I really hope this reaches their ears and brains - I don't know how much clearer you could be. I am terrified but I will fight (although my daughter wants to flee and I don't blame her).
Appreciate your call to action. I'm ready to buy a plane ticket for DC, spend as many of those 70 days as I can knocking on Capitol doors and pushing for courage. Any advice on which doors to start with?
It seemed pretty clear to me at the time that the "election" of DT in 2016 was something from which America could not recover. At least not for a long, LONG time. This reinstallation of a convicted criminal and rapist--a known sociopathic liar and malignant narcissist-- is the death blow. Some Rosemary's Baby type thing is being born. The path beyond this seems very murky indeed. Sorry for the downer. Needed to vent a little.
Jim, I have many thoughts about this and may be a topic I write about also. I think that one big moment in the Democrats failure was Bill Clinton sliding to the center when he became president. Essentially all that he did was shift the whole center to the right by an equivalent amount. He failed to present a positive yet competing vision. Instead, financially, both parties were aligned for some time.
There was no countervailing message.
Second is the internet and how it affected things. As a country since the Gingrich days of the 90s, we have not had effective federal governance. Instead we have complete partisanship and especially on the GOP side a failure to even negotiate in good faith. Therefore any decent regulation that should have been done long ago on the internet, was never done. It's unregulated and our children are watching a right dominated internet space and growing up on YouTube videos with a right leaning algorithm that teaches them over time that left wing politics, and liberals are bad.
My son literally came home one day saying, "those darn liberals," or something similar. I put a stop to it and he has been warned and is aware of this issue. It helps, but doesn't mitigate the damage the internet has done to our children and families and through the "fire-hose of falsehoods" as Ruth Ben-Ghiat says. It's the instant lightning speed dissemination of disinformation on a scale never before seen that has made lies indistinguishable from truth for some people. All made possible by an under-regulated internet.
Refusal in 2016 to confront our enemies, foreign and domestic, left us in this position when "peaceful transfer of power" invited Putin into the Oval Office without objection, and continued with Garland's DOJ (Jack Smith, now on bluesky, excepted). Please don't miss Tim Snyder's Gilligan's Island simile this morning, https://open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p/oligarchs-island?r=i0thn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web.
Progressive Democrats Are Good, centrist dimocrats are bad, and corpoRATe dimocrats are ugly.
I really hope this reaches their ears and brains - I don't know how much clearer you could be. I am terrified but I will fight (although my daughter wants to flee and I don't blame her).
Thanks Jim. Articulate my feelings at the moment.
Appreciate your call to action. I'm ready to buy a plane ticket for DC, spend as many of those 70 days as I can knocking on Capitol doors and pushing for courage. Any advice on which doors to start with?
It seemed pretty clear to me at the time that the "election" of DT in 2016 was something from which America could not recover. At least not for a long, LONG time. This reinstallation of a convicted criminal and rapist--a known sociopathic liar and malignant narcissist-- is the death blow. Some Rosemary's Baby type thing is being born. The path beyond this seems very murky indeed. Sorry for the downer. Needed to vent a little.
Within 70 days, a sitting President will have to choose when the civil crisis occurs, not 'if'. I appreciate your work. TY
Jim, I have many thoughts about this and may be a topic I write about also. I think that one big moment in the Democrats failure was Bill Clinton sliding to the center when he became president. Essentially all that he did was shift the whole center to the right by an equivalent amount. He failed to present a positive yet competing vision. Instead, financially, both parties were aligned for some time.
There was no countervailing message.
Second is the internet and how it affected things. As a country since the Gingrich days of the 90s, we have not had effective federal governance. Instead we have complete partisanship and especially on the GOP side a failure to even negotiate in good faith. Therefore any decent regulation that should have been done long ago on the internet, was never done. It's unregulated and our children are watching a right dominated internet space and growing up on YouTube videos with a right leaning algorithm that teaches them over time that left wing politics, and liberals are bad.
My son literally came home one day saying, "those darn liberals," or something similar. I put a stop to it and he has been warned and is aware of this issue. It helps, but doesn't mitigate the damage the internet has done to our children and families and through the "fire-hose of falsehoods" as Ruth Ben-Ghiat says. It's the instant lightning speed dissemination of disinformation on a scale never before seen that has made lies indistinguishable from truth for some people. All made possible by an under-regulated internet.
Refusal in 2016 to confront our enemies, foreign and domestic, left us in this position when "peaceful transfer of power" invited Putin into the Oval Office without objection, and continued with Garland's DOJ (Jack Smith, now on bluesky, excepted). Please don't miss Tim Snyder's Gilligan's Island simile this morning, https://open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p/oligarchs-island?r=i0thn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web.