#cancel American constitution

[ohyeslawd]

Google Project 25

What is Project 2025?

The Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project is a well-funded (eight-figure) effort of the Heritage Foundation and more than 100 organizations to enable a future anti-democratic presidential administration to take swift, far-right action that would cut wages for working people, dismantle social safety net programs, reverse decades of progress for civil rights, redefine the way our society operates, and undermine our economy.

A central pillar of Project 2025 is the “Mandate for Leadership,” a 900+ page policy playbook authored by former Trump administration officials and other extremists that provides a radical vision for our nation and a roadmap to implement it.

Project 2025 Snapshot

Proposals from Project 2025, discussed in detail throughout this guide, that they claim could be implemented through executive branch action alone — so without new legislation — include:

Cut overtime protections for 4.3 million workers

Stop efforts to lower prescription drug prices

Limit access to food assistance, which an average of more than 40 million people in 21.6 million households rely on monthly

Eliminate the Head Start early education program, which serves over 1 million children annually

Cut American Rescue Plan (ARP) programs that have created or saved 220,000 jobs

Restrict access to medication abortion

Push more of the 33 million people enrolled in Medicare towards Medicare Advantage and other worse, private options

Expose the 368,000 children in foster care to risk of increased discrimination

Deny students in 25 states and Washington, D.C. access to student loans because their state provides in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants

Roll back civil rights protections across multiple fronts, including cutting diversity, equity, and inclusion-related (DEI) programs and LGBTQ+ rights in health care, education, and workplaces

[qqueenofhades]

I don’t have any words right now for what’s happened. Where in the fuck do we go from here?

I don't know. I really, truly don't know. We can't sugarcoat how bad things are going to get, and we can't pre-emptively give into it anyway. This is going to be an unprecedented time in American history (if, sadly, not world history) and the forces conspiring to make you obey will gain much of their power from you doing so in advance, without a struggle. It seems fair to say that America as it has always been historically constituted is over, and may not return in our lifetimes, but we also do not know that for a fact. If nothing else, the fascists will find it very hard to cancel competitive elections, and we cannot sit back, throw up our hands, conclude that voting is clearly meaningless, and let them do that. There are a lot of other things that we need to do, but that's one.

There are various postmortems to be written and nits to pick, but Harris was thrown into an impossible situation and did the best she could in 100 days. Even her critics agree she ran a pretty much flawless campaign. But this country simply decided that a well-qualified black woman could not be preferred over the most manifestly and flagrantly unfit degenerate to ever occupy the office. They decided this for many reasons, not least because large swathes of the country now live in curated misinformation bubbles that, under Government Czar Musk, will only get much, much worse. They were helped by the cowardice and complicity of the "mainstream media" that could have ended Trump's career exactly like they did to Biden after the first debate, but chose to preserve the profits of their billionaire oligarch owners and did not do so, giving Trump the benefit of the doubt and normalization at every turn. They also hounded Biden relentlessly over the four years of his presidency, never reported on the good things he did, and drove him to the historically bad approval ratings lows for a president who was by any metric, quite successful (and will quite possibly be our last ordinary American president for a very long time). Along with the searingly ingrained racism and misogyny and misinformation, Harris could not overcome that.

Democrats clearly had a messaging problem, but it's also true that the country, quite simply, does not care about "democracy" when the economy is perceived to be at stake. Not to over-egg the Hitler parallels, but yeah. This is how Hitler returned to power in 1933 -- on the backs of widespread economic collapse of the Weimar Republic; voters decided they just didn't care about the overtly fascist stuff, which he then proceeded to you know, do with genocidal vigor. Except the American economy in this case was actually doing well, which makes it even more baffling and indefensible. Enough people simply memory-holed Trump's crimes (aided at every turn by SCOTUS, Mitch McConnell not convicting him after January 6, Merrick Garland being far too slow and timid, the corporate media), liked the racist fascist behavior or felt that it wasn't a dealbreaker, and decided that in this election, he was the "change" candidate. It's insane by any metric, but that's what happened.

The country is deeply sick. We do not know what will happen. It's going to get bad. Barring a miracle, we will not have federalized abortion rights again in my lifetime, and there will be widespread attacks on public health, women's rights, immigrants, transgender people, and other vulnerable people. Even and especially the ones who voted for Trump. Never Thought Leopard Would Eat My Face, etc. Alito and Thomas will swiftly step down and allow their seats to be replaced by 40-year old wingnuts hand-selected from the worst the Federalist Society has to offer. SCOTUS is gone for the next generation at least. There is very little prospect of it being ever fixed in the foreseeable future.

Trump will never face a scintilla of consequences for his previous crimes; all the open federal cases will be closed as soon as he takes office and fires Jack Smith. The best we can hope for is that he dies in office, but then we get Vance and the cadre of alt-right techno billionaires ruled directly from the Kremlin. Putin is celebrating this morning and with good reason; he's gotten everything he wants. Trump will egg on Netanyahu in Gaza and abandon Ukraine. Democracy across the world will remain even more fragile and badly under threat. Authoritarians will be empowered and American withdrawal from international systems will percolate in very dangerous ways that cannot and will not be fixed in the short run. I really hope all the leftists who celebrate this as the "defeat of the genocide candidate" will enjoy all the genocide and suffering that's about to come. And yes, I do think the Israel-Palestine war fucked us in a large way. Jewish voters perceived the Democrats as insufficiently pro-Israel due to the presence of far-left antisemitism, even as the far left attacked the Democrats relentlessly and never targeted the Republicans. Arab voters abandoned them, possibly deservedly. What would have happened without the war? We don't know. You get the historical period that you get. Netanyahu and Trump can now do anything they want. Hope it was worth it.

As I said, I can't sugarcoat it. We are going to be paying for this in some form for the next decade, and probably longer. I'm not as absolutely shattered as I was in 2016, but I am much, much angrier. We all thought, we all hoped, America was better than this. It isn't. That, however, is something that has also happened before. What we decide to do next will shape how the next chapter unfolds.

This would be a great time to stock up on needed medicines, renew your passport online, and anything else you need to do in preparation for next year. Many of us simply do not have the wherewithal, whether financial or otherwise, to leave the country. I don't know what will happen with me. I don't know what will happen to any of us. This was utterly avoidable and yet, America didn't want to avoid it. At some point, there's nothing else you can do. You can point to media cronyism, Russian influence, etc etc., but the fact that two of the most qualified presidential candidates who happened to be women have now lost to Trump twice makes it unavoidable. The virulent rightward shift of young men (of all races) in particular paints a grim picture as to how the reactionary misogyny of the 21st century is going to essentially undo most of the progress for social and gender equality in the 20th. The patriarchy has been a problem for most of human history. Doesn't really seem like it's going to change.

The end result of this, however grim: we're still here. We are still living within our communities. If (and this is a big if) Democrats can retake the House, they can put some checks on the process for the next two years. At this point, we are in full-out buying-time, trying-to-prevent-the worst mode. We could have continued fixing things, but we won't be doing that. We will only be trying to preserve ourselves and our friends and our smaller spheres of influence. It sounds very trite to say that we have to have courage, but we do. There's not much else.

It's going to be an awful winter. We have two and a half months to see this coming and know how bad it's going to be, and... yeah. I don't know how soon the buyer's remorse will inevitably set in, but it will. Tough luck, people. You voted for him. You get the country that you decide to have. But the rest of us are also here, and what Gandalf says is still true. We wish the Ring had never come to us, we wish none of this had happened, but we still have to decide what to do with the time that is given to us.

I don't have a lot more. I'll probably be logging off for a while. I don't need to look at the internet for.... yeah, a long time. (Will I do it anyway? Probably.) I don't know what else to leave you with, aside from again:

Do not obey in advance. Do not act as if everything is foreordained and set in stone. Fascist regimes end. They always do. We are going to have to figure out how, and it will suck shit, but the alternative is worse.

Take care of yourselves. I love you.

[batboyblog]

So... How do we live now.

good question, and one I'm not sure I have an answer to,

I mean one we have to hope that the next Trump term is largely like the first one, incompetent. That Trump won't have the skills or the patience to actually try to turn the US into a dictatorship, that his ego will be soothed by having finally won the popular vote and he'll be less interested in revenge against all his many enemies. That his corruption of our systems will be like during his first term around the edges and the damage to our systems of justice will largely be limited to around the person of Trump himself.

assuming that we still have largely free and fair elections (big if there) in 2 years and in 4 years Trump, having pardoned himself federally and used the powers of his office to shut down any state level cases, agrees to step down in line with the Constitution (he'll be 83 so hopefully tired enough to just go)

assuming that all Democrats aren't in jail or whatever, we need to not let perfect be the enemy of better, our failure last night means the Democratic Party will be more conservative not less, because they're trying to net voters, that fucking sucks particularly for LGBT people, but we need to do what we need to do, we need to deal with whatever humiliations we have to, I voted for Obama when he was talking about how his religion taught him marriage was between one man and one woman and thats how God liked it.

I fear that the general American public is really stupid, like REALLY dumb, that they don't understand ideas past a 2nd or 3rd grade level, So our Democratic ideas, not that hard to get, but at like a high school level, are way past what they can get and are willing to listen to. Trump and Republicans went all vibes and very basic ideas all the time, its who he is, finally the President who's as dumb as the public. idk what to do about that pre-say, but cancel anyone who isn't pulling on our side, don't watch people who shit on Democrats endlessly only to sometimes say "but you know Trump is worse" nope, done gone, out. Be mean to Trump on-line and never ever stop, maybe we can win the vibe war that he's a poopy pants old man, idk its just an idea, no more big ideas though, no big changes, no asking anyone to change how they live at all, Americans are just not able to handle it at all, we're a nation of the lazy, selfish and dumb, fight accordingly because the better angels have left the fucking building.

[1americanconservative]

@Bitcoin4Freedom

I can't stand Donald Trump. He is braggy, he insults people for no reason, and he is just a brutal personality. But my mind is made up. I'm voting for him and here's why: * He puts Americans and their well-being first. Kamala will not. * He will bring

@elonmusk

into his cabinet to be the efficiency czar and get rid of waste. This alone may be the best single reason to vote for him. * He will bring

@RobertKennedyJr

into his cabinet to Make American Healthy Again. He will finally get to the bottom of why our food companies are destroying the health of our children. * I'm sick of the way the media lies continuously about

@realDonaldTrump

, starting with the incessant racism claims. They are just nonsense. The latest thing I learned? He sent his plane to fly Nelson Mandela home after he was in jail with the U.S. wouldn't do it. Racist? No. * I'm sick of the U.S. being embroiled in foreign wars. Trump will keep us out of them again. He's just crazy enough that foreign nations will stand down. They have no fear of Kamala. They will fear him. * Trump sees this country as fundamentally good. Kamala sees it as inherently evil. * Trump will end the nonsense of the open border which makes our country less secure, less financially stable, and brings in millions of people illegally who compete for Americans' jobs. * This government has to print billions to care for the illegals. That makes all of our dollars less valuable and makes prices zoom upward. * He will stockpile Bitcoin. * He will keep men out of women's bathrooms and women's sports. * He is a heavyweight personality and negotiator. Kamala is a phony personality and a lightweight negotiator. * The people who want Kamala Harris to win are the most annoying people in the country. They have pushed for pronouns, masks, endless vaccines, cancel culture, riots, blatant racism towards whites, gender confusion, undermining the U.S. constitution. * He will upset the current political system. He was nearly the victim of assassination 3x. And he keeps going. He's not the best in interviews, but he at least puts himself out there. Over and over and over. Kamala hasn't done a single press conference. * Harris and the media trying to prop her up hid Biden's cognitive decline. They accuse

@realDonaldTrump

of being a threat to democracy. Yet she was installed as the nominee with no votes. She wants to pack the Supreme Court. She wants to eliminate the filibuster. She sued

@RobertKennedyJr

to keep him off the ballot. And the threat to democracy is Trump? Nonsense. * Those who support Harris look at Trump supports as vile, stupid, ignorant, and fascists. They disown family members or disinvite them from Thanksgiving dinner of they support Trump. This is disgraceful. * Every time she talks, I try to give her a chance. But she is the most phony and condescending politician I have ever seen. Ever. I can't do it. I won't do it. * She and those who support her are resistant to Voter ID and believe requiring an ID is racist. Her Department of Justice is suing the state of Virginia for trying to purge the voter rolls of illegals. Why would we not want 1 vote per 1 U.S. citizen? Is it more racist to believe people from the inner city are perfectly capable of securing a government issued ID? Or to believe they are incapable? That's it. I'm done. Thanks for hearing me out.

[mariacallous]

The death of the US government's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) is starting to result in disconnection of internet service for Americans with low incomes. On Friday, Charter Communications reported a net loss of 154,000 internet subscribers that it said was mostly driven by customers canceling after losing the federal discount. About 100,000 of those subscribers were reportedly getting the discount, which in some cases made internet service free to the consumer.

The $30 monthly broadband discounts provided by the ACP ended in May after Congress failed to allocate more funding. The Biden administration requested $6 billion to fund the ACP through December 2024, but Republicans called the program “wasteful.”

Republican lawmakers' main complaint was that most of the ACP money went to households that already had broadband before the subsidy was created. Federal Communications Commission chair Jessica Rosenworcel warned that killing the discounts would reduce internet access, saying an FCC survey found that 77 percent of participating households would change their plan or drop internet service entirely once the discounts expired.

Charter's Q2 2024 earnings report provides some of the first evidence of users dropping internet service after losing the discount. "Second quarter residential Internet customers decreased by 154,000, largely driven by the end of the FCC's Affordable Connectivity Program subsidies in the second quarter, compared to an increase of 70,000 during the second quarter of 2023," Charter said.

Across all ISPs, there were 23 million US households enrolled in the ACP. Research released in January 2024 found that Charter was serving more than 4 million ACP recipients, and that up to 300,000 of those Charter customers would be "at risk" of dropping internet service if the discounts expired. Given that ACP recipients must meet low-income eligibility requirements, losing the discounts could put a strain on their overall finances even if they choose to keep paying for internet service.

“The Real Question Is the Customers’ Ability to Pay”

Charter, which offers service under the brand name Spectrum, has 28.3 million residential internet customers in 41 states. The company's earnings report said Charter made retention offers to customers that previously received an ACP subsidy. The customer loss apparently would have been higher if not for those offers.

Light Reading reported that Charter attributed about 100,000 of the 154,000 customer losses to the ACP shutdown. Charter said it retained most of its ACP subscribers so far, but that low-income households might not be able to continue paying for internet service without a new subsidy for much longer:

"We've retained the vast majority of ACP customers so far," Charter CEO Chris Winfrey said on [Friday's] earnings call, pointing to low-cost internet programs and the offer of a free mobile line designed to keep those customers in the fold. "The real question is the customers' ability to pay—not just now, but over time."

The ACP lasted only a couple of years. The FCC implemented the $30 monthly benefit in early 2022, replacing a previous $50 monthly subsidy from the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program that started enrolling users in May 2021.

Separately, the FCC Lifeline program that provides $9.25 monthly discounts is in jeopardy after a court ruling last week. Lifeline is paid for by the Universal Service Fund, which was the subject of a constitutional challenge.

The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit found that Universal Service fees on phone bills are a "misbegotten tax" that violate the Constitution. But in similar cases, the Sixth and Eleventh circuit appeals courts ruled that the fund is constitutional. The circuit split increases the chances that the Supreme Court will take up the case.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Michael de Adder, Halifax Chronicle Herald

* * * *

Trump promises to eliminate future elections

July 29, 2024

Robert B. Hubbell

Last Friday, Trump told Christian rally-goers that “You won’t have to vote any more” if they elect Trump in 2024.

Let that sink in. A presidential candidate promised to eliminate future elections.

The media yawned.

Actually, the media ignored the story (except for The Guardian) until commentators on social media and the Harris Campaign shamed journalists into acknowledging Trump's antidemocratic threat—which they did in a dismissive, begrudging manner.

It is tiresome to highlight the media’s failings, but this incident is so egregious that it is important on many levels. Most importantly, it underscores that Democrats cannot relent in their effort to warn the American people that Trump hopes to end fundamental democratic norms—like the peaceful, regular transfer of power as prescribed by the Constitution.

Among the issues that should drive voters to the polls in 2024, Trump’s repeated promises to end democracy should be the most alarming. But concepts like “democracy” and “tyranny” strike many voters as “abstract.” Taking away the right to vote is not abstract; doing so would render all other rights illusory.

Let’s turn this incident against Trump by convincing voters that Trump really, truly wants to eliminate the right to vote after 2024. And we must not let him (or his surrogates) weasel out of the plain meaning of his words.

What did Trump say?

 At a rally in Florida on Friday, Trump said,

Christians, get out and vote! Just this time – you won’t have to do it any more. You know what? It’ll be fixed! It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians. I love you. Get out – you gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.

See The Guardian, Trump tells supporters they won’t have to vote in the future: ‘It’ll be fixed!’.

Like most of Trump's statements, it is simultaneously inscrutable and blazingly obvious. He is promising the end of democracy if he is elected. “In four years, you won’t have to vote again.”

The same words uttered by most other politicians might be susceptible to innocent interpretations. But those words uttered by this president can mean only one thing: He wants to eliminate elections in America. He tried to override the will of the people in 2020 by canceling their votes through coup and insurrection. He says he will do so again if he is re-elected. We should believe him.

To repeat: A presidential candidate has promised that 2024 will be the last time that Americans will vote because “everything will be fixed.” That is the equivalent of a five-alarm fire for democracy.

How did the GOP, the media, and the Harris campaign respond? You can probably predict their responses, but let’s look for ourselves.

The GOP response

In typical GOP fashion, the GOP response was (a) he didn’t mean what he said, (b) he said the opposite of what you think you heard, and (c) Trump says weird things all the time, so chill out!

The typical Republican response was delivered by New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, who laughed off the statement by saying, (a) it was “hyperbolic,” (b) Trump was trying to make the point that “We want everyone to vote in all elections,” and (c) it was a classic “Trumpism.”

Saying that the statement was hyperbolic and “a Trumpism” are. not serious responses because they do not address the substance of what Trump actually said. Trump incited an insurrection by telling people to “Fight like hell” moments before the attack on the Capitol.” We are long past claiming that Trump's words should not be taken seriously and literally.

Claiming that Trump's statement means the exact opposite of what Trump said is depraved. Sununu’s interpretation of “We want everyone to vote in all elections” vs. Trump's “You’re not gonna have to vote again” is depraved. The depravity of Sununu’s perverse interpretation is not diminished because Sununu delivered the lie with a hearty laugh.

Other Trump apologists (on social media) argued that Trump was saying only that Republicans would not need Christian evangelical votes after 2024 because Trump would do such a great job of fixing all problems in America, “you’re not gonna have to vote.” That explanation makes no sense; even if Trump “fixed” all the problems in America in the next four years, the Constitution still requires an election in 2028.

There is simply no reasonable interpretation of Trump's words other than his declaration that in four years, he intends to eliminate elections (if he can).

The media’s response

As noted above, The Guardian gave serious coverage to Trump's statement. US media outlets, not so much. See, for example, Lucian K. Truscott IV’s description of the NYTimes’ pathetic response. As Truscott notes in his Substack, the Times relegated the statements to “a few lines in a wrap-up piece about what’s happening in the presidential campaign . . . and they buried it on the Times website.” The Times then breezily moved on to pedestrian coverage of the campaigns as if they were reporting the details of an itinerary rather than one of the most shocking statements ever by a major-party candidate for the presidency.

Perhaps even worse was the pathetic interview of Chris Sununu by Martha Raddatz on ABC. Raddatz asked Sununu, “What the heck did he [Trump] mean there [in the statement]?” As noted above, Sununu responded,

(a)  The statement was hyperbolic; (b)  Trump meant that everyone should vote in every election; and (c)  That statement is a Trumpism.

Sununu’s pathetic response was enough to satisfy Radattz, whose follow-up question was, “Ok. Let's turn to President Biden and Kamala Harris.”

I won’t pick on Raddatz (much). Almost every journalist on mainstream media is as pathetic as Raddatz. The inability to ask follow-up questions to ludicrous rationalizations of attacks on democracy is staggering. Most are entertainers, not journalists. Their presence on “news” shows is insulting to their viewers.

Raddatz’s failure to challenge Sununu’s answer and her immediate transition to a question about President Biden and Kamala Harris demonstrates the media’s dangerous addiction to mindless “balance” and false equivalency. Nothing Kamala Harris did over the weekend deserves to be in the same news block as a story about a presidential candidate promising to end the need for elections. Nothing.

Having watched the media fail miserably for seven years with Trump, nothing should surprise us. But the guy tried to overturn one election already and is saying he will do it again. What will it take for the media to realize that Trump is a unique threat to democracy who deserves coverage that applies only to aspiring dictators?

Even if the Times and Raddatz believed that Trump's remarks had a benign explanation, they failed to acknowledge the more plausible, malign interpretation. Instead, they were willing to assume that Trump's remarks were harmless “Trumpisms.” They are not. We saw what happened after Trump told his followers on January 6, 2021: “We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.”

So, continue writing those letters to the editor and comments to stories highlighting the media’s failings. And become a messenger for Harris by amplifying her campaign’s messaging. Read on!

The Harris Campaign’s response

Kamala Harris’s campaign organization has been reacting to Trump's missteps and threats like a rapid response force to each. Early Saturday morning, the Harris campaign posted a clip of Trump's comments and attached the following statement:

Statement on Trump's Promise to End Democracy When Vice President Harris says this election is about freedom she means it. Our democracy is under assault by criminal Donald Trump: After the last election Trump lost, he sent a mob to overturn the results. This campaign, he has promised violence if he loses, the end of our elections if he wins, and the termination of the Constitution to empower him to be a dictator to enact his dangerous Project 2025 agenda on America. Donald Trump wants to take America backward, to a politics of hate, chaos, and fear —this November America will unite around Vice President Kamala Harris to stop him.

The Harris campaign’s statement is spot-on for several reasons. First, the campaign issued the statement just after noon on Saturday morning, showing a willingness and ability to rebut Trump quickly. By responding within the same news cycle, the Harris campaign shaped the social media response, which ultimately prodded the major media to acknowledge Trump's threat.

Second, the Harris campaign identified Trump's threats in plain language, including

“Trump's Promise to End Democracy.” “Last election Trump sent a mob to overturn the results.” “He has promised violence if he loses” “He has promised the end of elections if he wins” “He has promised to terminate the Constitution” “To become a dictator” “To enact dangerous project 2025”

Dangerous threats demand plain language. The Harris campaign rose to the challenge.

The campaign’s statement was strong in another respect: In identifying Trump as a threat to democracy, it identified Kamala Harris as the point of unity to stop Trump. A very smart move! Kamala Harris is giving Democrats the antidote to Trump's cult of personality. The campaign is fashioning Kamala Harris as a champion of democracy. And it is working!

Concluding Thoughts

Trump's threats present a dilemma. Should we take them seriously? Or does our attention give them credence and heft they do not carry on their own? As with most things in life, there is tension in truth. We must take Trump's threats literally and seriously. But we must not ascribe superpowers to Trump or self-executing inevitability to his threats. By taking his threats seriously, we can prevent them from coming to fruition. So, do not despair or cower in fear. Raise the alarm as we work to defeat Trump and stop his dark plans.

Meanwhile, Democrats continue to rally around Kamala Harris. She held her first fundraiser in Pittsfield, MA at the Colonial Theatre. The event was sold out, with an overflow crowd in front of the theater. Kamala Harris spoke after an all-star warm-up that included former Governor Deval Patrick, Senators Warren and Markey, Rep. Neal, and Heather Cox Richardson.

According to those in attendance, the evening was “electric.” The crowd was so enthusiastic, Kamala Harris had difficulty quieting the cheers so she could say “Thank you.” She gave a great speech and pumped up the crowd even further.

In eight short days, Kamala Harris has unified and inspired Democrats in a way that has defied expectations of pundits and career politicians. She is doing so at the precise moment that Trump's veneer of invincibility is cracking. We need to sustain the wave of enthusiasm for Kamala Harris and spread it to others—so that we can push Trump’s downward trajectory past the tipping point of no return. We can do that!

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[weredoingeverythingwrong]

Project 2025 is Terrifyingly Real

Project 2025 is Real!

Fear.

I have always had an undying love for the dystopian fiction novels that have long littered the YA genre and as I've gotten older, this has not changed. Books like Hunger Games, Divergent, The Uglies, Birthmarked, etc ruled the imagination of my adolescence as I pictured a world of such obvious dysfunction. The world in these books were always resolved by disruptive heroes working against the status quo. I stayed in suspense as I read the hero of my stories challenge their world order, fear made me grip my books as I read of the capture of my hero, and an uneasy relief as I finished the final chapter of the destruction of another morally bankrupt society so a new one could be built. This is what I lived for.

What I did not sign up for... is feeling the same fear and suspense and NONE of the relief, in my own reality. I have questioned the morals of society on several occasions, but never have I ever felt such an inescapable fear of the world as I do now. I know I am not the only one still carrying the anxiety that gripped the world in 2020 that never really went away, even when the masks and the social distance masks began to disappear.

**The lockdown changed the world. Here in the U.S, the change was obvious. Covid put the world on pause for really the first time in a long time, in a way society really hadn't endured in a long time, if ever. When the distractions of work, your social life, and the hustle and bustle of your existence are halted, you have no choice but to take an overview in a way it isn't practical to do when life is lifing. Many were fighting for their lives or watching family fight for their lives. What do I mean? I mean there were no distractions. There was nothing to do, but take stock of the life we live. It's no surprise that in the void of the well-placed distractions and propaganda, social justice issues and protests reached the level they did. This is also why I believe there was a need to return the American people back to their lives because they were paying too much attention. Black lives matter, the #metoo movement, and the rise of cancel culture began to become popular and movements that focused on action-based policies took ahold of Americans (I'll discuss this more thoroughly in another post.)

Four years later, we have learned so much. The misinformation age has reached fever pitch and the country has never been more divided. The division across race, gender, and class has never been stronger and internal biases reconfirmed by persuasive algorithms have brought us here. Here is the genocide of the Palestinian people, the attempted re-colonization of Ayiti, and the rise of the fascist regime of the United States. I am scared. Never has this life felt to unreal, and so much like the fictional worlds of my favorite books, but there is no chapter close or hero to await. It's just us.

Project 2025 is real. The rise of the white supremacist, christian regime and the crack down on democracy. If you have been paying attention, the agenda has been made clear.

The 1% will reap the rewards of their greed and the work force must oblige. There can be no dissent. Unions and protests are not acceptable and will be crushed with force. You will not be protected. You have no right to your body, your privacy, or your image. Your democratically-elected leader has no laws or consequences for their actions (If you haven't check out Sotomayer's dissent letter, here.)

We have long outgrown the needs of 17th century politics and the constitution has been exploited to fit the needs of the 21st century oligarchs.

The children of the future are being made illiterate, pushed away from formal education, and they are being taught even less. Laws are being repealed and allowing children more access to becoming part of the labor force. These are the future voters and citizens of this country will not be educated enough to organize, learn, or properly create community against a new status quo.

Come November even if we vote blue, we will just be pausing an inevitable coup of democracy.

This post may be a gasp of despair, but I still have hope for the people around me. I still believe we can prevail. I believe we can create a world that generations will learn about and can thrive.

We are doing everything wrong.

We can still make it right.

** Covid-19 is still very much a thing that was mishandled and was the very real plight of many. I have edited the post to reflect lock down instead of covid-19, for clarity and to not reduce covid-19 to a simple pause in life, when it was very real fatal pandemic for many.

[odinsblog]

In the coming days/weeks, you’re going to hear a lot about how Ukraine should accept the terms of surrender (as that’s what they are) offered by Russia—how they’d be “stupid” not to, how Zelenskyy should “do the right thing for his people” and prioritize saving lives, how peace should be the priority and we can’t always get what we want.

Make no mistake: even if Russia intends to uphold these terms once Zelenskyy accepts them, this is a terrible deal for Ukraine and a terrible deal for the world.

First of all, there’s no guarantee that Russia will respect a cease fire or peace treaty. Obviously that’s always the case with war, but it’s especially the case when they’ve already violated multiple cease fire agreements by firing on and murdering evacuating civilians, including children. So there’s your peace treaty.

Second, the terms that Russia has presented include virtually all of Putin’s actual goals for this illegal invasion (obviously “de-Nazification” and “de-militarization” were just lies à la “weapons of mass destruction,” a rhetorical tactic that really ought to be familiar to any self-respecting American leftist). Ukraine would forfeit its claim on the territories Russia has already illegally annexed/recognized, it would be forced to change its constitution (!!!) to commit to never joining any “pacts” (EU, NATO, anything else that forms in the future), and it would retain Zelenskyy as a figurehead while installing a pro-Russian actual government leadership.

This is—and I cannot stress this enough—not a “compromise” or a “peace treaty.” It’s terms of surrender. And the lesson learned here is that Russia can continue invading and terrorizing sovereign states without any actual consequences—remember, Putin doesn’t personally care about Western sanctions. He doesn’t care if his people are plunged into poverty as long as he and his cronies aren’t, and they won’t be. He’s furious about the sanctions because he finds them personally offensive and because they confirm his victim complex, not because he’s legitimately worried for his people like Zelenskyy is.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, Putin has made it extremely clear that he seeks to rebuild a Russian empire. He will not stop with Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk. (And make no mistake—Luhansk and Donetsk are not independent sovereign states like Ukraine; they’re simply Russian satellites.) He will not stop with forced regime change in Belorus, Georgia, Syria, and Ukraine. (And even if he did—isn’t that awful enough?) He is not “concerned about Russia’s security” or “worried about NATO’s encroachment” or whatever his extensive social media operation has you believing. He’s not concerned or worried about anything. He’s a dictator expanding his empire. He is exactly what you all feared Trump was.

I believe that this “offer” from Russia to Ukraine serves two purposes, and neither of them is to establish a lasting peace and autonomy for each country. One is to give Putin a potential way to back out of a war that has already gone much worse than he expected and cost him significantly in terms of personnel and equipment. (Not the sanctions—like I said, I don’t think he personally cares about the sanctions and in fact sees them as a political tool to use to his advantage.)

The second and more important goal is to create a way for the international community to blame Ukraine for the continued war. “If you’d just accept the terms, you could save your people and prevent nuclear war.” It’s absolutely classic DARVO tactics that, again, any progressive activist should be familiar with. “Sure, it’s not your fault he attacked you, but you shouldn’t have reported it, made a big deal of it, gotten him ‘cancelled,’ made it public, etc.”

It’s not Ukraine’s responsibility to “prevent nuclear war.” Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for protection—protection that it has not received, although Western aid and military assistance has undoubtedly been helpful. Placing responsibility on Ukraine to accept unjust terms and illegal annexation of its land in order to “prevent nuclear war” only lends credence to the claim that only nuclear weapons can keep a country truly safe—after all, it would mean that Putin’s nuclear threats have allowed him to invade his neighbors, terrorize their citizens, destroy their resources, replace their democratically elected leaders with his own puppets, and steal their land—without even having to make any concessions himself.

So here’s my plea to my American progressive/leftist siblings. Please question what you think you know about Putin, Russia, and Ukraine. There are certainly far-right and neo-Nazi political forces in Ukraine as there are in any country, but Zelenskyy is a progressive, democratically elected JEWISH president. NATO and the EU have their (serious) issues, but they have not pressured or forced any former Soviet states to join—in fact, prior to this war, it seemed unlikely that Ukraine would be admitted. Ukraine WANTED to join to protect itself from Russia, which had already illegally annexed its land, empowered far-right groups within its borders, and forced regime changes in surrounding countries.

Putin is not an anti-imperialist revolutionary; he denounces American imperialism because it’s convenient for him politically and it keeps the American left from putting pressure on our government to divest from Russia. Sure, maybe the Democrats oversold Russian election hacking as an explanation for Trump’s win (although the more I learn about the extent of Russia’s disinfo campaign, the more I question this common leftist talking point), but that doesn’t mean that Putin isn’t bent on conquering Eastern Europe and subduing Western powers by any means necessary. This goes far beyond American electoral politics, and the answers here do not conform to American party lines. Do not fall into the trap of dismissing politicians’ statements about Putin and Russia just because you disagree with the rest of their stances.

Putin is a dictator. Sometimes it really is that simple. A former KGB agent, he came to power by staging the modern Russian version of the Reichstag fire (look up “Russian apartment bombings”), using that as an excuse to start a war and win it, and he has maintained his power through strong-arming and terror. The State Duma is entirely symbolic at this point; anyone who goes against Putin knows that they are likely not only to die, but to die horribly, just like Alexei Navalny almost did not long ago (look up “Novichok” and prepare yourself for some body horror).

I could go on. I won’t right now. But in truth, I deeply regret the fact that I haven’t done more over the past 8 or so years to disrupt the blatant Putinist propaganda I hear from a lot of my fellow progressives. I had other priorities and I didn’t give it the attention I should’ve. To be clear: nothing America or American progressives could’ve done would’ve stopped this war, only delayed it or hastened it. The war was inevitable because Putin wants to conquer Ukraine, and beyond.

So I’ll just say—please, please listen to people who fled Russia/the Soviet Union, and to experts who study Russia. The most likely threat here isn’t a nuclear WWIII; this isn’t about you. The thing people like me fear most is simply that Putin will continue subjugating, terrorizing, and ultimately conquering innocent citizens of sovereign states, and that the West will eventually just accept this as the price of nuclear deterrence.

I’m not a political scientist; I don’t know how to stop this war. All I know is that Ukrainian surrender isn’t it. Listen to Ukrainians, anti-Putin Russians, and other experts, form your own opinion, and most importantly, keep your wits about you. Not everyone in this world is a good faith negotiating partner. Some people are, unfortunately, just evil. Hitler was, Stalin was, Putin is.

(source)

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Jonathan Haidt

Published: Dec 22, 2023

[Note: this is post #1 of a pair of posts. The second post gives the text of chapter 3 of The Coddling of the American Mind.]

In the days after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, university campuses immediately distinguished themselves as places set apart from the rest of American society—zones where different moral rules applied. Even before Israel began its military response, the loudest voices on campus were not university leaders condemning the attacks and vowing solidarity with their Jewish and Israeli students. Instead, the world saw faculty members and student organizations celebrating the attacks. 

Political commentator and Atlantic author David Frum summed up the moral uniqueness of the academy in this tweet, four days after the attack: 

Since then, there have been hundreds of antisemitic incidents on campuses including vandalism of Jewish sites, physical intimidation, physical assault, and death threats against Jewish students, often from other students. The response from university administrators has often been slow, weak, or entirely absent. 

[ Image. The scene on the exterior wall of my office building at NYU on the morning of October 17, 2023. NYU students had posted fliers about Israelis kidnapped by Hamas. Other NYU students tore them down. Other NYU students posted more of them. ]

Why is the culture of elite higher education so fertile for antisemitism, and why are our defenses against it so weak? Don’t we have the world's most advanced academic concepts and bureaucratic innovations for identifying hatred of all kinds, even expressions of hatred so small, veiled, and unconscious that we call them “micro-aggressions” and “implicit biases”? 

Yes, we do, but it turns out that they don’t apply when Jews are the targets,1 and this was the shocking hypocrisy on display in that Congressional hearing room on December 5. Congresswoman Elise Stefanik asked the President of the University of Pennsylvania “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's rules or code of conduct, yes or no?” President Magill was unable to say yes. When the question was asked in various ways to all three presidents, none could say yes. All said variations of “it depends on the context.”

Now, as a social psychologist who studies moral judgment, I’m all for context. Technically, those presidents were correct that students chanting “from the river to the sea” may or may not be advocating killing all the Jews in Israel. Those chanting “globalize the intifada” may or may not be calling for terrorist attacks on Jewish sites around the world. And even if they were, such political speech is protected by the First Amendment unless the speech is made in a context that is likely to incite actual violence, constitutes a “true threat,” or rises to the level of discriminatory harassment. Those three presidents could have said that their universities are bastions of free speech where everyone lives and dies by the First Amendment.

In fact, they tried to say that, and this is why they were so widely pilloried for hypocrisy. Like most elite schools, Harvard, Penn, and MIT have spent the last ten years punishing professors for their research findings and disinviting speakers who questioned the value of DEI. (See The Canceling of the American Mind for dozens of other examples.) As has been widely reported, Harvard and Penn are the top two schools in America for creating terrible speech climates, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. 

What on earth happened to the academy? As Fareed Zakaria recently asked: How did America’s elite universities go from being “the kinds of assets the world looks at with admiration and envy” just eight years ago, to becoming objects of ridicule today? How did we bungle things so badly?

Greg Lukianoff and I wrote a book that tried to answer that question in 2018, as it was happening. 

The Coddling of the American Mind tells the story of how American universities lost their collective minds, beginning around 2014 when student demands for protections from speech seemed to appear out of nowhere, including calls for trigger warnings, safe spaces, bias response teams, and mandatory trainings around language use. The students were supported by some faculty members and some administrators, and their combined force pressured many university leaders to accede to their demands even though, privately, many had misgivings.2

The new morality driving these reforms was antithetical to the traditional virtues of academic life: truthfulness, free inquiry, persuasion via reasoned argument, equal opportunity, judgment by merit, and the pursuit of excellence.  A subset of students had learned this new morality in some of their courses, which trained them to view everyone as either an oppressor or a victim. Students were taught to use identity as the primary lens through which everything is to be understood, not just in their coursework but in their personal and political lives. When students are taught to use a single lens for everything, we noted, their education is harming them, rather than improving their ability to think critically.

This new morality, we argued, is what drove universities off a cliff. For a while, the descent was gradual, but at Halloween, 2015, in a courtyard at Yale, the free fall began. Students and administrators espousing the new morality demanded reforms at Yale and, over the next few months, at dozens of other schools. With a few exceptions, university leaders did not stand up to the new morality, critique its intellectual shortcomings, or say no to demands and ultimatums. 

You can see the fall of higher ed in data from Gallup. The figure below shows that as recently as 2015, most Democrats and even most Republicans had high confidence in higher education as an institution. (Independents were evenly split). A mere eight years later, higher ed had alienated not just Republicans, but also independents. The trend for Democrats was down as well. The survey was fielded in June of 2023, well before the current mess. 

[ Figure 1. Percent of U.S. adults with "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in higher education. Source: Gallup (2023). ]

The good news is that the academy’s free fall is now over. American higher ed hit rock bottom on December 5, 2023 in that Congressional hearing room. Anyone who wants universities to bounce back and regain the trust of the American people must understand this new morality and ensure that it never holds sway on campus again.

The key chapter for understanding the new morality is chapter 3. I recently re-read that chapter and thought it would be of help to those who are struggling to comprehend the enormity of the culture change on so many campuses since 2015. Greg and I explained the transformation as the triumph of a cognitive distortion—binary thinking—such that students learn to slot everyone into one of two boxes: oppressor or victim.3 This mindset is the psychological basis of one of the three “Great Untruths” that we found flourishing on college campuses in the 2010s: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.4 We said that this was a terrible thing to teach students, and we explained why we expected that students who embraced this untruth would damage their mental health. (Subsequent research has confirmed this prediction.)

The central portion of the chapter describes two different kinds of identity politics, one of which is good because it actually achieves what it says it is trying to achieve, and because it brings both justice and, eventually, better relationships within the group.  We called this “common humanity identity politics.” It’s what Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela did by humanizing their opponents and drawing larger circles that appealed to shared histories and identities. The other form we called “common enemy identity politics.” It teaches students to develop the oppressor/victim mindset and then change their societies by uniting disparate constituencies against a specific group of oppressors. This mindset spreads easily and rapidly because human minds evolved for tribalism. The mindset is hyper-activated on social media platforms that reward simple, moralistic, and sensational content with rapid sharing and high visibility.5 This mindset has long been evident in antisemitism emanating from the far right. In recent years it is increasingly driving antisemitism on the left, too.

Common enemy identity politics is arguably the worst way of thinking one could possibly teach to young people in a multi-ethnic democracy such as the United States. It is, of course, the ideological drive behind most genocides. On a more mundane level, it can in theory be used to create group cohesion on teams and in organizations, and yet the current academic version of it plunges organizations into eternal conflict and dysfunction. As long as this way of thinking is taught anywhere on campus, identity-based hatred will find fertile ground.

With permission from Penguin Press, Greg and I present a condensed version of chapter 3 in a linked post, here:

What is the victim-oppressor mindset and how did it conquer the academy?

Please do go read that post, and then come back here. 

OK, if you don’t want to do that right now, here is the ending of the excerpt, which offers a partial summary. After describing the social psychology of tribalism and ideas about power (from Marx, Marcuse, Foucault, and Crenshaw), we analyze an intersectionalist text in which the author (Kathryn Pauly Morgan) asserted that because men created educational systems, girls and women in those systems today are essentially a “colonized population.” Here is our response:

Morgan is certainly right that it was mostly white males who set up the educational system and founded nearly all the universities in the United States. Most of those schools once excluded women and people of color. But does that mean that women and people of color should think of themselves as “colonized populations” today? Would doing so empower them, or would it encourage an external locus of control? Would it make them more or less likely to engage with their teachers and readings, work hard, and benefit from their time in school? More generally, what will happen to the thinking of students who are trained to see everything in terms of intersecting bipolar axes where one end of each axis is marked “privilege” and the other is “oppression”? Since “privilege” is defined as the “power to dominate” and cause “oppression,” these axes are inherently moral dimensions. The people on top are bad, and the people down below are good. This sort of teaching seems likely to encode the Untruth of Us Versus Them directly into students’ cognitive schemas: Life is a battle between good people and evil people. Furthermore, there is no escaping the conclusion as to who the evil people are. The main axes of oppression usually point to one intersectional address: straight white males. [...] In short, as a result of our long evolution for tribal competition, the human mind readily does binary, us-versus-them thinking. If we want to create welcoming, inclusive communities, we should be doing everything we can to turn down the tribalism and turn up the sense of common humanity. Instead, some theoretical approaches used in universities today may be hyper-activating our ancient tribal tendencies, even if that was not the intention of the professor. Of course, some individuals truly are racist, sexist, and homophobic, and some institutions are too, even when the people who run them mean well, if they end up being less welcoming to members of some groups. We favor teaching students to recognize a variety of kinds of bigotry and bias as an essential step toward reducing them. Intersectionality can be taught skillfully, as Crenshaw does in her TED Talk. It can be used to promote compassion and reveal injustices not previously seen. Yet somehow, many college students today seem to be adopting a different version of intersectional thinking and are embracing the Untruth of Us Versus Them.

So, how well does our analysis from 2018 hold up in 2023? Does chapter 3 help us to understand the recent explosion of antisemitism on campus?

Unfortunately, the analysis works perfectly. Many students today talk about Israel as a “settler-colonialist” nation.6 That is straight oppressor/victim terminology, from post-colonialist thinker Frantz Fanon. It treats Israel as if diaspora Jews were 19th century England or France sending colonists to take over an existing society, motivated by monetary greed. Once that frame is applied, students’ minds are closed to any other understanding of a complicated situation, such as the view that Jews are the original (or indigenous) inhabitants of the land, who had a continual presence there for 3,000 years, and whose exiled populations (many in Arab lands) had nowhere else to go after being decimated by Hitler’s version of common enemy identity politics.7 The French in Algeria could return to France, but if these students get their wish and Hamas gains control of all the territory “from the river to the sea,” it’s not clear where seven million Jews would go, other than into the sea.8

[ Image. Pro-Palestinian supporters march after a rally in New York City, October 9, 2023. Photo by Lev Radin, Shutterstock. ]

Direct evidence of the link between the oppressor/victim mindset and antisemitism was published last week in a poll from Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies and the Harris Poll. The survey was fielded on December 13-14.9 The survey asks about Americans’ beliefs not just about Israel but about Jews in America and on campus as well. I’ll summarize a few of the items, which you can check out in the report, and I'll expand on three in particular, which document the wide reach of the oppressor/victim mindset and its role in causing young people to embrace antisemitism.10 

The Harvard-Harris survey found that Americans side strongly with Israel against Hamas in the current conflict––except for Gen Z (here operationalized as the 18-24-year-old age bracket)11, which is evenly divided between support for Israel and Hamas. (See p. 47 of the report.) 

I should note that some have rightly criticized the Harvard-Harris poll on methodological grounds, especially for forcing respondents into binary choices, rather than offering a “don’t know” or “undecided” option. When such options are offered many people choose them, sometimes more than half, so the numbers you’ll see below probably overstate the prevalence of antisemitism, in absolute terms. Zach Rausch and I have been collecting all the recent surveys we can find on attitudes toward the Gaza conflict in this Google doc. Many other surveys have confirmed that there is substantially more support for Hamas among Gen Z than among older generations, although some studies find that Gen Z still tilts slightly toward Israel. It is the pattern of responses across questions and generations that I am drawing on, rather than the absolute numbers.

The survey found that Gen Z is not much different than older generations in agreeing that 1. Antisemitism is prevalent on campus (p. 50), 2. Jewish students are facing harassment on campus (p. 50), 3. Calls for “the genocide of Jews” are hate speech (p. 51), and 4. Calls for “the genocide of Jews” are harassment (p. 52).

Yet, despite agreeing with other generations that antisemitism is prevalent on campus, that Jews are being harassed on campus, and that calls for genocide are both hate speech and harassment, Gen Z is evenly divided as to whether campus protesters have a right to call for genocide against Jews. You can see the exact question below the table in Figure 2. As you can see below, all older generations favor disciplinary action as the proper response to students who publicly call for the mass killing of Jews. Only Gen Z does not.

[ Figure 2. “If a student calls for the genocide of Jews should that student be told that they are free to call for genocide or should such students face actions for violating university rules?” Harvard-Harris Poll, December 2023, screenshot from p. 51, with additional annotations by Haidt. ]

Why is Gen Z so tolerant of hate speech and verbal harassment of Jews, when it shows the lowest tolerance for such speech against other groups? The next three items show that the oppressor/victim mindset and common enemy identity politics are at work, but only for Gen Z. One item asked “Do you think that identity politics based on race has come to dominate at our elite universities, or do they operate primarily on the basis of merit and accomplishments without regard to race?” (p. 55). All generations agree that identity politics based on race is now dominant, but Gen Z, which has the most experience with current campus culture, agrees more strongly (69%, tied with those over 65).

The big difference between generations is that only Gen Z endorses this kind of identity politics. One survey item asks: “There is an ideology that white people are oppressors and nonwhite people and people of certain groups have been oppressed and as a result should be favored today at universities and for employment. Do you support or oppose this ideology?” [p. 56] 

[ Figure 3. “There is an ideology that white people are oppressors and nonwhite people and people of certain groups have been oppressed and as a result should be favored today at universities and for employment. Do you support or oppose this ideology?” Harvard-Harris Poll, December 2023. ]

Gen Z, and only Gen Z, agrees with the “ideology that white people are oppressors.” The direct line linking this explicit form of common enemy identity politics to antisemitism is found in the responses to the next item: “Do you think that Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors or is that a false ideology?”

[ Figure 4. “Do you think that Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors or is that a false ideology?” Harvard-Harris Poll, December 2023. ]

Gen Z, and only Gen Z, agrees. As I said earlier, the absolute numbers would be lower if a neutral or “don’t know” option were presented, so I do not believe that two out of every three Americans in that age range truly believes that Jews are oppressors. But even if half of the respondents chose a third option, the balance of those who believe it to those who reject it would still tilt toward “oppressors,” and more strongly than for any older generation.

In other words: While all generations agree that race-based identity politics now dominates on campus, only Gen Z leans toward (rather than away from ) endorsing such politics, applying it to Jews, and agreeing that we should treat Jews as oppressors—that is, treat them badly and not protect them from hate and harassment because they deserve what’s coming to them. 

I should offer a few clarifications. 

First, it is understandable that there is an age gradient, with older generations strongly pro-Israel and younger generations becoming increasingly supportive of the Palestinian cause. Older generations were raised by parents who remembered the Holocaust and understood the context within which the state of Israel was created. Older generations remember the frequent attacks on a vulnerable Israel in its early years. Younger generations, in contrast, have only known a strong Israel that occupied Palestinian territory (at least in the West Bank). There are two sides on this issue. I’m on one side, but I understand that there are good reasons for taking the other side. Opposing Israel or hating the Israeli government is not automatically anti-semitism. What concerns me is that anti-Israel sentiment seems to be increasingly closely linked to hatred of Jews and physical attacks on Jews and Jewish sites. Such attacks may seem morally justified, even virtuous, to those who believe that Jews are “oppressors.” 

Second, the Israeli military response has not been “surgical”; its bombing campaign has killed thousands of Palestinians who are not members of Hamas. Young people, most of whom are on TikTok, are probably more exposed than older people to videos of horrific suffering among Gazans. So again, I don’t criticize anyone for protesting Israel or the war, and I hope that universities respect pro-Palestinian students’ First Amendment rights to speak and protest. But the displays of support for Hamas began even before Israel had responded, and part of what was so shocking in the first week after the October 7 attack was the relatively muted and delayed expressions of concern by university leaders and campus organizations. Whatever has caused today’s campus antisemitism, it was already baked in before Israel’s military response began.

Third, I cannot say how much of today’s antisemitism comes from college classrooms (and K-12 classrooms as well), and how much is driven by social media, particularly TikTok. The rapid transition to the “phone-based childhood” that happened around 2012 is a crucial part of the story, which Greg and I discussed in The Coddling. As I have argued elsewhere, social media has introduced dangerous new dynamics into society, including explosive virality and the fragmentation of shared understandings (i.e., the collapse of the Tower of Babel). But given that today’s campus antisemitism is so closely linked with the oppressor/victim mindset, and given that Greg and I (and many others) have been warning about the dangers of teaching this mindset since before TikTok was created, I am confident that American higher education bears a substantial portion of the blame.

I do not believe that those three presidents, testifying before Congress, were antisemitic in their hearts. But in their heartless and gutless responses to a question about when it violates their campus’s rules for students to call for genocide against Jews, all three presidents validated the now-prevalent campus antisemitism. All three presidents essentially said: Jews don’t count, it’s OK to call for their deaths, as long as it does not “turn into action.”

According to those who embrace common enemy identity politics and its oppressor/victim mindset, all members of victim groups are justified in “punching up,” pulling oppressors down, vandalizing their buildings and symbols, and perhaps even raping their women and killing their children. At least, that is the implication of tweets from various professors who praised the Hamas attack, saying versions of “this is what decolonization looks like.”

Conclusion

In the tweet I quoted at the top of this essay, David Frum pointed out that elite college campuses have diverged from the rest of the country. Frum urged those of us in the academy to reflect upon why college campuses are so rife with antisemitism, in a country that is, according to public opinion data, very positive toward its Jewish citizens. I have tried to do that in this essay, concluding that it is our own fault for embracing and institutionalizing bad ideas, rather than challenging them. I have shown a direct connection between the oppressor/victim mindset and the willingness of many in the current generation of students to espouse overtly antisemitic beliefs (even if it is not truly a majority of them).

American higher education is now in a code-red situation. It’s not just Jewish donors and alumni who are withdrawing their support. As you saw in Figure 1, a majority of Americans had low confidence in higher ed before October 7. In the wake of the December 5 congressional hearings, it is now surely a supermajority, including perhaps most Democrats as well. Efforts in red-state legislatures to constrain, control, or defund higher ed will now find a great deal more public support than anyone could have imagined before 2015. 

If they are to regain public trust, university leaders will need to understand the victim/oppressor mindset and how their own institutions are encouraging it. Then they will need to take bold action and make deep changes. You can’t just plant a new center for the study of antisemitism in soil that is ideal for the growth of antisemitism. You have to change the soil, change the culture and policies of the institution.

Greg and I have an entire chapter (13) on how to do that, how to create “wiser universities” by enshrining free inquiry, changing the standards used to hire faculty and admit students, and then orienting students for productive disagreement. A wiser university would make students less susceptible to the oppressor/victim mindset even if they are exposed to it in a few of their classes. I will offer many more ideas in future posts. For now, I list organizations that specialize in improving the culture of universities, and I list essays that offer what I think are good ideas. I’ll keep the list updated for a while, so if you find good essays, please post links to them in the comments.

I close this essay with the quotation that opens Chapter 3 of The Coddling, from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, one of the wisest people I’ve ever had the good fortune to meet:

There is the moral dualism that sees good and evil as instincts within us between which we must choose. But there is also what I will call pathological dualism that sees humanity itself as radically... divided into the unimpeachably good and the irredeemably bad. You are either one or the other.

Universities can and must free students from pathological dualism.

[eugenedebs1920]

If you can’t win. Cheat! That seems to be the platform for the once, Grand Ol Party. That party died with Eisenhower. Nixon was a paranoid, racist criminal, who would do what it took to keep power. The “Reagan Revolution” was nothing more than a script written for a literal actor to do the bidding of Wall Street and big banks. W. Bush was more of the same , but at least he was a war hero. H.W. Bush was the least qualified candidate for president until his maga successor would stumble into the oval office 16 years later.

The Republican Party is the same racist fucks that use to head the Democratic Party before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It’s not blue or red, Democrat or Republican. It’s conservative v liberal. The conservative holding on to “the good ol days”. Yea!? What were those!? When you could treat a person of color like a second class citizen and all your other white friends would smile with approval. Tradition. What tradition is that conservatives?! Do we need to go farther back than that?! How bout when you could own another human being and make him do the work while you sat around and reaped the rewards? If that boy get outta line he’ll be gettin the whip! Fucking disgusting! Conservative. What the fuck you conserving!? Sure ain’t morality! Sure ain’t the rule of law! Sure ain’t the planet! Sure ain’t “family values”! Sure ain’t the Constitution, or our democracy, or our institutions, the courts, the balance of power, ethics, honor, dignity, pride! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU CONSERVING!?!? Because from where I’m standing, it’s hate. Because from where I’m standing, it’s voter suppression. Because from where I’m standing it’s corruption. Just like Reconstruction, just like the Jim Crow south, same shit. Different time. Same assholes!

Prove me wrong……

I’m almost as pissed At liberals as conservatives! (Not really) Do you want to make a change for good in this world?! Do you want to see equality as the law of the land!? Do you want acceptance and love to be the norm!? Where everyone is taken care of, we’re kind to those we know, and those we don’t. A place where corporate greed isn’t the main itinerary. Where being well educated is achievable to all Americans regardless of socioeconomic status? Do you want to live in a country where the bottom 50% of earners make more than 3% of the wealth?! Do you want fair banking and lending practices? A clean environment to live in, to be able to buy a house, raise a family, in a nation where the air is safe to breathe, where the water is safe to drink, where you don’t have to worry if your kid is going to get shot up at school?! Do you want civil rights, woman’s rights, LGBTQ rights, human rights, elderly protection, environmental protection, liberty, freedom, the right to pursue happiness?! Is that something you would like?!

Then toughen the fuck up! Quit this cancel culture, delicate snowflake bullshit! We’re not woke!!! We’re liberals!. The racist are coming with torches to lynch a motha fucker, you gunna stand up and fight, or curl up in a ball and cry!? The fuckin rules have been thrown out long ago. These pricks DONT FUCKING CARE! They will burn this shit down and wait for us to put it out with our liberal tears. Fuck that! If they’re going to burn this shit down we’re locking them In the fucking building while it burns to the ground. The gloves are off. No more going in to the boxing ring holding true to the sport while our opponent has a baseball bat and is ready to swing for the fences at us.

The high road has got us nowhere but low. So let’s stay there. If they’re want to play dirty and skirt the rules, so can we. If we don’t! And fuckin soon! They’ll be nothing left to fight for.

[godisarepublican]

New Ukrainian Terror Attack!

In an attempt to destroy a nuclear power plant, turning it into a Weapon of Mass Destruction -- a Radiological Bomb -- the Ukraine launched yet another drone strike against a Russian nuclear reactor.

This is going to touch off a nuclear response.

For real. Eventually the psychotic fascists in control of the Ukraine are going to succeed, and Russia is going to retaliate with tactical nuclear weapons.

Here's an extremely biased LEFTIST source. It's trying it's hardest to spin the story as anti Russian and pro Ukrainian, which means even LeftTards should be able to accept the truth: The Ukraine is out of control. They are trying to spark a nuclear war with these attacks. They are attempting to turn the nuclear plant into a radiological bomb, rendering vast areas uninhabitable while slowing murdering everyone exposed to the radiation with cancer. <link>

THE UKRAINE CANCELLED ELECTIONS! Google it. It is not a democracy. They are a fascist state that cancelled elections -- just like Hamas did in 2006 -- and they've cracked down on thought criminals, such as the Russian Orthodox Church.

Oh, wow, religious persecution! And cancelled elections. And terrorist attacks, including attempts at turning nuclear plants into Radiological bombs. It's almost as if fascists aren't good guys...

Anyway, Biden saw all this and, guess what? He's already agreed to "Sell" the Ukraine weapons which we all know you are going to pay for, not them, because why would Biden care about the constitution?

Only the House of Representatives can appropriate funds...

And why oh why would Biden even want to push us closer & closer to a nuclear war with Russia? I mean, besides the fact that he's senile and takes his order from Europe, which has already announced plans to annex the Ukraine.

Google it: The Ukraine join E.U.

That is and always was the plan. The EU engineered a fascist coup, back in 2013. Then they wait for the civil war to subside and roll in, annexing the breadbasket of Europe. But Putin nixed European expansionism. That's why Europe ordered Biden to sell them all the American natural gas, at super cheap prices, and drown us in the Ukraine.

Europe is always willing to spend to the last American dollar, fight to the last American life!

[ryanthedemiboy]

Agenda47 (Trump's Goals if he becomes President again)

I've bolded what I personally think are the most alarming (the rest either are frankly lies or already are the case. I'm not pointing out things that Trump has explicitly said he would do the opposite, etc, that'd take too much time and I have things to do)

Seal the border, and stop the migrant invasion

Carry out the largest deportation operation in american history

End inflation, and make america affordable again

Make america the dominant energy producer in the world, by far!*

Stop outsourcing, and turn the united states into a manufacturing superpower

Large tax cuts for workers, and no tax on tips!

Defend our constitution, our bill of rights, and our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to keep and bear arms

Prevent world war three, restore peace in europe and in the middle east, and build a Great iron dome missile defense shield over our entire country -- all made in america

End the weaponization of government against the american people

Stop the migrant crime epidemic, demolish the foreign drug cartels, crush gang violence, and lock up violent offenders

Rebuild our cities, including washington dc, making them safe, clean, and beautiful again.

Strengthen and modernize our military, making it, without question, the strongest and most powerful in the world

Keep the U.S. Dollar as the world’s reserve currency

Fight for and protect social security and medicare with no cuts, including no changes to the retirement age

Cancel the electric vehicle mandate and cut costly and burdensome regulations

Cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children

Keep men out of women’s sports

Deport pro-hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again

Secure our elections, including same day voting, voter identification, paper ballots, and proof of citizenship

Unite our country by bringing it to new and record levels of success

[the-eternal-quest-for-balance]

THESE ARE MY 20 PROMISES TO YOU AND ALL OF AMERICA:

1. SEAL THE BORDER AND STOP THE MIGRANT INVASION

2. CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY

3. END INFLATION, AND MAKE AMERICA AFFORDABLE AGAIN

4. MAKE AMERICA THE DOMINANT ENERGY PRODUCER IN THE WORLD, BY FAR

5. STOP OUTSOURCING, AND TURN THE UNITED STATES INTO A MANUFACTURING POWERHOUSE

6. LARGE TAX CUTS FOR WORKERS, AND NO TAX ON TIPS

7. DEFEND OUR CONSTITUTION, OUR BILL OF RIGHTS, AND OUR FUNDAMENTAL FREEDOMS, INCLUDING FREEDOM OF SPEECH, FREEDOM OF RELIGION, AND THE RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS

8. PREVENT WORLD WAR THREE, RESTORE PEACE IN EUROPE AND IN THE MIDDLE EAST, AND BUILD A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY -- ALL MADE IN AMERICA

9. END THE WEAPONIZATION OF GOVERNMENT AGAINST THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

10. STOP THE MIGRANT CRIME EPIDEMIC, DEMOLISH THE FOREIGN DRUG CARTELS, CRUSH GANG VIOLENCE, AND LOCK UP VIOLENT OFFENDERS

11. REBUILD OUR CITIES, INCLUDING WASHINGTON DC, MAKING THEM SAFE, CLEAN, AND BEAUTIFUL AGAIN.

12. STRENGTHEN AND MODERNIZE OUR MILITARY, MAKING IT, WITHOUT QUESTION, THE STRONGEST AND MOST POWERFUL IN THE WORLD

13. KEEP THE U.S. DOLLAR AS THE WORLD'S RESERVE CURRENCY

14. FIGHT FOR AND PROTECT SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE WITH NO CUTS, INCLUDING NO CHANGES TO THE RETIREMENT AGE

15. CANCEL THE ELECTRIC VEHICLE MANDATE AND CUT COSTLY AND BURDENSOME REGULATIONS

16. CUT FEDERAL FUNDING FOR ANY SCHOOL PUSHING CRITICAL RACE THEORY, RADICAL GENDER IDEOLOGY, AND OTHER INAPPROPRIATE RACIAL, SEXUAL, OR POLITICAL CONTENT ON OUR CHILDREN

17. KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN'S SPORTS

18. DEPORT PRO-HAMAS RADICALS AND MAKE OUR COLLEGE CAMPUSES SAFE AND PATRIOTIC AGAIN

19. SECURE OUR ELECTIONS, INCLUDING SAME DAY VOTING, VOTER IDENTIFICATION, PAPER BALLOTS, AND PROOF OF CITIZENSHIP

20. UNITE OUR COUNTRY BY BRINGING IT TO NEW AND RECORD LEVELS OF SUCCESS

Make no mistake, there are people, born in this Country, raised in the greatest Nation on earth, who do NOT want a few, some, most, ALL of the above from happening.

They are Democrats, Liberals, Progressives, Socialists, or putting them all together, you can cover them with the umbrella of . . . .

COMMUNISTS !!!

[chiropteracupola]

The Great Meme Harvest of 2022

so in january I decided to make a list of them, and now it's time to share out the bounty. here you go, in chronological order with some attempt at indication of influence.

it’s [slay]ing absolute [penis]

robert downey jr [there are federal agents outside my house]

horse plinko

blorbo from my shows

submeme: blorbus and tumblrinus

submeme: [variation on blorbo] from my [genre of media]

eeby deeby

[x] dead [y] injured in [commonplace but annoying household occurrence] incident

seinfeld ‘kramer, what’s going on in there?’ [alternating panel] ‘it’s a [x], Jerry’

tbh/yippee

variations on ‘short people will be carried off by birds of prey’

sickos: ‘yes… ha ha ha… yes!”

submeme: sickos variations (ancestral sickos &c.)

megamind no bitches

the queen of england is dead (resurgence from late 2021)

L + ratio + [x] and so on and so forth

dear god the [x] you put on earth to be [variation on] sleepy cosy is being made to [do a thing]

it’s me boy i’m the ps5, speaking to you inside your brain

quirked up white boy with a little bit of swag busts it down sexual style

live slug reaction

[x] would be a beautiful name for a baby girl

my son he has every disease

[x] be like [complaint] my brother in christ [you were responsible for the source of the complaint]

submeme: my brother in christ in general

eight hour victorious video

submeme: car battery

advice for new tumblr users

get drinked / I drinked you

[x] is such a raw line you’d think it was from [shakespeare]

something very lgbt is happening here

tumblr blaze (emergence of, subsequent misuses)

microplastics

she [x] on my [y] til i [z]

bisexual misha collins

submeme: NOT BISEXUAL misha collins

dracula daily

submeme: paprika discourse

morbius

submeme: it’s morbin time / morbius memes by people who have not watched morbius and are not planning to do so

submeme: morbius fails again!

carnotaurus mating dance

will they give you food if you visit them

submeme: we collectively cancel the nation of sweden

there should be kink at [pretty much any darn location the meme-maker can think of]

we need an american girl doll who [ate someone on the donner party]

mousegirl bartender

the man in the pikachu mask

a bad day to be the prime minister of a small island nation with a constitutional monarchy / &c.

[he]’s a 10 but [utterly nonsensical explanation why this individual is not worth it]

new db cooper theory he went up

smooth sharks

I wonder how I taste (one partner expects kissing, one partner expects Bite Bite Chomp Chomp)

would you still love me if I were a worm

hair clips and other things that are animals

gandalf big naturals

it was a gougar (possibly a resurgence from previous memes)

image of infodumping girl in pink shirt

sans undertale and the tumblr sexyman awards / QUEEN OF ENGLAND DEAD FOR REAL

the tumpet. bwaaaaa

i’m on my puter

lost focus and had a consensual workplace relationship

post stock market

[words in webpage somewhat similar to the name of a character or person indicated with circle and image]

a secret third thing

goncharov

submeme: this idiot hasn’t even seen goncharov

elon musk and his foolish antics

submeme: tumblr and twitter warrior cats

[lestat explains a piece of a media in a very strong phonetic french accent] / lestatspeak

hey. don’t cry. [very large number] of [thing] in the [world].

sorry [event which typically does not happen to human men happened to] your boyfriend [in exhaustive detail]

[number] ticket[s] to the barbie movie please

I went to [Mad At You] island and [none] of your friends were there

[victusinveritas]

The Republic Is Dead, Long Live The Republic

(by Jim Wright, original blog entry found here)

Poor man wanna be rich

Rich man wanna be king

And a king ain't satisfied

'till he rules everything

-- Bruce Springsteen, Badlands

Thus ends The Republic.

Hail! Mr. President.

It should never have come to this,

But, hey, at least democracy was fun while it lasted.

I made a pithy comment.

A couple of them actually, as is my wont.

Well, maybe not so much pithy as bitterly sardonic observations on yesterday's Supreme Court Ruling.

Here's one:

I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not sure how this works, but basically Biden is President For Life now, right? So, does Biden just "officially" cancel the election or do we have to break some windows and beat up cops first?

Sarcasm, right?

Obviously a reference to January 6th, 2021 and the violent actions of the then president and his howling rabble. A reference to that president's impeachment and the legal troubles he finds himself in (for now).

Right? Obviously.

Meta, the platform behind Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, removed it.

"It looks like you shared or sent something that could encourage violence and lead to risk of physical harm, or a direct threat to public safety."

I beg your pardon? I did what now?

"This goes against our Community Guidelines on violence and incitement."

Community guidelines on violence and incitement, you say?

I literally laughed out loud.

Literally laughed loud enough to scare the dog out of a sound sleep.

Hilarious.

Absolutely fucking hilarious.

Meta removed a number of similar posts from my various timelines. And it just kept getting funnier to me.

Funny ha ha, but also funny ironic.

You see, Mark Zuckerberg has higher standards against incitement of violence and threats to the public safety than the Supreme Court.

Mark Zuckerberg. That Mark Zuckerberg. That Facebook. That Meta.

Hilarious.

And what's even funnier is that I've now faced more consequences for allegedly inciting violence against the Republic than Donald Trump has or ever will -- because he's now officially immune from the consequences of his own actions and I as a mere plebe of the Imperium am most assuredly not.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum and Hail! Caesar.

Somewhere right now, up there in Republican heaven, Richard Milhous Nixon is swearing bitterly and staring down in utter disbelief at those who called John Roberts a "moderate conservative."

And, yeah, while that's probably hyperbole, the truth of the matter is the Roberts Court would have let Tricky Dick get away with it.

And the really ironic part here is that this Republican Supreme Court hasn't just sounded the death knell of The Republic by making the president Caesar, immune from the law and from the consequences of his own actions, but the Court has effectively killed itself.

I mean, what's the point of a Legislative or Judicial Branch when the Executive has unlimited power and absolute immunity?

The checks and balances of the American government are now effectively null and void, because with absolute executive immunity comes absolute immunity from both the Court and from Congress.

And that's exactly what this ruling does.

But then again, what would you expect from a Court that has no enforceable ethical code of conduct and refuses to even consider one?

The majority opinion, penned by Roberts himself alleges the founders of this country, the Framers of the Constitution, those men who'd just fought a bloody war of rebellion to free themselves from a monarch utterly immune from accountability and the law, actually envisioned an Executive who would likewise be immune from the law and accountability but is also somehow not a king.

Ur?

Never mind, he's rollin'

The opinion uses words like “vigorous,” “energetic," "decisive," and "speedy execution” of the president's duty to "faithfully execute" the law -- something the president has been able to do for 248 years, through multiple wars and myriad national emergencies, somehow without having absolute immunity.

But today in this new age, apparently the law cannot be executed vigorously, energetically, decisively, or in a speedy fashion if the president actually has to obey the law he's "faithfully" executing.

Explain to me how the guy charged with enforcing the law should be immune from it.

Explain it to me like I'm not a lawyer. Go ahead.

Why does this only apply to Presidents? Why shouldn't attorney generals be likewise immune from the law, or the police, or Supreme Court Justices ... okay, those are bad examples but I think I've made my point here.

The President must have “absolute immunity” for any “official act within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority," reasons the Chief Justice.

Now, again, I'm not a lawyer, but I noticed that the Chief Justice and his conservative Trump-appointed coconspirators on the Court didn't bother to define "official acts." That seems a strange omission, doesn't it? If they didn't define official acts, who does? The president? And Republicans don't see this as problematic?

But of course they wouldn't, would they?

But wait, there's more.

The opinion also offers up something called “presumptive immunity.”

Now, you'd think "absolute immunity" would cover it. If you have absolute immunity, how much more immunity do you need? That's pretty much what "absolute" mean, isn't it?

Ha ha. No.

According to John Roberts, the President also gets "presumptive immunity" for any action that falls outside his "official" duties, but within “the outer perimeter of his official responsibility.”

So there's official official and then there's also some other sort of official that's less official but also still official.

See? That's why I'm not a lawyer.

Anyway, this presidenting gig sounds like good work if you can get it.

As in the above decision regarding absolute immunity for official acts, the court doesn't provide any definition of "outer perimeter of official responsibility" or what non-official official duties might fall into it.

Confused?

It gets better, because Roberts goes on to say that this presumptive immunity for acts taken in the outer perimeter of officialdom might actually be absolute immunity after all, but “we need not decide that question today.”

So, we've determined there are official acts that get absolute immunity and there are less official acts that get presumptive immunity, but those less official acts might actually be official acts and entitled to absolute immunity instead of presumptive immunity but we don't have to actually spell out what any of those acts actually are today because something something gazpacho and the lower courts will just figure it out. Probably.

I'll pause for a minute so you can wipe at the blood which is no doubt running from you ear about now.

Unofficial acts, says Roberts, are not entitled to immunity, presumptive or absolute.

Oh, well, that's good.

We can hold the President accountable for unofficial acts.

Unofficial acts.

Unofficial.

The president can be held accountable for unofficial acts.

Heh heh. Riiiight.

When the president does it, that means it is not illegal!

-- Richard Nixon, 1977

Guess what? Turns out, Nixon was right.

If absolute immunity is only for official acts, then immunity is always going to be absolute because you can bet that when the president does it, whatever it is, it's always -- always -- going to be "official."

Bet on it.

You know why? Because the same court who made this decision, will make that one too.

And thus, the president can't be indicted and he can't be impeached.

There is no longer any Constitutional or governmental method of restraining a president.

And there is now no accountability to the American people whatsoever, not even voting if a president choses to "officially" ignore an unfavorable election and order his VP to change the results. That is exactly what the Supreme Court just said. This is quite literally the crux of this entire argument. That's what started all of this, a president who refused to accept the results of the election and who attempted to nullify those results through violence in order to seize power. Those are now official acts and immune from the law.

Up above I said I'd made a number of comments on social media that were later removed.

Here's another one:

When they line us up in front of that ditch they made us dig in the field outside the concentration camp gates, just before one of Supreme General Mike Flynn's Hauptsturmführers gives the order to fire, I'll be the guy who smacks you in the back of the head and snarls "I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO."

The post got several hundred responses.

-- You won't get the chance, I won't be there. I'm going for their throats with my bare teeth when they show up to "detain me for reeducation". They're going to have to shoot in the street in front of my own house in front of everybody.

-- I won't get there. I will take a few with me first.

-- Before that happens, I'm going to take out as many of those single helix mutant pieces of shit neckbeards as possible. You're welcome to join me. I will not go quietly.

-- Im not going down without taking a few of them with me.. jfs

-- I’ll be the girl who turns around and storms the bad guys. They may kill me, but I’ll go down fighting.

There were many, many more in the same spirit, I was in the process of recording them when Threads took the post down and I lost access to the feed.

We'll go down fighting!

Yeah. Great. Cool. I admire your spirit. War is fun. You're gonna love it. But the thing is, we wouldn't have to die fighting -- if you all showed the same grit at the ballot box.

Now, I'm not saying that those who shouted defiance up above didn't themselves vote. They follow me, they likely did.

But a lot of Americans didn't.

And they won't this time either -- despite their promise to go down fighting.

It should never have come to this and where does that leave us?

If the president does it, it's official. And if it's official then the president can't be impeached and he can't be indicted and he can't be convicted and he can't be held accountable to the people. He is, de facto, Caesar.

Or Vladimir Putin. Pick you poison.

That is literally Trump's entire argument.

Everything he did in office is official. He can't be impeached for it, he can't be prosecuted for it, and he fully intends to do it again, until he really is Caesar, or Putin.

And the Court said, Okay.

I'm not a lawyer, don't take my word for it. Instead listen to what Justice Sotomayor said:

The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding. … When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.

Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be.

That is the majority’s message today.

Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.

We probably could have avoided a lot of trouble and been much further ahead if we'd just paid our taxes, drank our tea, and knuckled under to King George III.

If nothing else, at least we'd have universal healthcare today.

So, where does that leave us?

Beyond guillotines and the Second Amendment, I mean.

November.

That's where it leaves us.

We have one chance to fix this without bloody war and revolution, and even that is a dicey proposition.

I lied up above. War isn't fun. Killing people is terrible. It's dirty and it's ugly and it's fucking horrifying and if you survive you'll never ever get the smell of death out of your brain. Ever. We're out of options. You don't get the luxury of sitting this one out or throwing away your vote because you don't like the choices. And bluntly, if you don't have what it takes to show up and vote, you probably don't have what it takes to pick up a gun and fight tyranny on the battlefield either.

It should never have come to this.

You want want a better nation, you're going to have to be better citizens.

With fear for our democracy, I dissent.

-- Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor

By Jim Wright

[mariacallous]

Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed that the country’s presidential election, that in peacetime would be expected next March, will not be taking place while Ukraine remains under martial law and is in a state of war with Russia.

Western right-wing social media personalities predictably greeted this news as confirmation of their prejudices against Ukrainian democracy. Failed politician and 2020 U.S. election denier Kari Lake was among those who complained, saying on X, formerly known as Twitter, “Zelensky is considering canceling elections in Ukraine. I didn’t realize that Democracy could just be turned off & on like a TV.” Not wanting to be left out, reactionary Michael Tracey dedicated several tweets to misunderstanding Ukraine’s constitution while furiously denouncing his own followers for correcting his mistakes via X’s Community Notes feature, claiming that “it’s totally false that holding elections during Martial Law is ‘banned’ by Ukraine’s constitution.” (The Community Note is, in fact, correct, and Tracey is, of course, wrong.)

So while, I hope, everyone knows not to take such figures seriously, Americans might still have qualms over the failure to hold elections. The United States itself has a habit, rare among democracies, of keeping the vote going even during wartime, as in 1864 and 1944.

Thus, it’s worth going into detail as to why the Ukrainian government has taken this position and how the Ukrainian electorate is responding to that. This news certainly didn’t come as a surprise to anyone in Ukraine, and the pressure surrounding wartime elections has been entirely external, leaving many Ukrainians baffled. The most prominent of these interventions was made by U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, who on a visit to Kyiv in August said he believed the Ukrainian government should hold elections in 2024. While it should be noted that, in responding to Graham, Zelensky appeared to hold the door open for elections next year, he also stressed that they were legally prohibited under martial law in the same interview.

These opinions are not confined to American conservatives either, with the president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Tiny Kox, telling European Pravda in May that Ukraine is expected to “organize free and fair elections,” shortly before walking those comments back in a subsequent interview.

For the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians, the idea of holding elections next spring is absurd. A recent poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that 81 percent of respondents thought that elections should not be held until after the end of the war. This view is shared across the country, with those in the eastern and southern regions most impacted by the ongoing conflict also overwhelmingly opposing holding elections during the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Ukrainian civil society has also reached the same conclusion, with more than 200 civil society institutions, NGOs, and human rights networks officially declaring their opposition to holding wartime elections. The prospect of holding elections next year had already been deemed “impossible” by Ukraine’s leading election monitoring NGO Opora in July, long before Graham arrived in Kyiv for his moment in front of the cameras.

For those who are unaware of what martial law is, in most countries it entails the suspension of a civilian government, replacing it with a military administration enacted during times of war, and it normally involves the curtailment of peacetime political freedoms such as freedom of speech and the freedom of assembly. While martial law is never a positive political development for a nation-state, at times of war, such as the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, such legal measures become unfortunately necessary to save lives.

Both constitutionally and legally speaking, the Ukrainian government is simply following Ukrainian law. The Ukrainian constitution and martial law legislation clearly prohibit presidential, parliamentary, and local elections from taking place under martial law, and Zelensky’s comments last week were merely a repetition of what other Ukrainian government officials have said on this topic in recent months. Other European countries, such as Germany, have similar provisions for postponing wartime elections.

In response to Kox’s comment in May, Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said: “The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe should clearly understand that there is a Constitution and laws of our country that we have to live by, and we will figure it out on our own. No elections can be held during martial law.”

Similarly, in June, Ruslan Stefanchuk, the speaker of Ukraine’s parliament, said: “If elections were possible during martial law, it could lead to the rupture of the state, which our enemy is waiting for. That is why I think the most correct and wise decision is to hold elections immediately after the end of martial law.”

Speaking in August, Ukrainian Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said: “It will be very difficult to hold elections in the country under such conditions. Indeed, there is martial law, there is war. When we end the war, then we will talk about elections.”

Some might dismiss the position of Ukrainian officials due to their own self-interest in remaining in power. If Zelensky were trying to cling to power against the wishes of Ukraine’s electorate, martial law would seem to provide the Ukrainian government with the legal and constitutional power to do just that.

However, this theory collapses on contact with Ukraine’s opinion polls. A survey taken this summer on a potential presidential election in Ukraine showed that more than 70 percent of respondents were planning to vote for Zelensky, with more than 50 percent of respondents supporting his ruling Servant of the People party.

The scale of the commanding lead that Zelensky has over his political opponents is nearly unheard of in any democracies, let alone Western ones. Few leaders around the world have the same level of popular support and legitimacy that Zelensky’s government currently holds. This is not a government that is in doubt about its democratic legitimacy, and if there were elections in March, the results would be almost guaranteed to be a landslide victory.

It is also true that Zelensky’s government under martial law banned 11 opposition political parties last March. However, the part that is often left out by those complaining about this is that these parties had explicit links to the Russian government and were in many cases actively assisting the Russian invasion. It’s hard to imagine any country not responding the same way when under invasion. For example, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s government banned Oswald Mosley’s pro-Nazi British Union of Fascists at the outbreak of World War II. Again, none of this means that Ukraine is no longer a functioning democracy—it is merely a democracy that is currently fighting off an invading army.

The final point is also the most overlooked by external observers pressuring the Ukrainian government into violating its constitutional obligations: the matter of safety. Holding elections while Russia continues to bombard civilian targets in Ukraine on a daily basis is not just dangerous; it is outright irresponsible. The Russian military has a track record of systematically targeting any large congregations of Ukrainian civilians. In October, Russia bombed a cafe where people had gathered for a wake, leaving 59 people dead.

In any wartime election, polling stations would become high-value targets for a Russian dictatorship that is hellbent on destroying Ukrainian democracy and a Russian military that carries out war crimes against civilians as its modus operandi.

Furthermore, 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory is under Russian occupation, and those citizens have just as much right as those living in Kyiv or Lviv to participate in Ukrainian elections, but trying to organize those under Russian occupation would put participants and organizers under mortal peril. Ukraine does not have the means of ensuring the safety of its electorate during this democratic process, and it’s arguable that no democratic nation could ensure the safety of its citizens under these conditions.

Lastly, while this situation has not arisen in Western democracies since the end of World War II, the United Kingdom also did not hold elections between 1940 and 1945, and at no point during that time were substantial parts of Britain occupied by Nazi Germany. Most of democratic Europe was occupied during World War II, but during World War I, France and other nations suspended elections. I have never heard anyone try to say this meant those countries ceased being democracies. The United States was able to hold elections during wartime because the front line was mercifully distant; Ukraine does not have that luxury.

Given that the overwhelming majority of Ukrainian politicians, Ukrainian civil society, and the Ukrainian electorate have categorically rejected the notion of holding elections while the country remains locked in an existential war with Russia, there is little excuse for external observers to be piling additional pressure onto Kyiv to hold a dangerous, illegal vanity contest with an already foregone conclusion.