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thecounterplan · 6 years ago

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There Are No “Never Trump” Republicans Anymore

(Image: The New Republic)

#NeverTrump isn’t a real political category. It’s a rhetorical strategy designed to give the GOP a pre-emptive chance to absolve itself once Trump is out of office.

It seemed for a moment in the arduously long, reality TV charade that was the 2016 election -- which, like all recent US presidential elections, took place over what felt like years instead of the one it was supposed to be -- that conservatives in the Republican Party were really going to fight the rise of Donald Trump. In March 2016, with Trump’s candidacy looking quite likely, Mitt Romney gave a speech in Utah condemning Trump on all fronts. “After all,” Romney said, reasonably, “This is an individual who mocked a disabled reporter, who attributed a reporter’s questions to her menstrual cycle, who mocked a brilliant rival who happened to be a woman due to her appearance, who bragged about his marital affairs, and who laces his public speeches with vulgarity.” Within just one year, captured in a now-infamous photo, Romney would meet with Trump in a fancy restaurant, where on the agenda was the possible scenario of Romney coming onboard the Trump cabinet. Romney didn’t get the job, which is probably for the best, but he did get spectacularly dragged by Trump, who by inviting him to dinner and then giving him nothing in return (except, one expects, the promise of tax cuts that would massively benefit people like Romney) made him out to be a “cuck,” to use the parlance of the Trump crowd.

The National Review, the long-standing conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley, took what appeared to be a bold move in devoting a whole issue to opposing Trump’s nomination for the GOP. (The cover is the splash image at the top of this piece.) Popular conservative commentators like Glenn Beck, Erick Erickson, and Mark Helprin launched attacks at Trump from all angles, declaring him an opportunist taking advantage of a party with a long-standing intellectual and cultural tradition that Trump, according this argument, exploits solely for his personal gain. Hell, Beck even correctly presaged that if Trump were to win, “there will once again be no opposition to an ever-expanding government.” (I can think of dozens of families torn apart by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement [ICE] who would agree with Beck -- although probably for different reasons.) Beck even later confessed to fomenting the political paranoia that in part produced Trump. The National Review frequently peddles in party-loyalty lines of reasoning and the vacuous rallying call of “As long as it’s not the liberals!”, so it was surprising to see them adopt a firm anti-Trump stance so early into the primaries in January 2016. It appeared, for a moment, like a cautious self-reckoning on the part of these major conservative figures and, perhaps, the movement itself.

Two years later, in his Blaze studio, Beck sported a Make America Great Again hat and declared that he would happily vote for Donald Trump in 2020.

I could go on. “This person said Trump would ruin conservatism.... barely into his presidency, they’re already defending his every move!” is a story so common now that each new iteration feels like something barely worth mentioning.

The behavior of the conservative political scene made sense at first, even amongst those who expressed worry about Trump. People like Ben Shapiro made a big stink about how they could never vote for Trump, but then once in office, with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, Shapiro and his colleagues in right-wing media weren’t going to use the boost in social and political capital afforded to their end of the political spectrum to damage the president. The Shapiros of the world expressed their misgivings about Trump -- he’s a liar, he’s really a New York liberal at heart, etc -- but they knew that in order to get any modicum of legislation out of their newfound control in Washington, they’d have to go through Trump. I remember tracking the posts and op-eds by the conservative commentariat in the first half year of Trump’s presidency and finding the temperature of the room pretty consistent: they could all tell he was bad news, but they weren’t about to sound the alarms just yet. After all, there are still libs to own -- and “owning the libs” is really all that can be said of the “philosophy” behind people like Shapiro, as Nathan J. Robinson so brilliantly put it -- and maybe if the GOP could ride Trump out and pick up a Gorsuch here, an Obamacare repeal there, the giant gamble of 2016 will have all been worth it.

Indeed, these “turning point” moments, where ostensible #NeverTrumpers realize just how good a conservative he is, are pretty easy to predict. The second Trump lands the GOP a mostly unqualified political win, like he did by appointing Neil Gorsuch to replace the Supreme Court seat vacated by the passing of Antonin Scalia and totally stolen from Merrick Garland, suddenly the #NeverTrumpers see the light. Immediately after it was announced that Anthony Kennedy would be stepping down, giving Trump the chance to fill another Supreme Court seat, conservative YouTuber Steven Crowder stated on Twitter, “I was pretty clearly a skeptical-optimist once Trump was nominee. And I readily admit now, that despite personal disagreements, @realDonaldTrump is absolutely the right man for THIS job at this time in history.” Like the conservatives in the executive and legislative branches of government, Crowder’s sudden enthusiasm for Trump makes sense, for now the GOP has a better shot of enshrining their increasingly unpopular policies through the least democratic of the three branches of government. (This is not to say that the Democrats haven’t liked the democratic insularity of the Supreme Court when it works to their advantage, as many astute commentators have pointed out in the wake of Kennedy’s departure announcement. Over-reliance on the judiciary, like so many problems with the US government, is a bipartisan problem.) And unlike the grueling and ultimately futile attempt to wholesale repeal Obamacare in Trump’s first year, the president’s general lack of professionalism -- to say nothing of human decency -- didn’t stop Gorsuch from getting his lifetime seat. Sure, Trump sounded weird when he introduced Gorsuch as his nominee; it seemed as if he skipped the part of Schoolhouse Rock where the Supreme Court gets explained. But at the end of the (supposed to be) perfunctory confirmation hearings, Gorsuch picked up where Scalia left off, and Trump, in the eyes of the GOP, couldn’t mess that up.

Since Trump will almost certainly get to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by Kennedy -- anyone who thinks the likes of Susan Collins will fall out of the Senate ranks on the confirmation vote must have been asleep the past two years -- I fully expect that additional Trump skeptics will decide that in the end even the thin veneer that is their “Trump criticism” isn’t worth keeping up if it means that Roe v. Wade gets repealed. Shapiro, who in what seems like a half-joke offered himself up as a Supreme Court nominee to Trump, Tweeted,

There are so many interesting things about Shapiro’s characterization of how the two major parties have interacted with the Supreme Court, including the pervasive conflation of “Democrats” with “the Left” that renders the “criticism” and “comedy” of people like Shapiro and Crowder unintelligible most of the time. First and foremost, conservatives have been happy to use the highest court in the land to produce legislation (see Second Amendment jurisprudence, which over the course of the 20th century reads increasingly like NRA ad copy rather than sound legal scholarship) and even invent whole new nonsensical ontological doctrines (like the notion that money is speech). Secondly, Shapiro continues in the regrettably persuasive rhetorical trend of framing originalism, a doctrine that is as “forced into” the Constitution as any living document theory, as simply “returning the court to its constitutional boundaries.” Thirdly.... ah, crap, I’ve gone off topic. Some arguments are so bad that they must be rebutted immediately. I digress. I quote the Tweet merely to say: for all of his anti-Trump posturing, I get the sense he will end up intellectually prostrating just like the rest of his colleagues in conservative media. To quote George V. Higgins, whose slept-on 1974 novel A City on a Hill reads like a study of the cronyistic governance we now find ourselves under, Shapiro “is like the rest of the horses: they’re getting thirsty, but they won’t drink till they’re ready.”

Despite these ongoing series of conversions to the Trump cause, the phrase #NeverTrump, originated by conservatives in 2016 who refused to vote for Trump even after he became the GOP nominee, persists in the discourse. After a series of Tweets in which he contradictorily described “preventing illegal immigration” as “not racist” while also describing such policy as “slowing massive demographic change,” Andrew Sullivan qualified his opinions on immigration policy with this admission: “Trump is not Hitler; I am not Neville Chamberlain; i’m a passionate Never-Trumper who wants to solve a problem that is empowering white nationalism everywhere.” Writing for Bloomberg, Albert R. Hunt calls the post-Kennedy retirement moment as “a hard time” for “Never Trump Republicans.” Emerald Robinson’s analysis of Never Trumpers in the present moment offers a similarly glum prognosis: “The Never Trump intellectual crowd has no momentum and no popular following these days.” Just two years ago, the thought that the host of The Celebrity Apprentice could come to define contemporary conservatism seemed laughable, even following his 2016 win. Most had the sense that Trump would fumble through whatever time he had in office, either until he was voted out, removed from office for any number of reasons (violations of the emoluments clause or Russia, take your pick), or if he got bored and quit. But in 2018, President Trump is finally winning.

“Never Trump” does, to some extent, accurately characterize the internecine squabbles amongst the conservative side of American politics. Some have been openly critical, and some, like George Will, have even called on Americans to vote for the Democrats to hold the Republicans to account. (Some have decided not to run for re-election in 2018, having successfully completed their life’s work of kicking poor people further down the curb to further enrich the already money-drenched upper strata of American society. Er, I mean, to spend time with their families.) But the term really should have died on November 8th, 2016. Since that day, the category of “Never Trump” has dwindled. What we really have that comes closest to “Never Trumpers” in the present day are “conservatives who occasionally criticize Trump.” Perhaps it’s just me, but I feel that “Never” carries a firm, imperative force that occasional criticism cannot live up to -- especially when that criticism becomes increasingly occasional. Admittedly, my point here is not novel: conservative commentator Jonah Golberg pronounced the Never Trump movement to be “nevermore” and over just a month after the Trump/Clinton election. Yet the name persists. Why?

One must question what “never” means in this context. Leading up to the election, the name made sense: it identified conservatives who would never vote for Trump. Clear enough. But once Trump won, what could “never” be describing? Never talk to him? Never support his policy decisions? Never identify with a party that christens Trump its leader? However one defines the “never” of “Never Trump” in the post-2016 political landscape, one thing unites all possible definitions: none of them accurately account for what the conservative movement in America has done to “counter” Trump. Anyone watching what’s happened to the GOP after 2016 could not come to any other conclusion that the GOP is Trump. That supposedly bold National Review issue feels like it was written decades ago.

As David Roberts convincingly argued earlier this year, the kind of Never Trump editorials that still get published by the “moderate” class of conservative -- your Sullivans, your Brookses, your Stephenses -- aren’t actually representative of the conservative movement by and large. The things that the Republican base likes about Trump -- his brashness, his vulgarity, his tough-guy attitude -- are anathema to the virtues prized by the conservative commentariat: civility, reason, balance. A columnist like David Brooks wants to present conservatism as a stable and philosophically considerate tradition: present-day conservatism in the GOP base wants to own the libs.

Now, I’m generally not the kind of person to tell someone that they can’t identify themselves politically however they wish. Moreover, though I grew up in an extremely conservative city, I no longer am a conservative myself, and as such I can’t say I have the insider’s knowledge of the movement as a whole. But I do feel comfortable in pointing out inconsistency, and like Goldberg I have a hard time accepting the continued usage of Never Trump outside of the very narrow conception “would never vote for Trump.” With Trump as president, and the GOP as his party, conservatives who still ally with the Republican party must ask themselves: “What does never really mean?” Without a bold proposal like Will’s call to vote for Democrats in the 2018 midterms, “never” in the current-day “Never Trump” reads a lot more like “Never Trump... until he does something we like.” Had there been a mass exodus of Republicans following 2016, maybe with the formation of a new conservative party, Never Trump would have felt like a true movement in the real sense, not merely a single “yes or no” choice at the ballot box. If one truly identifies as “Never Trump,” they have to maintain a pretty intense level of cognitive dissonance to continue identifying with the party that is increasingly being emblazoned with the all-caps, gold-colored name of Trump.

Some of the Never Trump crowd position their “never”-ness in superficially reasonable terms, as Shapiro attempted to in a recent interview with Bill Maher (11 minutes of unbearable smug which I would subtitle: “Alasdair MacIntyre was Right”). The argument goes something like this: “Look, I’m going to be level-headed about Trump. I’ll criticize him when he does something bad, and I’ll praise him when he does something good.” At first pass, this seems reasonable: it doesn’t have the intensity of a dogmatically negative or positive view of Trump, and it exhibits a rational standard of treatment. No one’s perfect, so you should criticize them when necessary, but when those same people do good, they should be rewarded. Sensible, no?

Not in the case of Trump. The same motivation that caused The National Review to publish its Against Trump issue is the same reason why Never Trump can’t exist in a world where “Never Trumpers” are either (a) still largely supportive of the Republican party or (b) likely to eventually turn over to Trump if he gives the party and its base enough of what they want. What the authors in the Against Trump issue saw in Trump -- the same thing that Romney and Shapiro and other conservative commentators saw -- is that if Trump was to become associated with the Republican party, its image would be irrevocably damaged. The reasons for this are obvious: the party of “family values” would be nominating a sleazy, New York media mogul who bragged about cheating on his wives (he’s now on his third); the party of the “heartland American people” would be backing a big-city Hollywood figure with numerous instance of screwing over the employees of his companies; the party that markets itself as having a philosophical heritage dating back to the Founding Fathers would be asking a guy with a comically paltry vocabulary to espouse its ideology; the party most committed to supporting the troops would have as its spokesman a guy who mocked a leading GOP senator who spent time as a POW in Vietnam for “being captured”; and, most damningly of all, the party which claims a monopoly on faith in America (and by faith I mean Christianity) would be throwing its weight behind a guy who embodies everything that Jesus Christ teaches against, what with his unrepentant egotism and love of gold idols. Nominating Trump, the Never Trump Republicans rightly recognized, would not merely be a political failing: it would be an act of hypocrisy whose magnitude had never been seen in the modern GOP, a moral collapse of such catastrophic proportions that anyone who continued to tie themselves to the GOP after a Trump nomination would be tacitly admitting that their political principles are easily expendable if short-term political gain can be actualized.

Well, Trump got the nomination, and rather than take a bold stance against that moral collapse of the GOP, the Never Trump crowd... waited. Never Trumpers knew that with all three branches of government under GOP sway -- with the takeover of the judiciary imminent -- that even an incompetent political figure like Trump could possibly manage some real conservative victories. Maybe those tax cuts would go through. Maybe Roe would be overturned. After a rocky start, the GOP started accruing political wins, gaining some traction in the process. Never Trumpers criticized the GOP on many occasions, but writing posts or issuing stern condemnations (cf. Senators McCain, Collins, and Flake) isn’t the same thing as holding one’s political party to account, particularly if, like those aforementioned Senators, they end up voting for all of the things the Trump-led GOP wants anyways. A quick look at FiveThirtyEight’s helpful data which tracks how often the current group of Senators votes in alignment with Trump is telling with regard to the political reality of Never Trump as a real movement:

That’s the lowest end of Republican support for Trump. Libertarian Rand Paul, who fashions himself an outsider in his own party, votes with the president two-thirds of the time. Republican “Trump critics” like Lindsey Graham and John McCain follow the party line at a rate even higher than that, as does “Conscientious Conservative” Jeff Flake. (Most interesting of all to me is the data showing several Democrats voting half or nearly half of the time with Trump, a clear reminder to the DNC that it isn’t the #resistance that it thinks it is, and to the conservative pundit class that the Democrats aren’t a far-left party, or even a left party.) 40 of the 51 Republican members of the Senate vote with Trump over 90 percent of the time. If that isn’t empirical proof that the Republican party isn’t the party of Trump, I don’t know what is. Perhaps the Never Trumpers could have never stopped the GOP embrace of Trump; in fact, I think that was always the likely scenario. But the turn from Against Trump to the full-throated endorsement of Trump in the GOP doesn’t just highlight the party’s desperate grasp at power as its popular support continues to dwindle: it shows the Never Trumpers that their political party was never really what they thought it was. Trump, as a friend of mine put it, didn’t say anything new to change the Republican party: he merely “said the soft parts loud and the loud parts soft.”

Now, at this point I’ve largely staked my claims on hypocrisy and moral failings. As I wrote in my inaugural piece for this website, hypocrisy lost any moral force it might have ever had in Washington a long time ago, so merely saying to a political party, “Hey, you’re not living up to your ideals!” doesn’t do much politically and feels cheap at the level of accusation. For me, the reason why we must sternly rebuke any attempt to keep the Never Trump brand active in political discourse is because of the obvious rhetorical strategy inherent to it: namely, once Trump is out of office, it gives Republicans a built-in apology tour, one that I regret to say will likely be persuasive to many people.

At the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference, Paul Ryan nonspecifically admonished his party to realize the err of their ways in the GW Bush years: “The Republican victories that began in 1980 were inspired here at CPAC. But as a conservative, I admit my party took success for granted. The Republican Party disregarded its roots - losing direction, sacrificing principles and failing to offer a vision relevant to most Americans.” After the rise of the Tea Party and the subsequent Republican electoral successes in the 2010 midterms, it became immediately unclear what policies Ryan thought represented the GOP’s abandonment of its principles. The policies that characterize the Bush years -- military interventionism and the expansion of the imperial United States, supply-side economics, to name a few -- remained party orthodoxy in 2010 onward, albeit in a much more intense, anti-government incarnation than had existed before. Still, the GOP may not have really tried to course-correct in the way that Ryan suggested in 2009, but at the time Ryan’s words made sense, given Barack Obama’s sweeping 2008 electoral victory and the general feeling that Bush would go down as one of the worst presidents in recent memory, in large part for the perpetual warfare his administration brought to the Middle East and the increasingly invasive security state. I remember people applauding Ryan’s words back then, and it’s easy to see why. After a massive failure, you should own up to it. For a minute it seemed like Ryan, then a rising star in his party, was actually doing that.

Flash-forward to when Trump is out of office, whenever that might be. I can already see the reams of teary-eyed mea culpas that will wallpaper the op-ed sections of magazines and newspapers nationwide: “We lost our way!” “We abandoned our principles!” “A few brave souls in our party spoke out, but not enough of us listened to them!” So long as the phrase “Never Trump” exists in the political discourse, it allows Republicans of all stripes to claim that the party was not monolithic under Trump, and that many did actually try to resist his agenda. If there are pleasant New York Times columnists who claim to be conservative and from time to time call Trump out for his degradation of the office of the president, the GOP can pivot to those types as speakers for “a new direction in conservatism.” The Never Trumpers can see this too: reading the work of people like Shapiro, it’s easy to detect that the minute Trump is out of office, they’ll perform some entirely undeserved grandstanding, claiming that the “rough times” are behind the GOP and that now they can focus on enacting government policies based on conservative principles -- all the while relishing those victories the party won under Trump.

Never Trump Republicans don’t exist anymore. To label oneself a Republican in 2018 is to take on the burden of knowing that whatever policy wins you claim between 2016 and 2020 are largely owed to Trump being in office. Remember, the reason why Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, to the shock of just about every prognosticator on both sides of the political spectrum, was precisely because he bore no resemblance to nice-guy party rubes like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. As was the case in the Tea Party-dominated 2010 elections, in which a gaggle of largely inexperienced (politically speaking) small-government types took over Washington, the Republican base was tired of Republicans. With Trump, those voters have gotten what they wanted in 2016: to remake the party in Trump’s image. (Note that the title of this article and the thrust of my argument is that there are no Never Trump Republicans; this does not mean that there couldn’t be Never Trump conservatives, though in order to be consistent politically those conservatives would either [a] need to form a new coalition and caucus with the Democrats, which shouldn’t be too difficult given how much to the right Democrats have drifted since Bill Clinton’s first term, or [b] form a new party entirely.)

A simple if absurd analogy can help boil down my point here. Suppose a presidential candidate knocks on my door tomorrow to let me know about their vision for America, which looks a lot like mine. To name a few policies: they’d eliminate the Electoral College, they’d advocate for Medicare for All or some other form of universal healthcare, and they’d set in place much easier and more direct policies for immigration and asylum seeking. All of it sounds great, and I’m almost immediately on board with them. But then, right as they’re preparing to wrap up their pitch, they say, “I will also personally ensure that every single person named Ryan in the United States is executed by public hanging.”

Now, for 99 percent of their spiel, I’m on board. It’s only the whole Ryan-killing business that really puts me off. But the Ryan-killing thing is a massive, unacceptable moral catastrophe, one that would not even be worth it if this candidate actually was able to pass all of those policies that are so important to me. Even if my primary political identity was centered on those policies passing, it would be unacceptable for me to align myself with someone who would in the process of pursuing those other policies murder countless innocent people. If the political party I identified with (full disclosure: I’m an independent) saw it fit to nominate this person for the presidential ticket, I would renounce my membership immediately. I could not associate with such a party, even if I agreed with it on the overwhelming majority of things. This is why comments like Crowder’s “despite personal disagreements, @realDonaldTrump is absolutely the right man for THIS job at this time in history,” or Shapiro’s “I’ll criticize him when he’s bad and praise him when he’s good” strategy are extremely disingenuous. Not coming to a consensus on whether or not the 1997 John Woo action film Face/Off is “so bad it’s good” or just straight-up good is a “personal disagreement,” one that doesn’t necessarily impinge on other agreements you might have with a person or group. The things one has to own up to with Trump -- and since he was christened the party’s president, yes, Republicans must own up to it -- cut deeply against the party’s ethos, to a degree that the very credibility of the party itself is completely rubbished. If you’re willing to call that a “personal disagreement” that you’d put up with to get a Supreme Court seat, then you’d put up with just about anything.

When it comes to Trump, of course, the hypothetical Ryans of America can rest easy, unless they happen to be trying to seek asylum for Mexico or are any woman that has to live with the fact that the man deemed worthy to lead the country has profoundly little respect for women, and has on multiple occasions made sexually creepy comments about his adult daughter. But the party leadership of the GOP and their supporters in the media class should have stopped resting easy the moment Trump won the party’s nomination. RNC delegates should have been faithless if they really believed the core worldview of the Republican party: small government, family values, the Judeo-Christian tradition, among many others. Trump believes in none of that. Above all else, he believes in himself, and to believe in Trump is to believe in wealth, and accruing it in whatever means is most expedient. (As it turns out, treating a private, for-profit property you own into a “Winter White House” that gets directly funneled taxpayer money is a pretty good way to do that.) By nominating Trump and spurning the principles that it touts as its intellectual and moral tentposts, the Republican party showed the world that it stands for nothing other than political gain. Such a (tacit) admission may seem old-hat, given just how cynical most people’s view of politics actually is, but even my cynical eye was stunned by everything about Trump and his ascendancy. Surely, I thought, if the GOP actually greenlit Trump’s candidacy, there would have to be defections unlike any we’ve seen before in either the Democratic or Republican parties -- not enough to totally cripple the GOP, mind, but defections nonetheless. But then they didn’t happen, and that’s when I knew.

From the moment Trump won that fateful night in November 2018, “Never Trump” disappeared as a real description of anything resembling a moderate conservative wing of the GOP. Now, Never Trump exists as a rhetorical and intellectual life raft for a party that finds itself simultaneously with all the political power it could possibly want and out to sea. Once Trump is gone and the rest of the party leaders are left thrashing in the choppy waters they’ve caused with their recklessness, they will cling on to “Never Trump” in the hopes that it will get them back ashore and in the good graces of the American public. Some will welcome them back out of sympathy. Some may even think, seeing the people bobbing amongst the waves, that the GOP will have learned the error of its ways. But none of us should be so naive. While forgiveness is a virtue, if moral and intellectual consistency mean anything at all, they would tell us that there comes a point at which a political party crosses a line from which it can never come back. By accepting Donald Trump, the GOP communicated that there are no lines which it would cross in order to advance its political agenda, even if that means fundamentally betraying their self-professed core convictions. It is our task as responsible citizens of a republic to remind the Republican party that there are no take-backs in Faustian bargains. Nor should there be.

#Donald Trump #NeverTrump #Mitt Romney #Ben Shapiro #The National Review #Glenn Beck #Jeff Flake #Susan Collins #Republican Party #GOP #Steven Crowder #John McCain #conservatism

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myowncentralperk · 7 years ago

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Great discourse - a bit old but good nonetheless- from Gabrel Rufián (ERC): Chairwoman. Ladies and gentlemen. Mr. Rajoy, Mr. Rivera. Mr candidate, Mr IBEX [spanish stock market]. (laughs) First of all, I wanted to show you something (he shows the map of the general elections where almost all is blue, representing the PP [right-wing with francoist past], with the exception of Catalunya, the Basque Country and the regions Huelva, Seville and Jaén), this is not a challenge, these are countries, different people who vote differently. We are this (points out Catalonia), in which among all of you add only one mayoralty. It's called winning and it's called losing. And you lost. It's called democracy. Be a democrat and respect it. (Murmurs, the president asks for silence.) That said, if you will allow me, I will take my five minutes to ask a series of questions that I think are pertinent, and that I hope you respond. In fact, I also hope that after this five minutes, the cave [right-wing parties], do not compare me with all the dictators of contemporary European history, with all but Franco, him, you always forget. Mr. Rajoy, why Carme Forcadell can end up in a court after fulfilling a democratic mandate and Fern��ndez Díaz, Mr. Fernández Díaz maybe in the Vatican embassy after conspiring from his office? Why Santi Vidal, can be-can not be a judge again because he said that he is independent and Alfonso can be one again after saying that "We have destroyed their health care"? Why are you so pissed off about a "Visca Catalunya lliure" [Long live free Catalonia] and so little with a "This the prosecution will destroy it"? Why? Mr. Rajoy, why in a state with 2.7 million poor children, with 32% of child poverty, why in the second most unequal state in Europe, you and the national orange front, Ciutadans [new right-wing party, their color is orange] (laughs), consider that the problem of childhood, of the educational system in Spain is that children study Catalan in Catalonia? (Voices - The president asks for silence) Why so Catalans study English, which does not seem wrong, have to do math in Spanish? Do you realize that you are monolingual (he points out), telling bilinguals (he points to himself), that they have to be trilingual? (laughs) Catalan children speak two languages, Catalan and Spanish, so they speak a language more than you. Why do they have to stop doing it? How can it be said that the Castilian-speaker is excluded, persecuted and threatened in a land, in a country, where the head of the opposition is a Jerezana [from Jerez, region in Spain], arrived in Catalonia eight years ago? How can you lack respect in this way for those Andalusians, Galicians, Murcians, Extremadurans, who left their skin [worked really hard] in places like where I come from, Santa Coloma de Gramanet, so that their children and grandchildren learn the language of the country that welcomed them. Be ashamed, and stop. Mr. Rajoy, why do you remember so much with chest blows, while proclaiming yourselfs Constitutionalistsn of the Article 105, when during 40 years you forgot about articles as beautiful as the 47 and 128? Why your constitution is worth to threaten a town, and not to give them a roof? Why are we the ones who break the constitutional order and we attack the national sovereignity if you were the ones who broke it and delivered it, one summer night of the year 2011? Mr. Rajoy, Mr. Rivera, why do you bother so much about an Estalada [independentist flag] hanging out in a balcony, and so little that the butcher of Badajoz, General Yagüe [francoist], has neighborhoods in his honor? (applause) Why the fact that hundreds of thousands go out on Diada [national catalan festivity] in Catalonia is a provocation, and that Spain is the second country with the most disappeared in Europe, and the planet, reconciliation? Why a constituent process that brings together 72 deputies of 135, ranging from the center-right-liberal-conservative to the most disruptive left is a drift, and that you are only able to compromise with your white mark, with that kind of Mr. Smithers of Spanish politics [Ciutadans] (laughter), is a sense of state? Why do you give so many lessons of Catalan reality if you are the last and penultimate political force in Catalonia? Why independence, Mr. Rajoy, is Pujol, 3%, embargoed highquarters and Andorra, and you, Unionism, are not Rato, Eres, Gurtel and Panama? [All corruption cases] (applause) Why do you give us anti-corruption lessons, if while in the Parlament of Catalunya a gangster is called a gangster, while here, you play Candy Crush? [It's not uncommon for politicians to be on their phones unfortunately] Why are we the deceived and indoctrinated when you have won the elections again with one more deputy for each corruption case in the last 4 years? Mr. Rajoy, Mr. Rivera, why a process that only demands ballot boxes and that holds an absolute parliamentary majority is antidemocratic, and that you to preside your state you put a man, from a palace, whom no one has voted, is democratic normality? [The king] Well, his father did have a vote, of a certain Francisco Franco Bahomonde, perhaps the name rings a bell. (murmurs) [He refers to the fact that our former king was raised into power by Franco] Mr. Rajoy, Mr. Rivera, if the Spanish state after 8 years of reactionary and neo-liberal policies owes more than 100% of its GDP, why is it an urn in an electoral college in Catalonia what threatens Spanish sovereignity? Mr. Rajoy, why are ther populations - and I finish Mr. President. Mr. Rufan has to finish. Why are there populations of 28 inhabitants with a brand new AVE station and others of hundreds of thousands, which are roasted every morning in a Rodalias? Mr. Rajoy, why 80 years later, Lorca is still in a gutter of Granada, and Billy the Kid is running half-marathons in Madrid? [Government makes it nearly impossible to dig mass graves from the Civil War] (applause) I'm done, Mrs. President. This is for Mr. Sanchez. [From the "socialist" party - more center rn] Mr. Sanchez, how much more - I would just like to say -, how much more governability of this country will ypu give up for not giving a voice to ours? How much more will you prefer Rajoy to an urn in Catalonia? Be brave. And I end up with a question for the companions: Iglesies and Domènech. Comrades, do you imagine a country with a residual PP? Do you imagine a country with the sufficient social, political and parliamentary majorities to initiate and complete a constituent process for a republic? The country that you imagine already exists and is called Catalunya. Help us, because we will always help you here. Thank you very much and good afternoon.

#politics #catalonia #catalunya #barcelona #human rights

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toomanysinks · 6 years ago

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All your meme are belong to AOC

Memes are the new vernacular of political culture and we dismiss them at our own peril. Liberals learned this the hard way late in the presidential campaign, when they began realizing how deftly the alt-right was able to use viral jokes, hashtags, and images as a propaganda tool, often to bolster white supremacist ideology. The phenomenon was propagated by Donald Trump, often through retweets (the president’s Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump, is arguably a meme farm at the highest level of government). Progressives have tried to fight back with their own memes, but nothing has gained the potency of say, new vocabulary like “cuck” or Pepe the Frog, the comic book character whose misappropriation as an alt-right mascot was condemned by its creator Matt Furie and his publisher.

But the left finally has a way to take back meme culture. Instead of originating from the anonymous bowels of 4chan or Reddit, it’s coming from Capitol Hill: the social media accounts of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (often referred to as AOC, which is also her Twitter handle). Not only is she fluent in Internet culture, but Ocasio-Cortez is also willing to take advantage of it, even as critics dismiss her, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, as a “little girl” or demand that her cohort of Democrats “stop acting like young people,” as Aaron Sorkin did during a recent CNN interview.

We meme IRL too

https://t.co/0NHFsutiWC

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 20, 2019

Ocasio-Cortez’s tweets mix her knowledge of Internet and gaming culture with statements about serious issues like taxation, income inequality, fossil-fuel pollution, and transgender rights, while her Instagram posts and Stories give followers a behind-the-scenes look at Congress. She’s prompted important policy discussions, most notably in the case of marginal tax rates, turned Mitch McConnell into a meme (#wheresMitch), and even made a C-Span video go viral.

Sworn into Congress less than a month ago, Ocasio-Cortez’s impact on political discourse is already obvious. This was highlighted over the weekend, first when Ocasio-Cortez tweeted “All your base (are) belong to us” about the popularity of her tax rate proposal, which calls for earnings higher than $10 million to be taxed at 70 percent, among both Republicans and Democrats. Though the meme itself has been around long enough to qualify as “retro,” her use of it still became a major talking point.

Then on Sunday, Ocasio-Cortez dropped into YouTuber Hbomberguy’s (AKA Harry Brewis) Twitch marathon of Donkey Kong 64, a fundraiser for transgender youth support group Mermaids, to voice her support. Speaking about discrimination against transgender people, Ocasio-Cortez said “it’s important that we do talk about these issues in the economic frame, but not let go of the fact that discrimination is a core reason for the economic hardship” (she also declared the Nintendo 64 “probably the best system out of all of them”).

Here’s @aoc talking about how Nintendo 64 was the best system. She’s on @twitch helping to raise money for trans kids. pic.twitter.com/cJIfUif1mv

— New Super Blood Wolf Moon Bros. U Deluxe (@GenePark) January 20, 2019

Ocasio-Cortez, the Congressional representative for New York’s 14th district in Queens and the Bronx, has also shown an adept understanding of how to satirize meme culture, turning it against itself even as she participates. This is something that any public figure who wants to own their own narrative and point of view must now be able to master. And Democrats seem to understand this, since they asked her to lead a training session about social media).

With @AOC, @RepDebDingell, @jahimes, @davidcicilline, @RepCartwright & @Twitter representatives at training session on Twitter for Democratic Members of Congress.

The below pic is called a selfie. pic.twitter.com/WHwlQHxpoj

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) January 17, 2019

Her critics have credited Ocasio-Cortez’s ability to go viral as a result of her youth and appearance. That’s certainly a factor, which Ocasio-Cortez has addressed. But she has figured out how to use even that criticism to her advantage. When a fake nude selfie of Ocasio-Cortez was reposted by right-wing news site the Daily Caller, it was an attempt to turn meme culture (and her looks) against her, but the Congresswoman instead flipped it into a discussion about misogyny against women leaders.

For those out of the loop, Republicans began to circulate a fake nude photo of me. The @DailyCaller reposted it (!) and refused to indicate it was fake in the title as well.

Completely disgusting behavior from Conservative outlets.

No wonder they defended Kavanaugh so fiercely.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 10, 2019

An earlier attempt by Twitter user AnonymousQ1776 to portray Ocasio-Cortez a “clueless nitwit” based on a video of her dancing in college also backfired by instead portraying her as, well, a typical college student. Inspired by a scene in “The Breakfast Club,” the video itself was an example of an early (relatively speaking) Internet meme, which itself triggered a discussion (and lawsuit) over copyright law and fair use rights, as noted by Freedom of the Press foundation director of special projects Parker Higgins. That tweet also, as you would guess from someone whose social media star is up high right now, launched the AOC Dancing to Every Song meme.

I hear the GOP thinks women dancing are scandalous.

Wait till they find out Congresswomen dance too!

Have a great weekend everyone :) pic.twitter.com/9y6ALOw4F6

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 4, 2019

But Ocasio-Cortez’s messages aren’t just for her political opponents. They also serve as a signal to people who have felt increasingly disenfranchised and scared over the last few years that the country’s problems, while profound, can be approached with intelligence and even some wry humor.

A week after she was sworn into Congress, tech investor Vinod Khosla casually dismissed her credentials, expressing doubt that she “understands basic economics, actual humans and technology.” This was a strange statement to make about someone who placed second in microbiology at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair and earned a degree in international relations and economics at Boston University.

That is assuming she understands basic economics, actual humans and technology. I doubt if any of those are true.

— Vinod Khosla (@vkhosla) January 12, 2019

“Good at memes” might not look as impressive on a resume as her prize in one of the most prestigious research competitions for high school students (other alumni have gone on to win the Nobel Prize and National Medal of Science), but it shows that Ocasio-Cortez understands tech (and actual humans) on a level that her critics, including Khosla, Sorkin, and Piers Morgan, who admonished Ocasio-Cortez to start “acting like a grown-up not a juvenile smart-a**e,” are perhaps incapable of.

Ocasio-Cortez has often been compared to Trump because of their ability to control the narrative through social media, especially Twitter. To cite another meme, however, Trump is chaotic evil, acting on the urge of impulses he seems unable to control even as they profoundly affect the lives of vulnerable people. Maybe it’s too early to tell exactly where Ocasio-Cortez’s political influence will fall on the D&D alignment chart, but it is anything but chaotic.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/21/all-your-meme-are-belong-to-aoc/

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samarajournal · 8 years ago

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Okay last time...

The thing that really bothers me with LP YouTubers rushing to defend Felix in poorly worded and misinformed responses is that they, along with a majority of their young fan base, do not know how successful activism really works. They do not know how social change is actually enacted, how civil rights has and is currently being fought for. But they are all quick to quote non violence, and everyone should love each other. Or that we should be nice to our oppressors and have a dialogue with them.

Let’s unpack that last notion right now. You see just from my personal experience, from my baby years of activism, if I talk to let’s say ten Trump supporters or KKK members, homophobic, or even biphobic individuals even if I talk calmly, politely providing specific examples with scholarly sources, I’ll be lucky if I get one individual to maybe sorta see my side of things. And even then there is no guarantee that they will actively work to dismantle that specific oppression system in the future. Why? Because ultimately, there is no incentive for the group at top of society (AKA white people, especially white straight cisgender males) to destroy a systems that supports and favors their survival and supremacy. If anything, dismantling this systems puts them at a disadvantage. To quote Jane Elloit:

“I was taught how to be racist at birth. I know how to be racist. I hate it.... I’m a racist. I was infected with racism at birth. I want to get over it. It us going to take me rest of my life to get over it, but I can do it, but I have to choose to do it.”

-Jane Elloit, Oprah Winfrey Show, 1992

The United States of America is a racist country. It was built, maintained, and thrived on racists actions and the oppression of a large portion of the population. And people that this country and the society was built for, white people, are taught and socialized to be racist. Racism, prejudice, and discrimination did not disappear with the Civil Right’s Act of 1965, the Stonewall Riots, or the election of former president Barack Obama. It hasn’t even really lessened, if anything hate crime has been on the rise since the 60s, it has only changed. I probably lost a lot of you in those last three sentences. You might feel angry, uncomfortable. Your probably writing sentences in your head to defend yourself. Good. Because confronting your inherent prejudice is not an easy task. Everyone is raised to develop biases, and we all have to fight every day of our lives to overcome them. You do that through your actions, constantly changing your mindsets, and constantly questioning every preconceived thought about people, society, cultures, ect. You will find fault in almost everything you see, you will begin to see stereotypes used in everything especially in the media, and in a lot of ways you won’t be able to guitlessly enjoy many of the things you use to.

Combating internal prejudices is a long, hard, and life long process. It is emotionally and mentally taxing, and you will be uncomfortable a number of times. Now back to my original point, acknowledging your privilege and prejudices is hard, and not everyone is frankly cut out for it. We as humans have evolved to actively avoid discomfort. So no matter how the message is delivered, people of a privileged class who have not have to think about their position and identity have absolutely no incentive or evolutionary drive to actually listen.

An even just on a logical basis, if a majority of people are so willing to listen and for their minds to be changed. If Nazis, Neo-Nazis, and KKKs (all of which have been on the rise let me remind you) were so open minded, then why haven’t they. Why wasn’t Trevor Noah able to convince Tomi Lahren that BLM is not a terrorist group? Or why Yassmin Abdel-Mageid wasn’t able to persuade Jacqui Lambie away from her support of DJT’s muslim ban or enlighten her on what sharia law actually is? Or why does the comment section of this MTV Decoded video looks like this? If it’s like being in a class with a teacher you don’t like. You might hate them or the way they teach, but you better learn and pay attention if you want to pass the class. It shouldn’t matter how the message is delivered if the message is true. You should want to be a better, decent human, and me or others yelling at your shouldn’t really dissuade you if that were the case.

And quite simply there is a PLETHORA of resources: literature, scholarly research, speeches, think pieces, books, poems, you name it; some of which I listed in this post and can be easily found with a google search. Activists travel to college campuses all the time. They is literally no reason for anyone to go up to any marginalized person and ask them to educate them. NONE. So by that logic, a majority of people should be enlighten. They should understand the ins and outs of systematic oppression. They should be ‘woke’. But they’re not. I wonder why? No I don’t, because they don’t want to listen. And quite frankly I don’t care.

I don’t care what you think of me. I don’t care if you think if I’m abomination, call me a n*gger, think I’m inferior, ratchet, ghetto. All I care about if you are in a position of power to enact policy to enforce your prejudices, how to remove you from that place of power, and how fast you can run cause you will be catching these hands if you say this to my face.

So this brings me, finally, to my main point. What works. What causes change. Well children, there are a number of strategies that you can partake in to enact social change. One of the most popular forms is non violent protest. Is the best method? That’s debatable and quite honestly I don’t think so in certian instances but I digress. Non violent process can be effective when use correctly and without stop. The main power, which even Gandhi, utilized is a concept known as backfire, which is pretty succinctly described in Justice Ignited by Brian Martin. He describes it as “ an action that recoils against its originators. In a backfire, the outcome is not just worse than anticipated — it is negative, namely worse than having done nothing” . In his book he cites both the Rodney King Beatings and the Dili masscare, the latter of which is described in that same page.

“Although Indonesian troops occupying East Timor had committed many massacres in the 15 years before 1991, they received limited attention due to censorship. The Dili massacre, unlike earlier killings, was witnessed by western journalists and recorded in photos and video, and later broadcast internationally... The Dili massacre, rather than discouraging opposition to Indonesian rule over East Timor, instead triggered a massive expansion in international support for East Timor’s independence.”

Corporations, groups, businesses, and governments all have one thing in common: their image is everything and when backfire happens that image in irrevocably damaged. When this happens they trust, capitol, support, MONEY, ect. The is the goal of protest, it is put people of power in positions where they are damned if the do and damned if they don’t. In this case the best case scenario is to give into the prostestors demand or risk looking and brutal. That is what Ganhdi did with is Salt March, which you can find detailed here.

It is what Martin Luther King Jr. did. Although for a time he try to change the hearts and minds of his oppressors, his main focus was uplifting his people, changing laws and policy, and making those laws were enforced. The Civil Rights Movements was the first instance of national civil unrest that was intentionally televised. The images of young Americans being hosed down, attacked by downs, killed, maimed, lynched seriously challenged America’s image as this morally superior, civilized country. And politicians knew it. And it was one of the majors factors that led to so many laws being changed during that era, and many of those unwillingly.

At the end of the day that is all we want. Minorities do not have time to worry about if our oppressors like us or see us as human. We know that answer. We know it all too well. We have bills to pay. Mouths to feed. And making sure our loved ones come home safe. ALL WE WANT IS EQUAL PROTECTION UNDER THE LAW AND THE DISMANTLE OF OPPRESSIVE SYSTEMS THROUGH POLICY CHANGE. That’s it. It would be nice if people saw me as a human being not in-spite of our differences but because of them. But at the end of the day it doesn’t matter. I don’t care. If at the end of day the person changing/writing the law is doing so begrudgingly and only because he doesn't want to seem racist, he is still doing it. And quite honestly, policy and law change is better done when the marganilazed are in power. History shows after law and policy in enacted the culture changes, for good or for worst.

Another strategy for social change is what ‘Punch a Nazi in the Face’basically does. It doesn’t have to be physical, but what this method entails is embarassing, blocking, and preventing problematic people from popularizing and enacting on their beliefs. I mentioned this before. But it is removing racists from political offices. It is making sure horrible people don’t have a platform to voice their opinions and gain support (looking at you CNN, Trevor Noah, and Bill Maher!). It is not fucking engaging them in debate! Basic human rights is not a topic up for debate. Inviting these prejudice ideologies to discourse is giving them the win. It grants them legitimacy. It tells them that you can disagree if people deserve to live or not. It is me saying ‘Climate change exists and their is a mountain of evidence to prove it’ and you saying ‘Well this person said that it was pretty cold last summer so....’. No! Sit down at the kids table and only come back when you have a substantial argument.

Basically this method is barring prejudicial people are not unafraid to voice their beliefs. It is dragging them on the internet. It is getting racists fired for racist Facebook posts. It is completely and utterly ignoring them when they scream at the top of their lungs for attention. It making sure that they suffer social consequences for voicing their problematic beliefs, jokes, supporting stereotypes. And yes, it is punching Nazis in the face. For now this strategm in conjunctions with others seems to be working.

This is far from a comprehensive review on how to enact social change. But at least it points anyone of interested in the right directions. And I hope that it convinces others that talking, peace, love, and happinees are techiniques for a perfect world, rarely works, and are naive. I hope people stop wasting their time on trying to convince people that are never going to listen or change. I hope you uplift and empower those or are marginalized and vulnerable, instead to trying to convince the powerful that we deserve rights. We know we deserve rights, and we are going to get them when-either you agree or not.

#activism #youtube #markiplier #jacksepticeye #pewdiepie #this will be the last time I talk about this #but I saw a lot of young misinformed fans and I thought I clear things up about social chnage #this concept is not simple and even in this it is over simplified #we do not fix social inequity by simply being nice to each other #Respect and civility are two different things #one is earned #the other should be given but it is not #especially to the marganalized

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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Can we get past the idea that politics is a reality show? Not if CNN has anything to do with it.

https://wapo.st/2GFl2QR

Can we get past the idea that politics is a reality show? Not if CNN has anything to do with it.(AGREED)

By Hank Stuever | Published August 01 at 8:00 AM ET | Washington Post | Posted August 1, 2019 2:52 PM ET |

Lately there’s a strange caution in the air about the intellectual pitfalls of comparing American politics to the performing arts — or worse, to showbiz. Be careful what you say about optics. Watch your words on the subject of appearance and presence; be wary of identifying playfully fictional metaphors amid such serious national and global crises. Above all, stop comparing the gathering mess of the 2020 presidential campaign season to television, particularly to (insert moralistic scowl here) reality TV.

Funny, I felt that way all through the 2016 election that gave us President Trump: The glee of defining his rise as a reality show with a profane breakout star landed us right in the middle of the worst reality show ever made. Such comparisons portray the reality-TV genre in broadly demeaning strokes. It’s a characterization ginned up by the kind of people who never watch TV, except cable news.

So can we possibly get past the idea that politics is a reality show?

Fat chance. Having subjected us to two nights of garishly adorned, overproduced, conflict-obsessed live “debates” among a field of 20 Democratic hopefuls (its own delusional gridlock of egos), CNN and the Democratic National Committee summoned the worst aspects of some of TV’s most popular genres and visual tropes.

The overall tone, of course, was cable-news alarmism, but the debates also resembled those celebrity-packed, prime-time game shows that litter the schedule all summer. One also got wafts of the blaring bombast of professional football broadcasts, and, yes, the stage-managed awkwardness of the lesser styles of reality TV.

“We are playing right into Republican hands,” one of the candidates, Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.), said during Wednesday night’s debate, in which CNN’s tenor of questioning seemed determined to portray a gamut of Democratic policy and beliefs as chronic afflictions rather than workable ideas. Candidate Andrew Yang, in his closing remarks, also went meta in the moment, pointing out the absurdity of the format, the game itself, where more people will notice his lack of a necktie than his platform.

And while the candidates were necessarily prepared to spar with one another (otherwise known as campaigning), CNN’s format facilitated a frenetic game of human darts, with questions designed to goad the jabbing. It was a never-ending two-night competition of lightning rounds, in 30- and 15-second rebuttals to one-minute answers.

Tuesday night’s opening round felt like a series of people being interrupted in mid-sentence, with CNN anchors Jake Tapper, Dana Bash and Don Lemon calling time limits as soon as anyone had anything interesting to say. Wednesday night was only slightly better, but never quite achieved the mood of actual discourse.

Instead, we were watching CNN make television — pieces and bites and clips of which it can repurpose into more programming fodder, days’ worth of pundit banter, befitting the network that overhyped the event for weeks with name-drawings, a countdown clock and relentless reminders to watch.

Even the set for the debate in Detroit’s Fox Theatre, which CNN boasts took 100 people eight days to build (using 25 cameras, 500-plus lights and 40,000 pounds of equipment), seemed like a vulgar example of what we’ve turned our politics into. It overwhelmed the sturdy and ornate authenticity of the palatial 5,000-seat theater, which was constructed in 1928 and built to last. CNN’s frantic impermanence insulted the structure’s beauty.

But that could be any of us these days — lit up like Christmas, in a panic, short of attention, looking for conflict, and then moving on to the next thing. Less than reality TV, this week’s debates put me more in mind of Showtime’s occasionally entertaining but utterly useless political junkie show, “The Circus,” in which three insidery correspultants (my word) just sort of show up wherever “politics” seems to be occurring, so as to add to a heap of speculative analysis and then rush to the next airport.

That’s the state of the 2020 campaign right now — premature, oversupplied, overanxious and, as several of the Democratic hopefuls noted on both nights, prone to using Republican talking points to eliminate one another as too left or too centrist or just too-too. This is only great TV if you’re the guy in the White House.

If CNN were being run thoughtfully instead of manically, a debate this many months away from the primaries would look less like “American Ninja Warrior” and more like one of those nights when “This American Life” rolls into town and everyone gets a free tote bag. Let’s talk. Let’s explain. Let’s meet some candidates with some stories to tell about how they can win. The candidates could have been seated in wing-backed chairs. The lights could be lower. They could have been allowed to finish their sentences. The debates would run longer (maybe three nights), but more calmly.

The DNC itself set a more useful mood during the pre-show, bringing out the Perfecting Church choir on the first night, offering a rousing national anthem from Dee Dee Bridgewater on the second, and personable pep talks from DNC Chair Tom Perez, who on Tuesday night urged voters to “speed date” the candidates; don’t settle down yet. Date around, Perez said, “fall in love with multiple people,” until you find the right replacement for President Trump. Politics keeps trying to mimic “American Idol” and “The Apprentice,” but does a better answer perhaps lie in “The Bachelor,” with flirtation and roses?

Wishful thinking, I freely admit. I find it difficult to take CNN’s approach as seriously as CNN does — this many candidates, this early, trying this hard to get to a date on the calendar that (we can only hope) will get here when it gets here.

CNN got most of what it came for (jibber-jabber for future chyrons) but maybe not the ratings it desired. Around 9 million TV viewers tuned in Tuesday night, far fewer than the 15 to 18 million who watched NBC’s two-night debates in June. (CNN says another 2.8 million watched Tuesday’s debate online. Wednesday’s TV ratings improved, with an estimated audience of 10 million.) Better than a “Walking Dead” episode, but low enough to get a taunting tweet from the president.

The candidates got some good licks in, uttered some lines we’ll forget by the weekend (“Go easy on me, kid”; “Stop yelling!” “I don’t understand someone who takes the trouble to run for president of the United States just to talk about what we cannot do and what we shouldn’t fight for,” and so on.)

There was so much of it as to be too much of it, and unfortunately, that’s all CNN really wanted. After the first night, as some went weirdly gaga for Marianne Williamson’s intergalactic message of love and justice (she’s an expert at telling people exactly what they want to hear, and not a bad TV character herself, as if she were conjured out of old “West Wing” reruns), I found a curious affinity for the closing remarks of Tim Ryan, the Ohio congressman who wound up nearly riffing on an old pop song: “There’s not going to be a savior,” he said. “Not going to be a superstar that will fix all this. It’s going to be you and me — ”

And we just disagreeeee.

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fmservers · 6 years ago

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All your meme are belong to AOC

We meme IRL too https://t.co/0NHFsutiWC

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 20, 2019

Here’s @aoc talking about how Nintendo 64 was the best system. She’s on @twitch helping to raise money for trans kids. pic.twitter.com/cJIfUif1mv

— New Super Blood Wolf Moon Bros. U Deluxe (@GenePark) January 20, 2019

With @AOC, @RepDebDingell, @jahimes, @davidcicilline, @RepCartwright & @Twitter representatives at training session on Twitter for Democratic Members of Congress.

The below pic is called a selfie. pic.twitter.com/WHwlQHxpoj

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) January 17, 2019

For those out of the loop, Republicans began to circulate a fake nude photo of me. The @DailyCaller reposted it (!) and refused to indicate it was fake in the title as well.

Completely disgusting behavior from Conservative outlets.

No wonder they defended Kavanaugh so fiercely.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 10, 2019

I hear the GOP thinks women dancing are scandalous.

Wait till they find out Congresswomen dance too!

Have a great weekend everyone :) pic.twitter.com/9y6ALOw4F6

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 4, 2019

That is assuming she understands basic economics, actual humans and technology. I doubt if any of those are true.

— Vinod Khosla (@vkhosla) January 12, 2019

“Good at memes” might not look as good on a resume as her prize in one of the most prestigious research competitions for high school students (other alumni have gone on to win the Nobel Prize and National Medal of Science), but it shows that Ocasio-Cortez understands tech (and actual humans) on a level that her critics, including Khosla, Sorkin, and Piers Morgan, who admonished Ocasio-Cortez to start “acting like a grown-up not a juvenile smart-a**e,” are perhaps incapable of.

Ocasio-Cortez has often been compared to Trump for their ability to control the narrative through social media, especially Twitter. To cite another meme, however, Trump is chaotic evil, acting on the urge of impulses he seems unable to control even as they profoundly affect the lives of vulnerable people. Maybe it’s too early to tell exactly where Ocasio-Cortez’s political influence will fall on the D&D alignment chart, but it is anything but chaotic.

Via Catherine Shu https://techcrunch.com

#TechCrunch

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newstfionline · 7 years ago

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Liberals, You’re Not as Smart as You Think You Are

By Gerard Alexander, NY Times, May 12, 2018

I know many liberals, and two of them really are my best friends. Liberals make good movies and television shows. Their idealism has been an inspiration for me and many others. Many liberals are very smart. But they are not as smart, or as persuasive, as they think.

And a backlash against liberals--a backlash that most liberals don’t seem to realize they’re causing--is going to get President Trump re-elected.

People often vote against things instead of voting for them: against ideas, candidates and parties. Democrats, like Republicans, appreciate this whenever they portray their opponents as negatively as possible. But members of political tribes seem to have trouble recognizing that they, too, can push people away and energize them to vote for the other side. Nowhere is this more on display today than in liberal control of the commanding heights of American culture.

Take the past few weeks. At the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington, the comedian Michelle Wolf landed some punch lines that were funny and some that weren’t. But people reacted less to her talent and more to the liberal politics that she personified. For every viewer who loved her Trump bashing, there seemed to be at least one other put off by the one-sidedness of her routine. Then, when Kanye West publicly rethought his ideological commitments, prominent liberals criticized him for speaking on the topic at all. Maxine Waters, a Democratic congresswoman from California, remarked that “sometimes Kanye West talks out of turn” and should “maybe not have so much to say.”

Liberals dominate the entertainment industry, many of the most influential news sources and America’s universities. This means that people with progressive leanings are everywhere in the public eye--and are also on the college campuses attended by many people’s children or grandkids. These platforms come with a lot of power to express values, confer credibility and celebrity and start national conversations that others really can’t ignore.

But this makes liberals feel more powerful than they are. Or, more accurately, this kind of power is double-edged. Liberals often don’t realize how provocative or inflammatory they can be. In exercising their power, they regularly not only persuade and attract but also annoy and repel.

In fact, liberals may be more effective at causing resentment than in getting people to come their way. I’m not talking about the possibility that jokes at the 2011 correspondents’ association dinner may have pushed Mr. Trump to run for president to begin with. I mean that the “army of comedy” that Michael Moore thought would bring Mr. Trump down will instead be what builds him up in the minds of millions of voters.

Consider some ways liberals have used their cultural prominence in recent years. They have rightly become more sensitive to racism and sexism in American society. News reports, academic commentary and movies now regularly relate accounts of racism in American history and condemn racial bigotry. These exercises in consciousness-raising and criticism have surely nudged some Americans to rethink their views, and to reflect more deeply on the status and experience of women and members of minority groups in this country.

But accusers can paint with very wide brushes. Racist is pretty much the most damning label that can be slapped on anyone in America today, which means it should be applied firmly and carefully. Yet some people have cavalierly leveled the charge against huge numbers of Americans--specifically, the more than 60 million people who voted for Mr. Trump.

In their ranks are people who sincerely consider themselves not bigoted, who might be open to reconsidering ways they have done things for years, but who are likely to be put off if they feel smeared before that conversation even takes place.

It doesn’t help that our cultural mores are changing rapidly, and we rarely stop to consider this. Some liberals have gotten far out ahead of their fellow Americans but are nonetheless quick to criticize those who haven’t caught up with them.

Within just a few years, many liberals went from starting to talk about microaggressions to suggesting that it is racist even to question whether microaggressions are that important. “Gender identity disorder” was considered a form of mental illness until recently, but today anyone hesitant about transgender women using the ladies’ room is labeled a bigot. Liberals denounce “cultural appropriation” without, in many cases, doing the work of persuading people that there is anything wrong with, say, a teenager not of Chinese descent wearing a Chinese-style dress to prom or eating at a burrito cart run by two non-Latino women.

Pressing a political view from the Oscar stage, declaring a conservative campus speaker unacceptable, flatly categorizing huge segments of the country as misguided--these reveal a tremendous intellectual and moral self-confidence that smacks of superiority. It’s one thing to police your own language and a very different one to police other people’s. The former can set an example. The latter is domineering.

This judgmental tendency became stronger during the administration of President Barack Obama, though not necessarily because of anything Mr. Obama did. Feeling increasingly emboldened, liberals were more convinced than ever that conservatives were their intellectual and even moral inferiors. Discourses and theories once confined to academia were transmitted into workaday liberal political thinking, and college campuses--which many take to be what a world run by liberals would look like--seemed increasingly intolerant of free inquiry.

It was during these years that the University of California included the phrase “America is the land of opportunity” on a list of discouraged microaggressions. Liberal politicians portrayed conservative positions on immigration reform as presumptively racist; Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, once dubiously claimed that she had heard Republicans tell Irish visitors that “if it was you,” then immigration reform “would be easy.”

When Mr. Obama remarked, behind closed doors, during the presidential campaign in 2008, that Rust Belt voters “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them,” it mattered not so much because he said it but because so many listeners figured that he was only saying what liberals were really thinking.

These are the sorts of events conservatives think of when they sometimes say, “Obama caused Trump.” Many liberals might interpret that phrase to mean that America’s first black president brought out the worst in some people. In this view, not only might liberals be unable to avoid provoking bigots, it’s not clear they should even try. After all, should they not have nominated and elected Mr. Obama? Should they regret doing the right thing just because it provoked the worst instincts in some people?

This is a limited view of the situation. Even if liberals think their opponents are backward, they don’t have to gratuitously drive people away, including voters who cast ballots once or even twice for Mr. Obama before supporting Mr. Trump in 2016.

Champions of inclusion can watch what they say and explain what they’re doing without presuming to regulate what words come out of other people’s mouths. Campus activists can allow invited visitors to speak and then, after that event, hold a teach-in discussing what they disagree with. After the Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that states had to allow same-sex marriage, the fight, in some quarters, turned to pizza places unwilling to cater such weddings. Maybe don’t pick that fight?

People determined to stand against racism can raise concerns about groups that espouse hate and problems like the racial achievement gap in schools without smearing huge numbers of Americans, many of whom might otherwise be Democrats by temperament.

Liberals can act as if they’re not so certain--and maybe actually not be so certain--that bigotry motivates people who disagree with them on issues like immigration. Without sacrificing their principles, liberals can come across as more respectful of others. Self-righteousness is rarely attractive, and even more rarely rewarded.

Self-righteousness can also get things wrong. Especially with the possibility of Mr. Trump’s re-election, many liberals seem primed to write off nearly half the country as irredeemable. Admittedly, the president doesn’t make it easy. As a candidate, Mr. Trump made derogatory comments about Mexicans, and as president described some African countries with a vulgar epithet. But it is an unjustified leap to conclude that anyone who supports him in any way is racist, just as it would be a leap to say that anyone who supported Hillary Clinton was racist because she once made veiled references to “superpredators.”

Liberals are trapped in a self-reinforcing cycle. When they use their positions in American culture to lecture, judge and disdain, they push more people into an opposing coalition that liberals are increasingly prone to think of as deplorable. That only validates their own worst prejudices about the other America.

Those prejudices will be validated even more if Mr. Trump wins re-election in 2020, especially if he wins a popular majority. That’s not impossible: The president’s current approval ratings are at 42 percent, up from just a few months ago.

Liberals are inadvertently making that outcome more likely. It’s not too late to stop.

Gerard Alexander is an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia.

#liberals #self-righteousness #Gerard Alexander

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clusterassets · 7 years ago

Text

New world news from Time: Robert Mueller’s Indictment Could Be a Win for Russia’s Trolls

It turns out you don’t need much to meddle in a U.S. election. Some cheap cell phones. An Internet connection. Maybe a few airline tickets and a good grasp of the English language. That was enough for the Russian troll farm to get started on their U.S. operation back in 2015. And they achieved what they set out to do.

Thirteen of them, mostly errand runners for the group known as the Internet Research Agency, have been charged for allegedly trying to skew the U.S. electoral process. The indictment against them, handed down on Friday by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, reads both like a warning and a potboiler. But it could also serve as an instruction manual, one that any determined group could use to replicate the operation. This is clearly not what the Special Counsel intended.

When it comes to catching criminals and deterring copycats, the indictment may yet succeed. It might at least become harder for the Internet Research Agency to recruit new trolls around its home base in St. Petersburg, especially now that some of them are wanted by the FBI and unable to travel outside Russia without fear of arrest and extradition. Their summer holidays may now be limited to the beaches of Sochi and Crimea.

But for the broader aims of the troll factory and its investors, the indictment could serve as a victory in disguise. Apart from providing a blueprint for their methods, it may further diminish public trust in the platforms people use to receive information, share ideas, and to engage in civic discourse. Disseminating those kind of doubts has been the aim of Russian propaganda for years.

“It does not function like traditional propaganda,” says David Patrikarakos, the author of War in 140 Characters, a recent book on modern information warfare. It doesn’t seek to promote any ideology or convince people to join any single cause. Instead, says Patrikarakos, “It tries to muddy the waters. It tries to sow as much confusion and as much misinformation as possible, so that when people see the truth, they find it harder to recognize.”

Take, for example, one of the troll factory‘s earlier campaigns in Russia, the one that followed the murder of Boris Nemtsov. On February 27, 2015, the Russian dissident and former Deputy Prime Minister was shot in the back while walking home a few steps from the Kremlin walls. Suspicion among his allies soon fell on the man he had spent his career trying to unseat: President Vladimir Putin, who denied any involvement.

The day after the killing, the staff at the Internet Research Agency received detailed instructions on how to spin the news. Their orders were to flood Russian news websites and social media with comments about Nemtsov’s killing, all in the hope of confusing the online discussion about who was responsible. “Technical instructions for Feb. 28,” the orders began, according to a copy that was later leaked to local journalists. ��Create the opinion that Ukrainians could have been mixed up in the death of the Russian opposition figure.”

Other theories spouted that week by the Agency’s trolls put the blame on Nemtsov’s girlfriend, his fellow dissidents, his American allies and his former business partners. They did not focus on dispelling the notion that Putin or his allies could have been involved. They simply crowded the debate with so many theories and alternative facts that everything about the case began to seem suspicious. “Next they’ll say that space aliens did it,” Nemtsov’s personal assistant, Olga Shorina, told me after watching these theories spread on social media at the time. “I can’t even look at it anymore.”

About three weeks after Nemtsov’s death – when a decorated veteran of the Russian security services had already been arrested for pulling the trigger – an independent polling agency in Moscow found that only 15% of respondents believed the Russian authorities had been involved. Perhaps even more surprising, the same survey found that only 10% of respondents were even paying close attention to the highest profile political murder of the Putin era. A far larger number had simply tuned out.

The Kremlin’s main propaganda outlets – the television news – no doubt played a more powerful role in shaping public opinion around that case. But the role played by the Internet Research Agency suggested a shift in strategy. Long before Nemtsov’s killing, in 2011, Russia had overtaken Germany as the nation with the highest number of Internet users in Europe. Even then the public was beginning to turn off state TV and going online for uncensored news.

Across Russia, and especially in the big cities, the political debate was also migrating to the Web around that time, especially to the blogging platform known as LiveJournal, whose audience in Russia around 2011 had come to rival some of the state-run news networks – it had 5 million Russian accounts with 30 million monthly readers. It wasn’t long before that space also came under attack. In April 2011, hackers targeted not just the blogs of the dissidents and opposition figures who were writing on LiveJournal; they took down the entire service.

“There’s no ideology at play here, unless you want to talk about an anti-blogging ideology,” Alexander Plushchev, one of Russia’s leading tech journalists, told me at the time. “These are clearly just Internet hit men who got the order to take out LiveJournal.” The aim, in other words, was to stop the conversation. And for a little while it worked. The raucous debates on LiveJournal ground to a halt as the site remained inaccessible for days, and many of its users began migrating to Facebook, which is a lot more difficult for hackers to knock offline.

The rise of the Internet Research Agency in 2013 was, at least in part, a reaction to that shift. Its managers recognized that trying to shut down the means of political debate was no longer enough. In the age of social media, people would just find another place to exchange ideas. The best way to stop them would be to infiltrate the discourse itself — and, whenever possible, to fill it with nonsense, conspiracies and lies.

The indictment of the Internet Research Agency shows in minute detail how easily this can be done. Reading through the schemes it describes – the fake accounts the suspects created on social media, the fake activist groups they formed, the fake causes they claimed to champion, and the phony protests they were able to organize in American cities – it is hard to avoid the tug of paranoia, the feeling that the civic discourse in any democracy is vulnerable to sabotage, and that every political statement is worthy of suspicion.

The reaction to such doubts could, in many cases, be a healthy sort of skepticism. It could remind people to check their sources of information and to question the voices that reach them online. But that sort of vigilance is hard to maintain. For many people, the easier option would be to withdraw from the debate for fear of being fooled again. And as the efforts of the Agency’s trolls have shown in the past, that outcome would serve their interests perfectly well.

With reporting by Sandra Ifraimova / New York

February 21, 2018 at 06:36PM ClusterAssets Inc., https://ClusterAssets.wordpress.com

#Time #world #news #ClusterAssets #ClusterAsset #Cluster Asset Inc.#ClusterAssets Inc.

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theliberaltony · 7 years ago

Link

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): OK, welcome all. Today we’re doing a “MOST POWERFUL POLITICAL PLAYERS OF 2018 DRAFT!!!!!!!” The idea here is both to look back on our 2017 picks and see how horrible they were and to preview what we’re looking for in 2018.

In case you forgot: The goal is to pick a team that will have the most influence over politics, policy and the national discourse in 2018.

Here are the final teams we drafted for 2017:

Our old, 2017 ‘power draft’ teams

Round Nate Harry Clare Micah 1 D. Trump M. Pence R. Mueller M. McConnell 2 P. Ryan M. Meadows A. Kennedy J. Sessions 3 J. Comey J. Kushner B. Sanders G. Cohn 4 S. Bannon B.R. Luján R. Tillerson T. Price 5 J. Roberts R. Maddow R. Murdoch S. Collins 6 H. Clinton I. Trump D. Coats N. Gorsuch

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): My team was good.

I HAVE NO REGRETS! (Except maybe, like, Rex Tillerson.)

micah: Harry’s team is the worst?

clare.malone: 100 percent.

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): I’m still impressed by my Ben Ray Luján pick!!!

micah: Nate’s last three picks are

My only bad pick was Tom Price, former Health and Human Services Secretary.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): Attorney General Jeff Sessions was an overdraft

micah: No way.

natesilver: Yes Shway.

harry: Oh lord.

clare.malone: Well, we are all very glad to have Perry in on this year’s fun.

micah: Let’s start the new draft!

Remember, it’s a snake draft. Everyone pick a number between 1 and 100 so we can determine the order. Nate has a random number generator.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): 14

micah: 88

clare.malone: 73

harry: 51

natesilver: 50

natesilver: OK, i’m gonna randomly pick the number … Micah will observe.

The number is … 39!

micah: RIGGED!

harry: This is trash.

natesilver: So order is Nate, Harry, Perry, Clare, Micah.

micah: Remember, this is for 2018!

We’ll do five rounds — we’ll go one-by-one in the first three and round-by-round for the last two.

natesilver: With the first pick of the 2018 power players draft, the New York Nates select … Donald J. Trump, president of the United States.

micah: Bad pick.

natesilver: Oh come on, dude.

natesilver: I wouldn’t trade Trump for your next three picks combined.

micah: I mean, because we include influence over the national discourse, it’s a good pick. If we were drafting for influence over policy only, I could argue it’s an overrated pick.

natesilver: We’re talking about a man who can lead us to war.

Or back us into war.

micah: I’m just saying that — given his level of involvement in the crafting of legislation — he has less influence over the nation’s business than your average president.

clare.malone: hmmm.

harry: I mean, that’s true.

natesilver: Wait, is it true? It seems … uh … not true. He totally drives “the conversation” more than any other president.

clare.malone: I’m not sure that’s true in the age of the imperial presidency!

Presidents inherently have huuuuuuge power.

perry: In terms of influence over policy, Congress has probably done its big bill (taxes), so much of the policy will be foreign affairs and executive branch stuff in 2018. That’s really Trump.

natesilver: Yeah, and what Perry said.

micah: Perry and Clare, I’m just trying to criticize Nate’s pick — stop taking his side.

clare.malone: Excited to spend the next hour with you all on this.

micah: Harry, with the No. 2 pick.

harry: Folks, I’m going to shock the world.

clare.malone: Al Franken.

micah: lol

harry: Here it is….

Are you ready?

natesilver: Bad pick.

harry: Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. Boom CRUSHED IT.

micah: OMG

natesilver: Oh my fucking god.

Sam Bowie.

micah: It’s a 2018 draft, Harry! Not 2020!

natesilver: Darko Milicic.

clare.malone: Explain, Harry.

harry: OK, it’s pretty simple for me: Democrats are in a position to take back one or maybe both chambers in Congress. Well-educated women are leading that charge. Democrats will have some overarching message, and I chose the person who has been the most anti-Trump and the most outspoken. She’s also in the New York media market.

She is very important to the public discourse.

micah: That’s all fair.

perry: It really isn’t.

micah: Hit him hard, Perry!

clare.malone: Totally fair arguments, but she is not a good No. 2 pick.

perry: And the next five to six picks will show why. Gillibrand is not going to be a big player compared to lots of others. Is she the most important woman in Congress, even? I think no …

harry: Again, this is discourse, not policy. Just so I’m clear.

clare.malone: Wait … it’s POWER, not discourse or policy. Right? And all the trappings that come with that: driving conversation, wrangling, etc.

micah: It is power over discourse and policy and everything politics!

perry: Gillibrand basically removed a senator (Franken). That is power. But I don’t think she will do that again in 2018.

clare.malone: You think Nancy Pelosi’s still the most important woman in Congress, Perry?

perry: Yes, Pelosi.

micah: Don’t answer that!

clare.malone: hah

micah: lol

clare.malone: I feel like that’s a good transition to Perry’s Pick (TM).

micah: Perry, with the No. 3 pick!!!

perry: Robert Mueller.

clare.malone: Yeah. Good choice.

micah: Yup. Special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election and potential connections with the Trump campaign; that’s a big job.

harry: Boring.

perry: I could make a case for him being No. 1, even. He could change the course of the presidency if he brings charges against Trump. Or if he clears Trump or never charges him and ends the investigation — that would be a huge win for the president.

natesilver: What if he gets fired next week, though?

perry: What he says in the wake of that firing would be huge. FBI Director James Comey was fired and that was a disaster for Trump.

micah: OK, here’s my anti-picking-Mueller argument: He could get fired, as Nate said. Also, he’s a straight-down-the-line guy. He’s basically at the mercy of whatever the facts on the ground are. So he’s only playing out a string.

To be clear, I don’t buy that argument.

But still.

natesilver: Yeah, I don’t buy it either. But I also don’t see how he could be ranked ahead of Trump.

harry: Mueller is the type of guy who many in the press think is important, but many voters don’t care about.

micah: Clare, with the No. 4 pick.

clare.malone: There are so many names to parse through.

micah: I know my pick.

My next two, in fact!

SNAKES!

clare.malone: Bully for you.

micah: lol

clare.malone: OK.

I’m going to go with a 2018 wave-themed pick: Nancy Pelosi, Democratic minority leader in the House.

micah: Oh god.

That’s a Harry-level bad pick.

clare.malone: hahahaha

natesilver: No, it’s better than Harry’s pick.

micah: Even if Democrats win the House, Pelosi wouldn’t become speaker until 2019 (and that’s assuming she does become speaker).

perry: Actually, Pelosi has essentially already forced out two members of Congress (John Conyers; Ruben Kihuen), one more than Gillibrand.

clare.malone: Ben Ray Luján is who I should have picked, right, Harry?

harry: That’s right.

natesilver: Pelosi could also influence whether impeachment proceedings against Trump begin this year.

micah: How?

People, Democrats are in the minority in the House.

natesilver: Let’s say Trump fires Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein or something. Is that grounds for impeachment? Could depend a lot on whether Pelosi wants to press the case.

clare.malone: Anyhow, here’s what I figure: She’s still a powerful fundraising, wrangling force in the party. (See my definition of power above.) And the Democrats might be heading into a little upswing, and might be tangling with Trump over DACA, etc.

perry: She will have huge influence over how the Democrats campaign in 2018, which matters for 2019. She will be a huge player in deciding if Democrats make impeachment a campaign issue this year.

harry: Micah’s probably thinking of picking Martin O’Malley, so don’t listen to him.

natesilver: I will note that Pelosi was NOT DRAFTED in our previous power players draft

micah: I have the No. 5 and No. 6 picks …

With the No. 5 pick, I select …

Anthony Kennedy, Supreme Court justice.

clare.malone: Snipin’ my team, huh.

harry: Ah, good old Tony K.

micah: And with the No. 6 pick I select …

John Kelly, chief of staff to the president.

perry: Excellent choices.

natesilver: One good pick and one bad pick there, Micah.

clare.malone: Crap. Kelly was mine.

harry: I think they are both terrible.

natesilver: No, Kelly is a bad pick.

clare.malone: No way.

micah: Nate, you’re wrong.

natesilver: Go back and look at our previous power player drafts and you’ll find that the people for whom the argument is “this person has Trump’s ear” always turn out to be crap picks because that changes so quickly.

micah: I don’t think Kelly’s power comes from having Trump’s ear.

natesilver: What power has he actually demonstrated so far?

clare.malone: He reportedly fired/forced out Omarosa.

micah: Kelly’s power is literal, in the sense that he has lots of control over White House personnel, as well as what information gets into the Oval Office (much more than former chief Reince Priebus, it seems). But he also has symbolic power, because so much of Trump’s credibility with other players in Washington rests on Kelly.

AND

If Kelly gets forced out, whatever he says will be hugely impactful. He knows all.

natesilver: Oh come on, you could have said the same about Steve Bannon.

And that pick — which I made in the fourth round last time — hasn’t aged well.

micah: No, I wouldn’t have said Bannon controlled the information flow.

And I wouldn’t have said that any of Trump’s credibility rested on Bannon.

natesilver: But you’d have said something equally bullshitty about him.

micah: lol

clare.malone: OK, you guys done fighting?

micah: Quiet power is still power!

perry: I think the dismissal of Kelly will be a big story if that happens. And if he stays, I think that means Trump has stayed somewhat normal (not fired Mueller, for example). Kennedy is big because the Supreme Court has big decisions coming up on gerrymandering and gay rights, and he is the swing vote. Kennedy could be No. 2.

natesilver: Yeah, the gerrymandering thing is a big deal for 2018, potentially.

micah: Lots of SCOTUS cases coming up that could literally redraw the political map.

harry: Just a quick add: I wouldn’t be surprised if John Roberts plays a bigger role than people think, so that may decrease Kennedy’s influence.

micah: OK, Clare with the No. 7 pick.

clare.malone: Vice President Mike Pence.

natesilver: Good pick.

micah: Hmmmm.

clare.malone: I think if the investigation of Trump goes … certain ways, Pence is on the up-and-up. And he’ll stop being so DL about his accumulation of power and dolla dolla bills.

Richard Nixon was only eventually forced out because he lost Gerald Ford’s vouching for him.

natesilver: I mean, there’s a nontrivial chance that Pence could become president next year, so start with that.

And if he turned on Trump, that would be a big deal too.

harry: I’ll add his being the tie-breaking vote in the Senate. That becomes a lot more nontrivial as Democrat Doug Jones of Alabama joins the chamber.

micah: Remember when Nate picked Obama in the first round?

natesilver: Obama was freaking president for part of this year! I don’t see how one can justify taking Kelly over Pence.

micah: Odds are that Pence will not have any official power when 2018 ends.

perry: Pence will not break from Trump. Or say anything interesting. Pence had virtually no influence in 2017. I guess former national security adviser Michael Flynn lying to him and Pence allegedly being mad about it mattered. I think.

micah: That’s the modal outcome.

Right. I’m with Perry.

natesilver: We’re drafting for UPSIDE, though. Trust the process.

micah: Stop making up new goals for the draft.

We’re drafting for POWER!

harry: Remember when Pence led a movement that got Franken expelled? Oh, wait. That was Gillibrand. That’s why my pick was freaking awesome.

Thank you.

micah: OK, Perry with the No. 8 pick.

perry: Mitch McConnell, Senate majority leader.

harry: I got no beef with that pick.

micah: I do.

natesilver: One could argue that the Senate isn’t going to pass much in 2018.

clare.malone: Yeah, that’s why I wouldn’t pick him that high.

I think McConnell will not only see a post-tax bill ebb in Washington power, but he’s a toxic force out there in the states for Republicans who are running as anti-establishment.

micah: +1,000,000

perry: Confirmations matter, and they go through the Senate, including if a seat on the Supreme Court opens up or the secretary of state needs to be replaced. Also, the only real Russia investigation in Congress is happening in the Senate. And McConnell, unlike Pence or House Speaker Paul Ryan, might really break with Trump in some strong way. Remember how McConnell behaved in August? McConnell is also likely to fight in primaries against Tea Party candidates.

micah: He might fight them, but he’ll lose.

natesilver: Perry is right. McConnell is clearly better than anyone else on the board.

harry: You wanna bet, Nathaniel? I bet you my pick crushes.

clare.malone: Do tell.

micah: With the No. 9 pick, Harry selects …

natesilver: Harry just said, “I can’t remember the name.”

micah: Not a great sign.

harry: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Nailed it, boom. (Note: I fully expect him to be fired soon.)

natesilver: Wait, are you messing with us?

micah: Are you deliberately throwing this?

harry: I love this draft!

clare.malone: Performance art.

micah: Make your argument.

natesilver: No, let’s not waste anyone’s time.

Just move on to the next pick.

micah: I mean, these drafts are always 50 percent farcical. But, Harry …

harry: I saw “The Disaster Artist” this weekend. I just think we hear more about Tillerson than most administration officials. Foreign policy is going to be a big deal. His firing could set off a firestorm.

micah: That’s not totally crazy.

Nate with the No. 10 pick.

natesilver: OK. I’m going with House Speaker Paul Ryan.

micah:

harry: In all seriousness, I nearly went with Ryan. I just thought it was boring.

micah: He might not even be speaker soon.

natesilver: He’s probably on the way out the door. But in some ways, that makes him more “dangerous” in the short run. He could do things that are politically unpopular with the general public — like big cuts to welfare programs.

Or he could turn on Trump since he was a lame duck anyway.

clare.malone: I think Ryan is too much of a party guy to ever do that

micah: He’ll say, “I have serious concerns about the president’s decision.”

natesilver: Yeah, I think Mueller would rise above that level.

What if Trump fires Mueller? And Ryan is worried about trying to protect his majority, or at least mitigate the damage?

perry: If he pushes a Medicare reform/cuts plan, that has the potential to turn a wave into whatever is worse than a wave. Ryan as a lame duck is a big policy danger for Republicans. He favors stuff that is even more unpopular than this tax plan.

micah: Nate, pick.

natesilver: OK, with the No. 11 pick, I take Chief Justice John Roberts.

I got ALL THREE BRANCHES OF GOVERNMENT, YO!!!!

clare.malone: I do respect spreading the power.

micah: That was my original team.

Harry, with No. 12.

natesilver: Harry’s gonna pick Ralph Northam.

harry: I select Mike Rounds. I’m kidding. I’m going with Jeff Sessions.

micah: Good pick.

natesilver: “Fine.”

harry: I DID IT!!!!!!

perry: Sessions has big policy influence; less on discourse. But I think he set most of his policies in 2017.

micah: Perry, please pick the No. 13 person.

perry: Sean Hannity, Fox News host.

He really matters to the conservative discourse. And I think he is going to defend Trump in ways that are problematic for the rest of the party, like leading the push to fire Mueller or Rosenstein.

harry: Hannity is this draft’s version of me picking Rachel Maddow.

clare.malone: No, I think it’s a good pick.

micah: That’s a hard pick to judge.

clare.malone: Hannity influences the GOP base enormously.

micah: Or does he just reflect the base? Is he the tail or the dog?

perry: I agree that it’s hard to measure his impact on discourse.

natesilver: One might argue that Hannity doesn’t have that much influence because there’s no chance he’ll turn on Trump.

He’s not a “swing” vote, so to speak.

harry: Hannity is a partisan. He toes the party line.

perry: Micah is right: I’m not sure. I think my question is not if he will swing against Trump, but does he call for things (firing Mueller or Rosenstein, for example) that are extreme, and thus put the party in a bind.

micah: Clare, with the No. 14 pick!!!

clare.malone: You guys are going to ridicule me, but…

Steve Bannon

micah: Clare.

clare.malone: Bannon is still going to make trouble in Republican primaries and cause chaos. That’s a power of sorts. And it could cost the party seats.

micah: True.

natesilver: That’s not a ridiculous pick, but something feels weird about how Bannon went from being picked in the fourth round last time to the third round this time.

He might have some influence, but I don’t buy that he has more influence on the outside than the inside.

Also, it seems possible that some of the people in his orbit will peel off after the Roy Moore debacle.

clare.malone: I definitely think that could happen. But he’s a powerful enough pest to be a pest for the full year.

micah: OK, so with the No. 15 pick, I select Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.

harry: Oh lord.

micah: If the GOP tries to do entitlement reform in 2018, Collins will wield a ton of power.

harry: Unless there’s a senator absent, she needs another partner in crime to wield power.

natesilver: I mean … meh? There’s also a universe in which the Senate is split 50-50 after the November elections and she might think about switching parties.

micah: You beat me to it! Switching parties is an underrated possibility.

natesilver: It’s not that uncommon, historically

micah: OK, so now let’s do the fourth round. Everyone give their picks, and then we’ll debate the whole round as a group. The order is me, Clare, then Perry, then Harry, then Nate.

With the No. 16 pick, I select Michael Flynn.

natesilver: “creative”

clare.malone: Mike Pompeo, CIA director.

perry: Mike Pompeo.

yuck

Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas.

micah: Wow!

harry: Mitt Romney.

natesilver: Going to go with a little bit of a sleeper here … Kirsten Gillibrand.

micah: haha

harry: LOL.

natesilver: I’ll take Chuck Schumer.

harry: Should have gone with Bill de Blasio.

micah: Micah had the best pick that round.

Flynn could bring down the whole administration if there’s a there there!

natesilver: Is he credible enough to do so?

micah: He’ll likely have documentation

clare.malone: I think the kids call it “receipts.”

perry: Foreign policy is big, so Pompeo will matter if he stays at CIA or moves to the State Department. So that is why I was going to pick him.

Cotton is also an important adviser on foreign policy to Trump, whether he joins the Cabinet or not. If we are talking about war with North Korea, those two matter.

harry: I have no problem with Flynn as a pick. If Trump or people close to Trump go down because of Mueller, it’s likely that Flynn will play at least some role in that.

clare.malone: Perry has explained my pick.

Sorry for picking it, but great minds!

micah: OK, LAST ROUND!!!!!

Nate -> Harry -> Perry -> Clare -> Micah

natesilver: Rod Rosenstein, deputy attorney general.

harry: I’m panicking. I don’t know who to pick. It’s tough. It’s crazy out there. I’m going to select with the biggest pick that I’ve ever made …

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, White House press secretary.

micah: Jeez.

perry: Jared Kushner.

clare.malone: John Dowd, Trump attorney.

micah: Joe Biden.

harry: BIDEN?!

micah: He’s running. Will play a kingmaker role in midterms. Etc.

natesilver: Dan Quayle wasn’t available?

clare.malone: What about Bernie?

We maybe overlooked him.

micah: I’m very meh on Bernie.

harry: I’d like to reverse my selection and select Fritz Mondale.

perry: Bernie’s impact in terms of the Senate may be important as well. Biden campaigned for Jones, but did that matter?

I’m not so sure it did.

natesilver: One of the more interesting developments is how Bernie actually hasn’t been at the forefront of many of the conversations this year. That’s why I gravitated more toward people with some sort of official position of power. Still, Bernie deserved to go ahead of some of the more dubious picks in the last round or two.

micah: Lots of people who were picked last time were not picked this time: Hillary Clinton, Dan Coats, Ivanka Trump, Rupert Murdoch, Rachel Maddow!!!

perry: Ivanka Trump has really made no difference.

Lots of those pieces written about her were kind of a waste.

micah: Very much so.

natesilver: Who picked Kushner?

perry: I did.

Kushner matters to the Russia investigation, in that he will be cleared or not cleared and that matters.

natesilver: I thought that was an underrated pick in the sense of Kushner could give Trump some very bad advice … or Trump could pardon Kushner.

perry: Right.

micah: Trump pardoning Kushner doesn’t make Kushner powerful!

We have this debate every time! Power is active, not passive!!!!!!!!

OK, here are the teams:

Our 2018 ‘power draft’ teams

Round Nate Harry Perry Clare Micah 1 D. Trump K. Gillibrand R. Mueller N. Pelosi A. Kennedy 2 P. Ryan R. Tillerson M. McConnell M. Pence J. Kelly 3 J. Roberts J. Sessions S. Hannity S. Bannon S. Collins 4 C. Schumer M. Romney T. Cotton M. Pompeo M. Flynn 5 R. Rosenstein S.H. Sanders J. Kushner J. Dowd J. Biden

harry: My finest draft ever. I’ll be collecting my awards later today.

micah: OK, everyone vote for a winner. You can’t vote for yourself.

Then we’re done.

perry: Nate picked five people who are in the center of the action. That seems like the best plan and the best group.

micah: Ugh. I vote for Nate’s team too.

harry: I vote for myself.

micah: You can’t.

harry: If I don’t vote for myself, then who will?

micah: No one. Your team is bad.

harry:

natesilver: Recusing my own team, I’d rank the other four teams:

Perry

Clare

[big gap]

Micah

[really big gap]

Harry

micah: lol

clare.malone: I vote for Nate’s, probably.

unfortunately

harry: Clare Malone.

micah: YAY!

Thanks all!

My main takeaway: Nate doesn’t appreciate John Kelly’s power.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #A FiveThirtyEight Chat

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wionews · 7 years ago

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I want to change the culture of politics: Kamal Haasan

Tamil superstar Kamal Haasan has created a stir with his decision to join politics. On occasion of his 63rd birthday on Tuesday, the actor launched a unique app for whistleblowers.

While addressing the media, the actor said the app was being launched keeping in mind the welfare of the people.

In conversation with WION's Kartikeya Sharma, Kamal Haasan spoke about his decision to join politics, demonetisation, Hindutva, future of Tamil Nadu and more...

Q: You are a successful artist. How and when you decided to join politics?

A: 35 years back MGR asked me to join politics. Even Karunanidhi had asked me to join politics years back. But didn’t entertain the idea much but things changed 10 years back. My families too are averse to the idea of me joining politics. My family felt that people become corrupt after joining politics. Even in the film industry, I ensured that I don’t touch black money. I even suffered financial loss because of it but never compromised. Q: Did anyone support you?

A: My daughters supported me but were afraid whether I will stop being an artist and I said how can that be possible? I said that I’m an artist and that cannot be changed. I told that artist doesn’t only mean becoming a protagonist in a film. Q: Is there any particular issue which made you finally take the call to join politics?

A: I have been running a welfare movement for 39 years. The idea of converting fan clubs for politics is not new in Tamil Nadu. I disbanded the fan clubs and turned them into welfare associations. Even then politics was an impediment to social service. We rubbed many people including the government the wrong way. We had to keep ourselves in good books to do our job. MGR and Karunanidhi allowed us to do the job but it changed during Jaya. Q: Why?

A: Jaya didn’t appreciate it. She didn’t like it. She was a powerful politician. It took me a long time to understand that it was emanating from her as she disliked such voices and by the time I realised it Vishwaroopam was already in trouble. Q: So, you were toying with the idea?

A: I had a great career going and I was thinking as to why I should rough it out.

In 2011-12, I decided to take the plunge and without hesitation, I decided to take on the government and that I believe was an act of politics. People say that I was silent when Jaya was present but I did sue the government. I did affect the government and went on to win the case against them. They again banned the film and we lost almost 60 crores by the time of release. But I still went ahead because I felt it was the right thing to do. Later my brother said, leave it, the battle is won but I said it has just started. Q: You are launching an app which will act as a device for whistleblowers? Are you saying that government has failed on corruption?

A: It is one part of the spectrum. It gives voice to the people. It is a platform for dialogue. It will have broad spectrum utility. It is a longwinded explanation which I will do in January. It is to get people together. It will have many versatile points of contact. Q: The detractors would say that it can lead to civic vigilantism?

A: It is about vigil. In real life, vigilantism is a pedestrian dream to be put in practice. That is only done in films. It is about boldly talking to the government. It is within the parameters of the law. Q: Election funding is the motherboard of corruption. How will you resolve this issue of funding? Will you also need funding?

A: Why should the fund be black. It can be neat and clean money. Q: There is also an inducement. Look at the politics of inducement in your state. Freebies before elections?

A: They are paid Rs 2000 rupees in cash apart from freebies as most of the freebies are broken and substandard. A lot of people would say prove it but it is a fact. My argument is that because you take Rs 2000 rupees you lose the moral authority to question politicians.

He can always look back at you and say what about Rs 2000 I gave you. In the process, five years of authority gets sold for 90 paisa per day. We need to restore people’s authority and they need to participate in it. Q: What is your vision for Tamil Nadu and where does the malice lie?

A: Unemployment is the issue but it doesn’t emerge from the government. People also need to understand. Everyone want their children to be engineers and doctors. This culture needs to end. That’s the problem. Other areas should be explored. I think after satyagraha and khadi movement, a "skill-set" movement is very important. To make India strong, a "skill-set" movement has to be strong. I’m already working on it. I want to expand it further when I go into politics. Q: Past 40 years, Tamil politics has been divided into two poles. Is Tamil Nadu ready for a third party?

A: It is not about space but it is about intent and productive plan for people. Q: Arvind Kejriwal met you lately. Did he ask you to join AAP?

A: He was a gentleman. He gave me three options including the choice to join them. I made it very clear as to what my intent was. It was very touching. I’m already meeting other chief ministers to educate myself. He was only exploring the possibility. Our understanding was that our pursuit is the same and that is to build the nation and hence we are tied to a common ideology. Q: There is a debate on GST and demonetization taking place. What is your view on demonetisation?

A: The reason why I enthusiastically supported the idea was because I still feel that it is a workable idea. I don’t know how it was planned but I’m an enthusiast for the progress of the country. Like Satyamev Jayate is a beautiful idea. But how do you make satya win? It is not easy. There is a difference between an idea and its execution. Q: Is politics losing its sense of equanimity? Artists are getting arrested over cartoons films like Mersal faced political outrage?

A: Absolutely. I don’t want to make BJP a whipping boy. The ear for dialogue is non-existent. Leave alone politician, lower level bureaucrats and policemen get affected and angry when asked questions. People abused Gandhi after the partition but he continued the dialogue. His didn’t cancel his meetings. The worst form of criticism is assassination and that too happened to Mahatma Gandhi. Q. Culture, films and cinema are fused in Tamil Nadu. Does it make Tamil Nadu a unique state?

A: It exists in other states but maybe Tamil Nadu got the idea of using cinema as a propaganda tool from Germany. Germany proved to the world the power of propaganda and later the US also did a similar thing to counter Hitler. Tamil Nadu is unique and a forerunner. Q: You had said that you are not an atheist but a rationalist. Please elaborate?

A: It is a name given by aastiks. I have a mindset of being rational. It is not my primary focus. For me, I have no religion or any God. A rational man would ask for certain proofs. Atheism is a name I refuse. Rational is good enough. My larger purpose is not to say where is God. There are Gods whose stars are fading. Maybe a new God would come. Look at it historically. Where is Zeus?

Q: You have been talking about a middle path. Today politics is swinging between caste equations and Hindutva? Where do you see yourself?

A: Hindutva is different. Hinduism is an umbrella under which Saivism, Vaishvanism and other forms of worship were brought together by the British. Neither Tamil literature nor Vedas record Hinduism as a sect. It is a large umbrella. You have to go to its finer points. My elder brother calls himself an atheist. He doesn’t believe in the concept. I would say that show me God. That is why I’m a rationalist. He is an atheist as he doesn’t wish for a God. Q: National anthem is being played in cinema halls. Does its playout before films make people more patriotic?

A: It is like a commitment towards the nation. It cannot be forced upon anyone. In my time in 70s, they played the anthem in theatres and I found people casual about it as they wanted to go home or catch a bus. Never take it there. Keep it for solemn occasions. Q: But current discourse has led to politicisation of patriotism?

A: You don’t have to remind people of it everytime. I sing national anthem with my children. In August it used to rain and I would go out in the rains with my children and sing the national anthem. Q: Your recent remarks on Hindu terror generated a lot of controversy. What were you trying to imply?

A: It was a remark which was badly translated. I used words to describe extreme. I was talking about slow marshal and violent attitude creeping in the Hindu fold. We were a peaceful lot. I was being critical of it. Q: Are you saying that Hindus are being radicalized?

A: Yes, and it is being facilitated by rhetoric. That’s what I was trying to criticise. To become a stronger country, we have to shun any form of violence. Q: The rhetoric has political acceptance?

A: It is there because there is a belief that it is another way to establish Hindu hegemony. But there are other ways of showing largeness. Let us begin by showing a large heart and accommodate and let’s make it an inclusive society. I have nothing against the Hindu society. My elders believe in Sanatan Dharma. My daughters believe in God and I have to keep in mind that I don’t hurt them when I write something on the subject. Q: Many people said that you failed to criticize someone like Zakir Naik while you were addressing the issues related to Hinduism?

A: I will criticise them also. They should not indulge in violence be it Christians or Muslims. No religion implies violence. All great books talk about love but we have become selective about them.

Q: Did the BJP ever approach you?

A: No. But PM selected me as the ambassador of Swachh Bharat and I accepted it because I’m willing to do for any party who wants to contribute to nation building. Q: So, you are all set for a new chapter?

A: I want to change the culture of politics. I’m not interested in taking anyone down. And people are ready too. New voters are coming of the age. I’m focused on that demography. They want change and I want to be part of it.

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dallasareaopinion · 8 years ago

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Stepping into deep water because someone should

Normal political discourse is difficult. People cannot seem to be able to sit down and have a rational conversation. Well is seems that way. Or people seem to be afraid to have a conversation with someone who disagrees with them. Anyone not afraid usually has an agenda that is far flung from mainstream needs.

Now this is for very basic issues. People forget it is okay to disagree and have point counter point discussions. If you bring up a topic that is controversial though, it is just about impossible for anyone to put forth a rational argument, yet at some point someone needs to say something very blunt

Racism and poverty are problems that neither the Republicans, nor the Democrats have a clue how to solve. I know many Democrats will go up in arms about they are the ones fighting these battles. Okay you are, but you are failing miserably at overcoming racism and poverty with your policies and at this point in history I am going to say lack of policies. Democrats are as closed minded as Republicans, just in a different way.

On the surface, many people will say they know how Republicans are not helping solve these issues, yet they miss deeper problems. They will interchange the word conservative and Republican. And believe it or not, the mass everyday Republican is a truer conservative than I give credit to the National leadership of the Republican party. They, unfortunately, let themselves be led astray by false promises of conservative action. So, at this point the Republican leadership has no intention of even trying to eradicate poverty or racism. It serves them well with how they disguise their policies.

Yet many hard-working conservatives who call themselves Republicans would actually like to see these issues addressed and a better resolution than what we have seen. They approach the issue seriously different than Democrats. Democrats on the other hand tend to fall back on forty-year-old verbiage about the problem and propose no new ideas to solve poverty or racism.

If you think that Democrats have done something, then think about this, just like the middle class the standard of living for people in poverty has declined. How does a poor person’s standard of living decline? Basically, they are more reliant on the government than they were 50 years ago. Their education is worse than it was 50 year ago. Their health is worse than it was 50 years ago. Poor people have suffered historically, yet we have created a whole new level of poverty in multi-generational welfare families. If the Democrats had really done something, don’t you think things would have gotten better than worse. And do not say it is because the Republicans have prevented this from happening. No, they haven’t. Yes, they have not produced any programs of their own. They want to reduce spending for social programs. They give tax breaks to the rich. So, it looks like this is all their fault. Yet what have the Democrats done that has moved the needle in any positive direction regarding improving the plight of the poor or improving race relations. Certain black people have done more than the Democrats to improving the standards of black people, and some of those people call themselves Democrats, but the Democratic party has not done anything new.

Let’s start with Hillary Clinton. She ran as the great hope for women in our country. Proof that we have moved forward as a society because we could elect a woman as president. Yet if you delved into her policies? They were a hodgepodge of individual statements to try and sound socially liberal by saying we are here to protect all the various groups from the mean old Republican Party. Seriously go back and read her website if still available. This isn’t a way to move forward and really is why the Democrats are just at fault for poverty and racism as the Republicans. You cannot accuse one group of people being against another if you yourself cannot offer more than lip service. And also, Hillary’s candidacy is proof how closed minded the Democrats have become. They were so obsessed that we must have a woman president they forget you need to nominate someone that might actually win. There are many people who really do not like Ms. Clinton, do not respect her, nor trust her. Yet the Democrat elites were dead set on shoving Ms. Clinton down our throats because that is what they wanted. This had nothing to do with what the people wanted. Sanders would have never won the general election against any of the regular Republicans because most of this country tends to lean to the moderately conservative side. It has always been this way. Yet the race would have been more traditional without all the madness if it had been between Sanders and someone else. There would have had some modicum of respect. He would have been roundly defeated, but his populist movement would have gotten a viable start.

And the young people he would have inspired would be more open to new ideas to fight racism and poverty. They would not have been tied down to 50-year-old failed policies. The only reason Clinton was close was because Trump was nominated. She also would have lost against most other Republicans, yet the close-minded aspect of the Democrat party would have prevailed and going into 2020 we would still be getting the same message from them as before. No real chance to address doing something about poverty and racism. And now the extreme elements, especially for racism have a stronger hold in the mainstream conversation than they have had in a long time. And why? The Democrats and Republicans didn’t do anything to PREVENT this from happening.

Yes, the wonderful, we know everything that is best for you party, doesn’t have a clue that they along with the Republicans have destroyed one of the most basic elements to prevent racism and to lift people out of poverty. And that is better education. You can throw money at education or you can improve it and neither party has done anything to raise the level of education in this country. Ignorance is a tool of evil and to fight it you have to give people the tools to become better.

And what is worse the party of business, the Republicans have left their constituency down. Advancing technology means people need to know science and math etc, yet we are not producing quality candidates to fill all the jobs. And it isn’t just science, people need to be able to communicate effectively so English is important. And they need to work well together so knowledge of civics and courtesy are important. And it doesn’t hurt if young people are the future of our country they understand our history so they can do even better. Yet at all accounts our kids are not getting the overall education throughout the whole of our country as they need. So now we have immigrants getting the better jobs at lower salaries than what our people should receive. Why,,??? Because the very same businesses that complain that they cannot fill positions support a party and platform that shoots ourselves down. The Republicans have created a vicious cycle that destroyed American ingenuity and one of our most basic values to go to school get a good job and do well. Sure, there are people who still fit this scenario, but they are fewer and far between. We need to offer opportunity throughout the country, not just in certain locales. Republicans try to tout these values, but the reality is except for their kids, it is all noise to look good.

And here is the real kicker, child development models with some slight differences in ages, but overall say kids’ education is the most important from 2-8 or so. If they do not get a good foundation at this point then it becomes much harder for them to catch up. And along with this, they need a healthy diet, and exercise. And this is the best time to instill values in a child. Everything we said we needed in the 1950’s was correct. A strong family, a parent with them to teach them values, people who strived to be successful to be their role models and an improving public education system. So basically, when people talk about that idyllic time of when America was great they are almost right. What happened was we did not follow through. Hence the Republican and Democratic leadership failed us by not putting this ideal into daily practice for the whole country. Instead they spoon fed political noise to their constituencies and left us with a whole host of problems from ingrained poverty, racism, under employed workers, terrible health education, obesity, pollution and poisons in our environment, random acts of violence to extreme acts of violence, child abuse, sex trafficking, gangs lifestyles more important than the family and a whole host of problems that can be solved with the right action. It will take a generation to turn the ship. And where does it start? It starts with the wonderful little toddler or baby in your neighborhood, rich or poor, white or black, or any other ethnicity, by making sure they get the right start. Whether you demand more from your local schools, or help parents learn to be parents, or create a safer community, this is where you make America great again, with the most innocent.

Kids will always play with kids, some maybe shy or unsure of themselves, yet overall kids will be kids given the opportunity. We teach them to hate and we fail their future because we spend more wasted energy and time fighting each other than just stopping and talking to each other about our children’s future. I make it sound so simple to make monumental changes, yet giving a two-year-old your time with love, patience, and finding them opportunities to learn will do more than anything the Republicans or Democrats have done in three generations. Sure, this is more, yet you need to start on the foundation to build something great.

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