#when will americans understand that politics isn’t binary it’s not just republicans and democrats like please research third parties

[ultraviolencced]

so called leftists: genocide joe has to go

genocide joe: drops out

so called leftists returning to their lib origin: kamala *heart eyes*

actual leftists:she’s copmala she’s killer kamala like yall she has said over and over that israhell has the “right to defend itself” and has no intention of pulling funding and weapons to israhell SHES A FUCKING COP GUESS WHO TRAINS AMERIKKKAN PIGS THE FUCKING IDF

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jill Filipovic at Substack:

It is one week until Election Day in the US. In many states, early voting is already underway. I hope you’re all casting your ballots or have plans to vote, because it really does matter. Many leftists and progressives, though, are saying that they will refuse to vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz because of Harris’s role as vice president in an administration that has funded and supplied weapons to Israel for their ever-expanding war — in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, and on and on. Some Muslim and Arab voters who previously supported Democrats are now refusing to vote for them; some are publicly backing Trump, while others are abstaining or supporting Jill Stein.

Look: I’m not going to lecture anyone here. I understand that withholding one’s vote over an unconscionable war can be a legitimate expression of one’s most deeply-held morals. But I’m going to make the case that you should vote anyway — and vote for Kamala Harris. As Rebecca Solnit put it, voting is not a valentine; it’s a chess move. A vote is not an endorsement of everything a candidate has ever done. In the US, it is a binary choice. If the Democratic candidate wins, the Republican candidate loses; if the Republican candidate wins, the Democratic candidate loses. There may be third parties, but in this particular setup and in this particular election, there are not actually third choices that stand any chance of ascending to power. Voting for one of them — say, perennial grifter Jill Stein — does not send a message so much as it increases the chances that the Republican Party wins and the Democratic Party moves right.

And what if the Republican Party wins? I’ve seen some people on social media argue that things couldn’t get worse, which strikes me as objectively insane. Things can always get worse. The worst things you can think of? They could have been worse. Trump has given no indication that he will do anything other than green light Israel’s actions — as well as Russia’s actions in Ukraine, and potential Chinese actions in Taiwan. Every single thing Trump and his team have said about Palestinians indicates that they see the group as subhuman — as terrorists from the time of toddlerhood, as Rudy Giuliani just put it at a Trump rally (“The Palestinians are taught to kill us at two-years old,” he said as he accused Harris of wanting to resettle Palestinian refugees in the US). It’s worth noting here that during Trump’s first term, he cut the number of Muslim refugees resettled in the US by 91%. While more than 38,500 Muslim refugees were resettled in 2016, those numbers dropped to just 3,312 by 2018. The percentage of Christian refugees admitted also declined, but not nearly as precipitously: From 25,633 to 16,012.

[...] But perhaps that isn’t enough; perhaps your argument is that a vote for a third party, or no vote at all, will send a message to Democrats that they need to move left. And while I like that idea and wish it were true, I have personally never seen it work in American politics. It has worked in primaries — see, e.g., 2016 Bernie voters pushing Hillary Clinton left, and in 2020 with the Black Lives Matter protest movement pushing just about every Democratic candidate left. But in general elections, when the center-left candidate loses to the far-right candidate, the conclusion is never, “the Democrat should have moved further left.” The conclusion is that there are more conservative and moderate voters in the country than liberal and left ones, and if the liberal party wants to win, it needs to moderate. This indeed was the lesson of 2016 that manifested in 2020: Four years after that stunning loss, Democratic voters chose Joe Biden, the most conservative of the Democratic primary bench, as the candidate. Voters weren’t in love with Biden. They were largely thinking strategically, and had concluded that a moderate white guy was the only hope to get Trump out of office. Reader, they were right. (For the record, I was a Warren supporter).

I would like to see the Democratic Party be a more progressive party. I am happy to see, for example, the party’s unapologetic embrace of abortion rights post-Dobbs. But the party gets more liberal when liberals win. There are no benefits to Palestinians if Trump wins, and many greater potential costs. There are no benefits to the American political system if Trump wins — Democrats will not look at a Trump victory and conclude that the answer is a leftward shift. And there are huge costs to just about everyone else: Undocumented immigrants and their families. Refugees. Women seeking abortions. International students. LGBT people generally and trans people in particular. The free press. The list goes on.

I personally don’t think the damage Trump can do is worth the virtually non-existent benefits of voting third party or not voting at all. I truly do understand feeling disgusted with Biden and Harris for their total cowardice when it comes to Israel. But I don’t think that sense of personal disgust, and the related desire to punish them in the voting booth, justifies all of the downstream effects that will come if Harris is not elected. And the fundamental reality is that if Harris is not elected — if enough people do not vote for Harris — then Donald Trump will be elected. And that will be the fault of the people who voted for Trump, but also of those who did not vote for Harris, and certainly of those who encouraged others not to vote for Harris. This is how elections work. There is just not a magical third option here where not voting for Harris but also not voting for Trump gets people who want to stop the shedding of Palestinian (and Lebanese and on and on) blood any closer to that aim.

[...] I’m not an idiot: I don’t think a President Harris is going to do what I want when it comes to US support for Israel. But I know that Trump is definitely not going to do what I want. And I suspect he will take the status quo to new levels of horror. If you also believe that’s true, I hope you’ll cast your ballot for Harris. You don’t have to be happy about it. But you do have to make a moral calculus: What are the real costs if Trump wins, to Palestinians and also to people the rest of the world over? How do those compare to the costs in Harris wins? If you do that math and still decide to sit it out or vote for someone who is not Harris — effectively decreasing her chance of taking office — well, that is certainly your right, and it may indeed feel quite righteous. But the real-world outcome is one you’re going to have to live with.

Jill Filipovic wrote an excellent Substack post making the case that electing Kamala Harris as President is a moral must.

[arcticdementor]

Never encourage a child to keep a secret from her parents. That’s what we used to say, in decades past, when we believed a sacred boundary encircled every American home.

Last week, I spoke with another mother who discovered her 12-year-old daughter’s middle school had changed the girl’s name and gender identity at school. The “Gender Support Plan” the district followed is an increasingly standard document which informs teachers of a child’s new chosen name and gender identity (“trans,” “agender,” “non-binary,” etc.) for all internal communications with the child. The school also provided the girl a year’s worth of counseling in support of her new identity, which in her case was “no gender.” Even the P.E. teachers were in on it. Left in the dark were her parents.

This duplicity is part of the “plan”: All documents sent home to mom and dad scrupulously maintained the daughter’s birth name and sex. But Mom noticed her daughter seemed to be suffering. Although far from alone in declaring a new identity - many girls in the school had adopted new names and gender pronouns – this girl’s grades fell apart. She became taciturn and moody.

When the mother failed to uncover the source of the girl’s distress, she met with teachers, hoping for insight. Instead, she slammed into a Wall of Silence: no teacher was evidently willing to let a worried mom know what the hell was going on. (Finally, one did.)

When I wrote Irreversible Damage, I documented that California and other public school systems had adopted a policy of creating two sets of documents around minor students’ gender. Similar policies have cropped up across the country, modeled on the one created by the activist organization Gender Spectrum.

A “gender support plan” isn’t merely a secret held between child and teacher, which might be bad enough. This is no private student confession, the silent whisperings of a troubled teenage heart. A Gender Support Plan, or any similar scheme, effects a schoolwide conspiracy to create a secret name and gender identity specifically withheld from parents. I’ve talked to a mom whose middle school daughter slept in the boys’ bunk on the school overnight before she learned her daughter’s school had, for more than a year, called her by a different name and openly referred to her as a boy.

Teachers and activists who support this policy typically make two arguments in its favor. The first is that the very fact that a teen would want to keep her new gender identity a secret from parents is proof that home is an “unsafe” place for her; that is, her parents, if they knew, would abuse her. The second is that this gender declaration is a deeply held and personal decision of the child’s. The school, in this scenario, is merely a polite bystander—at most, a kindly chaperone. It’s not the school’s job to ask mom and dad for their approval.

The first is absurd; the second, dishonest. Why would a teen agree to keep a secret from her parents, if not for the presence of abuse? Well, as one sharp Twitter user pointed out in response to the documents I posted, one can think of a few things a teen might want to keep secret from mom: an eating disorder; her decision to join a religious cult; her dabbling in drugs; a decision to send or post nudes; or have sex with a much older boy. Teens tend to keep from mom and dad a wide variety of healthy and unhealthy teenage experimentations—sometimes to avoid parental protest; sometimes, just for the pubertal frisson.

And in virtually none of these cases is the primary motivation to keep secrets from parents necessarily fear of abuse. Sometimes it’s to avoid—groan—another lecture or even a conversation. Other times, teens keep something a secret just to avoid a “No.”

Which, in fact, is what the schools seem to want to avoid as well. The non-stop sex-and-gender celebration that begins in many public-school Kindergartens is an attempt to liberate children from any traces of sexual innocence.

…

A peculiar power imbalance has arisen between public school teachers and the parents for whom the necessity of work renders them too dependent on these schools to question them.  Parents discover radical materials pushed on their children by accident, like passersby happening on a crime scene. They are treated as interlopers, trespassers; they are made to understand they have no right to be there; information on the ideology pushed on their kids is revealed on a strictly need-to-know basis. When parents do object to classroom gender ideology, they’re treated as morally obtuse or child abusers.

The contempt shown parents would be inexcusable even if teachers stuck to reading, writing and arithmetic. In a time when so many public school teachers are properly described as activists, that arrangement strips children of their families’ protection. And families must indeed protect them from an ideology that would turn students against any adult who suggests that a seventh grader suddenly jonesing for hormones and surgeries slow down. I have more than once wondered whether public schools that would openly pit students against their families, turn them against themselves and each other, aren’t doing more harm than good.

I mean no disrespect to teachers when I point out the obvious: the moment a middle-schooler whom they’ve encouraged to transition graduates to high school, they more or less wash their hands of him. Soon after the janitors have stripped the lockers clean and rolled fresh paint on the walls, teachers will mentally and emotionally prepare for the next crop of students. They may remember a few fondly—but that does little for a child they’ve set on a medically perilous path toward a dramatic identity swap. If it backfires – as it will in so many instances – it won’t be the seventh-grade music teacher who contends for years with the damage.

All of which might make you wonder, how on earth are schools getting away with this? Is there no law that bars public schools from concealing a “coming out” to parents?  Actually, there really isn’t—not a good enough federal law, anyway.

…

For the past year, parents have been placed in the absurd situation of playing Whack-a-Mole with the worst excesses of Woke ideology. A book here, a curriculum there. It’s exhausting—and it’s a losing game of endless defense. Time for offense.

This is where the most critical cultural battle will be fought. Not with reckless doctors, for whom lawsuits are coming. Not even with the therapists—in many cases, a luxury, parents can walk away from. It will be fought with America’s activist teachers. Will we allow the activists among them unaccountable access to the next generation of America’s children?

…

For Pete’s sake, the state requires that teachers ask parental consent before they offer a child Tylenol. Maybe the state should require schools ask parents before inculcating a whole new identity for their child. Indeed, federal law should insist upon it.

Funny thing about this “debate” over parental rights: it cuts clear across party lines. Republican, Democrat, gay, straight—the Mama Bears of America have a very particular idea of what sorts of identities we’ll allow other adults to push on our minor children. Those insisting that teachers must “protect” seventh graders from their parents—they are rarely parents themselves. What they demand is continued unmonitored access to your children. It’s past time we stopped giving it to them.

[ruminantminds]

me, my dream, my desire, how it's killing me, like i laugh at it.

SIOBHAN BLAKE ( SHE / THEY ) is a NON-BINARY FORTY * year old TOWN MAYOR who has been living in Moorbrooke for THEIR ENTIRE LIFE. Right now, they are currently residing in ELMSETT GREEN. It has been said that they look suspiciously like ROSAMUND PIKE and if they had to choose a song to describe themselves, they would choose VOILA by BARBARA PRAVI.

                 * they were originally forty-one on the app but after working out the birth chart i have decided their forty-first birthday is the fourth of june ! just in case you want to plan birthday things for her <3

mun introduction ;

hi everyone ! i’m shannon, i’m a non-binary autistic lesbian, i’m twenty-one && i never fucking learned how to sleep ! 

BASICS —

NAME: siobhan adrienne louisa blake.

AGE: forty.

GENDER: non-binary.

BIRTH DATE: fourth of june, nineteen-eighty.

BIRTH PLACE: moorbrooke, maine, usa.

SEXUALITY: lesbian.

RELATIONSHIP STATUS: married to alante patterson.

ZODIAC: gemini sun, aquarius moon, libra rising.

MBTI: enfp-a.

ENNEAGRAM: four, with a three wing.

HOGWARTS HOUSE: hufflepuff. 

THEME SONG: voila by barbara pravi.

FAVOURITE SONG: no plan by hozier.

OCCUPATION: mayor of moorbrooke ( 2020 - present. )

PAST CAREERS: english teacher at moorbrooke high school ( 2004 - 2020. )

EDUCATION: bachelor’s degree in literature at yale university, the only period of time they’ve spent not living in moorbrooke. 

DREAM JOB: senator for maine.

PARENTS: ciara & severin blake ( deceased. )

SIBLINGS: none.

SPOUSE: alante patterson ( m. 2015 ; together since )

PETS: two cats, vita && virginia.

PREDOMINANT TRAITS: wholesome, compassionate, ambitious, unconventional, humanitarian, self-critical, discerning, sociable, curious.

BACKSTORY —

apart from a few years at yale, siobhan has never lived away from moorbrooke. it’s where she was born, it’s where they were raised, it’s the place where she feels most at home. it’s filled with the people who watched them evolve into the who they now confidently are. but growing up with parents with massive expectations was never easy. 

because while they moved from new york, severin blake’s old money attitude never left him behind. 

( tw: fertility struggles ) and with old money, conservativism often follows. this is no exception. siobhan spent most of their childhood trying to be the golden child their parents wanted, even when it felt wrong. hopeful that some other sibling would come to take some of the weight off their shoulders, it never came to fruition, and she was their only child. severin blake — french-american businessman’s — only legacy.

siobhan was always more compassionate than their parents. when new people came to the town, she would always try to offer them a leg-up, no matter who they were, why they had come, or how long they were planning to stay. they had no issue playing chameleon to make others comfortable: wasn’t that what she’d always done, regardless? 

this rang true when alante patterson came to town. a few years younger than her, split from her siblings in the foster system, it just made sense for siobhan to try to be the other girl’s constant. the beginning of a close relationship that still runs stronger than ever, thirty years later. 

alante was always refreshingly honest, and always made siobhan feel safe to be . . . themselves, even if they were pretending to everyone else.

siobhan’s chameleonic tendencies made them highly popular as a teenager, her parents’ pride and joy, but the latter half began to fail when siobhan began to understand — began being operative, as it was a process that took them many years — their curiosity about their sexuality and gender. this relationship, and her parents’ desire for them to hide this evolving part of themselves, was a behind-closed-doors battle which led to anxiety & depression. 

a vicious cycle, because the attitude to mental health on severin’s part was also quite . . . medieval, and ciara certainly never intervened to stop him. 

( the blakes had always been protestant, though siobhan was reluctant to take part in any acknowledgement of such. siobhan has considered themselves agnostic since the age of thirteen, though she supports her wife in her faith as much as she can. )

siobhan came out when she went to yale at the age of eighteen, and her experience had been mixed. college took her away from her friends, estranging them from their high school friends and temporarily moving away from alante. when they returned from college studies and took up a job as an english teacher at the local highschool, her best friend was . . . married. 

which made feelings that began to blossom particularly problematic. especially when over the years that followed, no matter how hard they tried to let it go, those feelings persisted. and — eventually — became an affair so passionate that alante left her husband for siobhan some thirteen years ago. 

their relationship with alante is what made them truly decide to — and make them able to — exist fully as themselves. who they wanted to be. so now, they’re not quite as chameleonic, but she’s endearing to the people who are truly interested in her and that’s all that matters, isn’t it? ( isn’t it? they’re still learning, though they pretend the self-doubt is entirely gone. )

this part of their town-iconic relationship is not public knowledge, and thankfully never came to siobhan’s parents’ knowledge before their deaths five and seven years ago.

siobhan and alante married as soon as possible in 2015, but siobhan always had a dream of washington politics, buried for many years because the political climate of their youth would never take them. now... it’s possible, but alante likes this life, this town, their two cats, and wants to have children. 

as a compromise, siobhan ran for mayor of moorbrooke this recent cycle, and won. but here’s the kicker: will it be enough for them?

CONNECTIONS —

family: while she has no siblings, she does have cousins on ciara’s side, so if you’re interested in that then feel free to let me know & we’ll explore it! i love a good family tree, especially in town rps where i imagine it a bit more interconnected like broadchurch !

family-esque: if your muse has been living in moorbrooke a while, it’s likely siobhan knows them quite or very well. you know those people you call your aunt/uncle out of respect because they’ve been friends with your family as long as you can remember? a bit like that! it’s also a habit because siobhan has been . . . distant from her own family since she was a teenager. they never outright disowned them for what they were calling their ��� ideas ’ — i.e. being non-gender conforming & lesbian — but their disapproval was... clear enough. she doesn’t want anyone else to feel like they’re without support. 

therapist friend: the thing about siobhan is that they are the ceo of telling other people to look after their mental health while letting their own degrade. ( see: she can’t help taking on other people’s problems & wanting to solve them. )

high school it squad: yes, this is my not-so-subtle way of pleading for more older muses here. these people were siobhan’s friends when they were trying to be who everyone wanted them to be, not who she herself wanted to be ; they were the popular clique, and she adjusted herself as necessary to ‘ ringlead ’ them. i’m thinking they split up when they all went to college, and the rest of them have only just come back to town. the siobhan blake they’re going to meet is . . . very different than the one they once knew. someone who is now comfortable ( at last ) unapologetically in their own skin.

ex-student: if your muse was in high school in moorbrooke anywhere during their tenure it’s likely that siobhan could have taught them! she was the emotional support english teacher. sapphics, you know what i am talking about. 

ingenue: someone interested in politics who siobhan is sharing their passion with !

neighbours: anyone who lives in elmsett court, who wants to live next to moorbrooke’s favourite sapphic it couple? it comes with invitations to dinner and two adventuring cats called vita & virginia that they might have to retrieve from your house.

TAKEN CONNECTIONS

confidante: the only person, aside from alante, who knows the truth. that siobhan and alante’s relationship first ignited in a blazing, letter-ridden extramarital affair, eventually resulting in alante leaving her husband all those years ago. the person siobhan confides her worries in, sometimes. [ alec barlowe. ] 

OTHER TRIVIA

owns a motorbike.

they can still write in anne lister code from letters to alante.

of course, she is a democrat. we do not fuck with republicans here.

watches vita and virginia three times in your average week.

has an eclectic music taste, but frequents the record store because there’s nothing like vinyl. 

( yes, they have hozier on vinyl. )

will only drink white wine. don’t ask them why. they don’t know. 

would have zero wardrobe sense if it wasn’t for alante. money just doesn’t equal style.

the only social network she knows how to use is twitter. please, someone, teach them how to use instagram. bestie needs a social media guru because the people who run the rest of her platforms don’t get it, either.

allergic to banana. but eats it anyway for the mouth tingles.

has kept a diary religiously since the age of twelve.

[dukeofriven]

America: A Prophecy

‘What God is he writes laws of peace, and clothes him in a tempest? What pitying Angel lusts for tears, and fans himself with sighs? What crawling villain preaches abstinence and wraps himself In fat of lambs? No more I follow, no more obedience pay!’ So cried he, rending off his robe and throwing down his sceptre In sight of Albion’s Guardian; and all the Thirteen Angels Rent off their robes to the hungry wind, and threw their golden sceptres Down on the land of America. - William Blake, 1793

America is becoming ungovernable.

It’s simply much too large, too varied, and much too polarized for any one candidate to garner even the plurality of support needed to effectively govern as a president, complicated by the weaknesses of America’s social/political system that demands a democratically-elected executive somehow stand for the nation as a whole.

This isn’t a ‘diversity’ problem or a call for ethnic of cultural homogeneity. I’m from a country with greater diversity than the United States and we manage just fine. (I mean we’re facing a rising tide of rightwing resurgence exacerbated by decades of failure by ruling parties to replace the antiquated first-past-the-post voting system so I wouldn’t call us “fine” but those issues are rooted in numerous social trends, not racial demographics.)

It’s more a condition of the scale of Unites States and the internecine conflicts of groups within it. I remember during the last election hearing a lot about letting perfect be the enemy of good: ‘yes this candidate might not understand your ethnic/social/cultural group particularly well or speak to your issues, but you ought to vote for them anyways.’ From a certain point of view that’s true - I think it hardly uncontroversial to say that the world generally and America specifically is demonstrably worse under Donald Trump than it would have been under Hillary Clinton.

But leaving aside the candidates as individuals for a moment and viewing them purely as symbols the President-As-Unifier and the electoral circus around it becomes faintly absurd. The more often you have say to one group or another ‘stop needing a candidate to be exactly like you and just give them your vote because they’re more like you than the other guy,’ the more you overlook centuries of pain and marginalization. Groups that never had voices before have voices now: loud voices, prominent voices, and they are finding that they don’t want to sit down and shut up in the interest of some mythical unity anymore. They can’t. And therefore these presidential primaries are only going to get worse as things go on. They’re already getting acrimonious again, and those groups who have been told to swallow their voices again and again if they don’t want things to get worse are realizing that they’ve been used as tools as the status quo for far too long. Things don’t get worse when they shut up and vote like they’re told - but they never get better, either. Not in meaningful ways, or not rapidly enough to be meaningful to most of them .(‘By supporting the status quo you achieved a social victory and it only took you 45 years and your entire youth to see it come to fruition.’) The ‘baby-steps’ of change have started to seem less like care and caution and more like infantilization.

When the only people who could vote in America were white, adult, male property-owners you could have two political parties: there really was more that united voters then divided them, such as all voters belonging to the same class, ethnicity, language group, social background, Enlightenment-moulding education praxis, and willingness to compromise on treating human beings as disposable tools for labour. The greater the franchise has expanded in America the farther and further from that ‘unity’ things have gotten.

Since the Trump election in particular the question is asked: “What’s caused the polarization of America?” The real answers are a multitude of factors: unhealed wounds in the body politic after the Second Indochina War; the malaise, complacency, and self-indulgent omphaloskepsis of being the so-called superpower in the 90s; post-colonialism and free market economics bringing the worst ravages of capitalism stateside and decimating the illusion of a stable middle class. There’s lot of reasons as things are rarely simple.

Perhaps the most critical cause, however, the one with the greatest impact, has been this widening of not just the franchise but the gradual realization by the newly-enfranchised that they vocalize social discontent and express it - or at least attempt to express it - through voting. The ‘silent majority’ can only exist when the majority of oppressed and marginalized groups suffer in silence. The divisions that exist now existed in the 1950s, but they are only now being vocalized in such a prominent way. Even the labour movement and the Great Depression in the thirties did not sufficiently create an impression of intractable internecine rivalries such as now can be seen dividing America.

Republicans have understood this for a long time. This is why their politics have grown more and more tribalistic as the years have gone on. So long as they can dominate amongst specific strata of demographics they don’t have to care about winning any kind of nation-wide majority. They can fixate on the plurality that rigidly shares its belief systems: a rigidity created by and continually reenforced by the rhetoric of Republican doctrine and dogma. Democrats coasted on this for years, thinking that if Republicans focused only on a handful of groups then they benefited simply by having everyone else by default.

But it didn’t really work out that way. Gerrymandering by Republican bureaucrats helped a lot here by segmenting voting districts so that anyone outside the Republican voting base got split across multiple voting districts and never coalesced into more than a handful of centralized sources of power that the Democrats could rely on, but there’s a bigger issue. This Republican plurality positioning has only short-term value: they’re a demographic time bomb and as far back as 2012 I can remember their saner members talking about this as a matter of some urgency. But they were ignored, and the GOP is on a death-cult rocket ride to eventual obsolescence, although they’ll pull as much of American down around them as they go in an act of spite.

But that’s not the problem (or, rather, it is a problem but it’s not what I’ve come here to talk about today). Democrats got so used to coasting on being the party of the default that they lack any ability to talk to groups specifically. Nobody likes being taken for granted and they’ve started pushing back. Clinton’s failure to secure a margin of victory overwhelming enough to overcome the limiters of the Electoral College showed that two years ago: plenty of groups stayed home, an act of protest against a party that expected their vote for no other reason than 'not being the other guy.’

Nobody seems to have learned that lesson very well. Imagine two, three presidential elections from now, when the GOP is a spent force whose membership lists are now covered with dead people. (The oldest baby boomers are over 70, and when age brackets start to die in numbers it becomes a cascade. I can remember going from parades of WWII vets to a handful of wheelchair veterans in about a decade, and from some WWI vets to none in the same length of time.) For the younger among you two, three elections might seem like a long time, but it isn’t: years rush by faster than you think. So picture that world with a GOP in terminal decline and a Democratic party witnessing the prophesied triumph of demographic inevitability.

That’s essentially a one-party state, but a party that already struggles to be enough things to enough people now is going to buckle under pressures the American political system simply wasn’t built to handle. America was built around being a two-party state - of being a country in which the majority of people fit comfortably enough into two broad binaries and vote accordingly.

But they don’t, and they can’t, and America as it presently exists may be quite literally ungovernable. The centuries of appalling violence within America only complicate the picture further - it’s the sort of mixture of history, population, and anger that lead to the Balkan Wars, the conflicts between former members of the Warsaw Pact, and more recently the creation of South Sudan. America already had one civil war, there’s no reason to think that a re-fragmenting of America isn’t possible, especially given how contentious the language seems to be among different groups.

America has a scale problem, and I think Americans don’t really understand this. I live in the second largest country in the world by area but nobody actually lives here. See this?

It’s about fifteen years out of date, but the population hasn’t expanded beyond those yellow borders: just make the red bits much redder and you’re golden. Yet even this is still not getting the full picture. Let me show you with my photoshop skills: Everybody in the green bit:

Does not equal the population of the blue bit. If Canadian politics ran purely off of direct voting the entire country would be dominated by a group of people who live in about 0.14% of the country. What this means in practice is that for all that Canada has different grouping of cultural diversity (i.e. the political/social/cultural makeup of PEI as distinct from Vancouver as distinct from Iqaluit), should a civil war of either literal or abstract nature break-out the power of bodies is still located in one place. This is the population density of America:

Look at all those different concentrations of people and power. Like I said Canada does, of course, have other centres of power outside of old Upper/Lower Canada: despite what it thinks Toronto is not the entirety of the universe. But the multiplicity of metropolitan spaces and concentrated population centres such as you have in America don’t exist here. What am I getting at with this? America has spaces of intensely regional identity on an enormous scale. In Canada, for example, even Quebec separatism seems to be dying a slow and painful death. We’ve all got our our local identities, but Canadians are still mostly Canadian first, something else second. America by contrast, have fought a bloody civil war over slavery that afterwards was reshaped (falsely) into a war about regionalism, which mutated later into tribalism. This is why right-wingers in Union states spout Confederate flags. The flag doesn’t represent the literal loyalties of the Confederacy but its values: racism, white power, using human being as disposable tools for personal enrichment, and racism. (Anyone wanting to argue is welcome to read the Constitution of the Confederacy, which is nothing but the US Constitution with extra bits about slavery and river trade stuck in: it’s not subtle, and the character of the Confederacy is not up for debate.) Americans - or at least a worrying percentage of Americans - tend to link their national and tribal identities quite strongly: all you have to do is watch a Trump rally to work that out. To be an American is to be like me - thus, anyone unlike me is unAmerican. That is the sickness, the rot that is chewing up America from the inside. The right wing seized hold of the idea that the only Real Americans are those just like them, and other groups have started to adopt the same mindset out of self-defence, and these fractures are only going to deepen. Take that and add to it the way that political tribalism is fusing with regional identity and you begin to see the scope of the problem: you’re reaching the point where nobody from Region A can ever be thought of having any authority over Region B because Region A people are the Other. (Trump will probably be the last New Yorker City dweller to ever hold sway in the GOP: his successors will bind themselves to the base not merely through the tribal shibboleths of hating brown people and the poor who believe in improving their lot through anything other than force of will, but also through regional identity. No Californian Republican is likely to ever see front-billing again: you’ll prove your loyalty by only living in the ‘right’ places - solidly red, with no compromising purple of ideological weakness.)

So look at the Democratic party two, three elections from now: the party of everyone in the country who isn’t the GOP. How is that a functioning political group? What could it stand for that would effectively cover such a diverse collection of people? You cannot be the party of the centrists and the progressives and the leftists and the disaffected rightists and the communists and the socialists and the ethical capitalists and the neo-Marxists and the socially-liberal libertarians and the left-leaning rich and the remaining middle class and the working class and the vested corporate interests unwilling to directly support fascism and on and on and on. Democrats can run on the ‘Not Trump’ platform for the moment because the GOP will likely be the party of Trumpism from here on out. (The GOP had enough sense of self preservation to distance itself from Nixon back in the day, but ever since it refused to repudiate Reagan after Iran-Contra it’s shown that it is only ever going to double-down on its bets from here on out: it’ll be riding this train until the very bitter end.) But ‘not Trump’ is barely sufficient even now - because people want to know what the party is for, not just what it’s against. And it can’t be for everything but Trumpism - it’s too broad a field. So America is rapidly become ungovernable, because one party wants to serve a demographic facing extinction, and the other wants to be the Big Tent of literally everyone else no matter how different they may be. Which looks great on a poster about tolerance that you’d hang in a kindergarten class but is untenable when trying to unify 18-year old queer anarcho-syndicists of colour and 50-year old suburban capitalism-apologist whites: their goals are too divergent for harmony to make political sense. (And yes, ‘suburban’ is an antonym of ‘queer.’ Trust me on this.) They want fundamentally different things; just because they mutually do not also want a third thing does not mean they make stable, good, or even plausible allies. The Waffle Guardians and The Crepe Defenders can come together and agree that Pancakes are garbage but that is the end of their common cause, not the start of meaningful co-operation on a variety of issues mattering to both groups, because those don’t really exist. So America is becoming literally ungovernable because its institutions are incapable of operating outside of a narrow binary between two relatively close points. It was not designed, and cannot handle, the intense tribalism of the moment, nor the future that will contain a multitude of independently-minded political groups who are no longer willing to engage with big tent politics that ultimately never forward their own causes. We talk right now about a battle for the ‘soul’ of the Democratic party, but that’s bull. The fight is for who gets to keep the branding and the cachet of the name ‘Democratic Party’ - the next step is party secession, first when the centrists realize the progressives really do mean to literally destroy them and the status quo they hold dear, and then further fragmentation from there. I could go on and on down various laneways here about how increasing tribalism is straining the American system on a structural level. Take the Supreme Court, which only functions without a heavily politicized judiciary because otherwise democratic desires are stifled by entrenched judicial positions that judge issues only on their political merits. Or take how binary elected government in general only works with the understanding that every time power swaps between two groups the next group doesn’t instantly undo everything the last group did out of spite. (We’re seeing that in Ontario right now, actually, as a serious of��‘fortunate’ events brought into power a man so craven he makes Donald Trump seem downright generous in comparison. Our new premiere realized that if he just stops caring about re-election he can do whatever he wants to enrich his corporate buddies in the short-term, so he’s doing things that are enraging even his base, like removing anaesthetic coverage from colonoscopies. He, like Trump, is a ‘political outsider’ but unlike Trump his ego doesn’t need people telling him they love him - he’s perfectly happy being a vindictive thug, so even though he used populist anger to get into power he feels no reason to do anything for anyone who put him there. This is what happens when you elect a suburban drug dealer whose only goal is to revenge himself on an entire province for not taking his brother the crack-smoking mayor seriously. Ontario is so, so screwed.) Fundamentally, presidential republics are a disease. The American republican system has damaged every country its ever been exported to as its central structural weakness - an ability to be easily subsumed by autocrats - has been taken advantage of in basically every case, not to mention its tendency to fall into political deadlock. America’s own legal experts don’t recommend the country’s constitution to other - RBGs herself said that she would not use the US Constitution as a model to any country creating one today. The fractures that so ruined South America and the emerging African states that took the Us as their role model are finally happening in American itself. This feeling of paralyzation will only worsen in the years to come: it was practically baked-in to the political system from the start, the inevitable breaking point of planned obsolescence. America must either change - such as adopting a parliamentary model better-suited to handle the diverse social, ethnic, cultural, and regional demographics of such a large country, or taking an axe to existing institutional binaries and demolishing the two-party state - or die. I recognize the irony in saying that there is a binary choice about handling the inability to handle non-binaries, but there is a third option: sticking with the status quo. A status quo that is groaning under the strain of modern America, a status quo for which simple, minor modifications are unlikely to be enough to relieve the pressures the system is under. You could try that. You’ve been trying it for decades. How’s that choice working out? Two to three elections from now the idea that you can neatly divide political extremes into Liberal and Conservative, and that harmony can only be found in collaboration, will be so dead that not even the most committed advocate of the status quo will be able to ignore the smell - though he will, of course, say that the onus is on other people to come back from their ‘extremist’ positions, because it’s never centrism’s fault when people reject it as insufficient to the crises of the present. To the Americans who read this, you’re going to have to choose - and it really is a choice, surprising as that may seem. You can choose to let America end. To let it die. Countries die all the time. That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. Say you’re from a blue state: do you still want a future of sharing a country with a red state? America stays together because ‘more unites us than divides us’ - but is there a point where that truism can no longer be consider true? And at that point is there still value in remaining a union? Meaningful value, and not just a sense of duty or obligation to an ideal that doesn’t seem to have any real-world resonance? What is the point at which political compromise becomes something you can no longer stomach - when working together goes from making deals with the opposition to making deals with the devil? When do hyperbolic statements like the other side being 'the devil’ stop sounding like hyperbole? For all that I talked about the Founding Fathers and their immediate voting heirs being ‘the same’ one point on which they disagreed was slavery - but they found themselves able to compromise on the use of humans-as-property for labour. That I one of the founding pacts of America: some of us don’t like slavery, but we can live with it in the interest of unity. Could you, a time-traveler-turned-Founding-Father, make the same choice? On what are you willing to compromise to keep the union a union - what agreements could you make and still be able to meet your own gaze in a mirror? Keep in mind that choosing ‘change’ is no guarantee that the change will be successful, or that the post-America that emerges from that change will be any more a place you want to live in than if you had chosen to keep America alive. I merely want the full and total weight of those decisions to be clear. American compromised on slavery at the moment of its birth: it has lived with the consequences of that compromise ever since. America continues to exist because matters were compromised on - some benign, some heinous, all done in the interest of a greater good. Are you willing to make such compromises future - and are you willing to accept the consequences of what might happen if you are not? There is no ‘going back.’ The post-Trump America will not be a ‘return to normal.’ It can’t. Too many lines have been crossed for there to be a simple return to ‘normality’ when all this is done: that normal is dead. If you choose to try and reinstate it - if you choose neither change nor death but the old status quo - then the problems that birthed this current crisis will remain. Is that status quo strong enough to withstand a second round with such events? That’s something you’ll have to decided. Until then, American will remain ungovernable.

[theculturedmarxist]

Mirror Mirror

American political education is absolutely abysmal. There really is no understating how woefully misserved young people are when it comes to the breadth, depth, or quality of politics, regarding both those in the United States and even more so abroad. Practically as soon as their education begins, they are taught to think in terms of us and them; you have the settlers and the natives, the colonists and the British, the Americans and everyone else, the Whigs and Tories, Federalists and Anti-Federalists, Republicans and Democrats, Right and Left. At its most fundamental level, it’s a division between ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ a judgement dispassionately dispensed by the history of Winners and Losers. It’s a cornerstone of the American mythos, so much grease that keeps the gears of the illusory bourgeois democracy turning. ‘Democracy’ is right because it beat monarchy. The Allies were right because they defeated the Nazis. Capitalism is right because it beat Socialism. ‘American’s love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.’

This is an absurd, metaphysical view of the world. As Mao says, nothing is ever wholly good or wholly bad. Bad results can come from good events, and good results arise from bad events. History is a complex interaction of innumerable events, influences, processes, and factors resulting in sequences of unfathomable complexity. This is the reality of the world. There are rarely any easy answers, no one’s knowledge is complete, and black and white are so vanishingly rare as to scarcely exist at all.

It isn’t any wonder then that such a rigid dichotomy produces such intense alienation in those subjected to it. Male and female, man and woman, straight and gay, Black and White, all the innumerable false dichotomies perpetuated by this irrational philosophy are becoming increasingly manifest as the system which maintains them breaks down. It is a process long in coming. At every step of the way, it has been Capitalism producing the fertile ground necessary for these changes. Its destructive World Wars decimated the male populations in industrialized countries, thrusting women into industrial roles long reserved for men. The devastation of the first World War created in The Soviet Union the desperate need for skilled workers of any kind, opening up unprecedented opportunities for women as well as peoples throttled by the oppression of colonialism. This too was a manifestation of the absurdity of such a stark dichotomy. People are not content to subject themselves to the strictures of oppressor and oppressed.

Under Capitalism, there is no other choice. It all flows from the ultimate source: the logic of employer and employee, owner and lessee, bourgeois and prole.

We can see the results of this degrading logic here and now. Young people, finding themselves unable to be fit neatly into such trite categories as male and female, have ignited an explosion of exploratory gender expressions. As the brutality necessary to maintain Capitalism continue to manifest themselves, they increasingly turn away from the prescribed roles prescribed by it. As the system makes it impossible to achieve its allowed goals, people turn away from them. They see the folly in pursuing its hollow attainments, not only because their society has made it impossible to do so, but because they’ve seen the results of those that have; the wreckage of the lives of their brothers and sisters, parents and children, friends and family, continually wash up on the beaches of their own lives, embattled as they are by the tempestuous throes of Capitalism. 

This is an inevitability, but it is only the initial stage of its own long, involved process.

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. [Marx, "Critique of the Gotha Programme",Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1958, Vol. 2, p. 23.]

These people, after first discovering the tremendous, obscene swindle that has robbed them of their lives up to the point of their revelation, are naturally upset, angry, to say the least. A person can endure great and terrible suffering, particularly in the service of what they believe to be a good cause. This is true even when they believe that the source of the suffering is their own fault, a flaw in themselves, that must be corrected through the agony of self denial and penitent flagellation. If they were only better, they wouldn’t need to suffer, and they can be so long as they choose to, or so they are told.

To discover at long last that the source of their suffering isn’t arising from within, but inflicted from without, often inflicts a wound so great it is nearly beyond healing. It’s beyond a simple lie–a cruel but necessary falsehood intended for their benefit. It’s a vicious, hateful deception perpetrated against them, not in the abstract, but in themselves. They discover that their suffering hasn’t been inflicted apurpose, or even necessarily by those that hate them. Rather, they’re victimized coldly and dispassionately by an impersonal system erected entirely to eradicate them only because they in themselves serve no useful purpose to the people that sit at its pinnacle other than to be destroyed. This is perhaps the most savage wound of all, inflicted by the realization that the people who not only set in motion and maintain such a system don’t even care enough to hate them, and in fact even find that ‘their kind’ participate in it. They aren’t persecuted because of who they are, but because they’re not even important enough to hate by those ultimately responsible. Whatever value they might have had as pariahs evaporates in the face of the illuminating realization that they are just grist for the mill, crushed impersonally, mechanically for the benefit of people who never knew or even cared that they ever existed.

They’re angry. They should be. They have every right to be.

But that isn’t enough.

Even having come to this understanding, it isn’t enough to free them from the logic of the system in which they have been indoctrinated since birth. If people with White skin are preferred by the system that oppressed them, then the natural response is to embrace people with ‘non-White’ skin. If heteronormativity is the social force imposed on them, then queerness is to be endorsed. If the gender binary is what Capitalist society demands of them, then nonbinary manifestations are to be championed.

This is a step in the right direction, but only just. They have come to understand the need to refute the system that binds them, but merely going this far doesn’t even jostle their cell door. Still they are bound up in its logic of dichotomies, of essential separateness between nonexistent or ultimately arbitrary distinctions imposed on them by bourgeois society. Instead of rejecting the illusion of good and evil, they’ve merely inverted its polarity, keeping its logic but inverting its direction. Anger is given an outlet, but rendered impotent, perpetuating the process that originally gave rise to it. In short, this reflexive anger is nothing short of reactionary, regardless of whom it is directed against.

You can see this clearly in the many ways in which the ‘Left’ on tumblr so perfectly reflects the ‘Right.’ They think and act in the same Hitlerite racial logic. They both behave in the same absurd tribal way: for the Right, it’s taking refuge in the illusion of racial or national identity. Many on the Left do this too, thinking the way to combat the racism of the Capitalist system is by turning it back on itself, aided with the flimsy, self-serving liberal logic like ‘racism is power plus privilege’ or ‘you can’t be racist against white people.’ They see fascists calling for the extermination of shitskins and mudslimes, and retaliate by calling for the genocide of cumskins and crackers. They demand and rejoice when ‘white characters’ are played by ‘people of color’ and react with the same idiotic reflexive tribalism as their white ‘opponents’ when they demand the same in return. They fail to see how their demands for ‘representation’ by this or that bourgeois lackey of whatever variety, in whatever vapid bourgeois fairy tale, is being used as a tool to further divide them from the other sections of the proletariat in a race to be financially exploited, all for the sake of demanding disposable entertainment ‘of their own’ to consume.

It isn’t difficult to see the absurdity in the Rightist fantasy of the ‘nation.’ Spin a globe and point, and whatever state you land on will be full of numerous peoples of varying superficial, religious, and cultural similarities and dissimilarities. Even a relatively small country like England, for example, is not homogeneous. Through its long history it has seen migrations of Celts and Latins, Saxons and Angles, Norse and Normans, and it tells in place names, dialects, physical characteristics—which of these is ‘English?’ Which could possibly be ‘more English’ than any other? ‘The English Nation’ don’t exist. No nation did or does or will. They’re a con, a PR campaign to convince the working class that their interests and the interests of the bourgeoisie align, connected through the primordial blood-ties of ‘the nation.’ Its purpose is to create the fiction that hardship and success are both shared measure for measure between the classes, that despite the misery it took to produce it, all share equally in the ‘achievements’ of the ‘nation-state.’ Sure, the Kaiser spends his days idle in sprawling palaces while millions upon millions of Germans are turned into hamburger on the fields of France and Russia, but he really, truly cares.

The Queer ‘nation’ isn’t any different. It’s contradictions are just as apparent. It strives at once to be both universally inclusive yet internally divisive. The Queer ‘nation’ is divided into innumerable discrete ‘ethnicities,’ all at once expected to be united in voice and action but materially, necessarily separate. Each jealously harbors every last shred of historical or contemporary resentment in a farcical pantomime of the national conflicts of old. Any preference or prejudice by the bourgeoisie toward one or the other is brandished as an implement to demand that their ‘liberation’ takes precedence. Endless arguments burn away as they argue around arbitrary definitions about who is what gender, what words to use (or not to use) and how, who is gay enough or too straight to be included. Instead of seeking to be liberated from the identities formed in opposition to yet necessarily within Capitalism, they too seek constantly to be recognized, represented, integrated within the bourgeois society that they ostensibly are revolting against.

Marx in his critique of Bauer’s On the Jewish Question examines what necessary facts are required in order to achieve universal human emancipation. Bauer asserts that for Jews to be emancipated as humans they first have to give up their Judaism, and similarly mankind give up it’s religiosity to achieve the emancipation of humanity. Rather Marx asserts the opposite, that merely abandoning Jewish religiosity won’t bring them any closer to emancipation as people. Instead, those conditions which make Jewishness possible have to be made impossible, as in, the social conditions to which Judaism has developed in order to manage have to be obviated.

This is the same concept which underscores the necessity of the revolutionary proletariat. It’s what makes Communism a truly revolutionary ideology. It doesn’t seek merely to replace one class with another. True, Marx does speak of replacing the ‘dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’ with the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat,’ but this isn’t the end of Communism, to merely invert the currently prevailing power structure.

And does modern history not speak to the truth of this? As we come into the 21st century, through much of the developed world Christianity has waned as an institution. The world is no longer so uncertain. To treat sickness means no longer to entreat God in His house, but to see a medical professional in a hospital. Material abundance has made the specter of famine a thing of the past.

We see further evidence of this in the likes of The New Deal. It didn’t emancipate the worker, but only extended to a certain section of workers privileges over the others. Nor was the Soviet Union able to abolish class society, and so degraded ultimately into Capitalism. Even for the accomplishments of the Civil Rights movement in the middle of the 20th century, have those accomplishments lasted? The political Jim Crow might have vanished, but isn’t it just replaced with a financial one? In every case, the contradictions were not reconciled, only mitigated, and only temporarily. That is not to fault them for not accomplishing more, but recognizing that their goals were only partially fulfilled, and undone by the contradictions they let linger.

Consequently, the emancipation of any ‘identity’ or ‘class’ becomes a possibility when and only when it seeks to obviate the conditions which necessitate its existence. ‘Homosexuals’ will only be emancipated when ‘heterosexuality ‘ becomes an impossibility. ‘Blacks’ will only be emancipated only when ‘Whites’ becomes an impossibility. ‘Transgenders’ will only be emancipated when ‘cisgenders’ becomes an impossibility. The proletariat will be emancipated only when the bourgeois becomes an impossibility. Founding movements existing only in opposition to these things, fighting for ‘gay rights’ instead of abolishing the privileges which subjugate gays in the first place, is not only reactionary, but self defeating.

The fundamental conditions from which all of these arise is the class society created and perpetuated by Capitalism. The only way to free the peoples trapped within it is to dispose with the conditions which created and presupposed them in the first place.

[forsetti]

On American Politics: It’s All About Power

“It's all about power baby.” Dirty Little Secrets-My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult

For reasons that completely escape me, progressives have been unwilling to learn the most basic political lessons over the past few decades. They have been more than willing to allow conservatives to not just get power but sit by as decades of progressive policies are steadily rolled back.  They seem more content attacking people who are their allies than they are Republicans.  They often are too willing to pass along false information, bad history, even conspiracy theories about the Democratic Party and Democrats.  They mistakenly think their emotional involvement about particular issues and politics in general means they are correct and knowledgeable about both.  For many, political compromise is viewed as a betrayal and nothing will be accepted that isn't absolute, perfect adherence to whatever their political purity test de jour* happens to be (*not applicable to any politician they are currently passionate about.)  These behaviors, and a whole lot more are why I get so frustrated with progressive politics and why progressives continue to lose elections even though they have the demographic advantage in many places.  

Politics is about power.  It is this fucking simple.  Without it, all of your great, wonderful ideas aren't worth a damn.  How do you get political power?  By winning elections at the local, state, and federal levels. How do you win elections?  You don't win them by staying home and not voting.  You don't win them with “protest votes.”  You don't win them by voting for third-party candidates who have no chance of winning.  You win elections by voting in every election for the candidate who has the best chance of winning who stands for your values more than the other candidate with the best chance of winning. Period.  Full-fucking-stop.  Any strategy, any thoughts, any opinion about American politics that doesn't have this as its underlying principle is not only seriously flawed, it is a cancer that needs to be eradicated.

As simple as this concept is, it seems very difficult and problematic for many progressives to grasp.  Conservatives understand this really well.  It is the reason they have been able to steadily take control of governorships, state legislatures, many of the courts around the country, the House, the Senate, and the White House.  Republicans don't have the demographic numbers to be in control of much outside of very red states.  Yet, they do and it is ALL because progressives haven't learned what it takes to win elections-get power.   A lot of progressives are under the belief what has held back progressives from winning elections are bad candidates.  “If Democrats would put up better candidates, then they'd win more elections.”  What this really translates to is, “I won't get off my privileged ass and support or vote for someone who doesn't meet my purity test, regardless of the possible outcome.  Then, I'll bitch and moan about how progress isn't being made and it's all because of something else, someone else, but never me and my idiotic approach to politics.”  

Whenever I point out this truth, the purity progressives get their self-woven, natural fiber panties in a bunch.  They whine about how anything and everything other than themselves is to blame for the current political climate.  They have this stance because they don't understand American politics, at all.  Like it or not, American politics is a two-party system.  You have two choices.  If you choose to not select one of them or choose to select a third option, you are just as responsible for the current state of politics in America as the people who voted Republican.  

Imagine you are in a room with no windows that has a single ceiling light wired to a single on/off switch.  If you choose to not flick the switch on because your preference is a dimmer switch, you have chosen to be in the dark.  If you choose to jiggle the doorknob in hopes of opening the door to let in light, because you don't like the binary option of the light switch, you have chosen to be in the dark.  It doesn't matter how passionate you feel about the type of light switch or the number of options you think should be available if you do anything other than actively turn the switch to the on position, you are in the fucking dark and it is completely by your own choice.  You can sit in the dark bitching about how unfair it is you are dark and why the room isn't wired differently all you want but none of it is going to change the reality that you are in the dark because of your choices.

Because conservatives largely come from fundamentalist backgrounds built on binary choices-God/Devil, good/bad, men/women, right/wrong... they not only understand how the American political system works, they dutifully play their part to successful results.  It doesn't matter to them that a particular candidate in a particular election isn't their ideal.  To them, there are only two choices-the person with an 'R' after their name and the enemy.  This is why they have no problem voting for a three-time married, serial adulterer with five children from three different women, who brags about sexually assaulting women, and can't even pronounce “second Corinthians” correctly.  When put into a room with an on/off light switch, they didn't hesitate for a second about what to do in order to light up their conservative world.

This complete and utter understanding, whether conscious or unconscious, by conservatives, is why they control the majority of political power in this country even though they are a third of the population. Sure, they have purity tests but when push comes to shove, if the final options are a Democrat and a Republican, they will ALWAYS, en masse, vote for the Republican.  We can debate the merits of their reasons and approach until the free-range, organically-fed cows come home but this is how politics were intentionally designed and how they have worked in America since its inception.

This binary view of politics is not only what has allowed Republicans to consolidate power the past few decades but do so in spite of a shrinking demographic.  Because they have been so loyal to the party they identify with, because they know that if they don't vote for the Republican candidate, the ENEMY might win.  Until progressives adopt this exact voting strategy for a decade or more, they will continue to lose elections they should win.  They will continue to watch as conservatives win elections and roll back decades of hard-fought progressive policies.  They will continue to blame anything and anyone other than themselves for the consequences of their failure to understand the situation and act accordingly.

The entire Amerian political structure is intentionally constructed to be a two-party system.  Progressives can like this or not.  They can accept this or not.  They can do whatever the fuck you want with this fact but treating it as anything other than this is not a smart political strategy.  

Any progressive who doesn't think this is how progress is made needs to watch the Ken Burn documentary on the Roosevelts.  They need to pay close attention to how the far-left at the time hated FDR, tried to primary him, were always bitching about how he “wasn't progressive enough.”  FDR didn't implement the most progressive policies because of the far-left but in spite of them.  He was able to accomplish what he did because he had massive majorities in Congress throughout his presidency.  When you have more people who are your allies, it is a lot easier to get things done even when some of them don't completely agree with what you are doing or how.  

The last time Democrats had large majorities in Congress and held the White House was under LBJ.  It is no coincidence this is the last time major progressive policies happened.  Since LBJ, even if Democrats had control of both houses in Congress and the White House, the majorities were razor thin and with the filibuster in the Senate, a majority really isn't meaningful without sixty votes.  If you want a major progressive bill to get by the U.S. Senate you are going to need more than sixty Democratic Senators because a handful will not support it because of the makeup of their state/constituency.

This is why it is so important for progressives to not undermine Democratic candidates/legislators who are not as progressive as they want, especially if they are not from your state.  Doug Jones from Alabama might not be the bluest of Senators but holy-fucking-hell, he is a million times more progressive than Roy Moore or any other conservative from Alabama.  Yet, when Doug Jones was running and right after he was elected, the far-left did nothing but bitch about him and prop him up as an example of why the system is broken, why the “establishment” is the real problem.  No, idiots! Progressives demanding across-the-board purity tests are the fucking problem.  The far-left could run the most progressive candidate they can find in Alabama from now until the rising seas from climate change buries everything south of Montgomery and they will never win an election.  If you can put two and two together and come up with something greater than three and less than five, this means in order to have a Democrat elected to the Senate from Alabama, they are going to be less to the left than you would like.

It never ceases to amaze me how many times I see comments from progressives on social media or in comment sections where they are outraged some Democratic candidate/legislator from some state/district not their own, isn't supporting the “perfect progressive” agenda. They can say, “My bitching about Doug Jones from Alabama doesn't impact anything because I don't live in that state.”  Yes, it does. When progressives outside a voting area complain about the candidates involved, it has two very tangible, very detrimental effects: 1-It can depress the vote in that area from progressives who live there because they are being bombarded with opinions from other progressives telling them their candidate sucks; 2-The media picks up on this and rolls out hot take after hot take about how Democrats are in disarray and don't have a cogent strategy which becomes the accepted “truth” about the Democratic Party for a good chunk of Independent and Democratic voters.  

There is a reason why Russian online trolls spent most of their time and energy during the 2016 election NOT promoting Republican candidates and positions but PRETENDING TO BE PROGRESSIVES ATTACKING OTHER PROGRESSIVES because they know not only the importance of depressing voter turnout but how progressives are so willing to turn on their own kind.  This is why they targeted Democratic voters in swing states.  

The irritating thing is, while this was happening, in real time, some of us were not only pointing out what was going on but the dangers of it only to be mocked, ridiculed, lectured ad nauseum by the “progressives” who were gobbling up the troll bait, hook, line, and fucking propaganda sinker.  That this is what happened and went down irritates the fuck out of me.  That these same “progressives” who were so easily duped and were a big part of the problem not only haven't seemed to have learned a damn thing from the whole situation, they are adamant their shitty strategy and even shittier knowledge of politics are the Holy Fucking Grail of political power and prominence.

This is why, no matter how specific the Democratic Party is about what it stands for or how progressive the party platform is, the far-left, Independents, and the media constantly trot out idiotic claims like- “The Democratic Party doesn't know what it stands for;” “The reason why progress isn't being made is because of the establishment/corporatist Dems.”  No. No. No.  The reason why progress isn't being made is because progressives don't vote in every election, don't vote for the Democratic candidate with the best chance of winning, don't do what is necessary to defend progressive policies already won, don't understand how the simple concept of Us versus Them in a two-party system really works.

Let me give you an example of what I mean.  Recently, I had a back-and-forth about this topic online with someone who claims to be not only a progressive but one that really understands how American politics works.  When I pointed out that Hillary's campaign ran on the most progressive platform since FDR, their comeback was, “She only took this position because Bernie pushed her to the left and I doubt she would have followed through.”

Go ahead, think about this response because it a classic reason progressives suck at political strategy, winning elections, getting power.  Bernie lost to Hillary by almost four million votes in the primaries.  Yet, in spite of losing by a wide margin, his camp was given a number of seats on the platform committee.  The platform was agreed to by all factions and rolled out.  Yet, in spite of this very generous, very democratic situation and outcome, to the far-left it wasn't good enough and couldn't be trusted.  Unless Bernie won and had the complete say over everything, whatever happened could be used to rationalize/justify not supporting Hillary (I'm using this example but it applies to a lot of elections the past 30+ years.)  The whole “follow through” comment is telling, as well.  You never know what a candidate will/can do until they get into office and you see the context in which they have to work.  If Hillary would have won and the GOP had control of the House and Senate as they do now, the people who were wary of her “follow through” would be the first in line complaining how she didn't do what they thought she wouldn't do.

The reason I know this is how they would respond is that I watched them do this very thing with President Obama.  THE BIGGEST REASON WE ARE IN THE MESS WE ARE IS BECAUSE TOO MANY PROGRESSIVES SAT OUT THE 2010 MIDTERMS ALLOWING THE TEA PARTY TO TAKE OVER THE U.S. HOUSE AND THE MAJORITY OF STATE GOVERNORSHIPS AND LEGISLATURES.  Why did they do this?  Because, in spite of not having majorities in both houses of Congress, he didn't pass universal healthcare.  Never mind he did something that every Democratic President since FDR had tried to do but failed (comprehensive health care reform,) the purity left was pissed.  Never mind he only had 58 Democratic votes and even then not the entire time because of Al Franken's contested election and the death of Ted Kennedy, the purity left demanded he attains the logically unattainable.  I watched for eight years as the far-left complain, theorize, and make horrible decisions because President Obama didn't give them the unicorns they ordered in the exact color they wanted and in the perfect manner they expected.

Unless these progressives can explain to me how he was supposed to get their perfect, progressive policies passed without even a perfunctory, working majority in the Senate, they can take their views of how politics does and should work and cram them up their purity asses. Progressives allowed the Tea Party to win elections because they were more concerned with throwing a hissy fit about something that NEVER, FUCKING EVER WAS GOING TO HAPPEN than they were about getting power and making real progress.

I live in a state where this hissy fit changed the political culture from very blue to very red and we've only descended further down the cesspool the past nine years.  Every time some progressive whines about their chosen candidate not winning in the primaries, every time they bitch about how someone from some other state isn't “progressive enough,” every time they roll out idiot descriptions like “corporatist Dem,” or “establishment,” I think about the tens of thousands of people in Flint who have been generationally changed by lead in their water because of Republican choices.  I think of the hundreds of thousands of Dreamers who are suffering from anxiety and might be deported because of progressives piss poor priorities. Everything progressive claim to hold dearly is being bent over a log is getting the Ned Beatty from “Deliverance” treatment right now because of bad political strategy.  Not bad candidates.  Not the DNC. Not “the establishment.”  All of this is happening because the concept of here are two choices, one that wants to fuck you over as hard and often as possible and take away everything you care about and another who really wants to help you as much as possible is too difficult to grasp for some reason.

Even after pointing all of this out, there are some progressives who are still adamant their strategy is the winning ticket.  They believe that if they allow Republicans to continue to win and fuck the country over enough, at some point, America will reach rock bottom and come on bended knee to them to save it.  Even if this view was true, this would mean the most vulnerable in society will be screwed six ways to Sunday, in order to prove a point.  How many people denied health care is okay?  How much worse can the environment be damaged to where it is justified?  How many more people can be pushed out of voter registrations to where this is worth it?  How much wealth is it okay to redistribute upwards in order to justify being a purist?  How many voter, women, minority...rights is it okay to sacrifice for a mythological outcome? I have spent most my adult life studying, teaching, writing about ethics and not in a heavily alcohol-induced state while on painkillers can I come up with any moral justification for this mindset.

I don't know how you can claim to be progressive and at the same time make choices that hurt the things you claim are most important to you.  I can't take seriously the political strategy views of progressives who are willing, even in the short-term, to sacrifice POC, the LGBT community, immigrants, women... for hypothetical, long-term gains.  I don't trust any progressive who tells me that the Democratic Party needs to shy away from identity politics.  I have real problems with any progressive who uses terms like, “corporatist” and “establishment” when Republicans control the levers of power. I refuse to listen to the political strategy opinions of people whose election winning percentage record around the country is in the single digits.  Pro Tip: If you aren't successful at winning elections, don't give advice about political strategy.

If you think of yourself as progressive and are upset at me, too bad. I've been at this for almost four decades and watched the same pattern of behavior happen over and over and over and over again. I've fought for universal health care longer than most o the far-left has been alive.  Change, serious, generational change only happens in America because of lots of hard, well thought out work, and having the political clout to get it passed.  If you think you can magically bypass this, you are just as guilty of progress being held back as conservatives.  Sorry if this leaves a bad taste in your mouth but it is the truth.  America had a really good shot at some serious progress after the massive fuck up that was the George W. Bush administration.  Unfortunately, too many progressives had a major hissy fit because President Obama didn't give them everything they wanted right away, even though he never had a filibuster-proof Senate and was dealing with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.  Instead of understanding the situation and a basic grasp of a School House Rocks level of civics, a lot of progressives pouted stayed home during the 2010 midterms and allowed the Tea Party to fuck over the country in ways that are still going on today. When given the choice between Donald-Fucking-Trump and Hillary Clinton, many of these same progressives either replayed their stay-at-home role or voted for a third-party candidate.  How is that piss poor choice turning out for your progressive ideals?

Even many of the progressives who voted for Hillary really didn't help the situation.  I can't tell you how often I bring up the horrible political strategy on the left and someone will chime in with, “Look, I didn't like Hillary but I still voted for her.”  Well, la-di-fucking-da!  You did the bare minimum and you want not just a cookie but some praise?  Sorry, I'm all out of progressive, political participation trophies and orange slices for you.  You mean you had to really think about and “hold your nose” to vote for the most qualified presidential candidate in history and the first woman? Really?!  And, you want people to praise you for your effort?  Fuck you!  Knowing the choices, knowing the stakes, knowing history...you should have been eager to vote for her and should have been saying so to anyone and everyone who could hear for months.  Your half-assed, “I didn't want to but I voted for her,” attitude helped influence others whether you know it or want to admit it.  

I don't say these things to make progressives feel bad or piss them off.  If this is what happens, that's their problem, not mine.  I say these things to help progressives really understand that being involved in politics is more than voting every four years in presidential elections.  It is more than what you want and your priorities.  It is more than purity tests.  It is more than half-hearted efforts.  It is more than razor-thin majorities. Politics is about engagement, sacrifice, compromise, constantly doing whatever it takes to move the needle forward, large majorities, supporting allies even when you don't agree with everything they do. American politics is about slow, meaningful change.

Don't “Civil Rights Act,” or “Gay Rights” at me either as examples of sudden political change.  If you do, this shows you don't know a damn thing about history.  A lot of people think political change happens really quickly because they haven't been paying attention to anything that didn't happen thirty seconds ago.  People were pushing for Civil Rights since the end of the fucking Civil War but sure, go ahead and believe it happened all in the matter of a few months in the early 60s.  People were fighting for gay rights for decades before Obergefell versus Hodges made it the law of the land.  Real political progress is like a very large balloon, a lot of time and effort goes into blowing it up and when it finally pops from years of effort, a significant number of people act as if it suddenly happened because they puffed a couple of breaths into it.  Those last few breaths might have been the final thing that burst the “Progressive Dam,” but without the decades of blood, sweat, tears, life and limb from tens of thousands of progressives before you, that dam wasn't going to burst despite your best effort.  Show some appreciation and respect for those who came before you who most likely paid a much steeper price for their efforts towards progress than you can even begin to imagine.  Don't let their efforts go to waste because of your self-interests.  Learn how American politics really works and play it the best you can, not the best you demand or the best you want, but the best you can.

Just because you think you are “woke” politically doesn't mean anything without context, history, a workable strategy.  Passion is important, wonderful, necessary... but passion by itself is not only meaningless, it is dangerous.  Fascism relies on this kind of passion.  I'm not saying being a passionate progressive is the same as being a fascist but being emotionally invested in something is just the first step in a long journey.  This being said, there are a lot of similarities between the far-right and the far-left when it comes to purity tests, demonization of compromise, closed off belief systems... Just because your goals are better, doesn't mean the paths to achieve them are not unethical, moronic, dangerous.  

Until progressives learn these lessons, they will continue to fail to win elections they should win, they will continue to blame everything and everybody but themselves for their failures, they will be their own worst enemy in the fight for the progress they claim is most important to them.  If progressives don't believe me, just look at where progressive politics were in 2009, where it ended up in 2010 and where it is now.  If they still don't get it, here are a few names to consider: Neil Gorsuch, Betsy DeVos, John Bolton, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump, Rick Perry, Greg Pruitt...  How is your half-assed support of Democrats working out for you?  How does it feel for progressives to be responsible for the undermining of environmental rights, women's rights, LGBT rights, banking regulations, taxes on the wealthy...?  Maybe, just maybe, in the future, they will think about the big picture and not so much about their pet issues.  Maybe they will finally figure out that American politics is about a choice between conservatism and progressivism.  Maybe, just maybe they will realize that fighting against people who are their natural allies while the real enemy burns everything they love to the ground is really, really, really fucking stupid.

[scuttleboat]

Can you help me understand American culture bc i am just dumbfounded right now. Why do people think just because it was written that y'all have a right to bear arms 200 yrs ago, when there was completely different tech, that you shouldn't even question it? Like there's a reason you have amendments right? The constitution shouldn't be unquestionable. It seems like nothing at all is happening with regards to these constant shootings.

I’ll give it my best shot as liberal minded-adult female who lives on the West coast, but understand that I can’t explain to you American monoculture because in this area, we don’t have one. If I get anything wrong here on legal stuff, folks educated in the area can feel free to comment and clarify.

The United States of America is a collection of fifty individual states and commonwealths, as well as various territories, all of which have some form of local government that is part of, but not completely submissive to, a central federal government. There actually aren’t that many universal federal laws that we live under because generally our laws are passed locally, state by state, or even city by city, and then federal laws tend to be created when local laws are challenged. The two arguably biggest powers that the Congress (House and Senate) has are

1. to implement the annual federal budget (where our tax dollars go) i.e. determine which programs get funding to be enforced

2. to write laws on anything that has to do with national or inter-state commerce

The second is hugely important because most industries in the 20th and 21st century are massive, with companies that span states and even span countries. Some of the biggest are firearms/munitions, private prisons, and any sub-industries that feed off those. When you have a living industry that generates billions of dollars of profit for many different companies, such as firearms companies, people don’t want to give up their income. So all those companies like to hire lobbyists (truly the scum profession of our generation. and the prior generation.).

Lobbyists basically bribe, manipulate, and maneuver elected lawmakers and appointed officials to either pass or not pass laws that affect things like firearms sale and regulation. There’s also a ton of money being poured into news media and “public awareness” campaigns (read: propoganda) that affects who people vote for. So elected lawmakers are political and economically incentivized to appease gun companies, while simultaneously politically *dis-incentivized* to actually pass laws that would regulate them. Any regulation from the federal or local government is seen as an “attack” on gun companies’ profits, so all the more reason for them to run bad political ads to hurt a candidate, good ads to prop up a candidate that will help them, and also just throw money and political ‘help’ at anything they can.

Add to that the careerism that has eaten the Republican party alive, the timidity of the Democratic party, the way the two-part binary system has spent 2 centuries crushing any third party gains, and we have our current deadlocked government.

Regulation for guns doesn’t require a change to the constitution (which would be near impossible in our current political climate), and in fact most Americans (grater than 70% last I heard) support greater gun control, in various forms. However, the way American political culture works is that it’s a lot more clannish than it is logical: people stand behind a label. Especially politicians, because the label of political identity is huge in American culture. Think of, for example, how much people on Tumblr use labels to define themselves: gender, age, orientation, language, ability, knowledge, fandom. Imagine how obsessed Tumblr culture is with labels, and then imagine there are only TWO you can pick, or you can claim one of the “others” that has a stigma and institutionally very little impact.

So politicians of course epitomize that, it’s the personhood they sell when they campaign for office, and the personhood they rely to be re-elected. Even if that label shifts and gets distorted, and the Right becomes the Far Right becomes the Alt Right, they’re afraid to confront those changes because the alternative is to be labeled a traitor in all those nasty campaign ads and news media propoganda sources–which are backed, of course, by self-serving capitalist companies or by the political parties themselves, in aggregate.

In my personal opinion, the way to control guns in the U.S. is to do it state by state–that is, frustratingly, how the anti-abortion people are doing it. The environmentalist movements are doing it city by city, because that’s all they can get control of politically. Unfortunately, local laws will eventually be challenged in the federal court system, and if the US Supreme Court rules on a gun control regulation, then it could go either way. At the moment, out Supreme Court is as politically divided as our Congress.

I don’t know how to explain to you that people are evil and greedy and that they’ll accept a status quo where others die but not themselves, but that is the world we live in. Our political system is vulnerable to being exploited by evil, greedy, small-minded men, and unfortunately, the voting populace can’t always tell who’s evil and who isn’t.

Corporate money = advertising = propoganda = votes = deregulation + gerrymandering = more corporate money.

If you’re a gun corporation (or any company that lives off the suffering of others) it’s well worth it to invest in the U.S. government. We appear to be here for the taking.

[politicaltheatre]

Pass Fail

In two very short days those of us who believe we must all be accountable to each other in all things will find ourselves on the outside looking in. The right wing, convinced that they should not have to be held accountable, will control the White House and Congress, with Supreme Court and other judicial vacancies soon to be filled.

Some things are simple. They're either all one thing or a choice between two. Inside or outside. Up or down. Right or left. Right or wrong. Yes or no. Pass or fail. We like simple. It gives us certainty, or at least the illusion of it which feels almost as good.

At times like these simple is indeed very attractive. That attraction, of course, is strongest when things aren't simple, something we must always take pains to remember. We must resist the urge - and even more so, the urging - to accept seemingly simple answers and to ignore the complexity both of those situations and of the people seeming to drive them. Above all, we must resist the temptation to reduce our options to those simple, single or binary, choices.

The challenge for most of, of course, is that we have too many things we have to focus on in our everyday lives. We have jobs, we have families, we have debts, and we have distractions both good and bad that we can't and often don't want to avoid. What we need is help. Failing that, what we need is representation, someone to step up and pay attention and make sense of what is going on for the rest of us. We need that representative to protect us and to be accountable to us. It isn't an easy job but we've never lacked for volunteers, especially when that job comes with a paycheck.

Obviously, we rely on our elected political representatives - and presidents, senators, assembly members, council members, union directors, etc. - to recognize threats and protect us, and to value accountability for all including themselves. In a perfect world, that's what they'd do. This, however, isn't that world.

In this world, the job of protecting us from those we've hired to represent us belongs, for better and worse, to the journalist. Journalists, if they're doing their jobs, keep an eye on things and recognize bullshit when they see it. They then write or talk about it, not merely the act of it but the amount and quality of the bullshit it has been steeped in. In a perfect world, this is what a journalist does. Again, this is not a perfect world.

If this electoral cycle has taught anything, it isn't even close. Many journalists, too many, reduce their work to mere reporting, relaying what was said and done with no judgment. Well, they say "no judgment". Saying that makes things simple for them, or seems to; the truth is that it doesn't because nothing can. Having no judgment is, in fact, literally impossible. At some point a decision is made to stop looking at the consequences of things said and done. This is a big part of the effort to simplify the task. The problem is that decision, the effort to stop, to look away, is a judgment, one of value, one of moral responsibility, and always one of self interest.

To the best journalists, maintaining judgment, value, and moral responsibility requires maintaining their own objectivity. This means hesitating to treat anything as fact. This means accepting that the world is uncertain. This means being fully accountable to everyone. When something is fact, a certainty, they say so objectively, without regard or fear of whomever it is about. They measure who could be hurt by such a revelation and weigh that against who could be hurt by going no further. To them, this is what "ethics" means.

The trouble for us in relying on journalists is that they are just people like the rest of us, and most of them are not the best. Take NBC (please). Talking heads at MSNBC aside, the news division is something of a joke, reluctant to call bullshit on anyone and  dominated by the parent network's infotainment franchises, The Today Show and Access Hollywood. Over the past few administrations, the network has gone out of its way to curry favor by hiring or offering to hire relatives of the president.

Billy Bush, grandson of one former president and nephew of another, was fired by NBC back in October for encouraging Donald Trump's boasts of sexual assault when he was host of Access Hollywood back in 2005. Before that came to light, though, he had actually presided over another now-forgotten scandal back in August, as newly anointed host of The Today Show, when he credulously allowed Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte to lie to him about trashing a gas station, smearing their Brazilian hosts in the process, and then tried to give Lochte a pass after the lies were exposed. Al Roker, apoplectic at Bush's defense of Lochte, was soon made to apologize to Bush for calling bullshit.

Such are the journalistic standards of morning television, standards which dominate NBC and other broadcasters and which twist the word "ethics" into something resembling a form of etiquette. One must be polite not from respect to the person as a human being but respect to the power the person is believed to hold. If one wishes to be invited to the best occasions, if one wishes to have access, one must not offend the ones perceived to be in power. One must not, in fact, offend anyone. In following this form of journalistic etiquette, always ready to give a pass, one is always at a disadvantage, something those looking to lie or otherwise escape accountability know all too well.

The challenge NBC and other news organizations face, and always will face, is one of access. They face competition for every interview, every "get". Accommodation, many journalists are told, means access, and access is everything. Just ask Access Hollywood. Politics is packaged like entertainment these days for that very reason. Celebrities lie all the time, usually about the quality of their latest project; politicians and business leaders have grown comfortable lying, too, and for much the same reason, they want to sell something. They expect a pass on it. That's what access buys.

The challenge some of us face, though, in denying one person or group a pass is that we may end up giving another, possibly worse one a pass in order to do it. Those who would not and could not trust Hillary Clinton, for instance, voted for Donald Trump in droves, this despite the fact that much of what he said and continues to say is lies. And racist. And misogynist. And…well, we know. We know. He promised to "drain the swamp" and poured in toxic waste. His nominees lie and bullshit their way through Senate confirmations knowing they don't have to mean anything they say. No one's going to charge them lying to Congress, right? Of course, not.

The funny thing about the two reports released this month suggesting that Russia hacked the election and has compromising videos of Trump - funny in an ironic way, not a pee-pee way - is how unnecessary both were to understanding who Trump is and what he'll do as president. The official report, the one about Russian "interference", doesn't actually show Russia doing anything different than Fox News or Breitbart. 

Arguably, Russia didn't have to do anything because the American right wing was already doing it and had been for decades. Fake news on Facebook? It's been there for years. A cable news channel with coverage slanted towards the right wing and against progressives and labor? Are you kidding?! Seriously?!!

The most damning part of the official report suggested that Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange, had worked closely with Russia to orchestrate the leaks of embarrassing emails from Clinton campaign workers and damage the Democratic party. That Assange chose to give an exclusive interview to Fox News' Sean Hannity(!!!) didn't exactly make the case that he wasn't using Wikileaks to help one political party over another. Actually, if you wanted to destroy whatever credibility Wikileaks ever had as an impartial medium for casting light into the dark corners of the "Deep State", giving that interview pretty much killed it.

What Assange currently has at his and his highest bidder's disposal is the means to harm and apply pressure on enemies while protecting allies. That corruption of what Wikileaks seemed to have been, an indiscriminate, non-partisan medium for leaking secret documents, is what should scare everyone, which is what makes Glenn Greenwald's strident defense of Assange so strange.

It was Greenwald whose unquestioned integrity led Edward Snowden to seek him out when Snowden was intent on leaking NSA documents. Everything Snowden and Greenwald tell us to fear about unaccountable clandestine agencies pulling strings from those dark corners is credible and genuinely worth fearing. And yet, Greenwald's defense of Assange, in which he lumps Fox News' latest special friend with the likes of Snowden and Pentagon Papers whistle blower Daniel Ellsberg, is just bizarre.

Greenwald is so insistent on attacking the agencies accusing Assange of collaborating with Russian President Vladimir Putin that he willfully abandons the evidence of his and the rest of the world's own eyes about what Putin has done and what kind of person he is. In the past two decades Putin has made it his purpose to make The Soviet Union Russia great again, and he hasn't been shy about it.

Would Putin prefer Trump over Clinton or any Democrat (or any other Republican)? Of course, he would. Does Putin's government engage in the very same invasive, destructive behavior as the agencies Greenwald tells us to fear? Hell, yes. Has the Putin regime committed war crimes in eastern Ukraine and Syria? They've committed atrocities that should shame us all.

And yet there's Glenn Greenwald telling us our own clandestine agencies are inflating the threat posed to us by Putin in order to achieve their own nefarious purposes. He suggests that the entire campaign against Putin and Assange is to distract from Clinton's own corruption. Bunk. Greenwald may well be right that Hillary Clinton and everyone associated with her, including soon to be former President Barack Obama, are involved in heinous things and responsible for much of the misery that led to Trump being elected, but none of that - NONE OF THAT - justifies giving Putin or his regime or anyone associating with that regime a pass. People who hated the Nazis gave Joseph Stalin a pass. They were idiots.

Yes, everyone, even a corrupt liar such as Donald Trump, even a murderous thug such as Vladimir Putin, deserves protection from lies and abuse, from slander and libel, but failing to call out their lies and abuse, and their slander and libel, in the name of ethics or anything else is just that, a failure.

When Trump, in his usual style, rejected all accusations against him as "lies" and all those reporting those accusations as "fake". He and his staff openly bullied CNN's White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, in retaliation for the network breaking the story on, but not revealing, the dossier. On the face of it, it was just Trump being Trump, bullying a person or an organization in a flash of anger. When Trump attacked Georgia Representative and Civil Rights icon John Lewis days later, it seemed the same.

Both instances were widely reported that way. Trump the bully had struck again. He did not seem to understand the consequences of his actions. He did not understand the importance of establishing and maintaining relationships, not just with the press and legislators but with his own intelligence agencies. The scarier answer is that he understands perfectly.

At the press conference, the message to Acosta and CNN, and, more important, the other journalists in the room and their employers, was clear: "Behave or you will lose your access to the White House". His racism-infused tweets against Lewis had another message: "Know your place or lose access to the money for your district in the budget". His repeated attacks at the competence of the intelligence agencies had yet another message: "Shut your mouths or find yourselves replaced with those who will". It isn't that Trump doesn't want to hear what they all have to say, he merely wants to control it.

What we need to do, in these next two days, in these next four years, is call bullshit for what it is. Our representatives need us to support them, but they need us to hold them to account, too. Our journalists may rise to the occasion, even at a network as weak and unreliable as NBC, but they won't do so without us demanding a higher standard from them. We can't let them give the Trump administration or Congress a pass. To do that, we can't give them a pass, or ourselves. It's a lot to ask, but the stakes are high and we can't afford to fail.

- Daniel Ward

[jeremyfrechette]

The "Californication" of America

The "Californication" of America

If you have any doubts to the depraved depths progressives what to submerge America, look no further than the once Golden Republic of California. Inundated with 1.3 trillion in debt despite possessing the highest sales tax and marginal income tax rates in the U.S., California is now attempting to borrow from itself to pay outstanding retirement pensions. Why? When counties and cities continuously offer exorbitant employee benefit packages - the over 20,000 residents currently collecting 6 figure pensions - while the taxable revenues/incomes of private businesses and corporations are fleeing suffocating regulations in record numbers, somebody’s trying to eat Prime Rib on a McRib budget. Not to pour salt into insolvency or double dip those $15 minimum wage fries waving in the Western horizon, but Illegal aliens and their dependents cost Californians $25.3 billion per year according to FAIR's 2017 report: The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on California Taxpayers. The state's 3 million illegal immigrants and their 1.1 million US–born children cost the average California household — headed by a U.S. citizen — $2,370 annually. And what special allowances have been granted to those struggling, natural born families who pay must foot the bill of the Democratic Party’s foreign voter adoption and affirmative action estate? Mind your white privilege; even if you’re not white, live paycheck-to-paycheck and still can’t afford to rent a cupboard in San Francisco's Pacific Heights.

Enough about redistribution and devaluing a sentient being’s “worth”. Let’s talk about how California residents can now knowingly infect another person with HIV without informing their partner of their status, but state workers (including teachers and social workers) can be fined or even jailed for using the incorrect “gender” pronouns. In some educational institutions where gender-queer conditioning of elementary kids has becoming mandatory conditioning masked as sensitivity cognition, grade school students themselves can be reprimanded for not indulging their peers’ non-binary, role playing fantasies. In other words, ignore your genitals and reject your biological birth, liberate hate by wearing a dress, because little is more abnormal than just letting kids be kids without the inherited baggage of "sex" obsessed malcontents. But never fear, calling for the assassination of the President, beating peaceful pedestrians expressing political dissent or slandering any patriotic Republican as a Nazi bigot, is both commonplace, if not admirable, on enlightened college campuses and now in the “non-discriminatory” workplace.

Not to invoke the irony of future mugged constituents, California lawmakers recently passed Proposition 57 mandating early release for all “non-violent” criminals”. And what exactly constitutes a non-violent crime worthy of such leniency? Oh, just the rape of an unconscious person, human trafficking involving sex acts with minors, and assault with a deadly weapon. And here I thought legalizing child prostitution was but another attempt to normalize pedophilia among Hollywood benefactors lecturing Middle America about equality and tolerance. Once you breech and discredit one ethical boundary - those societal foundations of gender, family, faith and love of country - people will literally defend the most senseless, soulless acts for their existence is defined by limitless pleasure, perceived entitlement and a glaring inability to think for themselves. "Progress" isn't derived by forcing people to handicap their success, bake a sacrilegious cake to the extortion of financial ruin or purposely exposing innocent children to perverse Gay Pride parades and profane feminist rallies. Progress is realizing living the lifestyle of your choice, the literal sanctity between right and wrong, should never require confiscating the rights and dignity of others solely to validate/advertise one's bombastic beliefs.

With such inane reasoning masquerading as good government, it is of little surprise Governor Jerry Brown declared our immigration laws moot by further investing in sanctuary cities and attempting to obstruct ICE officials from apprehending known fugitives. When you’re more distraught over than the safety and so-called rights of non-citizens than the death of a 32 year-old woman murdered by a man deported 5 times, prudence and justice are antithetical anomalies. Not only are California illegals now eligible for driver’s licenses, they can legally vote in an election if they are officially registered to vote. And what does it take to register to vote in the great state of California? A driver’s license and a personal guarantee you’re a citizen. Yes, you heard me correctly, the legitimacy of our elections, the survival of our 241 year-old republic, is now based entirely on the honor system; or if you prefer perspective over subjective bliss, foreign invaders who consciously broke our laws without a hint of regret, only to be congratulated with a complimentary door prize, the honorary American oppressed immigrant mindset, of leftist socio-economic contempt.

I take umbrage with any self-respecting American, God forbid elected civil servant, who is completely indifferent to the estimated 3 million unlawful votes cast in 2016 simply because they believe small town America values and the electoral college should acquiesce to the moral degradation and militant activism of urban epicenters like San Francisco, Los Angeles or Chicago. Considering California alone accounted for over 10% of Hillary Clinton's final vote total, a 3.4 million difference that exceeded her 2.86 million final popular vote lead, I'm confused as to how those Donald Trump supporters representing over 90% of American territory - or precisely 3,084 counties of all 3,141 U.S. counties - should take a knee with Colin Kaepernick to empower a regressive state that dismisses the rule of law, mocks rural America and remains visibly contentious towards any concept of electoral sovereignty.

There’s also another term for those politicians who willingly subvert the immigration process and disregard our voting statutes to their personal and civic benefit? It’s called sedition, dereliction of duty, treason. If I may, when did defiant trespassers become “Dreamers” and doorbells a humanitarian crisis? Have millions of aspiring Americans from across the globe, for well over a century, not honored the afforded requirements for securing the privilege of becoming a U.S. citizen? Conspiring to invalidate prescribed protocols ratified to ensure legal and orderly naturalization – those measures explicitly enacted to protect America’s citizens and welfare - makes about as much sense as giving convicted felons the right to vote because of “felon disenfranchisement”; i.e., the admitted hearsay of political opportunists salivating over the fact 60% of released California convicts are minorities who deserve the opportunity to vote Democrat.

The same bureaucratic terrorists who forced 53 dairy farmers to go bankrupt and/or relocate to saner pastures due to absurd regulations on cow farts are somehow entirely satisfied with the unsubstantiated word of an undocumented, unvetted immigrant. Surprised? Not unless logic and liberalism share a nonflammable unitard. And while peace activists remain adamant U.S. citizens must undergo extensive background checks to exercise their constitutionally affirmed right to bear arms – naturally excluding those potential militants illegally entering a sovereign country in a post 9/11 world – their unflinching “non-partisan concern” for human life magically ceases at the recognized borders of radical agents like Iran and North Korea; inhumane, totalitarian regimes that globalists duplicitously believe possess an inalienable right to develop nuclear weapons despite vowing daily to destroy Western Civilization. So what’s the common denominator? Rampant, unabridged, unapologetic anti-Americanism.

When voting is no longer our most sacred duty and the integrity of our elections becomes a racist endeavor, as denoted by California’s refusal to investigate massive vote fraud uncovered in November, America becomes a second class citizen unable to defend itself in its own home due to fear of “offending” the same guests who would outlaw our flag, silence free speech and ban the national anthem if given only a fleeting chance. In essence, any policy that strengthens or reaffirms America’s independence, influence and economic vitality is an affront to the liberal narrative America must surrender its identity and founding Constitutional charter for being an evil empire built upon greed and White supremacy. Or in historically accurate terms, a superior culture displacing an ethnocentric population which supplanted other nomadic societies via the auspices of war, commerce, adaptability and/or technological superiority. Whereas California and New York are hopelessly lost to the left’s orchestrated demographic coup d’etat and ideological conditioning of their respective populaces, states like Virginia, Colorado, and Michigan are not far behind.

Regardless of one’s political persuasion, you don’t have to be a historian or even watch the History channel to understand America was erected as a free republic for a moral, self-sufficient people acutely aware of the triggers of tyranny, poverty and religious persecution. Individual liberty, limited government, transparency and accountability were never optional amenities on an academic drug trip to worship the Lenin Statue in Marxist Seattle. These autonomous attributes represented conceptual necessities whose only negotiable features were the exact method and expected integrity of implementation.

Unfortunately for the idyllic state of California, squatting on the world’s sixth largest economy and boasting vast untapped natural resources, its propensity for dysfunction and waste is only superseded by its systemic rejection of America itself. Whenever West Coast socialists are not charging working families and commercial transportation the highest fuel taxes in the nation, environmental terrorists who cannot differentiate between ecology and political alarmism are manufacturing water shortages and sparking unnatural disasters with pseudo-scientific regularity. Fixing the error of your naive ways is near impossible when rogue political fantasy displaces sound judgement and the Constitutional authority of your native country. How else can controlled thinning of excessive forestation designed to reduce the risk of uncontrollable wildfires, similar to the recent devastation which devoured 9,000 homes/buildings and 250,000 acres of habitat, be equated to "clear cutting" or raping the land?

It is also of little surprise California elitists, aka doomsday legislators seeking another excuse to tax common sense, believe Global Warming is not a natural, cyclical occurrence predominantly caused by solar fluctuations and the temperature of the Earth's core. Never mind Antarctic ice levels are far greater than 30 years ago and New York is not submerged beneath Al Gore's "unnatural science" grade point average, if you believe a .03 reduction goal in global temperatures in a century's time at an eventual loss of 2.5 trillion in annual GDP is a winning strategy, than counting cow farts and banning combustible engine cars by 2040 is your golden ticket to getting assaulted on Bay Area Rapid Transit for reading 1984 without a permit. But never fret, Sacramento City Council approved a motion to pay gang members for the conscious decision not to kill one another; or in layman's terms, obey the law and stay in school. And to think millions of decent, hard working Americans are ineligible because of their offensive civilized "privilege". 

Although it's mathematically impossible to pinpoint exactly what alternative universe California Democrats reside, our Forefathers would have called for a second armed revolution long ago. No, Really! Whether or not progressives approve of President Trump is a moot point if their own policies and authoritative abuse do not adhere to the prescribed constitutional checks of adopted statehood. Likewise, embodying the fight for state sovereignty by no means justifies endeavoring to become like those impoverished, inept nations your exploding illegal immigrant population is instinctively fleeing. It's hard to fathom how the once "Go West" mantra of American pioneers that catapulted California into an unprecedented wave of prosperity, proud nationalism and a vibrant centrifuge for diversity, has dissolved into an immoral state of cultural Marxism that believes government is god, gender is a fluid state of mind, exploitation a form of education, and patriotism an unjust form of racial oppression. 

It is obviously no secret the once predominantly “Red” stomping grounds of Ronald Wilson Reagan has been turned bright blue by an unprecedented wave of immigration and indoctrinated anti-Americanism. That was and always has been the goal of the radical statist quo. Where this nation was forged as a beacon of hope and opportunity for millions of law-abiding aspiring citizens seeking a better life, California has descended into counter-intuitive cesspool that preaches victimization over accountability, reverse discrimination over equality, intolerance over intellectual diversity. No matter how pure your intentions or how strong your faith in the nature of human volition, you cannot coexist with partisans so obsessed with maintaining political supremacy they would gladly surrender their own country to those who tirelessly seek our demise or break any rule to control our lives out of some misplaced sense of social justice that gives no such credence to their own failures and hypocrisy; most, notably, those corrupt, foreign governments globalists so foolishly favor to the liquidation of civility and the downfall of mankind.

While no American wants to witness the secession of California, or more profoundly the dissection of America's legacy and the abandonment of our fellow right-minded countrymen who represent the powerless minority, how long can you spare a cancerous appendage before it spreads, poisons your soul and ultimately takes your life? Will apathy reclaim our revisionist classrooms or assuage the sponsored anarchist war on police and freedom of speech? Once again, the left’s goal is not to coexist under the ideological umbrella that was and is America. Their unrelenting mission is to whitewash history, ensure conformity and redefine America by eradicating all borders, natural human distinctions – symbiotic gender roles and the family paradigm - so the concepts of liberty, individual achievement and morality quickly become outdated manifestations that can no longer threaten the secular supremacy of a progressive state. The systemic decay of California is as much a symbol of our failure as a society, as it is a dire warning to every governor and undaunted patriot that still believes God is the liberty of salvation, character does not fear consequence, and raising respectful, responsible children is by far our greatest contribution to humanity; that indomitable virtue of a free nation born from the bounty of a Judeo-Christian seed but distinctly American creed. If this transcendent republic has any chance to coalesce and preserve the timeless wisdom of a handful of visionaries marked for death by the tyranny of a crown's crest, I believe hope resides in the heartland of an industrious people - a summoned Convention of States faithful to independence and the merits of intelligent debate - still rightfully proud of their heritage and ever cognizant of the evil contempt and complacency breeds.