to be kidding me. Who are you, Tulsi Gabbard, monstrous traitor and foreign cutout that you *allegedly* are, to use the term “Not Qualified” as regards a career prosecutor and elected Senator like Harris? This is completely unacceptable.
Senator Harris, we are here for you. We’re not endorsing you-or anybody else- yet, but we’re here for you. You are a Democrat.
Here at Millennial Democrats, we haven’t issued an endorsement yet, and we don’t intend to, not for a while. The reason why is the wealth of riches we have in these candidates. All of them are so vastly superior to Trump or Bernie that even to compare them is facile. Our concern is making it unified through what promises to be a chaotic primary. Democratic
We have been there for all of them, too, not to mention every other Democrat. We’ve even stood up for Ilhan Omar and praised Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez when she’s done something right, even though they’re socialists. The only reason we ever have for going after another Democrat is being convinced that they’re anything but. That’s Tulsi for you. Back in 2017, we wrote that “Tulsi Gabbard has something for everyone, and all of it is dishonest“.
Well, here’s another lie she’s told. Kamala Harris is completely qualified to hold the office of President, and much more qualified than some, like her or Bernie Sanders. I remember when Bernie said the same thing about Hillary Clinton. Way to display your internalized sexism; not a big surprise considering your father was anti-gay extremist Mike Gabbard.
Researching the tangled tale of Tulsi Gabbard was really somewhat disturbing. Her situation is one of the clearest links we have to the ongoing problem of the far left and the far right converging. Her family hijacked Hawaii’s Democratic Party and runs it using Republican policies. Hardly any of her supporters have anything to do with us. According to one list of major contributors to the Tulsi Gabbard campaign, published by DailyKos in 2012, Democratic donors were actually exceptions on this list. Many of these people have not donated to campaigns other than Mike Gabbard’s Congressional campaign, or Richard Reed’s Senate campaign, both as Republicans. Reed’s Senate campaign was allegedly connected to both the Gabbards’ and to Butler’s religious group.
This all happened because Hawaii’s people and atmosphere are so liberal. It’s a one-party state; no Republican has any hope at all to get elected there. A serious attempt has not been made in years. But the last time someone gave it the old college try, it was Tulsi’s good old Dad.
The Democratic Party has had a long reign in Hawaii. Some of it comes from the popularity of the labor movement there in the 20th century, and the efforts of the Hawaii Democratic Party to push for greater inclusivity of the electoral base have traditionally been venerated. These factors have combined to earn Democrats near-complete control of the state legislature. But such an extended period of dominance has been resulting in increased voter apathy and increased factionalism within the Democratic Party of Hawaii.
This apathy is what led Mike Gabbard to try and challenge Democratic incumbent Ed Case in 2004. The elder Gabbard, known for his virulent anti-gay crusade in the 1990s, was attempting to overturn the status quo and win as a Republican the race to represent Hawaii’s 2nd Congressional District. At that time, a reporter for Honolulu Magazine requested an interview on her ties to the Chris Butler cult, her family’s religion, a bizarre offshoot of the Hare Krishnas.
Tulsi got nice and mad, and listen to what she said.
“I smell a skunk,” she emailed back. “It’s clear to me that you’re acting as a conduit for … homosexual extremist supporters of Ed Case!”
We can see this vicious, right-wingesque swipe at Harris is no isolated incident, but part of a long-running pattern. She’s carrying on the legacy of her father, like any dutiful daughter, and his values were utterly conservative, far enough to the right to border on libertarianism.
Libertarianism is a political philosophy that advocates for laissez-faire economic policies in a sense so extreme they believe government should be all but eliminated. It is an offshoot of the abominably racist John Birch Society, which was founded by a Ku Klux Klan member named Fred Koch. He was the father of the infamous Koch Brothers of Koch Industries, Charles and David-the founders of a third party, the Libertarian Party, which is basically a smooth-talking version of the rabid John Birch party line. David was to have been Vice-President if they pulled it off when they first ran in 1980. He spent two million dollars of his own money making the attempt but got crushed.
But they didn’t give up. They’ve been corralling their resources patiently ever since.
The libertarian movement is an interesting case. They have some huge billionaires working with them, like Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News. It’s supposed to be as far right as it gets. So why are so many figures from the radical left caught up with them?
On the Issues, a non-partisan informational website that rates and categorizes lawmakers and candidates describes Tulsi Gabbard as a “Libertarian-Leaning Progressive” based on her voting record.
A similar organization, Progressive Punch.org, provides a searchable database of Congressional voting records, from the perspective of the far left. They gave Bernie Sanders an A, for his lifetime support of progressive causes. Tulsi Gabbard got an F. Basic logic would suggest they would stand in diametric opposition to one another.
Why do they have all the same supporters, then?
One angry supporter of Bernie Sanders wrote the following nonsense on 7/23/17, on a thread discovered on Facebook. Note his dual enthusiasm for both Bernie and Tulsi. and his loathing for moderate Democrats. “No REAL progressive is gonna vote for more of the Clinton style, corporate special interest, Big Bank donor loving, false progressive garbage. Yet…here are the Democrats showing us early on that they haven’t changed. Ready for a repeat of 2016? Personally…I will work to expose and destroy the hopes of any candidate that the DNC tries to ram down our throats again by using Super Delegates and closed Primaries…and any candidate who remained silent against the DNC’s attack on our Democracy by rigging the election against Bernie Sanders. #Sanders/Gabbard2020 #Gabbard/Turner2020 This same man later went on to beg and plead for unity among the former supporters of Sanders- so that they will have greater success in attacking not Republicans, but Democrats. Mentioned at the spearhead of this assault on their fellows in the left, is always one name- Tulsi Gabbard.
Her record shows again and again that is not a Democrat in anything but name, even though so-called progressives love her. She managed to hoodwink Bernie supporters into thinking she is one of them. By resigning from the DNC at the time Bernie or Bust rioted during HRC’s nomination and since has come to embody misguided attacks by so-called progressives on the so-called liberal elite. In point of fact, however, the evidence indicates quite otherwise. Tulsi Gabbard does not vote like a progressive darling. She’s a surfer, which seems to be more important than her voting record. What a mess. This person would be the biggest con in the world if she wasn’t so incompetent. Ever heard her speak? Better than sleeping pills. Snore.
Her voting record, world view, and connections resemble much more closely a resume, tailor-made to be both barely acceptable to the leaders of the Democratic Party, and a perfect Libertarian plant.
Since the 2016 disaster, people worldwide have been paying more attention to world events- which have been pretty awful. Great Britain just got a far-right prime minister, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil is stomping up and down on human rights, and Marine Le Pen of France, who is blatantly Putin-financed, is leading Emmanuel Macron in the polls. Meanwhile, far-left figures like Sanders and parties like Germany’s pro-Putin Die Linke vote on behalf of Russian interests all over Europe. All this has helped a public awareness begin growing toward a reoccurring trend, one reshaping the entire scale of the political spectrum.
The left and the right are becoming the same entity.
This is far from new. History has played this drama out a great many times. The two have often historically converged when a common friend or foe suits both of their needs, and have proven capable of working in effective concert even though they’re involved for different reasons. Lenin’s doctrines specifically advocated for Communists using this technique, and these days they’ve been doing it so long they’ve started to resemble each other. New anti-democracy hybrid systems of totalitarianism may call themselves what they like, of course, be it corporate socialism or state-run capitalism. But in terms of policy and temperament, they are exactly the same.
This is why the monopolists are trying so hard to combine the far-right and far-left. They’re stirring up chaos until they see the ladder Petyr Baelish spoke of in Game of Thrones manifest, and then they use it. Nothing too complicated, but they’ve got a lot of ways to get it done. It’s almost like a game of three-card monte; its complexity lies within its simplicity. The monopolists are going to try and use that ladder to guide us off the path of freedom and democracy so that guys like the Kochs can run everything without any governmental restraint at all. That was why libertarianism was conceived of, and although it didn’t catch on right away, it’s got a few heads full of steam now. We are in the middle of watching nothing less than a full-fledged attempt at a Libertarian revival, aimed at the destruction of the newer and more cultured America we enjoyed under Bill Clinton and Obama.
When Trump took office, one of the first things he did was to yank us out of the Paris Accord so big business could get back to work mucking up the lakes and rivers again. That item had been high on the Koch agenda for years. When Scott Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general who had spent his whole career fighting the EPA, was chosen by Trump as the agency’s new head, all concerned had no trouble with interpreting that move. He’d been brought in to gradually dismantle it. Let’s return to the days of starting Lake Erie on fire, what a neat idea, dear boy have a cigar.
It seems clear that clean water for Flint, Michigan is about as likely as the same for Japan’s nuclear power plant post-tsunami. It just isn’t a priority to monopolists.
They want to bring things back to the old way, graft and corruption, and big bosses. Stuff we take for granted, like minimum wages and the eight-hour workday would be gone in a terrible flash. Ever read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle? Great book, but don’t read it on an empty stomach. Work-life was nightmarish for the American workingman back then. That’s what it would be like with no government that could hold big business accountable. That’s why Democrats have to dedicate their lives every single generation to fighting back this growing darkness.
It is also why the far left is getting to be such a tremendous problem. They fight us at every turn for no reason, but very rarely the Republicans. The Squad of freshmen Representatives like Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is comprised of all socialists who voted against caged children getting soap in a bloc just a few short weeks ago. Likewise, Trump is gaining all sorts of mileage by attacking them. Their ability to repulse middle America, in particular, is all but a red flag in the eyes of frenzied bulls. Their radical views are his biggest asset in 2020.
The punk rock anarchist types are clueless about getting taken in. Their protests are undermining their entire value systems, not to mention their future right to stay healthy. They think it’s going to all be dancing through Utopia- the Greek word for “nowhere”. My guess is it would be more like that movie “The Purge”. Without real Democrats to protect them, people too different to blend in would be little more than easy prey. To whose benefit does that end up working for? The monopolists, of course! They’re like a hydra, striking at a million places at once. They’ve got all the money. That’s why they’re able to co-opt so many people in either party- like Tulsi Gabbard.
On the Issues, a non-partisan informational website that rates and categorizes lawmakers and candidates describes Gabbard as a “Libertarian-Leaning Progressive” based on her voting record.
Monopolist sects of the global elite are linking up transnationally and behind the scenes in a previously unheard-of level of cooperation and making their presences known through elected proxies like Tulsi Gabbard.
To pull it off, they’ve got to use a combination of theatrics and money to manipulate the national dialectic, hoping they can eventually fool the people into demanding a third party, likely to be similar to the Viktor Orban’s Hungary “managed democracy” hybrid systems that are taking form everywhere across the world.
In this model minorities and LGBT persons and the poor bear the weight of society, civil rights and freedom are surrendered for illusory stability, and a bigger state than ever has autonomy enough to do anything they want, the way China randomly built huge camps in the desert and locked up a million Uighur Muslims last fall. Likewise, that LGBT activist, Yelena Grigoryva, just got stabbed and strangled in Russia. This is not a game. We have got to wake people up and splash awareness in their faces before it’s too late.
Two-thirds of the world’s states are now no longer democracies, including the United States. according to non-partisan organization the World Freedom Index, and that is very dangerous to everyone. The only thing still holding this neo-fascist tide from sweeping over the whole world like wildfire is the strength even of American democracy’s memory. That’s why they are trying to attack it. The only guardians of it are the centrists of the Democratic Party, which is why all this is happening. Their true enemies are not socialists. They are the liberals.
They are us, Democrats.
This is the likely explanation for why she thought it a good idea to savage one of her fellow Democrats, Kamala Harris, with such a mean and rude assault on her qualifications. It adds acrimony and stress to our already taxed body politic. She’s always doing something to hurt our party. They’ve been talking about running her to hamstring us for years.
Our opinion is that it was more than a mean streak that caused her to resign as DNC junior chairman at the worst possible time for the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party in general. Many different factors were involved, most notably The Wikileaks dump of hacked data from the DNC’s email servers had just happened, and the Bernie or Bust lunatics were rioting in the streets of Philadelphia, over illegally acquired and hacked emails proving that Debbie Wasserman-Schultz resented Bernie’s inability to file out basic FEC forms correctly.
Tulsi said she was resigning in disgust, a double whammy for her. Not only did she get to damage her fellow Democrats, she gained millions of hardcore Bernie or Busters in the process. They think she’s one of them, even though more reputable leftist publications like Jacobin Magazine have also tried convincing them repeatedly. One article of theirs I would was titled “Tulsi Gabbard Is Not Your Friend.” They had no more success than we have.
It’s not that often that the socialists and I can come together on anything, but so far as Tulsi goes we’re riding in the same boxcar.
It could be that Tulsi’s been indoctrinated by Chris Butler, the guy who runs that twisted mutation of Hare Krishnaism cult that you were raised in? The one who now goes by the name Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa? The Butler cult has built a shadowy and global organization that according to some numbers in the tens of thousands, and the Gabbards are its most public and conspicuous members. The Cult Education Forum has more than a hundred pages worth of threads detailing their activities over the years.
We have got her back- just as we’ve got Joe Biden‘s, or Beto O’Rourke‘s, or Al Franken‘s. We’ll stand for any of them other than Tulsi and the Bern, two disingenuous libertarians only in the race to sow dissent and chaos. That sort has always hated people like Kamala Harris because she’s strong and black and female. They did the same thing to Joy Reid, whose defense we also took the torch for. Remember this, Bernie Bots?
We do. And we will never, ever forget it. Progressives, lol. If this is progress, give me the Stone Age back.
According to the lawsuit, filed by lawyers representing Gabbard’s campaign Tulsi Now Inc., Google suspended the Gabbard campaign’s advertising account for several hours during the first Democratic debate. “On June 28, millions of Americans asked Google about Tulsi Gabbard,” the mournful wording went, “and Tulsi sought to answer them. But Google silenced her.”
In response, Google says “automated systems that flag unusual activity on all advertiser accounts — including large spending changes” were to blame for the suspension of Gabbard’s account. Google says their automated systems aim to “prevent fraud and protect our customers.”
“In this case, our system triggered a suspension and the account was reinstated shortly thereafter,” said Google spokeswoman Riva Sciuto. “We are proud to offer ad products that help campaigns connect directly with voters, and we do so without bias toward any party or political ideology.”
Now, who to believe? Analytical tools on Twitter have shown tens of thousands of fake accounts swarming on her handle. This is her M.O. Check out that picture. Every little dot represents another one. It looks like a grand fireworks finale.
“Thousands of inauthentic Twitter accounts emerge when exploring tweets where @TulsiGabbard’s handle appears (large highlighted cluster includes ~20K accounts) cc: @yoyoel @delbius @vijaya” Thanks to @GeoffGoldberg!
This is all a result of the Citizens United ruling allowing the use of dark money in politics. Now private empires like the ones put together by the infamous Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries can spend nine-tenths of a billion dollars to hoodwink and influence us.
The thing about their strategy is, it’s completely common sense. What would you do, if it was your billion dollars, and your goal is to control the nation’s data flow- which is to say, its people? Would you really only support one side, and not try to influence the other? Did not Lenin say, The best way to control the opposition is to lead it yourself? It’s a football strategy, really; pretty basic stuff. They’re playing both the ends against the middle.
This is the libertarian way. Ask Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire owner of Fox News. Or his friend, Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart, and many others too. Sheldon Adelson, Robert Mercer. Richard Mellon Scaife, the mean alcoholic billionaire who funded the Arkansas Project to destroy Bill Clinton’s life for some random reason, they all do this and they’ll continue to as long as it works. It’s a strategy.
That’s what I’d do.
I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the Koch brothers recently, ever since I happened to read that David was unexpectedly, and after all these years, pushed out by his older brother, Charles, notorious eminence grise of the American political scene. It seemed surprising to me, not something I’d expected in any way. These guys should have it all right now. The Tea Party destabilized the Republican Party, and made it ripe for the capture of Trump. Now there’s a radical faction in the Democratic Party, too, an insurgent campaign against the center.
A New Republic article from 2014 called “GOP Death Watch: The Final Days of the Republican Party” pointed out that the big advantage the Democrats had back then was that our radicals had no part in our power structure (radicals should never have any power), whereas the Republican Tea Party was making it too difficult for the old guard, the John McCain style Republicans, to keep any order or unity among themselves.
They were all the way up in Bernie, even his campaign manager Tad Devine. He was Paul Manafort’s lead attache in Ukraine back during the Orange Revolution, and he was the first witness called at Paul Manafort’s trial because he worked for Manafort in Ukraine, as did Rick Gates, the first witness to crack to Robert Mueller.
Catch that. Three of the top strategists opposing Hillary Clinton in 2016 had been doing Vladimir Putin’s bidding in this capacity for longer than a decade.
How much more obvious can you get? It goes without saying, of course, that Putin is the biggest libertarian of them all. He is the head, the rest are the tentacles. Julian Assange of Wikileaks, who dumped the DNC emails, is a libertarian, too. They’re all in on it together! It’s on the front page of every newspaper, every day. Most Americans know this stuff instinctively, deep down in their hearts, along with something else:
Somehow, somewhere, their plans went horribly astray.
The feeling I’m getting from the world right now is that of great and utter tension. It does not have the feeling of being scripted anymore. It’s like it’s taken on a life of its own like an avalanche. They’ve lost control, and only Putin’s got the gambler’s nerve to enjoy it. He knows full well how little of Russia truly takes place under his will or even say-so. They know to shut up and go about their business in that part of the world; no one can take that away from them. Their muteness speaks for all of humanity on this one.
Tulsi Gabbard is not someone to trust, in our opinion. She’s just in it to deal out some cheap shots, leave some permanent, rankling schisms behind her, and run away chortling to plan out her next Tuggle Snuggle, horrid black widow that she is. Truly, she is a worthy successor hamstringer to her master the Bern. Her trolls are uglier than his, and I never thought I’d say that about anyone.
Going forward, it’s important for us to be especially mindful about who we support, and who we don’t support. Real Democrats are loyal and they know how to work with a team. They stay in the sane center, they pay heed to reality and the requirements of the position, and they don’t throw away their advantages by getting hasty. They corral resources, shore up trenches, dig their foxholes deeply and well- and above all, keep their own backyards clean of libertarian fakirs like the Tuggler. Gabbard, you are the one who is unqualified. If you want to throw reviles around, look in the mirror. You’ll see trouble with a surfboard gazing back at you.
First they came for the Communists, wrote Pastor Martin Niemoller during the grotesque misery that was the Third Reich, and I did not speak up, because I was not a Communist. That’s not the end of the poem, of course, but most of you will already know that. It’s been used so often in the last three years that it’s almost become a cliche. Just the same, it’s really been on my mind the last few days, as Donald Trump’s wicked attacks on the four Democratic congresswomen, that being Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, alternately flip-flops and intensifies.
I have been thinkhe poem’s very last line.
“Then they came for me. And when they did, there was nobody left to speak up for me.”
We’ve all got to learn from history.
Taken from this angle, it becomes clear this is not purely altruistic. It isn’t just about Representative Omar and the others- who are all nonwhite women, by the way, always favored targets of the Donald Trump variety. They have faced terrible odds to get where they are, and that is commendable. There is no question they ought to be safe in speaking their minds! To #StandWithIlhan is to stand for the rights of all humans this time. If we let them send her back, what will we ourselves deserve if and when the going gets rough? It’s unthinkable to leave her to her fate.
For one thing, she’s a human being. She’s received a massive spike in death threats since Trump pinned that awful video on hisYou don’t turn your head when somebody’s in trouble. For another, she’s a Democrat. Until we’ve got reason on a Tulsi Gabbard-level to assume she’s just controlled opposition, she’s one of us. Even if she is a terrible pest (which is only about half true, she is much less shrill than Ocasio and still eloquent), we’ve still got to have her back. It’s about us all when it comes down to it. This is about loyalty, national honor, freedom. Can we be outspoken in this country and have our voices duly heard? Can we disagree without deporting one another? Are we really going to let a big orange demagogue make us forget that in America, we fight just as hard for an opponent’s right to say something dissident as we would for our own?
That’s what it means to stand for a principle such as freedom to speak freely. To fight hard on behalf of those who annoy you, to stand up for people when it’s hard, may not be peaches and cream- but it’s necessary.
So here I am, speaking up for the socialists, even though I am not a socialist, against something that a socialist state would do to me.
Doggone it, man.
When this whole thing came to a head, when Trump’s lunatic supporters started chanting “Send her back!” I took a long, tired sigh, and shook my head glumly. Man, oh, man, I thought, repulsed and dejected. After all the swearing to God and chanting muttered mantras vowing I wouldn’t, here I am just the same, going back on my word completely, because I really have to have to stand for good old Ilhan, again.
How many times is this going to happen? I can’t believe I’m having to do this. Omar has muddied our pond quite habitually by now. After last week, when she and the other socialists voted together in a bloc to deny children toothpaste, I felt completely used. I swore that I would never defend her again. We stood for Ilhan before, after all, the actual day she blew her smokestack with her comments about September in 2001.
I was in New Jersey on that dark backward abysm of a day. On top of a mountain where on clear days you could see right into New York City across the Bay. On 9/11, it was clear as an unmuddied lake, or an azure sky of deepest summer, even with all the smoke. We all sat there silently for hours that day, praying they could somehow save at least the building, it was not to be. We had nothing but each other that day, all but two of us had been strangers before, but afterwards our bond was thicker than a sad, mute despair as we watched the towers fall together.
My dear friend’s fiance was on the top floor and he lost her within seconds. Hearing her refer to the worst day in America’s history so cavalierly made me wonder if she wasn’t really a terrorist, and even when I was satisfied through research that was a slander and told everyone so in my first #IStandWithIlhan article, but’s not like she appreciated it. We gave her a chance the first time, we cheered her victory which took place in the Year of the Democratic Woman, we even ignored her repugnant involvement with the Democratic Socialists and hailed the entrance of a new Millennial Democrat onto the stage of current events in politics. But she keeps on blowing it. With her votes, and with her mouth. “Some people did something” is not the way to refer to 9/11 inside the borders of America. I doubt I was disgusted less than Trump himself was, as the sound of that, but that is not the point. I will still fight for her right to disgust me just as hard as I would my right to disgust myself- like I’d do if I said nothing here and let the Trump crazies do whatever they want.
The strategy Trump is using is pretty basic, actually, it’s the well-worn Remington of Evil Politics textbook tactics- the old Divide and Conquer trick. He knows his base truly hates Omar, almost as much as they hate Ocasio-Cortez. They don’t just dislike these women, or find them pesky (like when Ocasio-Cortez stages a protest in Nancy Pelosi’s office over climate change which we were doing anyway). They hate them. And some of them wish to do violence to them. I’ve seen and heard things on Facebook you wouldn’t believe. We had a guy come on our Facebook Page one day and say “Understand this Democrats. If Trump gives the order I will kill as many of you as I can.”
You can see I too have had to deal with death threats- not to mention more than half a thousand attempts to hack our blog out.
That is what we live with, Americans. That is what we live with, world. Threats of gang-rape, attempts to use doxing by finding our people in real life to lay in wait for them, even people coming to our houses. Taking pictures of our pets. Writing ugly letters to our loved ones! There is absolutely nothing these people will not stop at, and it’s best not to kid ourselves that they’re all just blowing smoke. Remember that James G. Hodgkinson who shot Steve Scalise a few months after Trump took power? He was a crazed Bernie or Buster! We had mutual friends on Facebook.
Creepy.
Trump’s singling out of Omar, in particular, is dangerous because of all the Islamophobia over the last twenty years and before. His twisting of her words out of context puts her actual life in peril. They might kill her over this. Black and white lives have been taken for this kind of thing many times. Most of us remember who John F. Kennedy was; a guy named Martin Luther King Jr. comes to mind as well. I have always hoped to come together with Trump supporters on the need for stopping the spread of socialism, but now they have gone way too far with it. Someone could get killed here. A friend of mine pointed out that Ilhan Omar doesn’t have the kind of security Hillary Clinton does. She’s gotten multiple death threats made against her already. They spiked massively In Trump’s world, where he and his money are untouchable, consequences don’t seem very real. The guy lives in a bubble made of excessive wealth and dementia. He has to be stopped.
I struggled with this. This group of people has given me absolutely no end of trouble. At first, it was just policy points we disagreed on, but soon I came to realize the differences were far more irreconcilable. Socialism is a plague. They’re Bernie Sanders people, and Bernie’s the reason Trump won in the first place. Ever since 2015 they have viciously attacked both us and me personally- and it’s creepy how every time I write an article criticizing the Bern Chinese hackers come in the night and try for many hours to take our site offline. One girl, a charming young thing called Crystal Sproul, said that she and my other millennial peers were all going to get rid of me and “Continue berning your party to the ground.” It does not fill my heart with joy to have to stick up for them.
But that’s exactly when doing it full-hearted really counts.
Omar and I may well disagree on just about everything. But it’s still not right to say nothing while Trump goes around stirring up his people against her. When you go down that road, you’ll end up in the council-fires of the Nazis. An American Dachau is not something we can tolerate, even for those who want to go around lighting things on fire and berning them.
It is sometimes very hard to be part of a team. I wonder if Representative Omar wouldn’t agree. You want to stand by your own principles, but still use what little power you do have to help people out and raise awareness with, that’s what power is for. If Nancy Pelosi, who like Odysseus has been harried for years on end by the freshmen antics displayed by these women, can forgive them for the sake of decency and for the party, so can I. Therefore here we are, standing with Ilhan- again.
The disaster caused by the illegitimate 2016 election has widened like the crack in a dam during the Donald Trump era, and people all over the world are feeling the pressure. A radical tide has swept over the whole planet, attacking like a hydra from all over the political spectrum, and the only thing holding it back is the strength of what has always been the bulwark of democracy on Earth, the United States of America.
But they’ve got their guy in charge of it, right now. We’re in trouble. Bad trouble. Readers of this blog will not need to be told.
Lack of cooperation between the various segments of the left not only lost us every branch of government in 2016, which was bad enough. It also left the door open for all kinds of infectious diseases and poisons to wander in. We have staved this off so far because we Democrats have had one big advantage. We have always had a good, solid moderate core in the center of the Party dedicated to its upkeep and maintenance, and so we have achieved strength through our unity even in the two years we had no power. That is being challenged by the beginning of factious, tangled wrangling between supporters of one or the other candidate.
This cannot be allowed.
In many ways, I consider this to be the most important article I’ve ever written. This is a call to every remote reach of the world, a shout out to any and all Democrats on Earth, and it is coming from the gut like nothing I’ve ever felt in my whole life. Every cell in my whole body agonizes for it. Please understand and come to realize.
Democrats must come together. Now.
Unity is our last best hope. Without it, we may very well lose everything. We could be flat on our backs for the rest of our lives, and subsequent generations of our children would be born into something like slavery. For the love of all creation, for the love of the whole human race, and for the love of love itself, help us to keep this 2020 presidential race a good one.
We are not enemies, it’s just the opposite. We are a family. We must become one in spirit and resolve. The requirements of the position demand it. The consequence of failure is defeat.
The 2020 presidential election has taken on an apocalyptic significance. American democracy is at risk of dying. In many ways, Trump himself has proven a bit of a softy, much more bluff than bluster, but his friends are completely vicious and he can’t stand up to them. He is the weakest president we have ever had in terms of foreign affairs.
At this year’s G20 Summit, the third one we’ve had the miserable honor of covering in the Trump era, he joked around with Vladimir Putin of Russia regarding their hacking of our election on his behalf. Putin looked absolutely proud of him, loving almost, as if he were gazing on the form of a beloved pet. “Look at him! Isn’t he a good dog? Look at all the tricks he can perform, right on command!”
Sigh. Trump may indeed be weak, but he has got some very rough customers for friends. We have the resources to fight back. But we are in danger of losing them. We will lose them for a certainty if we don’t stand together.
Here at Millennial Democrats, the choice appears extremely clear and obvious, as obvious as the big blue link above.
We’re going to stand behind them ALL. With everything we’ve got.
Democrats, we have to be ready to support the whole Big Five with equal fervor. We all have to be really careful here because if we mishandle the position in next year’s presidential election, in the four years to come after we will get wiped right off the board. We have nothing except each other, and that has always been enough, especially since we all have had the morbid pleasure of running into Trump and Bernie trolls and Russians and bots. Any of these people would be good at the job and a giant-worlds-away leap better than Trump or the Bern, Russian cutouts that we consider them to be. We’ve been saying this all along. All we have to do is keep walking in a straight line. Forward Together.
We have to embrace and get to know every one of these people, who are good people and worthy ones to the woman and man. We’re going to have our picks, that’s only natural, and that is fine. Just don’t get ugly about it and descend into bitterness and acrimony. Democratic solidarity is the final weapon we have.
Remember when we succeeded in pressuring Trump into reopening the government after the #TrumpShutdown? What a great day that was. Roger Stone got arrested, and as one organism we rejoiced. “Why are they (Democrats) always so loyal?” he bemoaned afterward, tail between legs and licking wounds. We pulled that off because we stuck together.
We have got to preserve that solidarity if we want to continue on our path to victory- and salvation.
The Democratic Party is our only hope. We are carrying the torch for the light of freedom everywhere. It will fall in a day if we give up. We have to remind ourselves of that as many times as it takes. We have got to follow this thing through to the end. In regards to the 2020 election, that means we’ve got to take the part of every one of our Big Five, these familiar dear good leaders who we all have known for years. They are all worthy and capable enough to run the country. We’ll take any of them because we’re tired of the horrible Trump era! We’ve got little kids in dog cages on our Southern Border, and there’s no one who can save them except us. This is a crisis of more than material resources. This is about the country’s soul.
It’s time for some real talk, and I hope everyone hears me. This is only partially about us. Even us millennials- who, I’d like to remind everyone, is no longer the youngest generation of voters- are going to be gone in a few decades and all that will remain of any of us will be the work that we did for the cause.
We are going to be judged by the quality of that work. Future generations will either revere or revile us. In the end, there is no fate but what we make.
Speaking as a private citizen, love for the cause is why I do this. The sheer importance of it is too big to contain with words; I’ll just say it is why I will be here to the end. The cause, per se, is to advocate for the future wellness of the world and human race, including every one of us ourselves. Those are all that matters, and we’re the only ones fighting for them. Once again. We cannot drop the torch.
The cause right now means getting rid of Donald Trump, and that goal alone is where our loyalties lie, not merely in the persons of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar. They have shown up as our leaders, and we are grateful for all of them, but at the end of the day, it’s the good old code of American decency that governs us. We will support those who champion our values, and loyalty ranks high among them, so please do be forewarned. We will fight as hard as we can against those who refuse not to get aggressive.
If for your own reasons you really cannot stand one or all of these candidates, but you still are a good Democrat who perceives how unbelievably critical it is to bring the curtains crashing down on the Trump era next year, if you really want to support just your pick, I get it. No worries.
Just please don’t go on the attack. It’s exactly like our mothers used to tell us, cliche or not. If you can’t say anything nice, then don’t say anything at all.
The Big Five will remain so until well into the primaries next year, and during the interim, we need to have good things to say for every one of them, even if we’re currently competing. You don’t hate your opponent in chess. You shake hands both before and after the game because your opposition is momentary. You will be united all your life by your mutual love of the craft. We all share the same values, and we all serve the same cause. So in the name of that cause we hold sacred in our hearts, we must now commit to forging ourselves into one.
Every Democrat must stand firm with every other Democrat, and more now than ever before, for the moment of greatest peril is upon us. The reason why is as simple as it is profound.
In order to survive, we have to.
We are living in a political landscape that is currently dissolving, and as it does every day presents new questions, fundamental and human in their nature, some completely new. As they do, we need to separate, observe, and classify them. Dissolution in chemistry means the breaking down of complex compounds into their basic particles. Scientists use this technique as a way to collect feedback and data based on the contents of the issue, and that’s exactly what we have got to do. All of us, not just this or that candidate’s supporters. We have to sort out what kind of a position we are dealing with before we can chart a good strategy, and that is going to take us all.
This is why we need philosophy, as an aside, Republicans like Tomi Lahren who keep cursing it like animals on Twitter, but then again, you already know that. That’s why you’re attacking these programs now at colleges. A University System in Wisconsin recently in the town of Stevens Point became first in the country to eliminate history from the roster of viable degrees. That is a disastrous indicator for the future of our species.
Wisconsin was settled by Germans, a people that produced the philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, who said history was of the highest importance to a people of high civilization. Like Ronald Reagan, that great man is rolling in his grave to see what his ancestors are up to. He’s at the Headbanger’s Ball down there, and all because you Republicans are inflexible morons. We can count on you for nothing, and we know it.
Republicans of the John McCain mold have gone the way of the dinosaurs; most of those who had honor in 2016 are now Democrats. They have joined our ranks and we thank heaven for them, but for all those to be counted in their number, it seems like Trump has co-opted three more. Again with the hydra analogy. Hercules, at least, ought to be pleased.
It’s on us alone, Democrats. If we forget the past again, we have lost. We cannot drop the torch. We’ll just keep saying that, over and over. We cannot give up, and we cannot drop that torch. Not if the Red Sea should close around us. We have to hold the line no matter what. We’ve got to learn to be that rock in the river. Society itself may have to use us for mooring by the end. We must be ready.
Ethical, strategical, psychological problems are already arising every single day, and they will multiply like flies as this goes forward. Some of these may be completely new, and very difficult. Sometimes we run into a problem which is all three, like a recent one about candidates and what we will or won’t post about them. These questions involve the heart and soul of the Democratic Party itself, and we have to guide it because that’s who we are. Like chess, there are levels of difficulty engaged in the solving of these puzzles, but no matter what they are we have to manage it somehow.
If we do not, we will never defeat Donald Trump.
To us, and us alone falls the unenviable task of holding the center through the biggest moral crisis this country has faced since the Civil War ended. The Trump era has been a continuous disaster, an insult and an assault on. If we don’t find a way to get rid of him next year- if we, in the center, at least- don’t learn the terrible lesson of 2016 and stand together now, we may never stand up again.
Trump will be lawless like never before, he will have nothing to lose, even now he is feuding with the New York attorney general, and why? Because he is facing charges there as soon as he leaves the White House. State charges, which no amount of federal power can deliver you from. That’s a good part of why they didn’t pardon Paul Manafort. We know for certain now that they discussed the possibility of giving him a pardon seriously.
Trump will have every reason to kiss the impediment of our current liberal government system goodbye. Being a third term president would for him be the safest option. He must know this better than anyone. He talks about it all the time.
The monopolist segment of the global elite has been setting us up for this. I truly believe that. They’ve been linking up behind the scenes in increasingly ominous ways; just ask Jamal Khashoggi. From the right and left alike, they are coming for us. Every evidence points to this conclusion, like a giant red arrow of warning. This country hasn’t been a full democracy since 2017 according to the World Freedom Index. In fact, almost the whole world is yellow now, not green or blue. Trump constantly flirts with dictators, and Fox News jokes about his being one. Viktor Orban of Hungary, who was the first to use the new plan of discarding democracy gradually by democratic means, bit by bit, was just invited to speak here and did so this last spring.
What do you suppose he had to say? One doesn’t suppose it was a paraphrase from Braveheart. I doubt anyone said a word for freedom that day. This is not a game.
We know the far-right libertarians have hated the government that can regulate them all along, guys like the Koch Brothers and Vladimir Putin, the latter of which caused a stir just this week about how “liberalism” (meaning democracy) has “outlived its purpose”.
We can’t count on Europe saving us, either, they’re in a death-struggle with the New World Order section of the global elite themselves. Marine Le Pen has been leading Macron in the polls in France, in Germany Angela Merkel- the de facto leader and torchbearer of the free world since Hillary Clinton was robbed in 2016- cannot live forever. Britain is in crisis thanks to Brexit years later with compliments to their very own alt-right chefs.
The alt-right has cooked up a hefty pile for the final third of the states on Earth to still remain (mostly) democratic. Our allies overseas will be lucky to save themselves.
Democrats, we all but stand alone, even now, against a rising tide that threatens to engulf us all in earnest. We are the only ones left who have the power to resist and hold it back. Knowing this in our hearts, as we all do, will we stand as a nation undivided? Will we fight for liberty and justice for all? Or will we close our eyes and play make-believe like children, squabbling like rabble in the moments before our heads go under?
Dictatorships using tenets of both fascism and socialism have supplanted democracy everywhere. It’s us and a few embattled others overseas who are still carrying the torch for the light of truth and freedom.
We simply cannot drop that torch.
We cannot give up now. We have got to stay the course to the end or succumb to a dark and bitter fate. We will be powerless spectators as they do whatever awful things they want. We are going to lose absolutely everything. We tried to warn the Sanders cult of this in 2016 and they did not listen.
If we make that same mistake, we drop the torch.
If the Democratic Party descends into squabbling now, there is no way to prevent this unthinkable horror. Our solidarity is our only hope because superior numbers are the only resource that we have. If we descend into fractiousness and squabbling, we might as well throw that torch in the toilet.
We’ll be lost worse every day. We will not have anything to fight back with. A thug class like the ones the Nazis had will grow strong enough to suppress all of us, and they will do so under the aegis of legality. History has shown us before that the right will stop at nothing to maintain a position such as this once they have got it. There is no way to overstate the case as to how bad it could be.
We really need to think about the Holocaust.
Our numbers are stretched already, thin and sparse, like a Russian grocery store. Every time one of us throws their hands up in frustration and surrenders, the problem gets worse, as do our chances of coming out of this with a country we can all be proud to live in. Make no mistake, either. If democracy falls here, it will fall elsewhere, and within a span of time that is likely to shock us, all that we hold sacred will be gone. It will melt into the night, like the state of East Germany.
Remember when we pressured Trump into reopening the government after the #TrumpShutdown? That was necessary big time and only made possible by those who remained true blue. All of us suffered great stress and anxiety, and many suffered worse. For the sake of an angry whim, and for the longest period in American history we lost five billion dollars.
Coincidentally, five billion was the exact sum we wouldn’t give him to build his moronic wall with.
His pettiness knows no bounds, he’s got the most dangerous friends there are, and he talks like he’s in early-onset dementia. Who knows what he might do given four more years unrestrained? We’ll be giving him a free hand if we all go to war with one another.
Conversely, and objectively speaking, look at all we’ve accomplished in the last two and a half years when we’ve stuck together! Democratic dedication in the age of Trump has accomplished miracles. It’s no small list, especially considering the Republicans were left in control of all three branches of government for four-fifths of that time.
We hit them hard last year with a massive Blue Wave, retaking the House and staving off a net loss in the Senate, even though we had twenty-five mostly red state Senators up for election and they had only eight.
We managed to save the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, with a little bit of help from John McCain. We shook the very earth with our efforts to keep Brett Kavanaugh, alleged molester of women, out of the Supreme Court when Kennedy resigned under corrupt-seeming and payoff-looking circumstances. Had Republican and woman Susan Collins stood with us, we could have kept him out. But she didn’t.
As always, we stood with ourselves alone, arrayed in ragged armor for the battle of speaking truth to power.
We raised awareness about former Alabaman judge Roy Moore‘s awful past as an alleged serial rapist, and kept him out of the Senate, and replaced him with worthy Democrat Doug Jones, the first time any Democrat had held a seat there in several decades- although that raises yet another example. Time passes fast, and Moore is running again and doing just as well as he did before- just like Marine Le Pen, rising in the polls against Macron in France.
We’ll have to hold the line again on all this stuff very soon.
We can’t do that if we don’t observe one critically fundamental rule- Democrats do not attack Democrats. If the partisan fighting over who’s going to be the one in 2020 is allowed to keep intensifying, far too many of us will lose sight of that. We can’t afford it. We have to put out these fires wherever we see them if we want to save the forest.
As an aside, and for the sake of clarification, now seems a good time to remind ourselves that Bernie Sanders has not ever for a minute of his life been a Democrat, which utterly excludes him from this statement. We consider him an adjunct of Putin and Trump; see the link above if you need to know why. Tulsi Gabbard’s a deal-breaker too, for reasons of foreign corruption and cult membership, but we’ll have to cover that another time. Anyone else we will fight for as hard as we can.
It is along these lines that our new strategy was conceived. From this day forward, our mission is simple. To stamp out the fires of bitter faction wherever it rears its ugly head, and not by yelling and blustering, but with reason and kindness and understanding. The sword of truth is forged in debate and whetted by discourse, and dissent is the highest form of patriotism, which means we need to be having these discussions.
They will help us improve the final quality of our platform, a full half of how we’re going win the people back from the ogre Trump. But they’ve got to be debates and not Royal Rumbles. Unlike Fox News, our goal is not to compete with other cable stations, but to find new ways to do good for the people of the world. That always has been and always will be the sole purpose of this organization. It’s right out there on our Home page. Check it out.
If any of you Democrats, our readers out there, should happen to disagree, I encourage and even implore you to write in so that we can begin to talk it out. If you feel like there is something so critical that it’s worth breaking our fellowship over, then hadn’t we better talk it through? In order to begin to find some kind of solution, I need to hear what you guys think the crux of the problem is, and what you think we ought to do about it.
We have to find common ground before it is too late.
We need each other desperately, and that means we need to inspire and uplift each other, regardless of what candidate you’d like to see win the chance to compete in the biggest election in the primary. These candidates and us, their supporters, have got to keep their eye on that 2020 ball to the point where we become an indivisible mass again.
Again, remember the Blue Wave, less than a year ago, when all of us were united and resolved on standing behind whoever won? It was the only light there has been since this thing started, and together we preserved it. Alone we are nothing, but together, we are invincible, and we need to be.
Who else but we Democrats are so determined to carry the torch for health and truth, in the face of these looming new Dark Ages? Who else will lift a hand in staving off the fall of our world order? The others are taking sledgehammers to it, and Russia’s laughing all the way to the Iron Throne.
We would all of us be going into the dark. Together at last.
I’ve been thinking a lot about St. Augustine, the bishop of North Africa’s final Christian community, the Roman town of Hippo. He gave his life in defense of his city, an impossible task that he attempted anyway. His sacrifice has echoed through all generations to come.
Imagine how it must have been in those blasphemous horrid days. The year 400 A.D., Rome falling, disarray descending like an endless blanket of the chaotic, starless night everywhere that any eye can see. In the midst of it all, besieged and cut off on all sides, the small town of Hippo held the last torch that burned on the planet for truth in the hands of St. Augustine, the town bishop, no trained warrior at all. Determination and powerful faith gave his great heart an unshakeable resolution.
In the name of the same cause we all are fighting for, knowing there is no future but what we make, he determined to resist the coming hordes to his last breath, which he did.
Hippo stood before it fell, but fall it did, and in the final fracas Bishop Augustine was killed, murdered in the gutter by that era’s Bernie Bots and MAGA ravishers. But in the end, his victory reigned supreme. He was immortalized by his courage and was christened a saint. His example will stand as an inspiration to the final generations of mankind, and those who stood by him will be remembered and honored for their courage. When the stuff came down they held the line.
For the people of Hippo, the fight was unwinnable from the start, and after the city fell the final torch went out. It was not to be relit in Europe until the eleventh century, and the Dark Ages in between endured for three times the current lifespan of America. But it burned so brightly before the end that God himself must have seen it, and been proud. The story endures as a different kind of fire.
Augustine is a personal hero of mine and I refuse to shame his memory. I will carry that same torch through any storm I have to because that is what is needed. Our situation is far from as dire as unfortunate Hippo’s. At this time we can still win, and we must.
Refusing to give in to vicious cults, made up of sick members of global elites, is engraved in Democratic DNA by this point. We have guarded our gate now for a hundred years, fighting daily for progress and the people. The most vigorous political action has been needed to sustain us on our journey. It will always be needed. An active, informed citizenry must be present if freedom is to survive.
I remember how crushed I was the night of the election when it was read out to all of that HRC had officially been robbed. Distraught and furious, I felt like a wounded animal and lashing out in anger was all I wanted to do But my mentors rescued me from my own worst tendencies. They so fiercely demonstrated to me, in the beginning, their willingness to grimly fight on that my fury had been soon replaced by hope.
They taught me what it means to be a Democrat. Decency, loyalty, and love. Not cruelty and viciousness. Those are the arts of the enemy.
Where I had been floundering in despair, they had been keeping cool, waiting with the patience of hunters for their moment to strike back. Plan B was formed in an instant, and soon I realized there were about sixty-five billion more plans after that, to be rock-souped on a dime when the situation called for it, cooked up by all the Pattons I’d been given as my teachers. They took a lot of time with me.
What heroes. You folks know who you are.
I’m the young guy who’s always hung out with all the older guys (kind of weird, to see myself becoming the older guy myself! Time to grow up!) so baby boomers have always been among my best friends. They come kick it with people of all ages. We all get on well for the most part and we get a lot of work done, together. They’re all old tigers, like General Alfred Joffre of France, who spared his country a defeat in WWI with his cool head and his counterattack. The Miracle of the Marne was brought about by men who are in the same position as us people of every gender.
I thank God for the dear good baby boomer generation, our parents who saved us from the draft, and who showed me the way to the only truth I know: No good Democrat could ever quit at a critical juncture such as this. When we’re needed to answer the call to such a dramatic extent, we show up, just like our parents did before us. They made the Greatest Generation proud. Now it’s our turn to do the same for them.
So long as the United States are united, surrender is out for Democrats- and make no mistake, having no discipline and attacking each other like beasts are the same as surrender or worse. Our souls recoil from the very idea, abomination as it is. We are not going to give over to the same darkness that brought us sadly here.
The 2020 Democratic candidates must become one.
I am counting on you all out there to help me help our leadership to Make America Sane Again. Resisting internecine rivalry is no longer an option, but a survival-based imperative. We have got to start talking to each other, especially those who have already decided on a 2020 pick.
Again, our Big Five at this time are Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar. We have good things to say about every last one. We have got to get together and form a plan, and that means starting a discourse. Please feel free to invite us as mediators. We love all of you. God, I could not mean that more. This is our country and we are all countrymen (forgive the gender reference; countrypersons doesn’t quite have the same ring.)
A discourse works best when there are people involved who are deeply committed to the results. The requirements of the position mean we all have to be both passionate and flexible in regards to their own position. We need every single one of you, and losing you is a tragedy every time. So please, Democrats. Hold the course. We know what the risks in losing are but look at our reward for winning too. Democracy itself might survive because of our efforts. Our torch will keep on burning through this whole mess, because of you personally.
Stand behind all Democrats. If you do exactly this, we’re sure to win. But if they manage to divide us, they will conquer. We’re not about to let that happen.
For country, Party, God by all his great Names and St. Augustine, I am going to be there, and when I go I am going to kick the hell out of the wicked insane opposition and have some fun while doing it. You’ll be with me, and I’ll be with you, and we’ll be two fish of many in an ocean of deep blue.
I believe in my heart that at the finish line, almost all of you will be there with me. We are going to help each other stay calm and to keep all of our heads clear, and together we will hammer out the best way to go with this. In the end, we will have the best available. Trust due process.
During the interim, let’s stick close and tight with everyone. Get in touch with anyone you know who are participating directly in the campaigns of the Big Five. No Bern, who has always been Russian infested, no Gillibrand who stabbed Al Franken in the back, and no Tulsi Gabbard because she’s Tulsi Gabbard. The others are likely to remain obscure. It’s time to start thinning out the herd.
Today’s political reality says to me that it’s time to get behind them all. We need to tell them that they have to become a team. In a perfect world, there would be weekly strategy meetings held with strategists every day until the last day, because all involved would realize that this is only partly about them.
It’s about the cause. What were we saying again, about a torch and maybe not dropping it? That’s likely to be a good decision.
The decision as to who to support in the home stretch would be the same as our own model, to be made by consensus based on pragmatism and data, and all candidates involved would be deeply committed to keeping this match above the belt. They would be doing everything they could to help their supporters realize that any and all of them would be really good. Every single one is worth fighting for, with a full heart and spirit, and helping everyone to keep that goal foremost in mind is what we’re on.
For our part, we’re going to pledge right here and now to fight for all of them, with equal fervor in our hearts. If you will all pledge with us, next year’s victory will be assured, and we can begin the long labor of cleaning up the mess made by the radicals. Going forward, Democrats, please help us spread the word. We want to see a #BlueTeam2020, made up of these five Democrats and everyone else who realizes how needed they are. We are ALL going to take down Donald Trump.
The mess on our southern borders continues to get worse by the day, and nobody has quite known what to do. It came as a big relief to everyone genuinely concerned about the fate of our Southern American neighbors, who have come to us for help, that the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives has passed a bill to give these people some relief.
The House voted 230 to 195, mostly down party lines late Tuesday night to approve a $4.5 billion measure to send humanitarian relief to the southern border, addressing concerns about conditions of detention centers where migrant children are being held.
This whole time we have barely heard or seen a thing. Many have feared the worst. Finally CNN got to go inside, and there’s no doubt that it was about time, but still, no one knows for sure what they’re up to; about all we do know is it doesn’t involve mass graves. We know they’re not ordering mass shootings, but other than that there is very little positive to say.
The following observations were made by Clara Long and Nicole Austin-Hillery, the journalists assigned to the story’s coverage by CNN, but they spoke for us all when they published them.
We have been speaking out urgently, since then, about the devastating and abusive circumstances we’ve found. The Trump administration claims it needs even more detention facilities to address the issue, but policy makers and the public should not be fooled into believing this is the answer.
The situation we found is unacceptable. US Border Patrol is holding many children, including some who are much too young to take care of themselves, in jail-like border facilities for weeks at a time without contact with family members, regular access to showers, clean clothes, toothbrushes, or proper beds. Many are sick. Many, including children as young as 2 or 3, have been separated from adult caretakers without any provisions for their care besides the unrelated older children also being held in detention.
These meathook findings leave little room for equivocation and help to shed critical light on a basic fact of critical importance.
We are dealing with the totally awful here, combined with more than a dash of the hideously absurd, although all of us are used to that by now. It’s Trump, after all.
Among other things, we had to actually have a vote about whether or not these little kids should be able to get soap and toothpaste. In the world’s richest country. What an insult to the history of the world’s remaining superpower.
Republicans are boasting about the worst thing they’ve done since Iraq, but even they and Trump seem mostly miserable. They’re not handling this situation well, but they didn’t create it, either. It’s a problem for us all at this point and a highly complex one. It should be noted that the Senate passed relief legislature as well, so that’s good.
Certainly, medieval solutions such as walls are a laughable measure. These people are coming here because our laws allow them to. Unless that changes, the wall would be nothing but a pointless and ugly disaster. They’re coming in through legal ports anyway. It’s almost like the right is starting to see that a wall’s not going to stop legal asylum seekers, but of course, that is probably a pipe dream. Bipartisan is practically a curse word to the modern right wing Party.
Democrats, as usual, are desperately trying to clean up what we can and keep it from getting any worse. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was the one who put this relief bill together, to the surprise of absolutely no one, and her ability to keep her caucus in order has allowed us to keep things up and running. We even got some Republican votes.
Only one group of people in all of this wide nation’s Democratic Party stood in a bloc to oppose a bill that should have been a no-brainer for any progressive.
How unbelievable is that? This is Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar we’re talking about here. Omar’s father was a Somalian cab driver who was able to get in here only at the cost of great difficulty, and now she is a famous Representative with an important voice to be heard in the Democratic Party. She blew it badly here. We gave her a chance before, and wrote “#WeStandWithIlhan-This Time.”
No way are we sticking up for her now. Not on your life.
At least the moderate core of the Party remains decent. I don’t have a thing to say for the rest. I guess Ilhan Omar can’t be outright proven a terrorist, so there’s that. But she sure does have some awful friends, and by this I mean Bernie Sanders, who she just co-authored a bill with, just as much as the Council of American-Islamic Relations. They’ve been right here to undermine us whenever it has counted all along, and look what it could have led to this time! The sheer physical revulsion I feel towards that vote they made is indescribable. Let no one say that we have not reached out; we have. Over and over again. But they just don’t share our values.
Regretting the need to keep this article about the kids and not the endless evils of the socialists, it’s disappointing from anyone to vote for refusing soap to caged immigrant children. Why was it not possible for Democrats of all stripes to come together and pressure Trump into buying these kids some soap and toothpaste? The guy does not mind at all putting on these displays of pettiness, unreal for the richest country in the world, but we do!
So much for Giving me your tired and poor. Our citizens are mostly the types of people who bought into all that Statue of Liberty stuff about the “huddled masses yearning to break free”. They opened up a Japanese internment camp for one particularly lucky huddled mass. I hate the term “masses” anyway and find it smarmily arrogant and superior. Those are people in there, not chewed and processed cud.
That last is a rather dehumanizing metaphor, which brings us to our next troubling observation. These people are not being discussed in the language of respect we should use when we hear of the plight of other humans, wherever or whoever they may be. They’re being referred to as pests and vermin. This cannot be allowed. We’re on a slippery slope at this point.
This really is Nazi-like, and not in the same overdramatic and irresponsible sense that Ocasio-Cortez used to compare what’s going on right now to the Holocaust. It’s in the sense of negating the basic human value possessed by every human.
Respect and kindness from our fellows ought to be a birthright, possessed by all members of our species. It’s always been unequal, and that sucks enough. But now Trump and the right wing are removing it altogether. The next step really could be mass graves and the death camps, and if it does come down to that we’ll be up against it even worse than ever. We now have these four time bomb socialist candidates to deal with on top of the mountainous pile of our other challenges.
Three Republicans voted in favor of the bill, and just four Democrats opposed the vote — they were all freshmen Democrats, and arguably the highest profile freshmen from the 116th Congress: Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley. All four said earlier in the week they would vote against the bill due to its funding of Immigration and Customs (ICE), which they have called for to be abolished.
There they are! The usual suspects, on again about the abolishing of ICE. Is this really the time? Make a speech or something, if you want to make a meaningless gesture. This is the same thing they pulled when Ocasio-Cortez refused to vote to help us re-open the government.
Oh, and those pictures of her showing up like a dynamo on the border today like some kind of a Terminatrix? They weren’t even recent! The shame of it all!
How in God’s holy name are we going to get those kids out of those cages, if we can’t even come together on giving them toothpaste? There’s no end to the outrage we ought to feel! It’s like living in a Nazi cartoon! If only we weren’t so beat up and numb already, from the previous three years of traumas! And let NO one forget, not a single bit of any of it could have been possible except with the help of Bernie Sanders!
That is why people now are getting murdered down there wholesale, in many cases by predator Americans who have gone there to act out their violent fantasies.
Removing from the German public their perception of their Jewish neighbors as humans like themselves proved invaluable to the Nazis when they locked down all of Europe and began to hunt them down and kill them off. It needs to be clearly noted that we’re far from saying they’re doing anything like what the Nazis were doing- yet.
We do not wish at all to trivialize the Holocaust, which dwarfed in proportion by far any other human tragedy. AOC made a big mistake there. She then made it obvious that she’s anti-Israel completely by refusing a visit to Auschwitz with a number of survivors, another big mistake. But just because she’s shrill and hysterical doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a wildly overstated point. The longer this goes on, the more vicious Trump will get, and we all know how he looks up to that savage lot. There’s no telling where it all might end.
Sincere people of all political persuasions should be able to get that we need to take care of children. The fact that we can’t just says it all about the state of the nation today. One thing is for sure, and one alone. The radicals are not helping on either side. The Democrats are the only ones who can, so we need to support each other now more than ever. All old grudges should be piled up like fall leaves and lit afire. The stakes are too high.
Going forward, the plan is clear. We have got to do what it takes to link hands with our people down there on the southern border, and we’ve got to do it now. We want you to give us those kids back, Trump, and a rage is growing in us because you won’t. The Point of No Return is now on your horizon. Turn back now, and you may yet reach the shore. History will revile you anyway, there’s no getting around that anymore, but only as Mussolini, not as Hitler. Take it or leave it.
And give those bars of soap to those dog-caged children!
Thank the Lord God above, thought I, upon seeing these polls. At least people have finally woken up about one of the many vile former residents of the neo-Pandora’s Box that is the Trump era. Seeing Bern crash, the one man without whom none of this could have been possible has been the one really good thing on our entire political spectrum. Everything else is just tragedy and chaos, the whole miserable world is on the brink, it’s far from only here. In France, Marine Le Pen is leading Macron in the polls. This is a complete disgrace.
It’s been a long couple of years and no mistake. There’s not a single person in my life doing any kind of well in the slightest way. More than one of these, I am exceedingly sorry to say- like, really, sorry in the absolute extreme- are people I went to school with that bought into Bernie or Bust. They haven’t learned, either. One girl I know who voted Stein in the end just got fired from the Dollar Tree. Prettiest girl in the school, back in the day. God, how depressing.
I remember how hard I tried three years ago to tell people how it would be. Every front will be one on which we’re going to get assaulted, every day will be a fresh indignity, every right we have will be up for libertarian grabs, and every person in the country will soon be broke. They just didn’t care. You couldn’t speak to them. And when they were done, they did all they could to just blend right back in among the real anti-Trump Resistance.
Now, look at us.
Being right is one lousy consolation prize, but it is what it is. How do you like Bust, Bernie fans? Bust is here! We are living and wallowing in Bust, like pigs in slop! Are you really still naive enough to think Bernie Sanders can fix it? He hardly makes sense when he talks! This whole thing would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. “Curse God and die,” said the wife of Job, who refused.
It’s clear to me Job must have been a Democrat.
They’re saying the 2020 recession‘s going to come next year, but it really seems to me it’s here already. The stock market is showing signs of crashing.Gas prices are up by a dollar a gallon. Productivity is not terrible but the people never see it. The economists can run around with all the fancy words like “macroeconomics” they can find, but they can’t make it so people aren’t broke. When they say the economy is good, they just mean that most people have jobs. This standard terminology ignores the question of how much those jobs pay, or which classes of society reap the gains.
Wages are rising too slowly compared to the cost of living, which means the monopolists and not the workers are to capture the gains from productivity growth. Lower productivity also means less wealth available for the government to redistribute.
In other words, economists and commentators are calling the economy “great” because that’s what they’re used to doing. They just mean that most people have jobs. In fact, it’s a very real problem faced by people in America today, a serious problem that requires a serious solution.
How in the heck is it possible for anyone to conclude the shambling wreck we saw blathering about Franklin Roosevelt on TV Wednesday night is the man to handle it?
The point of having a State of any kind is to protect and administer well the resources possessed by the nation. Bernie doesn’t understand this, which is why his whole speech was so depressing to watch. Some of his ideas are similar to ours, some are blatant thefts, all are ill-explained and murkily conceived of. It’s just a disgrace.
Readers of this blog will not generally need reminders about why we all came together. A new entity arose online in 2016, on Facebook and elsewhere, one financed by a hostile foreign power and infiltrated by extremists from the left and right alike. Robert Mueller’s report stated clearly that the Sanders campaign was “central” to the Russian plot. We were woefully behind and unprepared compared to the opposition. Now we’re not, and that’s the one thing we’ve got going for us.
We’ve spent a lot of time since then vetting Bernie, and helping people to understand how insincere and ugly his whole crusade really was. People are listening, too. Bernie is now not only behind Joe Biden in the polls, either. Sincere progressives, serious ones, have begun to coalesce behind Elizabeth Warren, which is fine. Will they end up winning some liberals over to their plans?
If they make sense, of course, they will!
Traditionally, we’ve taken the side of the moderates when writing of Democratic politics. But progressive ideas are a big part of our time-honored Warren was not an enemy back in 2016. She did not fall for the “Run Warren Run” scam the year before, an attempt on the part of Bern’s eventual financers to hamstring Hillary Clinton using another female candidate- they chose Bernie instead! He wasn’t even their first choice. Warren was, and if it ends up being her in the end, she can sure count on my wholehearted support against Trump.
Why? Among many other reasons, I believe she’d do a better job handling economy and infrastructure. So would Joe Biden, obviously. Kamala Harris is a Senator, Pete Buttigieg speaks seven languages, and so on. These are people who could perform the tasks this country needs better than Donald Trump could. All of them are acceptable.
On the other hand, look at Bernie. Just look at him! That blue clown suit! “To me, democratic socialism means democracy, basically,” he said once, hilariously enough. He has got to know what he’s doing, by conflating our system constantly with one of left-wing dictatorship, but what of it? Taking a dump on the lawn is what he does.
The other night’s speech was all about hearing Bernie out while he finally finished giving a coherent definition of the “democratic” socialism he’s been telling us about for all these years.
His supporters do not know what socialism is, and their habit of using the term imprecisely has caused a tremendous confusion on the topic, and everyone has been very excited to hear what he was going to say to clarify.
Those who were expecting something new was to be disappointed entirely. It was the same tired stump speech from one rally after another back then.
We’ve covered this before, on this blog, but thanks to the good old Bern, here we go again.
Socialism and social democracy are just not the same things at all, period. They’re not even kind of the same. They’re really not even alike, except for the letters their names share. The whole misunderstanding is just a mess that Bernie made. It’s a deliberate and destructive confusion in terms. Nothing more.
One of these recommends upkeeping and protecting it, the other wants to light it all on fire.
Antifa protesters, getting stupid.
The former advocates a tempering of capitalism’s harshness with a social safety net. The latter consider it broken already and intends to make sure it’s broke some more. Darn broke, in fact. Wielding the hammer is Bernie’s plan.
Geez.
The progressive section of the community has two halves, like any other. There’s the rational and serious half, and there’s the Bernie or Busters.
The former knows that social democracy is the term in Europe used to describe adherents of a governmental system designed to augment and improve market-based, democratic societies using techniques derived from socialist theories, e.g the social safety net that gives American citizens the right to basic health care.
The latter want to pretend its whole deal means making the United States just like Norway and Sweden, but those are capitalist countries that protect the free market and recognize its importance. They are free people, like Americans who lived before the Trump era (according to the World Freedom Index, we haven’t been a full democracy since Trump took office), and they have stated over and over again that Bernie is wrong and that they resent his “socialist slurs”.
Bernie Sanders was lucky to be able to get to the Soviet Union in 1988 and praise all its stunning socialist achievements before the entire system and empire collapsed under the weight of its own spectacular failures. pic.twitter.com/bENmwVKi0g
Left-wing socialist countries like Venezuela, the Soviet Union, and North Korea use the markets as well, but they treat their citizens like captives and place bureaucrats in the places of businessmen. They create captive markets that monopoly capitalists can exploit. Capitalism per se is not the problem. It’s just a power source. The problem is the cancerous appendix it’s developed, the branch we call monopoly capitalism.
It isn’t like the left never has any good ideas or makes any good observations, and this excellent term is one of them. It was Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union, who first argued that laissez-faire capitalism had mutated into monopoly capitalism after World War One, and that the free market was now an illusion. Our answer is that this goes too far, the free market does exist, and the limits of human power often manifest in our inability to control it. But it certainly has gotten sick. We’ve been seeing this more and more in the last few decades.
So make no mistake- Bernie Sanders is one hundred percent right to be talking about economic inequality in the United States. It’s a HUGE problem, and we will figure something out about it. The first step is to know just what we’re dealing with. In that aspect, Bernie is in some ways a bigger hindrance than Trump himself. Confusion swirls after every word he says.
Sanders has made a contribution to humanity by getting people worried about this. It’s just that in refusing to talk about the role the left wing has played in the degenerating of our global order, he is deliberately blinding himself and his people to a critical half of how the whole thing has come to work. Left-wing and right-wing aren’t that important to guys like Putin and the Koch Brothers. They will finance any ideology if it helps them achieve their goals of world domination; a critical component of fascism. The threat is two-pronged, and one head is not less dangerous than the other, big talk from one about helping the “masses” notwithstanding.
The socialist powerbrokers, like Raul Castro or Nicolas Maduro, eat like kings themselves off the deals they do with the capitalists they despise. Left-wing dictatorship is no less loathsome than right-wing dictatorship, and all dictatorships today are totalitarian, meaning Stalin and not the Tsar, for example. But Sanders didn’t talk about them.
We’re in trouble here.
It certainly is true that right-wing type dictatorships are badly on the rise. Sanders was right to bring up Hungary’s Viktor Orban, for example. That’s the guy who came up with the model they all want to use, to get rid of democracy using democratic means. It was disgusting when Trump invited him to speak over here last month.
But why not Nicolas Maduro? Wouldn’t the Venezuelan example have been worth mentioning, as a way for the Bern to establish himself as a thoughtful, generous-minded future crafter of American policy? Would that not have been a good time for a concession statement? The display he made the other night was disgracefully unserious. My English 1A teacher would have failed him. The rubric we use would have done him like a chainsaw.
Sanders didn’t want to talk about Maduro because he calls himself a “democratic” socialist, which suits his agenda. That is unforgivably misleading and deceptive. Bernie owed it to the people to show us he understands that dictatorship of any flavor is equally horrible and wrong. In the timeless accusation of the Big Lebowski, he completely failed to achieve. Sure, Jair Bolsonaro’s presidential victory in Brazil was and is troubling in the utmost. But Venezuela also is collapsing! The crisis on the southern border is largely due to the failure of socialism!
The Trump administration can and should be justly reviled for the methods they have used to deal with the problem, as locking little children in dog cages cannot be considered right no matter what the circumstances are, but they didn’t cause it. This willingness to ignore the other side of the problem was the primary fallacy of his blind-in-one-eye argument, as presented on CNN the other night. It has been all along.
Going forward, look for Bernie’s name recognition and past enthusiasm to fade in comparison to the plans and viable paths to solutions offered by other candidates.
You can’t even squeeze blood from a turnip, let alone a viable political theory we can build a working system from. St. Bernard is not Karl Marx.
If we ever need a President of Post Office Renamers, Bern, we’ll give you a call.
The long-awaited Office of the Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III‘s thorough and explosive Report on the Russian interference into our 2016 presidential election, and the obstruction of justice issues that arose during the subsequent investigations has raised like never before the question of whether or not to impeach Donald Trump for what clearly are extremely serious offenses against our democracy.
It should be understood going in that all of us will be going into the dark together, in what may well prove to be the most consequential decision of our lifetimes. In deciding the question of the fate of our current illegitimate, babyish president Trump, the Mussolini of our times, any discussion of the topic must begin and end with that.
There will be trouble in every last street and bar and coffee shop in the nation; brother will turn on brother. There will be a rage on both sides like nothing we have seen since the Civil War, exceeding by far what we saw in the 70s with Richard Nixon and Watergate. There will be more than one event like Charlottesville, where our sister the martyr Heather Heyer was run down by a cursed soul and dragged to her death behind his van. We’re pleased to report he’s now rotting in prison. But that too is one more link in the chain.
Elsewhere down South, where many people like the men below would rather be Russians than Democrats, internationally known televangelist Franklin Graham is literally telling his followers to prepare for civil war if impeachment proceedings against Trump go through. People listen to that guy down there. If they start giving orders to open fire, it is our opinion that they will do so. Without a doubt.
Red, sad, and confused Americans.
Anecdotally, we had one sick man named Rene Hollan visit our Facebook Page and say,
“Understand this Democrats. If Trump gives the order I will kill as many of you as I can.”
We gave that to the FBI the following morning.
There were hopes, in the beginning, that the likes of John McCain and Susan Collins and once strident Trump critic Lindsey Graham would eventually realize just how crooked he is when the Mueller Report finally came out and proved he’d benefited willingly from Putin’s help. But neither the voluminous document itself nor the subsequent comments of Robert Mueller that essentially proved Trump a criminal has proved to be the game-changer we had hoped for. This is not the Republican Congress of the 1970s that acted with honor during Watergate.
Insofar as Trump’s sleazy role in it all is concerned, it seems that a lifetime’s worth of doing deals with a wink and a nod allowed him to maintain plausible deniability- barely. On the question of obstruction, the case is far more straightforward, everything from trying to fire the Special Counsel Mueller to trying to get former White House counsel Don McGahn to change his story on a number of particularly ham-handed attempts at co-opting a good civil servant. The web of lies, untruths, and viciousness Donald Trump has spun around himself is like a leper’s shroud, hard to see through.
The common strand of corruption is the only thing obvious and unquestionable.
We all live in the madhouse as a result of trying to come to terms with it all, but at least about one thing, there can be no doubt at all. The man is deeply corrupt, we say again, and he’s been a real disaster for America.
But that is not quite the question we face.
Trump is an unworthy leader in every possible way, yes. He cheated and bullied his way into the White House. But although it was a blatant theft, the unpleasant fact remains. In the end, he did win the election, and his tenure in office is already a fait accompli. Nobody’s talking about the 25th Amendment and removing him due to insanity, more’s the pity. Given that, and from what we know for sure as of this minute, can we really say we’re certain he should be impeached? In lieu of all the chaos and the cost?
All this is to say nothing of the fact that any measure of impeachment we do try would at this time merely be symbolic. It will never, ever, ever pass a Republican-controlled Senate. Impeachment may well be getting considered by our strategists as a nuclear option of sorts, a last-ditch attempt to prevent him from running wild completely between next year and 2024 if the great tragedy strikes a second time. With a Democratic Congress, we could remove him if we had to. But unless we are patient now, that will never happen.
We’ve got to think strategically here, with our heads as well as our guts. Trump wants us to try and impeach him, because he knows it is the one thing we could do to turn him into a pitied figure, one the public might actually view sympathetically. The stakes of this are too high for premature attacks made for the sake of showy idealism.
It may well be that national honor will force our hand in the end, but we ourselves do not have all the facts yet. A vast amount of research and contemplation must go into formulating a workable strategy here, for all of us Americans are now dancing on the razor’s edge together. There’s no need to bother asking me what I’d like to see happen to Trump for all of this as a private citizen; just look around. But in terms of the law, things are somewhat different.
Fortunately, we’ve got the best legal minds in the vast United States of America working on it around the clock as we speak, and under the most competent leader we could ever want: Nancy Pelosi, whose talent for organizing her caucus and keeping track of time is unparalleled, and gave us Obamacare among many other a legislative score.
Having Nancy Pelosi back in the Speaker’s chair was the single most immediately crucial factor in the Blue Wave of 2018.
She got more important bills passed in her first six months in office back in 2008 than the Trump administration has in nearly three years. In short, she’s good. Really good. And that is good for us. Because whoever has to take this on had better be the best. To impeach or not impeach is largely her decision.
In April 1970, while in session, Congressman Gerald Ford raised an old rhetorical question: “What is an impeachable offense?” Ford at this time was the House Minority Leader (Pelosi’s job pre-Blue Wave 2016-2018), and his answer to the question was stark and illustrative.
That majority in today’s House of Representatives belongs to the Democratic Party. We definitely do have the right to start these proceedings.
That is why we are being so careful!
Impeachment is an utterly drastic step, a divisive and frankly tragic one, regardless of the outcome. They do not make the country look good, to say the ludicrous least. Lurid Ken Starr the pornographer wiped slime on the courts that will never come off when he painted his lurid fantasy tales about the sexual exploits of Bill Clinton, the second president to be tried for impeachment in the Senate. The Republicans were annihilated in the next Congressional elections- just as we Democrats were after Nixon.
The reason why? Both Clinton and Nixon were very popular among their respective camps, who judged themselves abused, whether or not this was the case. Retributive backlash in the form of division and strife swept the country twice and left rankling wounds in the hearts of members of both parties. It set the stage for a third one to be totally apocalyptic.
In closing, we must keep in mind going forward that impeachment is nothing to speak of lightly. It rips countries apart. It may well prove necessary to give it a try in the end- but not without first considering every option with meticulous care.
While it is not easy to be patient about this-for surely, We the People have never before had such a surreally egregious cause- it is vastly important to understand how high the stakes are and how dangerous the strategy would be. It’s an incredibly tough call given the circumstances, which is why we at Millennial Democrats haven’t weighed in on it hard either way. It is our opinion that Hillary Clinton’s recent suggestions involving televised hearings and utmost caution provide an excellent roadmap for the future.
This observation leads us to the primary thesis of the article. We have got to stand behind our Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, who is one of the smartest and toughest people in America today.
We have always held Pelosi to be strongest by far for this position of high power in Congress. Back last fall, everyone mostly did, and nothing has changed. Even the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was back then the sworn enemy of every moderate everywhere, ultimately decided not to oppose her on practical grounds. If you want to get anything done at all, you’ve got to have good leadership. We have the best, and most of us have known this all along. She is our Speaker of the House, and make no mistake.
This decision is all but hers alone.
In closing, Nancy Pelosi has been our choice to be our leader from the Trump era’s Day One. She is by far the person in the best position to make the call, and whatever way it goes, it is our firm opinion that she’ll have made it. We need to support her fully in any case and circumstance.
The one thing we cannot afford right now is for our coalition to dissolve into more fractious squabbling. The world needs our power now more than ever, and to bring it to bear, we must centralize and fully focus it. There is only one person in all of these vast United States of ours who can do it as God knows it must be done, and that person is Nancy Pelosi.
The entity known as the far-right conservative entertainment show Fox News Network has become a big problem for America. Under the reign of Donald Trump, which never would have been possible without them, a new Dark Ages era of falsehood and deception has begun. Their talking heads have become a sort of private-sector State TV, and by the day they become more brazen.
Something has to stop them eventually, and the American people still can if they decide to rise up righteous. We’ve got to raise awareness about Fox “News”. They are not a real news station legally as well as in fact. They are not subject to airwave regulation by the FCC because they are just a cable show.
They can lie whenever they want without any penalty. And they do!
Judging from current events, it’s hard to pick a winner as to which recent event inspired us to write this story now; any other day would have done as well. The now-infamous Pelosi hit video on “Lou Dobbs Tonight” seems a reasonable place to begin.
Facebook, which has resolved on being dishonest and Russian infested itself, refused to take it down, which got a lot of justified heat slung at them, but they weren’t the real culprits this time. Liar Fox hosts were, but that didn’t raise many eyebrows. The whole world has known for years they’re just right-wing talking heads. Most of us have long since gotten used to being lied to by Fox, and we know on whose behalf.
The Republican Party, and the monopoly capitalists worldwide who are footing the bill for them.
The Republican Party, or more accurately its extremist wing known as the Tea Party and Fox “News” have a lot in common. They have the same ostensible values, but more importantly, they share the same financiers. The New York Times did a piece in 2010 titled “The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party.”
Libertarian Rupert Murdoch, the creator of Fox “News”, is a billionaire and was numbered in stone among their ranks before he retired. His fellow libertarians and allies Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries were the other chief culprits, unsurprisingly. Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial — a cause that forestalls threats to Koch Industries’ vast fossil fuel business.
Which “news network” has been pushing that line the loudest? We don’t even have to tell you.
As we have discussed many times on this blog, “libertarian” is the new word for monopoly capitalist, or fascist. Whenever you think of Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries, that’s who we’re talking about. A total media monopoly has been a Koch agenda item for years. Hawaiian representative Tulsi Gabbard, of all people, plays a strange role in their world. The arch-villains of Occupy Wall St, a dark money private political empire designed to promote far-right causes.
The Murdoch family is one of the biggest players. The amount of money they have formally given to the Republican Party is vast. Who knows what they’ve been up to since Citizens United? One can only speculate, and look at what we know for sure in the meantime.
Kathleen Ronayne at OpenSecrets.org put together the following statistics, leaving no doubt who Fox and the Republicans are getting their bread buttered by.
Since the 1990 election cycle, Murdoch has contributed about $750,000 to federal candidates and political committees, according to research by the Center for Responsive Politics.
Of that sum, 80 percent — or $600,200 — has benefited Republican candidates and committees, including a $250,000 contribution to the National Republican Senatorial Committee during the 1990s, when the committee could still accept unlimited “soft money” donations.
These days it’s the son of Rupert, Lachlan Murdoch, who has run the place since 2017, and he is no better than his father.
When he took over, he promptly sold nearly every anti-Trump asset they had to Disney, including the Simpsons, their one contribution to humanity. King of the Hill too, I suppose, but on the other hand, we lost Beavis and Butthead out of the deal.
Speaking as a private citizen, I don’t think it was worth it. Every day, like boll weevils, they eat away at the strands of what Americans believe is going on.
Earlier today, when Robert Mueller made his first public statement regarding the report that bears his name regarding the Russian interference in our election, they swung into action right away. Headlines bearing such trivial names as “Laura Ingraham says Mueller ‘attempting to resuscitate the corpse’ of his report'” and “Mueller statement made for ‘bad day’ for Pelosi, 2020 Dems, Trump campaign manager says” proliferated all over the Internet within an afternoon.
The people claiming that the contents of the Mueller Report are anything but a disaster of the highest scale for America are part of the problem, and as usual, Fox hosts are leading the charge. The wrigglings of Sean Hannity were as loathsome as those of Glenn Greenwald (almost; at least the former will admit what team he’s on). We’re not going to get into that in this article, however. We’re going to stick with Fox and hope that Mr. Mueller won’t mind too much our lack of focus in his work today.
Fox “News”, for never again will we write the very words without using quotation marks, a practice I am hoping will catch on, is not really a news station at all. It’s part of 21st Century Fox, a cable entertainment network, and this is of the utmost importance because it explains why they can lie to us this way so systematically.
MediaBiasFactCheck provides the background.
Founded in 1996 by Rupert Murdoch, Fox News Channel, also known as Fox News, (FNC) is an American basic cable and satellite news television channel that is owned by the Fox Entertainment Group, a subsidiary of 21st Century Fox.
Catch that? Entertainment! This will set the standard for our entire evaluation of this clumsy version of State TV we derisively call “Faux News”. Cable networks are not real news networks, at least not in the sense that the Big Three stations (NBC, ABC, CBS) are, because they do not go out over the airwaves. They are therefore not subject to Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, airwave regulation.
The FCC controls the airwaves. That’s their task. It’s their job. Their only job! And who among us has not asked before, with all the constant misinformation, the innumerable floods of lawsuits over wrong stories, the countless times they have been sued, why doesn’t the FCC do something?
Well, actually, for the same reason Robert Mueller didn’t charge Trump with a crime! They don’t have the legal right! The FCC has no jurisdiction over cable. Neither does CNN, of course, but they adhere to journalistic standards more than three-fourths of the time. Fox can’t even make halfway.
They only tell the truth on the air 42% of the time.
They’ve been using it as State TV, like in Russia, you know; the dictator’s mouthpiece, his most accessible way to lie directly to the people. But actually, it’s just like him, sham to the core and nowhere near the inner circle. We should be telling people this every time it comes up. Fox is NOT a news network because it doesn’t get to use the airwaves. It’s got to crawl through the ground like slithering worms in cables.
Cable television is far less regulated and held to standards far less rigorous than a real television station. They alone are the supreme arbiters of what they can say or not say during their slots of television, and cannot get in trouble for lying, which they do constantly. They are in no way the same as a Big Three airwave station.
To get our neighbors to see how worthless Fox really is, we need one simple equation and to raise awareness about it.
News is “fake news” if it has no journalistic standards, be they chosen or enforced by airwave laws and the FCC.
Those standards are defined by the journalistic tradition, and by national airwave laws.
Fox does not go out over airwaves, nor do they value journalistic standards.
Therefore, Fox = fake news.
Fox will lose all its power to mislead our people with lies if we raise enough awareness about this fact, which is, of course, the goal of this article. Fox But we’ll get back to that. In the meantime, let’s look at how much faith 21st Century Fox, of which Fox “News” Network is just a part, has in the truthfulness of the talking heads it’s hired.
Company makes no representation or warranty whatsoever regarding the completeness, accuracy, currency or adequacy of any information, facts, views, opinions, statements or recommendations contained on the Company Services and/or the Content.
Unbelievable!
A little background about the channel itself seems in order. Fox “News” was created by Australian-born American media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who launched it on October 7, 1996 to 17 million cable subscribers. It has gained in power and reach since that time tremendously, and its brazenness has grown beside it twice as fast, a mutated golem made of mis- and dis- information.
The word “disinformation” comes from the Russian “dezinformatsiya”, meaning ” false information given to deliberately deceive”, and so we mostly think of it as something Russian. Certainly, to say the least, disinformation strategies of the type Russia used to interfere in our 2016 presidential election cycle have become a problem in today’s world. But the Russians are hardly the true masters.
Here in the United States of America, we also know a thing or two about getting lied to by our president. We know too that his primary way of doing it has become his own personal, privatized version of State TV- Fox “News”.
What Fox has done over the years, or even just during the election, dwarfs what the Russians did to the point of demonstrating their accomplishment as puny. The Kremlin got a few ads through to people on Facebook and held a few rallies; definitely creepy, but absolutely nothing compared to what domestic mouthpieces are capable of. Russia was able to goad an enormous bull, not become one.
Compared to what Fox is capable of, they’re nothing. Small-time pikers, and no mistake. You don’t have to take our word for it, either. Consider rather the words of Ralph Peters, a former Fox News strategic analyst and a retired lieutenant colonel in the United States Army who left the network last year in March, disgusted with its sycophantic coverage of Trump and the vicious rhetoric of its talking prime time heads.
Peters said specifically that he could not “in good conscience” remain with an organization that, he argued, “is now wittingly harming our system of government for profit.”
He went on letting them have it, too.
“In my view, Fox has degenerated from providing a legitimate and much-needed outlet for conservative voices to a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration,” Colonel Peters wrote in his message, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.
As a people, we’ve gotten so used to being lied to by Fox that even the most acutely aware of the problem tends to have to shrug their shoulders at this point. But 99% of the slander thrown at Hillary Clinton in 2016 came from that direction. Varying aspects of what we know as the conservative media machine cooked it up over a quarter of a century, which illustrates and highlights the crux of the problem. Here in the land of the free, one of the most double-edged swords there is free speech.
Free speech is why I can write these words without having to fear death or the concentration camp. But it is also why we must tolerate Fox “News”, the Republican mouthpiece, lacking in all credulity- and yet, something I would still fight for their right to do just as hard as I would my own. In a democratic society such as ours, we have no choice but to grin and bear it. . Nothing true or useful comes to the people by way of it. It’s actually the polar opposite of news, which is daily information given by professionals, intending to inform the people about current events. Fox’s intent is to waylay and confuse.
What we, as a nation, have gotten used to accepting as a valid source is really one of the most wicked and egregious disinformation campaigns to take place in all of human history! It has not been by any foreign power that this disinformation has been unleashed on our people, but on our very own television sets, playing twenty-four hours a day nationwide. People are used to it, so they accept it as credible.
Nothing could be more inaccurate.
Fox “News” is NOT a news channel. It’s an entertainment channel, like everything else on cable. Cable news is never news at all.
When world leaders, be they figure of states or high-profile figures from civil society, deliberately employ untruth against their own people, they are without a doubt using a method of repression, and a very costly one at that. In the Donald Trump era, weaponized lying has become easier and more common than ever before. Fox News has become his primary mouthpiece.
This is a disaster for America because such a state of affairs cannot help the inflicting of large-scale corrosion of democracy, regardless of the state it’s taking place in. If a country values its democratic system, its citizens will have to find ways to ward off this threat from time to time.
Otherwise, it will not survive.
I can hear someone asking, off in a parallel universe perhaps, what’s the harm in it? Let them have their pleasant delusions if it helps to keep them at work. Is this really something we have to fear will badly wound America?
That is why James Madison wrote the Federalist Paper 10th.
A stupid and incompetent citizenry is something no nation will long survive, so you better believe it will badly wound America. It already has. Fox News disinformation ends breaking up families, making people permanently angry, and seeing to it they’re uneducated on as many subjects as possible.
Rolling Stone Magazine provides the following sad anecdote to illustrate the tendency’s nature.
Jen Senko believes that her father was brainwashed. As Senko, a New York filmmaker, tells it, her father was a “nonpolitical Democrat.” But then he transferred to a new job that required a long commute and began listening to conservative radio host Bob Grant during the drive. Eventually, he was holing himself up for three hours every day in the family kitchen, mainlining Rush Limbaugh and, during commercials, Fox News.
“It reminded me of the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” Senko says. “He used to love talking to different people to try to learn their language, but then he became angry about illegal immigrants coming to the country, that they were taking jobs from Americans, and that English was becoming the secondary language.”
Studies have proven an actual physical effect of this by studying the brains of Fox News viewers. Author Daniel Goleman has coined the term “amygdala hijacking” to describe what inflammatory rhetoric and imagery are designed to do: trigger the emotional brain before the logical brain has a chance to stop it. The anger centers of their brains are literally more physically developed than those of healthy people. It’s like benchpresses for a bad temper.
In the year 2000, hosts like Hannity and the now-disgraced and silent Bill O’ Reilly made themselves the champions of the second Bush regime. This made them some friends. They learned a big lesson from it, too, one they’ve been revving up the engine off of ever since.
Misleading your viewers and using base anger to fight with is a quick and easy way to gain support from embittered people-whose numbers grow larger with every war and crisis. Divide and conquer is the oldest trick in the book used by the rich by preying on their fellows, in or out of America.
After 9/11 took place, while all the world was mourning and gearing up for war, Fox was making bigger and bigger bank as a result of their conservative alliance. They experienced a 440% increase in viewers, blowing the doors off comparable news organizations like CNN who don’t use wild speculations and click-bait headlines.
They got so big so fast, in fact, that when now-disgraced former CEO Roger Ailes came right out and said they are not a news organization in 2007, nobody much really heard him. They were too busy listening to Bill O’ Reilly and Sean Hannity instead. Hannity is a particular problem these days, as Trump’s good buddy, people give a lot of undue credibility to the lies told by him- a cable network entertainer, not a journalist.
Why are Big Three news networks like CBS or NBC or CNN so constrained by the truth while Fox is not? Surely the mighty Federal Communications Commission should be able to call Fox News to command, so why doesn’t it?
Actually, though, the FCC has no power over Fox or CNN, because both are cable shows and ultimately designed for entertainment! This is key. The difference between Fox and CNN is ideological. One chooses willingly to use journalistic standards. The other does not. Neither one is forced to! Fox is not legally obliged to tell the truth on the air.
Fox isn’t subject to FCC airwave regulation because it isn’t on the airwaves! Clever, right? Now they can spout all the hideousness they want and still dare to label it the truth. CNN is truthful by choice, but people think it’s because they have to be. That is not true, and it is almost certainly why the FCC doesn’t chop Hannity’s head off.
They nearly destroyed Howard Stern just for being annoying.
Make sure to catch that last part. Fox, the so-called “News” Network is in no way legally obligated to tell the truth about anything! They are a feature offered by the entertainment company 21st Century Fox. Entertainment is allowed to lie! It’s all just part of the show.
Making them tell the truth would spoil the effect, and our system doesn’t force them to. Not any more than USA’s client the World Wrestling Entertainment has to come right out and say pro wrestling is fake. People know it in their hearts, but they want to believe in the wrestlers, so they do. They like a good show. It’s exactly the same with Fox.
Although it should have been, it is not true that Fox has been made to start using a disclaimer saying “For Entertainment Purposes Only”. That was an April Fool’s joke in 2017 circulated by reporters, designed to make readers laugh- and to make them think. But it’s definitely true that entertainment is how they think of themselves. Ailes told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015 that he does not consider the other basic cable news channels — CNN and MSNBC — to be Fox’s competitors.
“We’re competing with TNT and USA and ESPN,” he said.
Discussion about American political issues today-meaning every single facet of life in southern North America- means a debate, unless you’re in a room where everyone agrees with you. Those debates will see a Fox-trained cadre putting forth the opinions of trolls like Hannity as a valid counterpoint to anything, even proven scientific facts. People take him seriously and believe the things he says.
Recently he said the immigration deal we nearly came to with Trump a “Garbage Compromise”. But actually, Hannity himself is an absolute, complete, and total trash can. He didn’t even go to school for this, he was working as a housing contractor when he randomly volunteered for radio and offered himself out as a mouthpiece for rightist nonsense.
If you’re willing to lie without repentance, there’s always some monopoly capitalist hoping to bring down America with your help.
Hannity has paid off for them with some real whoppers over the years. The anti-Obama movement of birtherism, 2016 voter fraud, “deep state opposition” of a “Shadow Government” – a network of government officials that are working to hinder the Trump administration. Conspiracy theories about the Seth Rich murder, and so on, leading up to the biggest lie of all- that Debauched Donald was fit to run this country.
It’s all a big show, not truthful news, but then again it was not meant to be. As the Fox “News” Network’s own CEO Roger Ailes said, they’re really competing with football and pro wrestling. It’s all for ratings and money- money that comes from billionaire libertarians like the Koch Brothers and their founder Rupert Murdoch.
Hannity will say whatever the Murdochs want him to.
That’s a big problem when most of it is not true; a third at most of Hannity’s public statements were rated fully true by Politifact. A recent Fairleigh Dickinson PublicMind Poll revealed that most Americans get their political knowledge from Sunday morning political shows on television. These “do the most to help people learn about current events.” That would seem to confirm their opinion.
However, listen to the rest of the story.
“[S]ome outlets, especially Fox News, lead people to be even less informed than those who don’t watch any news at all.”
Again, this is because Fox is not a news channel. It’s entertainment packaged as news to mislead and stultify the American people. Great misunderstanding and bitterness come from believing things that just aren’t true. Real consequences arise from surrendering our objectivity.
Fox viewers have been getting angrier and angrier for decades, their bitterness manufactured and exploited. And who do their Friends at Fox lead them into feeling bitter towards? Liberals, progressives, anyone who wants to help the people. Anyone who isn’t just like them.
A full 60% of Fox News viewers describe themselves as conservative according to a 2012 survey by the Pew Research Center. According to John Ray at Data for Progress, “Across a variety of political and cultural attitudes, Republicans who report getting their news from Fox are significantly to the right of Republicans who don’t.”
Studies galore have been done to measure these tendencies, which should be well-documented and understood. Every one of the organizations reaching these conclusions is similar to MediaFactChect, a neutral nonprofit organization that exists to classify and track partisan bias levels among political media entities. They do this according to a rated standard political spectrum, going as always from extreme-left to extreme-right.
A related group, PunditFact, measures their commentators’ honesty. These standards are both logical and apolitical, and can reasonably trusted as far as anything else in the written world can.
Fox News is given by MediaFactCheck a Bias Rating very near the extreme end of the pole as Strongly Right, for reasons that are really rather damning. We’ve included them in blockquote below.
These media sources are moderately to strongly biased toward conservative causes through story selection and/or political affiliation. They may utilize strong loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes), publish misleading reports and omit reporting of information that may damage conservative causes. Some sources in this category may be untrustworthy. See all Right Bias sources.
Overall, we rate Fox News strongly Right-Biased due to wording and story selection that favors the right and Mixed factually based on poor sourcing and the spreading of conspiracy theories that later must be retracted after being widely shared.
They also score badly by the standards of PunditFact, a second and related organization’s tool for measuring the percentage of truthful reporting done by political analysts on the stories they discuss and the terms they use to describe them. We decided to include the numerical figures below, as a stark quality comparison between the center and far-right journalists is to be found there.
Currently, at Fox and Fox News Channel, 58 percent of fact claims made by pundits and on-air personalities have been rated Mostly False, False or Pants on Fire. NBC and MSNBC were not great either, but their work still represents a significant improvement versus Fox at 45%.
CNN scored best with only 22 percent of their fact claims not making it through the filters and most of those coming from guests rather than commentators, which is interesting because CNN also is a cable network. They chose to use journalistic standards of their own volition, not because they were forced to by any mean laws or regulations.
Conversely, Don Irvine over at Accuracy in Media showed what Fox thinks of truth as a value.
Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes told The Hollywood Reporter that Fox News has become so big, the network is really competing with cable sports and entertainment networks like TNT, USA and ESPN, not the ratings-challenged CNN and MSNBC.
They laugh because it doesn’t get the ratings that come from anger and savage lying. It also doesn’t get big bucks from the likes of Charles and David Koch.
We have to keep hitting this point until it sinks in. Fox cannot be trusted, and we should immediately go on the attack whenever someone cites them as a source rather than arguing on the merits or flaws of their absurd claims. Fox is not a news network at all. It’s just an entertainment cable network, like TNT or USA. They do not have a record of journalistic integrity, and they do not have to have one. We must attack Fox credibility on these grounds.
On a cable network, or elsewhere, journalistic standards are a choice. Citizens have to know there is a big difference between the quality of the work of those who adhere to them and those who do not. Fox has made its choice long ago, and so we must make ours. We have to start hammering this home immediately. As fast as we can. Fox is LITERALLY-and legally- fake news. They have systematically and for decades mangled truth in the pursuit of power and money.
We are done listening.
All the filth and lies the Bernie supporters were slinging around in 2016 came through their pipeline. They laid the groundwork in the minds of the American people that made them accept the Russian disinformation that convinced Bernie supporters to riot in the Philadelphia streets.
Most of all, they convinced the American people that Donald Trump, a known con man, racist, and bully, was worth entrusting the greatest responsibility in the world. They have put our entire American system at risk. The last pillar in the world holding democracy up
The nonsense the Russians were using was the same old anti-Clinton stuff Rush Limbaugh and his pals have been spouting. The record is clear and the facts are too.
In Trump’s words during the first 2016 presidential debates, somebody better call Sean Hannity.
