#pretty sure the answer here is revolution but sure. yeah. i NEED to send kamala harris $5 to SAVE DEMOCRACY

[chronicswitch]

Literally begging social media (it's ofc Meta products) to stop showing me liberals who are "feeling the most patriotic [they've] ever felt since 2016" about the US elections

Not really sure how we can feel patriotic about our country contributing immensely to war after war with people we have more in common with than we do with those in power in the US, all to extend the empire and further capitalist aims

🤔

[qqueenofhades]

I was already distressed about the political and social situation in the US, and then this happens. Are there any examples of societies that fought back against fascism and won, without civil or international war breaking out? Surely there must be some success stories in history. How did other societies overcome fascism, are there lessons to be applied to our current situation? Please tell me we're not doomed, because I have no hope for the future.

Sigh.

Okay.

I’ve been through... a lot of the stages of grief by now. That is, rageposting on tumblr, venting to my friends via text, drinking, crying while drinking, lying on my bed and staring at the ceiling, feeling the crushing weight of certainty that we’re all screwed and nothing matters, crying while talking to my sister, crying generally, lying in bed some more, and am currently still in bed while writing this, but am struggling to put on my internet historian aunt hat and offer some comfort to the stricken masses.

First off: This is bad. I’m not even going to pretend this isn’t bad. We all knew RBG had cancer again, but it was pretty fixed in our minds that she would somehow manage to hang on until after the election. 45 days before the biggest presidential election of all time, in the middle of this year, when names including Ted “Zodiac Killer” Cruz and Tom “Time for Roe vs. Wade to go, block federal funding from being used to teach about slavery, send in the military to crush the BLM protesters” Cotton have already been floated as some of her possible replacements? With Trump and McConnell determined to work as fast as possible to steal this seat as brazenly as they can, because they are literal fascists who don’t care about their own example (Merrick Garland was nominated in FEBRUARY of an election year and McConnell held it up for being “too close to the election?”)

Ugh. Anyone who doesn’t get that this is bad or acting like people are overreacting doesn’t get what’s at stake. And when, as we’ve said before and are saying again now, the future of everyone who isn’t a white straight rich Republican man in this country depends on an 87-year-old woman with cancer for the fourth time? Something’s wrong here. RBG’s death did not have to leave us in this total existential panic, and oh yeah, maybe this could have ALL BEEN AVOIDED AND WE COULD HAVE ALSO HAD THREE (3) NEW LIBERAL JUSTICES SECURING PROGRESSIVE LEGISLATION FOR A GENERATION IF SOME OF YOU HAD JUST FUCKING VOTED FOR HILLARY CLINTON IN TWO THOUSAND AND FUCKING SIXTEEN.

(Why yes I am still mad about that, I will be bitter until the end of time that we were consigned to four years and counting of this completely avoidable nightmare because of apathy, misogyny, and Leftist Moral Purity TM, but we’re talking about the future and what can still be done here, not what’s in the past.)

Anyway. Here’s the bright side, which admittedly sucks right now, but it’s been the answer all long:

VOTE.

You have to fucking vote, and you have to fucking vote for Biden/Harris. Everything that we’ve been talking about is no longer a hypothetical; it’s happening right now. This is not just some Awful Worst Case scenario, and it’s not somehow being spouted by privileged white liberals ignoring the struggles of the masses. (Viz: that awful fucking text post with its simpering self-righteousness: “are you punching nazis or just telling oppressed people to vote blue?” I hate that text post with a fiery passion and it’s the exact kind of morally holier than thou leftist propaganda that wouldn’t surprise me if it was generated by a troll farm in Krasnoyarsk.) My dad is disabled and lives on Social Security. Trump’s second-term plan to end the payroll tax takes SSID out by mid-2021, so... I guess that’s my dad fucked then. I’m a gay woman with long-term mental illness, no healthcare, no savings, no current job, and a lot of student debt. My sister has complex health problems and relies intensely on publicly funded healthcare programs. All my family have underlying conditions that would put them at worse risk for COVID (age, asthma, immune issues.) These are just the people IN MY HOUSEHOLD who would be at risk from a second Trump presidency. It says NOTHING about my friends, about all the people far less fortunate than us, and everyone else who IS ALREADY DYING as this nation lurches into full-blown fascism. That is real. It is happening.

Here’s the good news and what you can do:

Democrats are fired up and mad as hell, and they’ve already donated $31 million between the announcement of RBG’s death last night and today, and that number is climbing every second.

You can help by donating to Get Mitch or Die Trying, which splits your donation 13 ways between the Democrats challenging the most vulnerable Republican seats in the Senate. That also has raised EIGHT MILLION BUCKS in the less-than-twenty-four hours.

You can donate RIGHT NOW to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, vote if your state offers early voting, request your mail-in ballot, or hound everyone you know to ensure that they’re registered.

You can call your US Senators (look up who they are for your state, ESPECIALLY IF THEY ARE REPUBLICAN OR YOU LIVE IN A SWING STATE OR ARE UP FOR RE-ELECTION IN 2020) and phone the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 to voice your insistence that they respect RBG’s last wishes and refuse to vote on any Trump nominee until after January 2021.

The other good-ish news is that I woke up to an email from the Biden campaign this morning about how they’re well aware of this and they’re already on it. BUT WE CANNOT COUNT ON EITHER THEM OR THE SENATE DEMOCRATS TO BE ABLE TO STOP IT. Because Joe Biden is not president and the Senate Democrats do not have a majority, if the Republicans manage to rush a nominee and a vote and all 52 GOP senators vote for that nominee, hey presto, tyranny by majority, a SECOND stolen Supreme Court seat, and a 6-3 hard conservative majority for the next generation. Even if Roberts or Gorsuch sometimes defect on procedural grounds, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer (who is also 82 and thus ALSO might soon be replaceable, thus resulting in an EVEN WORSE ideological swing) would be outnumbered on everything. This is terrible. I’m not even gonna pretend it wouldn’t be.

BUT:

If Joe Biden is elected with a Democratic Senate and House, IT MATTERS. It gets us off the fascism track, it gives us the ability to make progressive law and have it enacted without going to die in Mitch McConnell’s Kill Stack, it gives Biden the executive authority to nominate liberal judges and change Trump’s worst outrages on day 1, it stands as a huge example of a nation managing to reject fascism by democratic process, and while yes, we’d still have a terribly rigged Supreme Court, Democrats would control all the other branches of government and be able to put safeguards in place. The other option is outright fascism and the end of American democracy for good. This may sound alarmist. It’s not. It’s literally what the situation has ended up as, as all of us who were begging people to vote for HRC in 2016 saw coming all along.

So yes. That’s what you need to do, and what WE need to do. We need to make as much goddamn noise as possible, protest, contact elected representatives, make sure everybody pulls their weight and ferociously fights the promised attempt to ram through a new justice before Election Day, all that. But even if that does happen, THEN WE NEED TO FUCKING DONATE, ORGANIZE, AND VOTE FOR JOE BIDEN AND DEMOCRATS UP AND DOWN THE BALLOT. ALL OF US. NO EXCUSES. NO MORE TWITTER LEFTIST ECHO CHAMBERS. NO MORE. THEN, EVEN WITH A RIGGED SUPREME COURT, WE WILL ALL BE SAFER ON NOVEMBER 4TH AND CAN TRY TO FIX WHAT’S BROKEN.

The stakes are just too high to do anything else.

May her memory be a blessing, and a revolution.