#the poll hasn’t ended yet. but fuck it. only 2 hours left and I don’t think anything’s gonna pass over the lead at this point

[salty-an-disco]

(Explore) Why do I get stuck with a new narrator? Where’s the one for this story?

Hrng. The second time is somehow more startling than the first.

But hey, no need to snap at me. I’m just as confused as you are! I’ve no clue on the whereabouts of this story’s narrator, maybe they accidentally lost this story and I happened to find it thinking it was Stanley’s story.

Or maybe we both switched our assignments while bumping into each other in the Narrator Headquarters.

(Just to make it clear: this was a joke. There is no narrator headquarters, we all work independently from each other. Or, at least, I do. Hm. What if there is a Narrator Headquarters? Why haven’t I been invited to it then? No, no, there isn’t. I’d be invited if there was.)

[shotorozu]

Hello. I got into a car accident and I was with my younger sister too. I got 2 surgeries and I don’t remember much. My younger sister got a few stitches😞 I feel horrible like an older sister.

Was wondering if I could request a head anon of where reader gets into a car accident and the characters react to it. (Tamaki, izuku, shoto and any of choice. Sad thing is my FUCKING Spanish teacher won’t respond to me and I have really bad grades on that class 😢 ( ´༎ຶㅂ༎ຶ`)

Thank you and take care also Safe driving

s/o getting into a car crash

character(s) : bakugou katsuki, amajiki tamaki, todoroki shouto (bnha)

legend : [Y/N = your name] they/them pronouns used, quirk’s not specific

headcanon type : fluff, comfort (x reader)

note(s) : 😦 omg i hope you’re doing okay, anon- your spanish teacher better respond to you or else >:T

»»————-　♡　————-««

bakugou katsuki

when he gets word that you’ve gotten into a car crash, his hands crack with mini explosions— dropping everything to literally run to wherever you’re at

“damnit, damnit, damnit! where the hell was i when that happened?!”

appears a lot pissier than usual, in reality— he’s just really worried, and he can’t slow down his heart palpitations!

“calm down bakugou!”

“calm.. CALM DOWN? RIDDLE ME THIS, ASSHOLE—”

hm okay, so lets say that you were in the passengers seat when the crash happened

katsuki will probably want to find whoever was the driver, and just absolutely go ballistic on them, but probably ends up not doing that when he thinks about what you’d feel

and lets say another driver crashed into your car— katsuki will search high and low just to find that said driver, and he’ll show them hell

and if you crashed into a poll or something, he wouldn’t get too mad— but he’ll still scold you, and lecture you about driving safety

when he finds out you need surgery, he’ll be so upset

“what do you mean SURGERY? who the hell crashed into you, and why do they have a license?! they’re a danger to society!” he sounds angry but he’s quietly yet impatiently waiting outside for the surgery to be successfully completed

cleans and takes care of your remaining injuries, doesn’t matter if there’s a tiny little scrape on your forehead, or if you’re left with a bunch of broken bones.

he’ll be nursing you, like it or not.

he doesn’t let you leave your bed during your recovery, he insists— and you have an idea of what’ll happen if you try opposing katsuki 💀

don’t ever be worried about your grades! you have a smartie as a boyfriend, so he has probably made an extra copy of notes that you’ve missed

and he’ll probably argue with a teacher if they refuse to cooperate because,, YOU ALMOST PASSED AWAY?? is that not a valid excuse?

“i get that you’re really busy, but they literally almost died— how is that not an valid excuse? Y/N’s a hard worker, and a good one! and i will not rest until you understand!”

it might seem a little over protective of him to do this, but katsuki won’t EVER let you drive a car alone for who knows how long, he’ll be there with you just to monitor your driving.

that is, until you gain his trust back— that you could drive without almost losing yourself

amajiki tamaki

for him, it feels like the world is going slower

when he gets a call that you’ve gotten into a car crash— his anxiousness shoots through the roof, and it’s causing him to assume the worst of the worst

he’ll feel so guilty though, tears welling up in his eyes as his entire body shakes just thinking about you in a hospital bed

because,, where was he when that happened? how did he only learn about this now?

eventually, mirio and nejire calm him down to the point that they could properly bring him to the hospital you’re staying at

without him shaking like an old nokia

knows not to blame anyone, regardless of who crashed the car (he’s not confrontational anyway)

yet, he can’t help but think about how things would’ve went differently if he was there

feels frustrated to the point that he starts tearing up when he finds out you needed surgery, and even when you tell him that he can’t be guilty because of you

he still is 😔

anyways, when your surgery is completed— he eventually musters the courage to just put all of his nervous feelings aside for now, and take care of you like the sweetheart he is!

knows a shit ton of food (courtesy to his quirk) so he cooks you something new everyday during recovery

during your recovery, tamaki isn’t fond of the idea of you walking around, doing things as if nothing happened. he ends up making sure you stay in bed, by staying in your room for days

it might take a while for him to be reassured that you won’t accidentally end up in a ditch again, but for now— you’re carpooling with the big three

worried about your grades because of the time you’ve missed during your recovery? no worries! tamaki made an extra copy of notes, and basically summarized it in a way you could understand!

it’s a rollercoaster 💀 but at least this made tamaki take initiative, even without being pushed to do so!

let’s just say, mirio and nejire are really proud of him :))

todoroki shouto

he’s been wondering why he hasn’t seen you in a few hours, and on top of that— he hasn’t been able to contact you

like,, at all. but, he thought you were just feeling ill— so he decided that he was going to head over to your place after his tasks were taken care of.

but that’s all forgotten, when he finally gets word that you’ve gotten in a car crash— and that’s why you weren’t there

he literally freezes in place, and his reaction was almost like he saw the endeavor-nomu fight all over again.

the idea of his love being in critical state, made the normally calm todoroki placed in distress

after being calmed down by his fellow classmates, he quickly abandons whatever he was doing, so he could rush to the hospital

currently, you were in surgery. he appeared pretty calm on the outside, but internally— he was a mess. though, he did have to keep it together for you

when shouto finally meets you out of surgery, his gaze is soft “hi love— no, don’t stand up! just stay there. do you remember what happened?”

your description of it all isn’t the best, but he couldn’t blame you at all

if another driver crashed into you, it’ll be an intimidating encounter,, he won’t be physical, but his words will be harsh— not even caring about the fact that the driver is literally quaking in their shoes

and if you were in the passengers seat, shouto will briefly look at them with pure disappointment— he can’t really help it,,

but he can’t find himself being mad if you were the driver, he’s just glad that you’re still with him as you could tell, shouto’s only soft for you

immediately goes shopping for groceries after he takes you back, and you’ve guessed it! he makes you soba, since you’re fresh out of the hospital

insists that you stay bed ridden, and you can’t seem to oppose— since he’s giving you the softest of gazes.

unintentionally isolates you during the entire recovery stage, because he’s so absorbed with taking care of you— that he didn’t even think if you wanted to see your classmates

not that you’re complaining,, you get to see shouto and only shouto for an entire week or so!

he lets your classmates and friends see you after a bit, but he insists that they don’t speak too loudly— worried that they’ll accidentally ache your head

(that’s when everyone found out about shouto’s great caretaking ability)

worried about your grades and classes? shouto will handle it. he’ll reach out to your teachers/professors, and he’ll try to make some negotiations, he makes sure to tell them that you were taking time off because of a health emergency

will he immediately let you be in a car by yourself after? hm,, maybe not— it’ll take some time for you to be able to drive alone again. if you need to go somewhere by car, he’ll accompany you :))

he will NOT let another accident happen, not on his watch! his heart wouldn’t be able to handle it

»»————-　♡　————-««

likes and reblogs are appreciated, thanks for reading!

i do not own bnha/mha and it’s characters. boku no hero academia/my hero academia belongs to horikoshi kohei, i only own the writing and i do not profit off of my hobby

do not plagiarize, reupload, translate, or use my works for audio readings without permission

[lizacstuff]

Can’t wait to read you thoughts on this episode. Eda and Serkan are getting engaged! ngl seeing the rings did something to me, I haven’t recovered yet.

I KNOW!!!!! I missed the rings so much. When folks were upset during the filming of 20 when it became apparent he wasn't wearing the ring anymore, I remember saying that they have to take them off so they can put them back on for real, and it will be oh so sweet when they do. Flashforward six weeks and YES!!!! Just seeing those rings again is sweet we're going to die when they actually slip them on during the next episode. I'm not attached to any of my own jewelry the way I'm attached to their rings, lmao.

As a whole this episode was very enjoyable for me.  The new writers clearly realized they needed a mood change after episode 25, and I was thrilled to see the show return to its roots. The tone felt more like the first batch of episodes than any in recent memory. What a relief. Also I've said prior to this that I suspected that where we would feel Ayse's absence was in the humor and lack of sparkle.  Well I thought this episode had plenty of both, so I stand corrected. The first Edser scene with Serkan gliding by Eda without saying a word and then having his trusty sidekick Leyla keep an eye on what they were doing outside set the light comedic tone and put everything on the right footing from the get go. 

More later on Edser, let's start with all the nonsense they use to fill the rest of the 2+ hours. 

(continue under the read more)

What in the frack is Babaanne's endgame?  Does she have one?  Is it to take revenge on Serkan? To get Eda back in her orbit? Or just to cause chaos? Or is she testing them? Not sure. 

I enjoyed the scene between mom and son, Aydan and Serkan's relationship has really become one of the best on the show, certainly better than recent Eda/Ayfer.  Which is interesting, because in the pilot they established that while Serkan may be rich with material things, he was lacking in love and emotional familial support, while Eda was poor in regards to material things, but was surrounded by love in the form of her family/friends. Though perhaps one of the greatest gifts Eda's given Serkan is an improved relationship with his mother, and the impetus to distance himself from his unloving father. While Serkan has inspired her growing independence from her aunt. 

Speaking of them, let's move on to Aydan and Ayfer. PLEASE MADE THIS CHEF NONSENSE END! Good grief. I really don't enjoy watching these two ladies making total asses of themselves over this douche. Both of them trying to catch him on his jog and then going along with his aikido nonsense. It feels like he's just playing with them for his own amusement. Both deserve better and I don't even like Ayfer. Also if my boss gave me a single red rose for being employee of the month, I'd find that both creepy and hella disappointing (crash prizes please.) 

Meanwhile Ayfer is still testing my last nerve. When Aydan and Seyfi show up and inform her that they've found out that Serkan and Eda broke up and she responds with, "Were they even together to break up?" I wanted to slap her upside the head. Whatever official relationship status Eda and Serkan have, they have been connected and in a romantic relationship this entire time. The bit of time jump at the start of 15 before she goes back to work for Efe, is really the only section of time since they've met where they weren't in a relationship. And while Eda isn't all that forthcoming with Ayfer when it comes to Serkan, she hasn't really hidden it well. It was at Ayfer's birthday when they were on the ice together being very romantic, Ayfer was at Aydan's 70s party and could very well see Eda and Serkan attached at the hip all night and wound around one another intimately slow dancing, Ayfer knows Eda spent the night at Serkan's when she left because of Babaanne, Ayfer was at the NY party and saw them together there. Not to mention Ayfer knows Serkan saved her business and why, she knows Serkan was still wearing his ring, and she knows Eda looked completely shattered over leaving Serkan as Ayfer heartlessly reacted with glee in the last episode. 

So asking "were they even together" just completely diminishes what Eda is currently going through, as if parting with him is no big deal because there was nothing there to begin with, when she knows better. When she's seen it with her own two eyes. Seriously.. fuck her. Every other character who is a friend of Eda and Serkan all know that they're a unit. I don't even feel bad that she came to ArtLife to beg for Eda's company, but Eda ended up blowing her off. Surprising Serkan with a proposal was a much better use of her time.

Engin and Piril, yeeesh, I feel for Piril, trying to put off this meeting. I'm sure she's thinking it's for Engin's own good, but her flipping into total bitch mode when they're newlyweds... not great. Not an auspicious start to the marriage. Even if she wants to keep Engin away from her father, she ought to confide in Engin and tell him why she's freaked. I'm assuming we'll get more of that in the next episode since Engin is looking rough in those promo stills. 

My favorite side plot was probably Grandog's henchman's (what is his name?) crush on Melo. Melo deserves to be crushed on, and I love that she is so uninterested that she doesn't see it.  Much more fun to have him chasing her, and her being oblivious. Poor Leyla, trying in vain to get his attention when he only has eyes for Melo. Enjoyed that Melo and Leyla made the agreement that Melo would help Leyla get the dude and Leyla would help get rid of Erdem. I'm looking forward to see where this goes. 

Ceren and Ferit... were there too. 

Now onto the A story (and let's be real the only one that matters) Eda and Serkan. Obviously 25 left us off in a very sad, heartbroken place. I'm not sure what decisions were made, when or why, but at some point TPTB decided they needed to get back to their roots and thank goodness. Episode 25 was just so dark, Eda was miserable the entire episode, as was Serkan, and that's not fun to watch for 2 hours. The way they handled them here is much better. 

I know some feel the tone shift was too much. To that I would say, it was so dark in ep 25, I'm happy to do a 180, no matter the reason, to get back to a place where watching is fun, and also I think of the breakup as Eda throwing the breaks on a runaway train and once she did, and she was sure the train was stopped at least for the time being, then she could take a moment, reassess the situation and potentially decide it wasn’t as dire as she thought. In the last episode, every moment Eda delayed giving that old bitty what she wanted, something catastrophic befell Serkan, his business, or his family. The pressure mounted, the stakes were high and in the end she had to do whatever was necessary to stop Babaanne's assault on Serkan. 

This episode we saw her catch her breath and then formulate a plan. I think a tone shift fits with that. Of course she feels lighter knowing that even though she hurt Serkan, he's protected for the moment. Now that that's taken care of, she's ready for next steps. So it works that the next morning we see her telling Melo and Ceren that she's not going to give up Serkan, and outlining her plan around getting close to Babaanne in order to get something on her. Good girl!  

As I said above, I just adored that first scene outside ArtLife. The girls gathered around, trying to warn Eda that Serkan was coming, and then his walk by where he KNEW EXACTLY WHAT HE WAS DOING when he got right up in Eda's business without even looking at her.  He knows what makes her weak in the knees. And I love that Serkan decided to play it like this. HE KNOWS. He knows she loves him, he knows there's more to the breakup, and he knows how to deal with it. Drive her crazy until she cracks and tells him everything. OR drive her crazy until they end in a passionate, possessive sex explosion. One or the other.  

Quick poll, who didn't love watching Serkan take back the reigns of his company? This gal did. YAAAAAAAAAAASSSSS. Alpha Serkan is back. Kick the old bag's throne to the curb. Kick the old bag's creepy client to the curb. Now we just have to kick the old bag and her deranged, obsessed sidekick to the curb as well.  But for now, I loved seeing him at the end of the table, making decisions, not brooking opposition. The team squabbling over his decision, but he just sits back, unbothered. Total power move. I appreciate Ferit questioning the decision, questioning it is the right thing to do in his position, but he may have gotten a little too pissy about it. Dude, this entire company IS Serkan. The success of the company is due to his talent, his vision, his business acumen. I get they're all worried he's making a decision because of Eda, but he's got a proven track record of, you know, being right, so there's no reason to get shirty. If Serkan doesn't want to work with someone, his instinct is probably on target.

Eda getting Babaanne to stand down warmed me from the inside out. I find it interesting that she used the argument that they were pushing him too hard and he didn't deserve it, and Babaanne bought it. For one I think Eda was worried Serkan was going to snap and do something that might start Babs' Bolat revenge cycle again. For two, she just wants the love of her life to win and be calm. However, if anyone in that room didn't catch onto what happened there, that Eda and BigB leave and then come back a minute later and BigB has done a 180, I question their competence. *cough* Ferit *cough* He's just not the sharpest tool in the shed. However, obviously, Serkan knew. 

On another note, they've gotten pretty murky with the line between ArtLife and the holding.  Babaanne has 45% of the Holding, not ArtLife. Ferit has 5% of the holding, not ArtLife. So which company was working with the Prince?  Since it was a project to design a house, seems like that should be ArtLife? But Babs and Ferit seemed to think they had a vote which they shouldn't if it's ArtLife.  Who knows... whatever. 

Have you ever seen anything cuter than Eda in her coat and boots and protective helmet, leaning over, clutching her chest, exhausted after climbing all those stairs?  I mean she's an adorable bean just bent over and huffing and puffing, but the fact that she just climbed up goodness knows how many flights of stairs (judging by that view, an impossible number, but we'll allow it) just to see Serkan?  We giggle at her excuse that she did that because he gave her too much work. Eda, he's not going to buy that, luckily none of us want him to buy it. These two, they can't stay away from each other. Ever. She was also probably worried after the foreman told her he'd been up there for hours. Again, I think she's concerned that she's pushed him too far. So now she's in Serkan's shoes after the first breakup. Navigating that push pull of wanting to be with him, but sticking to the decision to end it for his sake. 

It's nice to see that her claustrophobia was not "cured" after going up in the elevator with Serkan one-time. On her own, she's still not able to face it. I'm sure she could do it again with him, but there's more work to be done before she can face it without him. 

Serkan was surprisingly vulnerable in both his conversation with Engin and with Eda on the top of that skyscraper. Even just telling Engin he was too out of sorts to join him for lunch, tells us that while he knows what he's doing, he knows there's more to the story, but he's still hurting and unsettled after the breakup. Then, "I create to make people happy, but I myself can't be happy. It's strange." Oh Serkan. I think you ripped my heart out with that... Eda's too. 

Eda was so discombobulated by Serkan's attitude. Whatever she expected from him, his acceptance of the break up, wasn't it. His proposal that they be "friends" threw her and she looked so distressed when he said, "Everyone will live their own life." Alarm bells started going off for her, much as they did for him at the top of ep 19 when Eda said she was going to start living her life. She did NOT like the idea of Serkan Bolat out there living a life that didn't include her, lmao. 

It's crazy to me that Eda has a friend like Fifi, who probably breaks and enters for a living, and yet she chooses Melo for a clandestine operation. Come on, Eda, you got to choose the right person for the job, lmao. I also question Eda's choice of cat burglar wardrobe. Seemed a bit... restricting and flashy. Though her skin-tight, snakeskin breaking-and-entering dress and fashionable trespassing boots did make it easier to transition to fine dining and driving your man towards rambunctious breakup/makeup/jealousy sex.  Not much to say about the restaurant scenes. The prince is creepy af, and was that the most awkward dance.... ever? The looks back and forth between Edser were excellent, so much tension and longing and jealousy. But boy is it hard to watch a scene with Balca in it, ugh she makes my skin crawl and I don’t even like looking at her. Also the deliberate way the actress has chosen to speak is irritating. Anyway, we now know Balca is pretty much capable of anything, if she’s capable of essentially poisoning the man she thinks she loves. Yikes. Did Nana realize that Balca poisoned him? I have to believe she did, because him being sick seemed part of the plan. THEY'RE ALL FULL EVIL!!! .

One thing I don't believe is that Eda Yildiz would ever walk out of that restaurant with Serkan looking that bad. No way she leaves him to Balca's care, or anyone else's for that matter. Nope, regardless of who was watching she would have insisted on taking him to the doctor herself.  But I get they were setting up the plot, so they sacrificed that bit. 

These villains are really bad at driving a wedge between two people who love each other. AngryGran is all like, "I know a foolproof plan, let's put them in the same room and get 'em all riled up with jealousy, then make Serkan sick so Eda's worried, then I'll convince her to go check on him and let's see what happens!" LMAO. Cheers to you, dumbasses, you brought us a whole heaping plate full of S.E.X. They were really banking that Eda was going to fly off the handle and think that Serkan went from an allergic reaction to sexing up the new obsessed employee very quickly. It's great that they all underestimate Eda and Serkan's relationship and connection, that should continue to help Edser as long as these fools continue to meddle. 

Eda was, wait for it, LEGENDARY, in her smackdown of Balca. QUEEEEEEEN. I'll never be over the, "You can only be with a statue of Serkan, darling." BWAHAHAHAHA. Yes! Throw her creepy, inappropriate present back in her face. And Balca's gall asking Eda to leave and then continually lecture Eda that they'd broken up. That takes either big cajones or huge helpings of delusion, because Balca has very little information when it comes to their relationship, yet she's playing her hand like she knows it all and like she doesn't care what gets back to Serkan. However, got to hand it to Balca for keeping her composure once Eda saw through her little staged production, because her story was painfully weak. Let's say for real that you're at your boss's house, the boss is sick so you're hanging around downstairs by yourself just to make sure everything is okay. What's the problem with just... you know... wearing your outfit with a coffee stain?  Unless you had a massive big gulp sized coffee and poured it over your head, why even change? Don't you just... live with the stain? It's not like you're making a presentation to the board of directors in 5 minutes.  For the love of god you're sitting there and no one else is around. Weak alibi.  

Poor Serkan, he's just there trying to sleep off having his allergies maliciously triggered, and he completely misses out on the love of his life fighting for him downstairs. Oh how he would have loved to see that. But oh what a way to wake up, with Eda Yildiz standing over him, looking magnificent, and rousing him with a scolding tone. I've already talked about how HOT the jealousy and possessiveness was here, so I'll focus on the scene itself. 

Let’s talk about the fragman first. Due to the short production timeline of this show, when they create a trailer they're doing it from the dailies, not from the show itself. That part of the show usually hasn't even been edited yet so the fragman exists before the episode. That means often there are scenes or angles that appear in the fragman, but not in the episode. It happened bigtime with the shower scene in 19, it happened randomly with the fragman for 20, they showed that really great shot of heartbroken Serkan in red, but didn't show the full thing in the episode, (when giffing it I had to use the fragman) and here, several of the best shots of Eda and Serkan ripping each other's clothes off were in the fragman and didn't make the episode. We can live with it for a lonely Serkan shot, but it's quite a bait and switch in this instance. Especially when pretty much every member of the cast (except Hande, Kerem didn't post anything either, but he did appear in that IGlive where the cast mercilessly teased him about it) promoted the scene. Not cool. I realize that they're dealing with sensors and may have had to cut things in order to avoid fines and such, but then they probably should have found a way to release the uncut scene on the internet as I've read other Turkish shows have done and like they did with episode 13. If you're gonna put something like this in the fragman to entice viewers, and have the cast promote it, you need to be willing to deliver. Badly done on the part of both Fox and MF Yapim.

That being said, one of the great things about the tighter restrictions this show has to adhere to, is they really show the intimacy instead. On an American show, these characters would have started eating each other's faces off and then tumbled into bed. There is something very hot, though, about them just invading each other's space, breathing each other's scent, nose to nose, nose to neck, nose to cheek... without breaching. Plus we got to see him carry her to the bed... even if they darkened it to the point you can barely see. I saw enough. HOT. The scene was short, but more tantalizing than lots of love scenes I've seen.

I was sad she left while he still slept in the morning. For him not to feel her get out of bed, she must have worn him out! It really would have been nice to see them wake up together, but I'm sure that will come. Plus it gave us the tension filled scene in the office. The knocked over lamp in the background was a delicious detail. Things got rambunctious! I'm glad Eda got to return the sentiment that only she can touch him, if only Serkan had heard it! Another thing that would have made him so happy if only he knew about it.

Melo is all of us upon learning about their night of passion. She's a whole cheerleader for them, and I love it. 

The post-sex scenes at the office were amazing. For several seconds I thought that he really did think it was a dream. Panic started to set in until she admitted she'd had it too. Phew. No hiding for Eda. I'm glad he flirted, instead of getting offended, and that she was at least honest about there being something she needed to do before they could really be together. Eda also handled the office conversation with Balca well. Love that she didn't show any reaction to her claim about Paris, just wished her a good trip. I felt that deep breath she took before going into his office. Yes, girl, calm down before you march in and accuse him of something, good thing he immediately invited her. I just about melted at, "I don't want to argue... you're precious to me." Serkan is gradually learning how to head off her fits of pique. 

The proposal... I... just... okay... my heart... I need a minute... still not over it. 

It was perfect. She made a surprise for him!!!!  After he asked her for a surprise a few episodes ago she did it and surpassed even his wildest dreams. It was quite a surprise for us too! Thank you for not spoiling it, show!  Serkan has told Eda he loves her about 3 dozen different ways, he's made it clear how he feels and what he wants ("Eda Bolat, sounds nice."). There is no doubt that he was ready to propose the moment he felt she'd be receptive, so it was wonderful that she threw caution to the wind and did it. Both Serkan and the audience needed to see exactly how much she loves him, and this was a wonderful way to do that. It's pretty much the biggest thing she could have done.  Also for those of us in other parts of the world (I'm in the US) it might not be too out of the ordinary for a woman to propose, but from what I understand it's rare and possibly non-existent on Turkish shows. That's pretty cool.

Did you see his face!?!? He was so happy at first when he registered that she was actually standing in front of him and then just totally gobsmacked when he saw the rings and realized what was happening. As for Eda, she was just glowing. GLOWING. And don't even get me started on the plane. That trip on the day after they met is such an important part of their love story and the call back here is wonderful. The first time around he thought she was there for him, this time he can't believe that she's there for him.  

Can't wait to see the way the full conversation/proposal plays out, do ya'll think he'll say yes? (hee)

[idairsauthor]

This Fcking Impeachment: Episode 2, Following the Strongest

PLAIDDER: Hello and welcome to This Fucking Impeachment, Weekend Edition. With me in the studio is Conn mac Emer. Conn, thanks for coming in on a weekend, I couldn’t get Gill to do it.

CONN: It is my pleasure. I mean that.

PLAIDDER: Thanks, I appreciate--

CONN: I LIVE FOR THIS.

PLAIDDER: Oooook...Conn, events that have unfolded since our last episode reminded me of one we taped during the government shutdown, which was called “The Art of the Possible.”

CONN: Oh yeah. I remember that.

PLAIDDER: Good. I wanted to--

CONN: That’s the one where you were arguing with me up one side and down the other and then just about an hour after that episode aired it turned out that I was ENTIRELY CORRECT.

PLAIDDER: Not entirely, friend. You were right about this part--Kleark, can you run the clip--

CONN: Look, with a process like this, it’s like a dance between what actually happens and what people believe is possible. Sometimes a thing has to actually happen before people believe it can happen.

PLAIDDER: Like that asshole becoming President of the United States.

CONN: Exactly. And sometimes, a thing can’t happen until enough people start to believe it could happen.

PLAIDDER: With you so far, friend.

PLAIDDER: But on the other hand, you did make the following predictions--Kleark, can we have clip #2 please--

CONN: When he loses the support of his party, he will go. Either they will impeach and remove him, or–and I think this much more likely–they will promise him that if he resigns they will not put him in jail. And he will do it.

PLAIDDER:--thanks, Kleark--and these predictions have NOT come true.

CONN: Yet.

PLAIDDER: I KNEW YOU WERE--

CONN: I know you knew. I just didn’t want to disappoint.

PLAIDDER: Well, anyway, indeed, I have started to think you might be right about some of this.

CONN: I am right about ALL of it.

PLAIDDER: I’ve started to think that impeachability might be like electability.

CONN: In our country we have neither of these concepts.

PLAIDDER: It’s basically our version of “most people follow the strongest.”

CONN: Oh. I get it.

PLAIDDER: So then--

CONN: No, wait, I don’t.

PLAIDDER: OK. “Electability” is something people talk about as if it is some kind concrete thing. In fact, “electability” is ‘real’ in that it can have real-world effects, but it is not ‘real’ in that it is not based on any material givens. Electability is a product of the collective imagination. It is self-creating, self-sustaining, and (sometimes) self-defeating. You become electable when enough people believe that you are electable. Anxiety about “electability” is a real problem in Democratic primaries, because it leads people to vote for whoever’s considered the most “electable” candidate instead of the one they want. Then, when the most “electable” person wins the primary, everyone’s depressed at how middle of the road and boring and Republican-lite they are, and they don’t turn out, and that’s how you get things like Buttercup winning that fucking election.

CONN: And Biden was supposed to be your most “electable” candidate?

PLAIDDER: Yes. Because he was an old white man who stood next to Obama for 8 years.

CONN: Your country truly is a magical and bizarre place.

PLAIDDER: I know. Anyway, what was beginning to happen before all this came out is that perceptions of “electability” were starting to change. The fact that Elizabeth Warren’s events are drawing large crowds has led people to start wondering whether she might actually be “electable.” This has led to her rising in the polls, and to Biden dropping--because people who liked her all along but thought she wasn’t “electable” are now starting to back her. I think her campaign managers understand this. They have been working very hard to create “electability” for her and it seems to be working.

CONN: So in your country, people won’t vote for their candidate if they don’t think that candidate will win.

PLAIDDER: Not everyone, but--

CONN: Thus ensuring that their candidate doesn’t win.

PLAIDDER: Friend, if you will allow me to quote “Waving Through A Window” from the musical Dear Evan Hansen, liberal voters in this country have learned to slam on the brakes before they’ve even turned the key.

CONN: I don’t understand any of that sentence.

PLAIDDER: Ironically, Buttercup’s election has sort of broken the electability thing, because now people are like, well fuck, ANYONE can be electable.

CONN: But this show is about impeachment...?

PLAIDDER: I’m coming to that. I think all those public opinion polls they did showing Americans didn’t support Buttercup’s impeachment worked the same way. I think people said they were against impeachment because they thought too many other people were against impeachment. As long as they thought impeachment didn’t have enough popular support, they didn’t want to support impeachment either. Because they thought that if impeachment really WAS that unpopular, impeaching Buttercup would only screw up the 2020 elections. But, like, half of those people with whom impeachment was supposed to be “unpopular” were people thinking, I so fucking WANT this guy impeached but not if it’s gonna cost us the House in 2020. In fact I think that impeachment hasn’t really been “unpopular;” it’s just that too many people thought it was impossible.

CONN: But you don’t have any evidence for this.

PLAIDDER: I do not. But I do know that some early polling suggests that now that it looks like it’s actually going to happen, impeachment is suddenly becoming more “popular.” Here’s one by Politico/Morning Consult showing a 7 point jump in people who want Buttercup impeached. Democratic support for it has increased 13%--but Republican support for it has doubled (from 5% to 10%, but still) and now 39% of independents also want him impeached.

CONN: That’s one poll.

PLAIDDER: Five thirty-eight has more.

CONN: They say it’s all still preliminary.

PLAIDDER: Dude, which of us is supposed to be the optimist here?

CONN: Friend, I am EXPLODING with optimism at this moment, but not because of polling. Or because of what’s happening with “impeachability.”

PLAIDDER: All right then, what lit your optimism fuse today?

CONN: You have forgotten something very important in this art of the possible.

PLAIDDER: All right, what?

CONN: Your president’s enablers, cronies, and craven toadies need to believe that it’s possible that his power over them might come to an end.

PLAIDDER: OK, so electability, impeachability, and...

CONN: Let’s call it destructability.

PLAIDDER: I like it!

CONN: I think your president’s destructability index is on the rise. I think it will only accelerate from here.

PLAIDDER: There’s no polling for that.

CONN: No. But if you look at the stories coming out now, you can clearly see that people who have been tolerating this monster for years purely out of fear of the consequences are starting to imagine a world in which he is no longer in power. And they would like to enter that world without having been utterly despoiled of their dignity and self-respect.

PLAIDDER: I wouldn’t have thought they still had any.

CONN: Friend, the number of people in the world who are as completely solipsistic and thoroughly amoral as your president is very small. Most people care something about the good opinion of their fellow-humans, even if it’s only their families and friends. It’s one thing to go along with a corrupt regime thinking that nobody will ever know about the thousand little compromises you made and the scores of presidential evils you concealed. It’s another to lie awake at night thinking about what will happen when the man you’ve been servicing has been brought down and now everyone who helped him is going to be dragged through the mire.

PLAIDDER: But is anyone really imagining that, apart from people like you and me?

CONN: Well, there’s already been one resignation. You don’t resign over a scandal if you still trust your boss to protect you. Also someone is telling the press about the calls with Mohammad Bin Salman and Vladimir Putin which were also stored on that classified server--presumably in hopes that someone else will be held responsible for it.

PLAIDDER: I kind of want to know how that Jamal Khashoggi conversation went, but I also kind of really, really don’t.

CONN: Steve Schwarzman, one of these “unofficial” envoys that your president seems to have used so much, is now contradicting your president in public--because he’s afraid of being drawn into this. Your Secretary of State has been subpoenaed. John Bolton appears to have been involved in all this--he’s just left on very bad terms. Meanwhile, your president is wildly flailing around looking for people he can throw to the wolves--starting, amazingly, with his own vice president. Which was bad strategy, because everyone ELSE watches that and says, “If the boss has already turned on his #2, he will CERTAINLY turn on me.” And so they’ve started to turn on your president, pre-emptively.

PLAIDDER: Because mostly people follow the strongest.

CONN: Yes.

PLAIDDER: But nobody REALLY knows who’s the strongest.

CONN: Exactly.

PLAIDDER: So people who stop believing he’s the strongest, stop following him.

CONN: Correct.

PLAIDDER: And if enough people stop following...

CONN: Then those 35 Republican Senators who have always hated him will throw him onto the pyre and act like they’re the ones who saved the country from him.

PLAIDDER: Well. I guess we’ll see.

CONN: YOU will see that I am correct.

PLAIDDER: Yeah, maybe.

CONN: You want to bet against me? Just to make it interesting.

PLAIDDER: Well, we’re out of time for now. Tune in...I dunno, could be 4 hours from now, for our next episode of This Fucking Impeachment!

[hillaryisaboss]

Lots of narratives have been going around about why Hillary lost. Most are placing the blame directly on the candidate herself, ignoring a few key points:

1. Hillary won the popular vote by 3 million votes. Yes. 3 million. To minimize this or not take it into consideration proves you are bias in your analysis of why Hillary lost. You don’t win the popular vote by 3 million if you are a truly bad candidate (Hillary also won every single debate). And for historical reference, Al Gore only won the popular vote by 500,000. Hillary won it by 3 million. 3 million votes is no small feat. You cannot ignore this fact if you want an un-bias analysis of why Hillary lost the election. The last two Republican Presidents lost the popular vote!

Also – both popular vote winners Al Gore and Hillary Clinton were hurt by progressives (Nader and Bernie) who got too comfortable after 8 years of a Democrat in the White House. Our side seems to shoot itself in the foot after 8 years in power. As we learned yet again -- every vote counts, especially in the swing states. Because guess what? You can win the popular vote and still lose the election due to the electoral college. Progressives blew it big time for the second time in 20 years and hurt our popular vote winners Al Gore and Hillary Clinton. A cumulative 3.5 million more votes for the Democrats!

2. In U.S. politics, one party usually has power over the White House for only 8 years. Very rarely does a party hold onto the White House longer than 8 years. The last time was when Bush Senior won after Ronald Reagan, but then he quickly lost re-election to Bill Clinton. Democrat Al Gore couldn’t even win after Clinton left us with a surplus and booming economy. This usually happens because the side that isn’t in power tends to rise up, while the side that occupies the White House gets lazy and complicit. From a historical perspective, America was already headed towards a Republican Administration in 2016. Combine that with the racist backlash to Obama, and Trump exploiting the rise of worldwide racist nationalism, it’s no wonder their base turned out and ours didn’t. Remember – under Obama, the Democrats have lost 900 legislative seats nationwide and most of the Governorships and state legislatures, too (in addition to the White House and U.S. Congress). The backlash to Obama has been strong and was bound to hurt us in 2016. Point is – in American politics, very rarely does the same party occupy the White House for more than two-terms. This especially holds true when you combine that with racism and the rise of nationalism working against the first African American President. Conservatives were out for blood after 8 years of Obama, while our side shot itself in the foot by allowing Bernie to run as a Democrat (Nader all over again).

3. Just as in the United Kingdom (Brexit), there has been a worldwide resurgence in a nationalistic white working-class. Trump exploited this in a way Bernie Sanders never could have. Why? Because nationalism is being used to scapegoat immigrants and minorities. The 2016 election truly was an election about which party was going to turn out their base (whites vs. minorities). That’s why Hillary spent her time trying to convince us of the dangers a Trump Presidency posed to minorities. And if we had voted in levels similar to 2008, our base would have triumphed. But a core part of our base was missing – young voters that showed up for Obama but not Hillary. Why? Bernie fucking Sanders. Most of the “Bernie-or-Bust” voters I knew were young male progressives who puked at the thought of ever voting for Hillary. They even called Bernie a “sell-out” when he half-heartedly campaigned for her. What a shame. Because in the face of Brexit, every vote counted. Remember – Trump only won the swing states by a total of 80,000. How many “Bernie-or-Busters” were in the swing states? Seriously – never underestimate angry white men showing up at the polls (Brexit and Trump). Our side is much harder to turn out. That’s why every vote counted. And yes… I’m looking at you, college students!

4. Comey. The momentum the 3rd debate victory produced was lost after the Comey letter. The 3rd debate was the debate where “Nasty Woman” was coined. The closet thing the Hillary campaign came to naturally produced momentum. And it (luckily) came near the end of the election in the final stretch. Hillary was riding high after the 3rd debate domination – 11% polling lead. Everyone thought she was going to win and Nate Silver gave her over a 90% chance of winning. But then came the Comey letter. 

His letter also came after the release of Trump’s “pussy grabber” tape. The media narrative switched from “pussy grabber” to “FBI re-opens Clinton E-mail Probe.” The headlines became anti-Clinton rather than anti-Trump. And in American culture, media momentum is huge. That’s why they call it an “October Surprise.” Late deciding voters heavily broke for Trump due to the Comey letter and that’s what made the difference. 

Hillary ordered a complete analysis of the election and the Comey letter was the only new variable from her 11-point polling bump after the 3rd debate to election day. “Pussy grabber” was old news. “E-mails” became front and center yet again. This is why there is currently an independent review of Comey’s actions as we speak. Official protocol says to never release anything about a case if it may sway an election. Why? Because it might turn out to be false. Just like what happened. Comey ultimately retracted the letter in the final hours of the election, but the damage had already been done. Hillary was finished. Her 11-point debate lead – gone. That’s why there is currently an official investigation into Comey breaking official protocol and swaying the election in Trump’s favor. Once this investigation is complete, I’m sure you’ll be hearing from the Clintons.

5. Sexism. The 2016 election proved a far more qualified woman can still lose to a far less qualified man. Actually, Hillary was the most qualified person (man or woman) to ever run for the Presidency. Any man with Hillary’s accomplishments and qualifications never would have lost. It wouldn’t have even been close. Period.

6. Russian interference. We’ll never know exactly how much Russia swayed the election, but the influx of “fake news” targeting Hillary Clinton definitely had an impact on her public perception, especially in regards to her “trustworthiness.” Putin had a vendetta against Hillary because he held her responsible for the protests he faced after his re-election. He also thought Hillary would be far more aggressive and effective than Obama. He’d rather have a puppet and buffoon as President (Trump) than the brilliant Hillary Rodham Clinton.

7. The media. Hillary’s e-mails were made to seem just as bad as the millions of horrific things Trump did over the course of his 4-times bankrupt career. The false equivalence was mind-boggling. In the pursuit of trying to appear “un-bias” by saying both sides were equally corrupt, they ended up being bias against Hillary and helping Trump win the Presidency. The actual un-bias viewpoint is that nothing Hillary has done is anywhere near the level of deplorable things Trump has done. But the media made Hillary seem just as bad as Trump in order to give the impression that they were being “objective.” 

I truly hope the media did some soul-searching after the 2016 election. Tearing down Hillary and glorifying Trump – giving rise to his “cult-of-personality” has really bitten you in the ass, hasn’t it? Now you have at minimum 4 years of covering a manipulative propaganda artist con-man who just likes to play head games. Have fun!!

8. Republican witch-hunts. Republicans abused their power, which led to 8 separate Benghazi investigations. More investigations than Pearl Harbor, the JFK assassination, and 9/11. Yet Hillary was never found of any wrongdoing and came out victorious after her triumphant 11-hour Benghazi testimony. Unfortunately, after so many fake “scandals,” Hillary’s image had been damaged. Which was the entire point of these fake scandals – even if Hillary isn’t guilty, we can still accuse her of corruption and plant seeds of doubt. But rather than viewing the Republicans as the corrupt ones, manufacturing fake Clinton scandals and wasting tax-payer money, many Americans drank the Clinton hate kool-aid (even progressives).

All of these factors led to the “perfect storm.” Which is why we needed every single vote in every single state. Yet Hillary still managed to win the popular vote by 3 million despite Russian interference, Bernie mania, multiple witch-hunts by Republicans, 11-hour Benghazi testimony, sexism, a media hell bent on false equivalency, a rise in worldwide racist nationalism, one party historically only occupying the White House for 8 years, and the devastating Comey letter. 

3 million more votes. Despite it all. A majority of Americans agree with our vision and our values. By the millions. And that’s not even taking into consideration ID laws and voter suppression of minorities, which greatly decreased the amount we won by.

“But, you know, then at the end, we had the Russians and the FBI deal. She couldn’t prevail against that. She did everything else and still won by 2.8 million votes.

The finest vote counter in America is Nate Silver. He told you what costed the election.” ~President Bill Clinton

A political icon and legend. Was going for round 3 in the White House. And we all know she ran it the first two times.

[dixxymouri]

Let’s Talk About Georgia

All right so most of my followers including my international followers know that those of us in the US have been dealing with a giant orange toddler being placed in our highest office and everyone with a brain having a panic attack about it, while the dumbest and/or most racist, sexist, homophobic, and otherwise bigoted of our people think this is just great. You know, Russia meddling, Twitter tantrums, that whole thing.

Well, barring someone finding some truly damning evidence that the GOP can no longer ignore, the earliest the sane people of this country can get even a little control back in the long run in 2018, when our next big election year is. No we can’t get rid of the Orange Menace but we can reduce the strangehold his party has on our legislative branch of government, since about a third of one body is up for re-election and the entirety of the other house is also up for re-election, as well as a smattering of local and state level races as well. However, special elections do come up to fill vacanies, and we had two of those last night.

(This got long so I’m going to do my followers a favor hide the rest of the post from their dashboards)

Democrats (those would be the good guys) decided to throw all of their money and backing into one of those elections, although the guy in the other race apparently did a lot better than anyone predicted he would so maybe they should have gone after that race? Either way they didn’t, they went after the seat representing Georgia’s sixth distract.

What’s interest about both races is that they are VERY conservative districts that, in any other election, Democrats probably wouldn’t have bothered with because there just isn’t a path to victory in those places...normally. And while both Democrats lost the chance to give our side some much needed ground in the legislative battles ahead, it does paint an interesting picture that I think a lot of people are missing.

Deep red districts are suddenly competitive in this political environment. Imagine what would happen in a swing district under the same circumstance. 

While a lot of people are decrying “close isn’t good enough they still lost”, well, that really isn’t all there is to it. Again, these are deeply conservative districts and the GOP was fighting tooth and nail to keep that seat out of Georgia in a district where they have had to do it. Unless, you know, the leader of their party is an extremely unpopular idiot. 

Again, I would have been THRILLED to see the SC or GA races go blue this time out but that didn’t happen. And while that’s going to make legislative battles until 2019 nightmare fuel for anyone who isn’t a straight white dude that understands how bad this administration and the GOP at large are, it still bodes well for the next big election cycle. People are mad and in more competitive districts that’s going to be HUGE.

I’ve got a friend on Facebook (really one of my mom’s friends) who is a die-heard Clinton fan to the point where she might actually hate Bernie Sanders even more than Tiny Hands McGee and seems to be of the opinion that Democrats shouldn’t change anything - they won the popular vote, after all, so who cares about moderates and independents?

Well, she should - like, oh boy, she really, REALLY should. 

Here’s the thing - the Democratic base is going to go for the Democratic candidate most of the time and the mouth-breathers voting for the GOP really just need to see the troglodytes they vote into office go “look, a gay person exists!” to be whipped up into a foaming at the mouth hate frenzy in the voting booth. You’re not going to get me to vote for a Republican unless the Democrat has done something completely abhorrent (which is not the non-story that was Benghazi and certainly not over a fucking email server) and you’re not going to get GOP voters to vote blue unless their guy like, brags about sexually assaulting women-wait, no, they actually did that time, maybe if they assault a reporter-no, no, they voted that guy in, too, maybe insinuating children should starve OH COME ON GOP VOTERS WHAT THE FUCK!?* No, the voters both parties need to be clammoring for are independents and moderate voters, the people in the middle who don’t feel strongly about one side or the other. Last year those people either stayed home, wrote in Bernie in their own version of a foaming at the mouth temper tantrum, or got nervous because of the 2016 version of the Comey memo**. These are the people whose votes ACTUALLY MATTER. Moderate and independent voters living in swing states are the ONLY people who matter in US elections.

Does this suck? YES. YES IT DOES. The US probably needs to get at least one more major party into the fray in order to balance things out a bit, but that’s a whole different blog post because there’s issues with that aren’t really relevant here. The point is that whether we like it or not, this is the state of American politics right now. You have TWO choices for the most important political figrues representing you - sometimes, SOMETIMES you get an Independent or Libertarian governor or senator somewhere, but NEVER the POTUS - and that’s IT. Americans had to choose between Hillary Clinton, a flawed but otherwise incredibly qualified candidate, or Putin’s Pee Pee Tape Puppet. Moderate voters in a small number of swing states decided this election. And while those people failed us this time, those are the people who CAN be won over and we need going forward. 

And the good news is? They’re already pissed. Toupee the Terrible has a whopping 64% disapproval rating, the highest the rating has been for the last several presidents (as in I’m not even sure RICHARD NIXON ever had a disapproval rating that high and that guy resigned in shame). He also got there in record time - he’s yet to have a net positive approval rating (though he cited one pollster that gave him a 50% but I’m suspecting that pollster may have mostly polled GOP voters) and since his approval rating is about a 35-36, that means its basically his base of die-hard racist fans vs. literally everyone else. Yeah, maybe those people weren’t enough to win Georgia or South Carolina but they represented a massive swing towards the left in those districts, like 20 percentage points worth. Now imagine those kinds of numbers in districts that were a lot closer than 20 points. 

Now this is still really bad - like, SUPER bad. And sadly, this administration probably will kill people. Ever see this picture floating around Tumblr?

Yeah, the height of the AIDS crisis happened during the Reagan administration and was largely ignored because it mostly affected the LGBTQ population and the GOP doesn’t really give a shit about them. They probably didn’t act until they realized that straight people, especially straight white people, could be infected via blood transfusions. Today’s GOP has done a LOT of stuff to hurt people, though the big two are pulling out of the Paris Accords (for fuck’s sake NORTH KOREA has the moral high ground over us on this issue***) and the AHCA, which is basically just a giant tax cut to rich people at the cost of healthcare for everyone else. There is a six year old CHILD in DC lobbying to save the ACA because it’s believed that there’s a good chance the new bill will get rid of the ban on lifetime limits, meaning if an insurance company sees you’ve already spent $1 million in medical bills over the course of your lifetime you don’t get any insurance for the rest of you life, and this poor kid reached that TWO TIMES before he was even a year old. 

This is going to get voters angry. Most people know someone with a pre-existing condition and once voters see those people they love getting screwed by the new healthcare bill they won’t be happy. You all know someone in your personal life with a pre-existing condition, and if you somehow don’t, I am both an asthma patient and a cancer survivor. EITHER could get me dropped from my insurance if the GOP gets their way. 

Okay that started to get off topic as I increasingly couldn’t figure out a way to end this so...yeah, go vote blue in 2018. 

*Yeah you know who the first one is but the second two? Those are both real GOP candidates who really won elections in 2017. Apparently the GOP is now the party of reporter punching and starving children.

**This number is a lot harder to pin down but unfair voting laws also probably blocked people from voting. See, unless you’re a minor or a felon, you cannot be denied the right to vote in this country, but that doesn’t mean the GOP hasn’t figured out ways to make it REALLY hard for “certain voters” (usually this means minority voters) to get to the polls. This usually comes in two flavors:

1. Limiting the number of polling places in left-leaning neighborhoods. This means the lines at the polling places that ARE open are a lot longer, so voters will a) get frustrated and leave or b) leave because they have other commitments, such as their jobs, that they have to return to. Employers HAVE to give you time off to vote but it’s like, two hours or something like that. It’s very feasible that a crowded, left-leaning neighborhood with only one polling place when they should really have two or three or more may have wait times even LONGER than that. Pretty sure that in these cases lots of polling stations open up in right leaning neighborhoods. 

2. Voter ID laws. Now in theory this one isn’t completely terrible, it’s what they do with these laws in practice that makes it a problem. A lot of these voters the GOP doesn’t like (remember, minority voters) may have a harder time getting a state-issued ID, either because there aren’t enough government offices issuing IDs (similar to the insufficient poling place problem) and the ones that do exist may be hours away from left-leaning communities, the office has a difficult schedule to work with (as in sometimes these offices may only be open for something like a few hours a couple of days a week) or they’re cost prohibitive to people with already tight budgets to work with. 

Other flavors usually involves getting rid of or not implementing programs that make voting easier, such as early voting, same day voter registration, or mail-in ballots, all of which make it MUCH easier to vote.

***Yes, North Korea is a part of the Paris Accords - so’s Russia and basically every other country the US doesn’t play nice with. The only other countries that aren’t in the agreement are Syria, which is currently engaged in really brutal civil war right now so they aren’t really in a position to get involved in stuff like this right now, and Nicaragua, which didn’t sign on because they didn’t think it was strict enough. I suppose there are probably some micronations and unrecognized nations that probably aren’t on the treaty, either, but we’re talking about a microscopic segment of the world population. Lord Dampnut pulled us out to make his buddies in the energy industry happy and/or to continue erasing President Obama’s accomplishments because of that one time he made fun of him at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner. Because he is a petulant child. 

[useunknown]

Why I’m Afraid

“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.” Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style, Harpers, 1964.

“How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice - "Resist the beginnings” and “consider the end.” But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have changed here before they went as far as they did; they didn’t, but they might have. And everyone counts on that might.“ Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

Reason #1: Because I’m a White Liberal Coastal Elite Unaccustomed to Losing

We joked the race would be called for Clinton by the time our election-watch party started at 6:30. Which was fine, because who wanted to watch Wolf Blitzer stall for five hours while vote tallies streamed in? A gleeful gmail thread counted down to the party. Who was bringing the kleenex? There would be tears of joy to mop up. We wondered if Clinton would find a maze on the inside of Trump’s head when she scalped him. A Trump piñata was going to be on hand.

We gathered at a friend’s Echo Park home, “I Voted” stickers slapped over our hearts, half-surprised the election wasn’t yet in hand. Trump and Clinton were still tracking even in Florida, but needless to say that would change when the urban areas started reporting. 

We were graduates of good universities, many of us working in or around Hollywood, who yes, read The New Yorker, and had been listening to Keepin’ it 1600 and joked about Donald Drumpf and told everyone they had to see Moonlight because it’s just incredible. We wanted more diversity at the Oscars and used the right pronouns when we talked about transgender people, and talked about firewall states and paths to 270 electoral votes and how as soon as Clinton won Florida and North Carolina, it would be over. 

We flipped between CNN and MSNBC, watching stables of pundits on expensive sets dance around touch screens as they tried to divine the arcana of obscure suburbs. Trump was winning in counties Obama had won in 2012. The pundits scratched their heads– the polls were getting some things unnervingly wrong. Every so often they’d give a projection, a picture of Trump appearing on the screen with his smug smile, a check mark under his name. The map kept getting more red, Trump’s electoral tally creeping towards 270. We looked at each other– what the hell was happening? We poured more wine as we realized Clinton wasn’t going to win Florida, or North Carolina, or Ohio, or Iowa. Even New Hampshire seemed to be in doubt. I pulled up pathto270.com on my phone and did the math... Wait a minute: if Clinton didn’t win Michigan, she was finished. We broke out a moments-away-from-being-legal pre-roll to take the edge off.

And then Wisconsin started to turn red. And then so too did Pennsylvania. Suddenly it was Clinton who needed to surge ahead in five different states. We changed the channel to Fox News because we suspected that MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki wasn’t being entirely upfront with us. Sure enough, they had already called Michigan for Trump. "It’s over, isn’t it,” someone said despondently.

Those fucking deplorables, in their fucking baskets. Did they realize what they had just done to our country? 

We looked at the Trump piñata in the corner. We were too devastated to go near it, or acknowledge how wrong we had been. I don’t think a piñata’s ever had the last laugh at a party– but it was that kind of night.  

Reason #2: Because I’m Sheltered from Injustice and feel Entitled to Happy Endings

All around me, in communities real and online, in group-texts with friends and conversations with strangers, there’s an unquantifiable sadness. At a hip Silver Lake coffee shop the day after the election, baristas had become de facto grief counselors, each customer arriving at the cash register with a sorrowful sigh.

“How are you?” 

“Oh... you know.”

Sigh. “Yeah.”

I was in Los Angeles on 9/11. The mood on November 9th, 2016 was bleaker. 

Losing elections is one of the despairs of living in a democracy. Every few years you’re liable to feel like your country has been wrested away from you, and that you’re powerless to stop it. But Trump’s victory left us feeling far more bereft than if McCain had won in 2008 or Romney had won 2012. 

Part of it is the dissonance between where we thought our country was and where we’ve found it. We had our phones out, ready to record the moment when we burst through the glass ceiling into an era of a more tolerant, cosmopolitan, liberal, inclusive America. After 43 white male presidents, we’d have an African American and now, a woman. John Oliver had joked during the campaign that if Democracy was a computer game and Clinton was completing women’s 100 year-quest to get the oval office, Donald Trump made for a fitting final boss. We could endure his white nationalist chauvinist worldview and categorical unfitness to be President when it seemed like his campaign was a gross-out Farelly Brothers comedy and his defeat was an afterthought. 

We had believed in a myth of the teleology of liberal progressivism and placed faith in the ultimate goodness of “the American voter.” Clinton’s victory would be the triumph of forward progress over restoration, togetherness over division, high roads over low ones, love over hate. 

So it’s no surprise we were crushed. When a Republican beats a Democrat, that’s politics. When it seems like the forces of evil have triumphed over the forces of good, that can feel like tragedy. Especially to people not used to the world treating them with indifference. Perhaps we’d been standing upside down the past eighteen months– the glass ceiling we thought we’d been looking up at was actually a floor, and we’d just fallen down through it. 

But there’s also something more sinister in the air. A cosmic foreboding. A greater trauma has taken place, something menacing and chilling that makes you think “something’s different this time.” My body is tense, an epigenetic voice that’s seen demagogues and persecution in another life, warning me to be on high alert because somehow, I know how this one ends. It was only a hundred years ago that my grandfather bribed a boarder guard and dressed like a girl to flee pogroms in the Soviet Union.

Reason #3: Because I’m Being Reactive and Underestimating America

Cooler heads will cite America’s resilience: “We’ll survive because we always do.” 

We’ve had bad presidents. It hasn’t meant the end of the republic. We’ve emerged from wars, economic downturns, and attacks on our freedom. We’ve seen demagogues, and rebuffed them. If a president’s terrible, he won’t get reelected. Everything’s cyclical. The system can be slow and ugly, but it reacts and corrects. 

This is by no means the first time a party has controlled all three branches of government. Republicans did it in 2000. They proceeded to lose Congress in the 2002 midterms, and narrowly lost their senate majority in 2006. They may have charged into a few ill-advised wars that killed hundreds of thousands of people and ballooned the deficit and accelerated global warming and brought moral shame upon us with secret torture prisons and warrantless wiretapping and aggravated wealth inequality with tax cuts for the rich and the deregulation of banks and fostered conditions for the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression along the way, but that whole mess brought us Obama, and the republic survived. 

And when Democrats took the White House and a majority in the house and senate in 2008? Republicans curled up in an obstructionist ball for two years, and took back congress in the 2010 midterms. It is the greatest gift the founding fathers gave us– a system that errs towards gridlock, which has protected us against the forces of tyranny for some 240 years. 

The Cooler Heads will cite reasons why this will be the case for Trump. They cite the fact that Trump’s Republican coalition is unwieldy at best. That Trump isn’t even really a Republican– his campaign was against Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and the Republican establishment as much as it was against the Democrats. Once the Republicans cut taxes for the wealthy, appoint a few conservative judges to the courts, roll back Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and the Clean Energy Act, Trump’s coalition is going to start to fracture. 

Trump didn’t win the election because he broadened the Republican coalition and attracted new voters to the Republican party– he won because voter turnout was down. Trump had a million more votes than Romney in the states he won that Romney lost– Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Michigan (with Wisconsin virtually the same), but total voter turnout was lower than it was in 2012 in all of these states (except for Florida, where voter turnout was up 8% from 2012 and Trump outperformed Romney by 11%). Longterm demographic trends still favor the Democrat’s coalition, and if Trump governs as poorly as we fear, democratic voters will be ignited to turn out for the midterm elections in 2018 and to take Trump down in 2020.

The Cooler Heads will also note there are mechanisms for the minority party to obstruct the governing one from getting things done. The Republicans don’t have the 60 votes they would need to force things through the senate. Democrats will copy the Republican playbook from the past eight years and at the very least, they’ll manage to stop Trump from doing anything that puts the country in existential danger. 

As for Trump’s campaign of intolerance and the wave of white nationalism he rode into office, cooler heads will argue that while he may hold views that are racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic, he’s more empty vessel than ideologue. His rhetoric during the campaign was designed to make the election about identity. But it was a cynical marketing strategy, not an ideology. 

The Cooler Heads might even pontificate that a Trump presidency might not be all bad. I think they’re wrong, and getting there requires a cocktail of denial and privilege, but they might reason that while Trump’s a demagogue and a narcissist with designs to use the presidency to enrich himself and his family, perhaps he’ll have a business man’s savvy about running the government. Maybe he’ll pass a big infrastructure bill that doubles as a stimulus, with Democrats ensuring its inclusive and a chastened media monitoring for corruption and graft. He’ll promulgate business-friendly policies that enrich banks and corporations and increase wealth inequality, but the American economy hums as high corporate profits propel the stock market upwards.   

Mike Pence and Paul Ryan try to push through a radical Republican agenda, but run into gridlock. They don’t have the 60 votes they need repeal Dodd-Frank, they repeal Obamacare through budget reconciliation but delay when the repeal goes into effect because no one can figure out how to replace it, as Republican voters realize through a haze of misinformation that Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act are the same thing, that repealing it would mean no longer being able to afford their cancer treatment, and that everything they don’t like about Obamacare was the result of Republican obstructionism and sabotage. Republican lawmakers stop short of Trump’s craziest proposals, which do indeed prove politically unworkable.  If Silicon Valley keeps innovating and a policy of isolationism keeps America out of a clash between Europe and the Middle East, Trump could even end up being remembered as a middling President, a tier above George W. Bush and Millard Fillmore.

Reason #4: Because the Real Best Case Scenario is Actually Terrible

Even if Trump was a normal politician, his platform would be dangerous. His incompetency and illiteracy and the fact that he processes the world like a five-year old child is enough to spell disaster.

Trump’s stance on climate change alone could be, by definition, apocalyptic. If he walks away from the Paris Accord, it could be a decade before the world cooperates on climate change again. We could look back on his presidency as the moment when we accelerated environmental degradation and doomed the planet. 

Trump’s complete ignorance about diplomacy and geopolitics could also rapidly throw the world into turmoil. He’s exhibited minimal understanding of how the world works or America’s place in it. He’s volatile, reactive and vengeful in a fragile world that manages order only through predictability and diplomacy. Our allies are frightened they can no longer rely on American support, and if we drive them away, they’ll find protection elsewhere. 

Trump’s belief in protectionism will cut economic ties that foster cooperation and American soft power. Trump’s plans to walk away from the TPP will cripple American influence in Asia Pacific, and cede influence in the region to China, and his plans to declare China a currency manipulator and use Taiwan as a bargaining chip could escalate tensions with China and make Sino-US relations openly hostile. 

Trump and the alt-right’s categorical condemnation of Islam and hardline approach to fighting terrorism, including a Muslim immigration ban, the astonishingly unconstitutional Muslim registry, the resumption of torture and black sites, and even the semantic obsession with saying “radical Islamic terrorism,” threaten to alienate moderate Muslims and foster more extremism, while compromising American values and diminishing our standing around the world. Trump could be the buffoon who brings the clash of civilizations to fruition.

Trump’s volatile temperament is at this point well-documented. He’s reactive and vindictive, prone to late-night Twitter rants that spew invective without any basis in fact. What happens when he takes aim at a foreign leader? What happens when he decides to escalate a Twitter War into a real one? U.S. foreign policy has never been in more reckless hands, and the possibility for a misstep that threatens our security, weakens our standing in the world, or triggers an international crisis have seemingly never been higher.

There’s a current of fear sweeping America and Europe, as white people without a college educations outside of major cities who are culturally and economically alienated from the forces of globalization, who never recovered from the 2008 financial crisis and in whom a fear of Islam and terror have been ingrained since 9/11, are turning to right-wing nativist movements that promise a return to a more prosperous past. Countries across Europe are being strained by the influx of refugees, and nationalist parties in Finland (18% of the vote), Denmark (21%), Austria (35%), Hungary (21%), France (14%), and Switzerland (29%) are gaining support on the back of anti-immigration platforms that call out Islam by name. 

This is the sentiment that loomed over the Brexit referendum, which saw British voters upend polling expectations and vote to leave the European Union. On the day of the Brexit referendum polls showed a 3-4% lead for “remain” that was within the margin of error, only to have an unexpected victory for “leave” that was spearheaded by the turnout of non-college white people in the heartland, who longed to reclaim some imagined “past greatness,” felt the loss of “national identity,” and scapegoated immigrants for taking jobs and straining public services. Five months later, the US election has followed the exact same script. 

Trump spent the campaign stoking fears that America was hurtling towards the apocalypse. Now that he’s the president-elect it’s tempting to invoke the same kind of hyperbole. I’m nervous Trump’s administration is going to be one of unprecedented corruption and division, that serves one part of the country at the expense of others, that brings out the worst in us and represses what’s best.

But even in this scenario, the country would survive. Our system, our principles, our resolve have always allowed us to weather these storms. Progress doesn’t move in a straight line. We’ll survive this and come out stronger on the other side, because we always do. Sure the idea that Trump could be the end of the 240-year American experiment is the thinking of the paranoid conspiracist.

But god, if there was ever a moment to wonder if we’re in uncharted territory, it’s now. Because there’s something dangerous about the “we’ll survive because we always do” axiom: it holds true until it doesn’t. 

Because this Time’s Actually Different

There is a critical difference between the 2016 Presidential election and the 57 that came before it: we’ve never elected a demagogue like Trump to the office of the President. 

Of all the demagogues that have emerged in the course of US history–Huey Long, George Wallace, Joseph McCarthy, Charles Coughlin– Trump is the only one to seize our highest office. We’ve watched him closely for 18 months. He’s not bound by any norms, or decency or sense of shame.  His politics are dangerous.

In Trump, we’ve elected the tyrant our founding fathers feared and designed our democracy to defend against. The populist who could rise to power by appealing to base emotions and making promises to the working class that couldn’t be kept. Soon-to-be-boycotted by the alt-right founding father Alexander Hamilton warned that it was democracy’s greatest vulnerability in Federalist #1: “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.” 

A vengeful narcissist who believes he’s above our norms should not be in the Oval Office. Trump’s campaign followed a demagogue’s playbook– drumming up fears of terrorism and national decline, scapegoating minorities and immigrants, shamelessly lying and promising the impossible. He’s announced intentions to jail his opponents and sue his accusers, incited violence at his rallies and shown a preference for confrontation and vengeance over compromise or resolution. He’s declared the rights to freedom of speech, religion, and assembly to be annoyances he could do without. 

The institutions and norms that were supposed to keep a demagogue out of the White House have already failed us. This puts the United States in uncharted territory, and the possibilities of a Trump presidency should be considered in that light.

Trump’s consistently demonstrated a belief that the rules don’t apply to him. For 25 years as a private citizen, he stiffed contractors and creditors, committed infidelity and sexual assault, and evaded taxes. Most disturbing, Trump maintained during the campaign he wouldn’t accept the election results if he lost, a statement he modulated but never retracted. The peaceful transition of power is the most fundamental and singular political feat of American democracy. It’s the reason any of this works. If Trump was prepared to challenge these precedents as a candidate who was expected to lose, what might he do when he’s in office? It seems not a matter of whether Trump will abuse power– it’s how brazenly and destructively.

Trump plans to have his children run the Trump Corporation while he’s in office, and has put his children in charge of the transition team that will make all key hires for his administration, an unconscionable conflict of interest. I’m not about to pretend that U.S. politics haven’t always involved horse trading and corruption. I’m sure the alt-right has corruption anecdotes about the Clintons and the Obamas– but what Trump’s trying to get away with is unprecedented.

Never before has there been such an obvious channel for directly bribing the President of the United States. Foreign leaders with holdings in foreign companies could award lucrative deals to Trump Corp to influence U.S. policy. Trump’s recently opened hotel in DC seems poised to become a direct channel for foreign countries to bribe Trump, and puts him in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause. Trump’s children headed his campaign and have chaired his transition team– there is no separation between them and Trump. The idea that a “chinese wall” could exist between Ivanka Trump, who heads Trump Corp, and her husband Jared Kushner, who Trump has challenged anti-nepotism laws to bring into his administration, is ridiculous. 

When a company or foreign government meets with Trump Corp, it will be hard not to imagine it’s also dealing with the United States government. It’s a dangerous line that at best opens the door to unprecedented corruption and at worst leads to Donald Jr. igniting a cyber war when he threatens a well-connected Chinese Developer. As Matt Iglesias reasons in one of the most chilling articles written since the election, given Trump’s philosophy of rewarding loyalists and punishing his rivals, Trump could turn the U.S. into a post-Soviet style kleptocracy. A pay-to-play system in which fealty to Trump’s administration is necessary for doing business, while businesses that voice dissent find themselves on the wrong side of regulations, losing government contracts, or embroiled in federal investigations. 

He’s already begun to set the stage for this kleptocracy, with his deal with Carrier “to save a thousand jobs from being shipped to Mexico.” The narrative on the right is that Trump met with Carrier and convinced it to keep a plant open in Indiana, thereby saving a thousand jobs before he’s even arrived in office. Obama would have been pilloried by the right if he ever boasted about “saving jobs from leaving.” He can’t even get credit for creating 16 million jobs during his presidency. No matter that 6,000 Carrier jobs are still leaving, and that Trump has merely slowed the inevitable. This isn’t an economic policy– it’s a precedent for companies to hold the government hostage– “cut our taxes or we’ll leave.” But of even greater concern, Trump has taken the first step towards his kleptocracy, and disguised it in a triumphant and politically-difficult-to-argue-against story about saving manufacturing jobs. A world where he picks winners and losers, singling out private companies to reward or punish on a case-by-case basis. Like the most dangerous demagogues and paranoid psychopaths, Trump keeps a list of his enemies. He has shown no hesitation in using his Twitter account to attack them and seems to relish the power his tweets have to move markets. 

As for Trump’s unwieldy Republican coalition– I want to believe there are reasonable Republicans that might serve as a check on Trump. That party cooperation with Trump’s agenda will slow after they’ve implemented the top agenda items of the Republican establishment and done their best to erase any trace that Obama was in the White House. But if Republicans were too spineless to condemn Trump during the campaign, how can we expect them to stand up to him when he’s returned them to power, touts a voter mandate, and uses the oval office as a bully pulpit? 

These are the same Republicans that began undermining our institutions earlier this year, when they abdicated their constitutional duty to give a hearing to Merrick Garland. A week before the election, Republican senators were vowing to obstruct any Supreme Court nominees appointed by Clinton, abandoning any pretense that this was ever based on even the most rickety of precedents. Our institutions are all that hold our country together. When they cease to transcend any one person or party, our entire republic is threatened. 

Normally the losing party regroups after an election and begins to work towards winning back legislative control in the midterm elections. Bush lost his Republican majority in the house and senate in the midterm elections of 2002, and Obama lost his in 2010. But while a lot can change in two years, the 2018 midterm elections don’t seem to offer democrats that possibility. Republican gerrymandering will aid Republicans in holding the house for the foreseeable future, with many Republicans more afraid defeat will come from “getting primaried” from the right than from a Democrat challenger. In the senate, only eight Republicans are up for reelection, seven of them from solidly Red states, while 25 Democrats are up for reelection, ten of whom are from states won by Trump. 

Even more than gerrymandering or specific senate races though, the Democrat coalition faces a longterm structural and geographic problem. Democrats enjoy a voter majority, but their support is inefficiently distributed in a system that awards political power based on geography. For the second time in five elections, the Democrats won the popular vote and lost the electoral college. Clinton won California by 4.3 million votes, and won its 55 electoral votes– Trump won Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and North Carolina by about 800,000 votes, and won 108 electoral votes. Representation in the senate is also geared towards geography– the 40 million people in California get the same number of senators as the 600,000 people in Wyoming. The arithmetic of congress and the electoral college was set up to create a buffer between voters and their elected officials and to prevent any one region from becoming too powerful. But with democrats clustered in cities and on the coasts, the arithmetic currently cedes disproportionate representation to Republicans, and even as demographic trends favor the democrats, it could be a while before demographics catch up to geographic distribution. Add to that the fact that Trump can appoint a partisan crony to chair the federal reserve in 2018 to grease monetary policy in the run up to the election in 2020 and that Republicans will delay the repeal of ACA until after the midterms, and the Republican hold on power could end up increasing in 2018.

Trump’s early cabinet moves also portend an Orwellian state, rendering every department’s name into cruel irony. The Environmental Protection Agency will be led by a fierce climate change denier who works for the oil and gas industry, the Department of Labor will advocate pro-business policies that aid in worker exploitation, the Federal Trade Commission will encourage monopolization and consumer exploitation, the Department of Justice will condone civil rights abuse and exact revenge on Trump’s opponents. Trump has appointed a white-nationalist anti-semite to a Bismarckian role exempt from congressional approval, and seems intent on filling most other positions in his cabinet with plutocrats and alt-right loyalists. Instead of emptying the swamp, Trump’s filling his cabinet with muck from the bottom of it. People is policy, and Trump’s administration is shaping up to be an intersection of the Christian right, white supremacists, Trump loyalists, and cronies of the oil and gas industry.

And what happens when a demagogue who doesn’t play by the rules decides he doesn’t want to relinquish power? For now, a 60-vote supermajority is needed in the senate for key appointments and legislation, which will allow Democrats and key Republicans to moderate Trump’s agenda. But what happens when Trump grows annoyed with the filibuster, and pressures the senate to blunt the tools of minority opposition? And makes dangerous appointments with a 51 vote majority approval that turn the courts from a check on his power to a rubber stamp?  And declares war on the the press, limiting White House access to conservative media of his choosing, and expanding on the precedent set by his friend Peter Thiel in the lawsuit that ruled against the first amendment and led to the shuttering of Gawker? And helps the passing of discriminatory voter suppression laws (the 2010 reinstatement of which already helped to sway the election for Trump) under the guise of addressing voter fraud, and deregulates campaign financing, while making Breitbart a state-sponsored TV Channel to be transmitted to every home and be built-into every American-made iPhone, which by the way, will now transmit all of your private information to the Department of Freedom. On one hand, it sounds unthinkable. On the other, everything that’s happened since Trump declared his candidacy has seemed impossible– until it wasn’t. It may be time to assume the worst about him and prepare accordingly, rather than being surprised with every new offense that pushes us incrementally closer to an autocratic kleptocracy. 

This is all without even mentioning Russia. At the very least, it appears Russia hacked the DNC and leaked information in an attempt to sway the election towards Trump, with the Trump campaign taking advantage of the leaks that dogged Clinton throughout the campaign. Remarkably, Republicans who used to call themselves patriots are now happy to condone interference in an American election by a hostile foreign power. Which is insane. But at worst, all of this goes much deeper. Multiple intelligence agencies seem to believe that Russian intelligence taped Trump getting peed on by prostitutes when he visited Moscow in 2013, giving Russian intelligence blackmail to wield against him. This theory would hold that the Kremlin systematically coordinated with and funded the Trump campaign, working through Paul Manafort, who took over Trump’s campaign over the summer of 2016 before disappearing back into the shadows and whose ties to Moscow are well-documented, and it would mean Russia has a puppet in Washington DC for the next four years. Trump’s consistent pro-Russian stance, his obsession with Putin, and his nomination of Exxon Mobil CEO and Russian Order of Friendship Recipient Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State further suggests treasonously deep ties between Trump and Moscow. Trump continues to deny all of this, even the universally agreed upon fact that Moscow hacked the DNC. If there’s unrest in Latvia in the next few years, and Russia blocks security resolutions to intervene but moves in unilaterally as a peacekeeper, and Trump doesn’t do anything about it, we’ll know the tape is real.  

Because This Could Go From Bad to a This-Is-The-Darkest-Period-In-American-History Worse

There was speculation during the campaign that Paul Ryan and Mike Pence were more ideologically extreme than Trump. “Sure, Trump’s got some crazy in him,” the thinking went, “but at least he used to kind of be a democrat.”  If Trump was to end up being impeached, be it due to allegations of treason, perjury, violating the constitution, or demonstrating with finality that he’s unfit to hold office– or if he succumbs to a heart attack because of his incredibly poor health– there was an idea that the devil we knew might be better than the devil we didn’t. It was Pence, after all, who backed a law in Indiana that would force women to have a burial for their aborted fetuses, and spearheaded the charge to leverage Hurricane Katrina to pass policies that lowered labor standards and gave handouts to oil and gas companies.  

I’m offended by most of their politics, and would no doubt look upon their agenda in horror, but I’d accept this was our democracy playing out. Red vs Blue, D. vs R., hollywood liberals vs bible belt conservatives, with a lot of filibustering, fundraising, and shouting at each other on Sunday shows on the way to relative gridlock. But I would believe that no matter the appearance of corruption, religious fervor, or even bigotry, that they believe in democracy, the constitution, and the rule of law. 

But in Trump, we’re faced with a new set of concerns. I’ve spent a lot of words talking about alarming implications of Trump’s temperament, his policy views, and his incompetence. But the only scarier thing than Trump’s blustering incompetence is that he, and more likely Steve Bannon, are in fact maniacally competent. 

For the past eight years, Democrats and Republicans have had a philosophical battle over whether our system worked. Obama tried to navigate unprecedented partisan gridlock to pull levers that nudged the country in the direction of a progressive liberal agenda, even if the movement was sometimes slight. With the nomination of Hilary Clinton, Democrats continued to stake out a belief that change could be affected within the current system. The Republicans, radicalized with the ascendence of the Tea Party, became the party of revolution– they decided they didn’t believe the current system worked, and they wanted to overturn it. This made the Tea Party well-suited to be an opposition party, because it was always ready to play the game of chicken. Either it would get its way, or it would lose and take the whole government crashing down with it– and it was perfectly fine with either outcome. The Democrats would never have risked jeopardizing America’s credit to gain a policy victory, as the Republicans did when they threatened sovereign default unless Obamacare was repealed. But instead of being thrown out of power for needlessly threatening to throw the global economy into chaos, Republican lawmakers expanded their hold on both federal and state legislatures over the past six years. There was a time when conservative Republicans could at least be counted on to be patriots and believe in upholding the constitution, but Republicans have become the party that is willing to abandon those tenets for other ideological gains. 

The country’s susceptibility to autocracy is made more challenging by the  “post-truth” environment in which we now live. The fact that “post-truth” is now a term we throw around and accept is itself ludicrous and dangerous, but seems to be the only way to adequately describe the current political and media landscape. The polarizing impact of social media networks, the death of the local newspaper, the erosion of civil society, the divide between people with a college education and people without, between secular liberals in the cities and religious conservatives in the heartland, have made it so that Democrats and Republicans no longer inhabit the same reality, and have no mechanism for even communicating with each other.  As of 2016, 72% of Republicans still doubted whether Barack Obama was born in the US.  Over 60% of Republicans still didn’t believe global warming was due to human activities. If we can’t agree on objective facts, we open the door to unspeakable horrors, with no way to hold those who propagate them to account.

Republicans have denounced every news outlet that follows basic journalistic standards as an ideological arm of liberal elites. Meanwhile, many Trump supporters get their news from Breitbart, the propaganda organization of Trump’s top advisor, Steve Bannon. No US President has ever had a news organization for directly misinforming his supporters. State-run news organizations are hallmarks of autocracies.

The Great Con of the Republican party is that it relies on the support of people its policies don’t particularly help. It’s not just democratic campaign rhetoric that Trump wanted to cut taxes for the wealthiest 1% and deregulate banks and enrich businesses at the expense of their workers– that’s really the crux of their plan.  Trump added a populist spin that won him the election– but I’m against his policies because I’m confident they’re going to leave the country worse off. 

So the scary part of a Trump presidency happens when his policies fail to make a difference in the lives of his supporters. When it turns out that fixing health insurance wasn’t as simple as selling plans across state lines. When protectionist policies increase the prices at Walmart. When putting tariffs on Mexico doesn’t bring back post-WWII manufacturing jobs, but rather accelerates the pace of automation. When the Affordable Care Act is repealed and people can no longer pay for their cancer treatments. When Americans realize they’re worse off, and Trump faces a rising tide of disapproval and charges of incompetency, and begins to scramble to deflect his failures from his administration and place them somewhere else. 

This is the point when a lot of presidents would lose reelection. But this is where Trump and his demagoguery set up a different dynamic. Trump has proven uniquely adept at speaking to his supporters, and distracting them from policy by fanning the flames of intolerance and xenophobia. He has a strong cult of personality and commands blind allegiance from a base that puts faith above reason. They have perhaps been failed by our society-- left behind by our economy and education system, they are unequipped to understand their own self-interests or confront ideas that challenge them-- as Errol Morris mused, the "a stupid person is a person who treats a smart person as if he is stupid.”  Their shame leaves them angry, their resentment leads to tribalism. Those bright red Make America Great Again hats recall a tactic used by other fascist movements to identify their supporters– badges of allegiance that serve as a mechanism of deindividuation and embolden those wearing them to express their most base and intolerant beliefs.

But it may not just be a matter of incompetency. Trump has expressed his admiration for Putin’s regime, and Steve Bannon subscribes to William Strauss and Neil Howe’s theory that every 80 years America has a major crisis, when the system gets remade. Trump and Clinton were both viewed so unfavorably that the 2016 election was often framed as a contest between the lesser of two evils. But we may have actually seen the triumph of a deep-seated white-Christian authoritarian world-view. Trump might be inviting crisis. 

I’m afraid we’re about to see the most cynical version of disaster capitalism. Employed by the Bush administration after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina (and documented by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine), where the Trump administration welcomes disasters and leverages them to implement policies that roll back our freedom, weaken our institutions, enrich government contractors and cronies, and try to remake the world order. I’ve already mentioned why Trump’s bluster towards Islam is strategically flawed– we risk alienating moderate Muslims we need as allies in the fight against radical Islamic terrorism, and ending up in some sort of clash of civilizations. But there’s another, scarier scenario– given Trump’s clear racism towards Muslims, the many mentions he made of killing terrorists and their families during the campaign, and his belief that the mistake in Iraq was not securing the oil– I wonder if Trump is seeking out this clash. If he’d invite another terrorist attack on American soil, blame Obama for being too soft on terror, and use it as an excuse to partner with Russia to create a white Christian world order that wipes parts of the Middle East from the earth. Scarier still, I’m nervous his supporters would welcome it.

It would seem I’ve assuredly veered into the realm of paranoia and conspiracy that I set out to avoid. I hope we’ll laugh about it one day– I’ll be happy to get a boozy, yuppie brunch in Silver Lake with all of my liberal elite hipster friends in two years, after the Democrats retake the house in 2018, a Sunday edition of the New York Times on the table with a headline “Trump Card: Congress to Begin Impeachment Hearings,” as Trump sits at 18% in the polls. We can laugh about how I was a directionless millennial– a “whiny loser,” as Trump would say– who was prone to conspiracy theories and didn’t have enough faith in American institutions, which truly do always win out in the end. 

But I can’t help but watch what’s happening and think we’re living through that fateful, chilling, divergent moment that will appear in history books. The kind of moment of which historians will ask, how did this happen and why didn’t anyone stop it? 

[flauntpage]

Solving Philadelphia’s Sports Talk Radio Problem

If you’re under the age of 50 and above the age of 15, it’s obvious that Philadelphia has a sports talk radio problem. This city is big enough for two separate stations to fill nearly 24-hours of original content every single day, so why do listeners have to restrain themselves from putting a boot through their radio after listening for an average of two minutes?

The answer isn’t an easy one, but I’d like to propose a potential four-step solution that I think will help improve sports talk radio in Philadelphia.

Step 1: Fill a room sky high in both the 97.5 Fanatic and 94 WIP studios with wheels of mozzarella, arms of salami, slabs of mortadella, Rocky Blu-rays, back issues of Playboy from 1984 and knock-off Chinese made Eagles jerseys.

Hang a sign from the door marked “Free.”

Step 2: Wait until room is filled. When at capacity, crack open door and throw in smoke bomb.

Step 3: Amidst confusion, send in army of interns with large burlap sacks. Stuff hosts into said sacks with notices of termination. Tag each host with tracking device to collect valuable data on the mating habits of the morbidly obese. Hire a forklift if interns alone cannot successfully remove hosts from their respective stations. Be prepared to widen doorways throughout each building. Unceremoniously dump fired, confused hosts in alleyway. Congratulate self on job well done.

Step 4: Hire new hosts.

Sure, it may seem harsh, but the unoriginality of the medium is so deeply entrenched in both stations that they need to be completely uprooted. They have such an incestuous relationship that it’s not a matter of “if” a fired host will find another job at the rival station, but only a matter of “when.” Rob Ellis. Anthony Gargano. Jon Marks. Tony Bruno. Mike Missanelli. All failed or otherwise flamed out at their respective stations…all found homes at the rival station.

Did Rob Ellis, the human equivalent of a deep coma, need TWO chances at TWO sports talk stations to put listeners to sleep? Did he really need a daily morning television show? I assure you his failures were NOT due to people being unable to see his weak-chinned face.

If someone’s tired schtick wasn’t getting ratings at WIP, it will CERTAINLY do better at The Fanatic! Anthony Gargano’s “cuz” act had worn out its welcome… uh, everywhere, so of course The Fanatic jumped at the opportunity to hire him to anchor its flagship morning show! At least they gave him a unique slant this time around with Brian Baldinger and human dynamo Maureen Crowley Williams. WHAT FRESH-FACED TALENT! The most interesting thing about Baldinger is his gnarled finger. Has anyone cared what he’s had to say in the past, oh, let’s make it a conservative 25 years? No. No they haven’t. But they’ll reinvent the morning show they will, one recycled bit after another. LET’S GO TO THE MEATLOCKER AND TALK TO FREDDIE MITCHELL FOR THE MILLIONTH TIME, WHAT A CRAZY MEATBALL! OH MAMA MIA.

(Just a side note for a moment, can each station please have a moratorium on booking Freddie Mitchell? He played four seasons, very poorly I might add, and he hasn’t stepped foot on a football field since 2004. Do we need to hear him complain about Donovan McNabb again? We do not. You were garbage, Freddie. It wasn’t McNabb’s fault that you washed out of the NFL. I do not need to hear another unsubstantiated story about how everyone on the team hated McNabb…which was probably true, but god damnit I don’t need to hear you tell it AD NAUSEAM.)

Wing Bowl was fun like 20 years ago, right? Tits, wings, huge slobs eating themselves into an early grave as greasy Angelo Cataldi cackles in the background and their soon-to-be widows beg them to stop, disappointed Wingette fathers…it’s a Philadelphia tradition! So what does The Fanatic do? Creates Fantasy Fest, an annual event that gives 35 mouthbreathers from Kensington the excuse to begin drinking at noon and ogle the one unlucky stripper from Delilah’s who is NOT getting paid enough to be there.

This caller to The Fanatic last weekend perfectly encapsulated the Fantasy Fest experience:

Caller: "Hey I just left Fantasy Fest."

Host: "Wasn't that the best party ever?!"

Caller: "I'm not going to lie, no." ::hangs up:

Perfect

— CogginToboggan (@CogginToboggan) August 26, 2017

I didn’t make that up. That was a real call. I don’t think I’ve enjoyed anything more that has been aired on The Fanatic.

The one host in the past decade who attempted to do anything different was Josh Innes, and he was ran out of town in his husky boy jeans faster than Pete Rose running to an alleged underage sex party.

Innes dared to step away from the tried and true Philadelphia sports talk formula of cliched topics and “hilarious” daily polls. You know the ones…. “Call in, we’re taking your top Philly guys who ever played linebacker for the Eagles…Jeremiah Trotter is up there for me, I tell ya. Call in, 610-632….”

For every one host or producer willing to try something different, there are 25 Jason Myrtetuses in the background rehashing and pushing the same old garbage. “How about a fake caller? He could call in when things are slow, really rile Mike up! Just make him black, don’t worry about it, we’ll call him Dwayne. He’ll be outrageous and say really stereotypical things that I think a black person would actually say if I knew any in real life. THINK OF THE RATINGS!”

In the words of the immortal Digital Underground, “It’s just the same old song.”

Here’s what one of the stations could actually do if they want to break the cycle: You know the person on your staff who is behind the scenes that has pitched an idea for a show that seems “out there” or “too different” from what you’re used to hearing on-air? Promote them to on-air. My god, do us all a favor. I beg of you.

Take a chance, get a different opinion on-air for a change. Do you really need to hear Mike Missanelli or Angelo Cataldi breathing heavily into a microphone every day and taking the contrarian view on EVERY SINGLE TOPIC because it “creates content?” Get a new voice on your airwaves, get someone who is going to take a chance, who will do something we haven’t heard a million times already, and who won’t publish terrible polls on Twitter. Spare us, please.

Or, better yet, listeners should just stop listening. Go ahead and put that foot through your radio and don’t replace it. Read the Coggin Toboggan and Crossing Broad instead. Fuck it. There are a ton of writers here now. Everyone here can mash their hands onto their keyboards and come up with semi-coherent sentences, I guarantee you that. WHAT AN ENDORSEMENT!

All angry emails and letter bombs from WIP and Fanatic hosts/producers should be addressed to Kyle Scott at Crossing Broad. He’s the one who allows this nonsense to be published on his site. [Editor’s note: Shaggy defense.]

Like what you saw? Did you only dry-heave once or twice reading this piece of garbage? Then follow me on Twitter @Coggintoboggan.

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Solving Philadelphia’s Sports Talk Radio Problem published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv